"No one mourns the wicked," we're told during the immediately arresting beginning to Wicked, which concludes two hours 40 minutes later with the words, "to be continued" flashed up on the screen. Will filmgoers mourn that they have to wait an entire year to see the second part of this supercharged screen adaptation of the stage musical blockbuster that London and New York audiences can currently absorb in a single sitting? (Not for nothing has the show taken up seemingly permanent residency at Broadway's largest theatre, the Gershwin.)Wicked does nothing by halves except, it would seem, make Read more ...

Our home planet orbits the medium-size star we call the Sun. There are unfathomably many more stars out there. We accepted that these are also suns a little while back, cosmically speaking, or a few hundred of our human years ago. Ever since, in imagination, we have supplied other stars with planets, and planets with life. Science, so far, has lagged behind fiction. That may be about to change.The known universe has grown almost unimaginably larger since the time of Galileo. That feels like it should increase the chance there is something else alive out there, somewhere. But how to really Read more ...

Beautiful Thing’s opening scene plays out like a sweary take on Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl, Meera Syal’s potty-mouthed PE teacher lambasting her Year 11 pupils with language that would now have her hauled up in front of a professional conduct panel.Originally a stage play, writer Jonathan Harvey’s screenplay drew upon his own experiences as an English teacher in South East London, and the banter, as funny as it’s cruel, struck me as painfully accurate. 1996 seems like another world – a time when Clause 28 forbade local authorities from "promoting" homosexuality, and the age of consent for Read more ...

One day in the early 90s I accepted the offer of a lift from a friend to a university open day I hadn’t been planning to go to. I ended up attending that university and there met my wife, and if I hadn’t done that my life would have been very different, and my children wouldn’t have been born. And this is of course true back through the chain of my ancestors – back hundreds of generations: each of them had to meet in order for me to be here.Brian Klaas’s Fluke is all about the millions of contingent coincidences that make up our lives, and poses the question: “If you could rewind your life to Read more ...

Have you ever considered the sheer range of sounds? You may think of deliberate human efforts to move the air: music and song, poetry or baby talk, cries and whispers. Other human-made noises come to mind: sirens, bells, fireworks; the hum of the street or the bustle of an army on the move. Animal and bird sounds appeal, of course, along with the music of a landscape – creaking branches, tinkling streams, or whistling winds. And if we are waxing metaphorical, perhaps the “sounds” of the cosmos, such as the echoes of the Big Bang, that still reverberate faintly as fluctuations in the universal Read more ...

If you cannot even step into the same river twice, how to take the measure of the ocean? Dipping your toes at the beach is irresistible, but uninformative. Sampling stuff out at sea helps more, but you have to get serious. Consider the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR), a device designed in the 1930s for recovering plankton from the open ocean. They are cruising along, tethered unobtrusively behind cargo ships and hauled in from time to time to assess their microscopic catch.By 2021, Helen Czerski tells us, CPRs had been towed for 7 million nautical miles, which would take them 326 times Read more ...

Why is it important for a music conservatoire to make recordings? What is the educational context? These are questions we have continued to reflect upon at the Royal Academy of Music – celebrating its bicentenary this year – since we took our first steps towards what has become an established and invigorating part of Academy life.Twenty five years ago, we made a conscious decision to equip young musicians with the particular skills required for "the studio". There was also the belief that giving students greater artistic agency would only yield exciting results, empowering them to take a Read more ...

We started The Multi-Story Orchestra back in 2011 with a group of friends when we’d left university. Conductor Christopher Stark and I basically wanted to find new ways to play orchestral music that would escape formal concert halls and be more exciting and more accessible.We thought car parks might be good places to try – they’re big, they’re open, and people don’t really associate them with anything in particular. We started off playing in a car park in Peckham, run by Bold Tendencies, and we now play there every summer. We’ve also played in other car parks around the country – in Read more ...

Let’s talk repertoire. Over the past decade the range of British plays, especially those from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, has shrunk in state-subsidized theatres. You can no longer easily see work by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Restoration rakes or Georgian comics. George Bernard Shaw is in hiding. English 19th-century problem plays are invisible.The abandonment of older genres, of difficult plays, is just one symptom of subsidized theatre’s craven surrender to populism. Even 20th-century drama is under threat. So can the National Theatre buck this trend with this rediscovery of The Read more ...

Nora is seven, and it's her first day at school. Big brother Abel, already enrolled in their local primary, promises to find her at playtime. Prised away from her father's embrace, tearful Nora is set up from the opening moments of Playground as a sensitive child.The cold blue colour grading, atmospheric sound design, and choice of camera perspective – always from the height of a child – immerses the audience from the very first moment in Nora’s experiences. No score distracts from the cacophony of the playground, the overwhelming echo and crash of the swimming pool. Quasi- Read more ...

Having had her own problems with alcohol and anxiety, Sheridan Smith no doubt felt some kinship with Jenna Garvey, the central character she plays in The Teacher. Evidently a talented educator who inspires loyalty and enthusiasm in her pupils, Jenna is also partial to a hectic night’s clubbing fuelled by reckless quantities of drink.Jenna teaches English at Earlbridge School, somewhere in the north of England. Teaching is in her blood, not least because her father was also a teacher and was held in almost mystical regard by, for instance, Jenna’s principal, Ken Mills (Anil Desai). Jenna is so Read more ...

Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen left me dumbstruck in the cinema in 1998 with its brilliant depiction of an incestuous, viciously glamorous family imploding over a family celebration. At the time, I hoped that my Danish mother never saw what looked, to all intents and purposes, like a home movie about her former life in Copenhagen. More than 20 years on, Vinterberg did it again with Another Round, a black comedy about four high-school teachers navigating their mid-life crises by drinking their way through routine lessons and boring family suppers. The result was an Oscar-winning masterpiece Read more ...