England
Matt Wolf
The pronouns have it in Alan Ayckbourn's career-defining comedy of spiralling misunderstandings, which has arrived on the West End 46 years after first hinting at the formidable talent of a dramatist who could make of many an "it" and "she" a robustly funny study in two couples in varying degrees of crisis. Far nervier than its study in middle-class mirth at first lets on, Relatively Speaking hands Felicity Kendal her giddiest stage assignment in years, and she is well served by a Lindsay Posner staging that once again gives Ayckbourn pride of place: the man of the moment (to co-opt one of Read more ...
Mark Dery
Are Anglophiles born or made? Or cultured in a medium of suet and sentimentality, romanticism and Marmite? Inexplicably, this question has gone begging, at least in the States. Perhaps American scholars deem the subject too frivolous to merit academic scrutiny in the same way that camp, kitsch, and cuteness had to wait for freelance intellectuals like Susan Sontag, Celeste Olalquiaga, and Daniel Harris to legitimise their study. Of course, the whiff of Toryism or just garden-variety snobbery clinging to Anglophilia has left it in permanently bad odour with American cultural theorists, most of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Cheltenham is the Dubai of the Cotswolds: a modestly populated town of 100,000 with sufficient wealth and influence to attract disproportionately lavish art and sport to its genteel Georgian streets every summer. Its jazz festival, in its 18th year, has the added advantage of a founder (Jim Smith) and artistic director (Tony Dudley-Evans) with real love and commitment for the music. A mix of vaguely jazz-inflected pop stars and the cream of international jazz, established and on the way, are these days concentrated in tented venues in leafy Montpelier Gardens (pictured below), putting Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Although Peter Moffat's story of a Derbyshire village has been designed to evolve into a 100-year saga, this first series amounted to an extended requiem for the fallen in World War One. The monstrous thunder of the guns has reverberated incessantly throughout these six episodes, as the story has wound its way though a woefully predictable trajectory of patriotism, optimism, disillusionment, despair and bitterness.But Moffat, in his Not-Downton Abbey hat, has been at pains to stress the ways that responses to the conflict were determined by class or social standing. In an especially anguished Read more ...
David Nice
Blether on MasterChef about love and passion for one’s craft has so devalued the currency that I hesitated in applying the terms to conductor John Wilson, last night moving from Hollywood and Broadway to another enthusiasm, tuneful British music. Yet who merits them better than he?His brand of hectic brilliance was sometimes too much for the Barbican Hall’s magnifying tendencies, but a keen-sprung technique – a word not used enough in culinary TV – leapt over some of the gloopier hurdles in an overture by Walton and a swoony concerto by York Bowen. With Vaughan Williams’s Five Tudor Portraits Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Benga is at a crossroads. Like many who arose from the dubstep scene, the 26-year-old is finding the term an albatross that’s hard to throw off. Sure, he was one of the Croydon originators of a sound that now dominates Transatlantic pop, a sound which is the basis for his national radio show and his band, Magnetic Man, but the term has become restrictive, too often tired shorthand for a lack of imagination among his lesser peers. The new album, then, is called Chapter II, although it’s his third, presumably to emphasize that we’re witnessing a rapid and drastic evolution.The truth is it’s no Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"For youth, for change and always for the people" was the slogan with which Rupert Murdoch relaunched The Sun in 1969, having bought it from its previous owners IPC for a mere £800,000. Murdoch, the Aussie iconoclast who kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford university in the early Fifties and claimed to be an ardent socialist, decreed that his new tabloid would be free from party political affiliations and would refuse to kow-tow to the British establishment, which he instinctively loathed. His message resonated with a broad swathe of the British public, and within 100 days the paper's Read more ...
Julian White
The first minutes of Paula Milne's new three-parter are absolutely hilarious. MP Aiden Hoynes (David Tennant) resigns from his post as Business Secretary and launches an attack on the Prime Minister from the backbenches in an attempt to trigger a leadership contest, only to find his comments greeted by embarrassed silence. In a split second he has turned from a Westminster high-flier into a social leper who can clear out the House of Commons Gents like a foul gaseous emission. He gambled, he lost and he has no one to blame but himself – well, himself and his best friend, Work and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And the killer is... No, that would be telling, and you might not have watched it on catch-up yet. But was the revelation worth the wait?We often complain about the way British TV dramas are often squeezed into three or four (or two) parts, when an American series would stretch to 16 or 22 episodes. Hats off, then, to ITV and Broadchurch writer Chris Chibnall for picking up the baton to create an eight-parter designed to depict the impact of a boy's murder on a small, tightly-knit seaside town (Oskar McNamara as murder victim Danny Latimer, pictured below). Hats partly back on again, Read more ...
David Nice
Brave old world, that has so much unheard music in it. Not exactly the words of Shakespeare’s Miranda, I know, but that’s how I feel having experienced great things in the concert hall for the first time recently: Tippett’s Second Symphony from Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra last night, and earlier in the week more self-styled “musical toys” from overnight sensation as Newcomer of the Year at the BBC Music Magazine 2013 Awards Mei Yi Foo: a gallimaufry of piano miniatures by Bartók, Benjamin, Fujikura, Lachenmann and Unsuk Chin.You’ll note no inclusion there for the London Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Three years after Jonathan Creek's last one-off special, tellies across the land resounded once again to the strains of Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre, a theme tune cunningly chosen to reflect the show's mix of menace, wit and whimsy. Nor had writer David Renwick stinted on the bizarre quirks and fiendish sleights of hand, in a tale featuring a vanishing corpse and an unsolved supernatural mystery from the past, amid a herd of gambolling old thesps having a whale of a time.Chief among these were Nigel Planer and Joanna Lumley as polymath and TV producer Franklin Tartikoff and his Read more ...
David Benedict
Faced with an unfamiliar play, it’s usually hard to spot exactly where the writer stopped and the director started. Not here. This is one of those occasions where a director’s voice is considerably and almost constantly louder than the playwright’s. You might think you’re seeing Rodney Ackland’s Before The Party but what you’re getting is Matthew Dunster’s assault upon it.Ackland’s 1949 adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s short story is a subtle evisceration of upper-middle-class manners. Living in post-war comfort, the highly respectable Skinner family are dressing for a local garden Read more ...