theartsdesk com, first with arts reviews, news and interviews
Adam Sweeting
Tuesday, 19 January 2021
The oeuvre of M Night Shyalaman has tended to veer between unsettling creepiness and sometimes hilarious misfires, but, working as Executive Producer with screenwriter Tony...
Daniel Lewis
Tuesday, 19 January 2021
One of the finer episodes in Raven Leilani’s startling debut (which contains an embarrassment of fine episodes) comes about halfway through, when Edie, our young, struggling black...
Tom Birchenough
Tuesday, 19 January 2021
Catalan director Albert Serra’s interest in late 18th century France is well established – his previous film was The Death of Louis XIV – but the title of his new one has precious...
Miranda Heggie
Monday, 18 January 2021
Another year, another lockdown. Though I have little doubt this was not the way most us of hoped to start 2021, we can at least be grateful that we’re not suffering quite the same...
Adam Sweeting
Monday, 18 January 2021
Or, What The Durrells Did Next. Writer Simon Nye, writer/director Roger Goldby and star Keeley Hawes are all veterans of ITV’s Corfu-based fantasy, and while Finding Alice...
Liz Thomson
Monday, 18 January 2021
The tears of a clown is a familiar enough metaphor – a cliché, perhaps – and as an image it adorns the sleeve of the latest album by Mike Rosenberg, better known as Passenger, the...
Kieron Tyler
Sunday, 17 January 2021
The First Generation 1965–1974 is a 35-CD box set dedicated to the blues maven and propagator John Mayall. As well as the...
Mark Kidel
Sunday, 17 January 2021
Volker Schlöndorff’s brilliant adaptation of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel The Tin Drum hasn’t aged one bit: just as the book...
Graham Rickson
Saturday, 16 January 2021
Janáček: The Cunning Little Vixen, Sinfonietta Lucy Crowe, Gerald Finley, Sophia Burgos London Symphony Orchestra and...
Kathryn Reilly
Saturday, 16 January 2021
What’s all this? Female voices, guitars, a song lasting over four minutes… harmonies? Have Britain’s savviest social...
Sebastian Scotney
Friday, 15 January 2021
Cerys Matthews is a best-selling author, award winning DJ and multi-million selling musician, singer, reciter... and...
Matt Wolf
Friday, 15 January 2021
Noel Coward's 1941 comedy was one of the theatrical casualties of the first lockdown last March in a Richard Eyre-directed...
Robert Beale
Friday, 15 January 2021
Jonathan Bloxham makes his debut as conductor with the Hallé Orchestra in the third of the Hallé’s Winter Season concerts on...
Thomas H Green
Friday, 15 January 2021
When the concept album first properly took flight, in the late 1960s, before it became slave to the bloated artifice of prog...
Tom Birchenough
Thursday, 14 January 2021
Veteran Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky has gone back to his beginnings for his latest film. The real-life events on...
Graham Fuller
Thursday, 14 January 2021
The Night Porter depicts the consuming sadomasochistic love affair of an SS officer, Max (Dirk Bogarde), and the Catholic...
Joseph Walsh
Wednesday, 13 January 2021
In 1964, Cassius Clay, NFL superstar Jim Nathaniel Brown, soul legend Sam Cooke and political firebrand Malcolm X gathered...
Tim Cumming
Wednesday, 13 January 2021
Back in 2013, the London-based singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist launched the first of a trilogy of albums...
David Nice
Tuesday, 12 January 2021
Born in exigency at the end of the First World War and soon kiboshed by the Spanish flu, The Soldier’s Tale as originally...
disc of the day
Blu-ray: Liberté
On 'libertinage': Albert Serra’s improvisaton of 18th century debauchery is painful in every sense
tv
Servant, Apple TV+ review - shocks, shivers and black humour in missing-baby saga
M Night Shyalaman's drama is fascinating and confounding
Finding Alice, ITV review - thriller, comedy or melodrama?
Keeley Hawes leads a strong cast in no particular direction
Spiral, Series 8, BBC Four review - dark days in the City of Light
Final series of the show that's more than just a 'policier'
film
Blu-ray: Liberté
On 'libertinage': Albert Serra’s improvisaton of 18th century debauchery is painful in every sense
new music
Album: Passenger – Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted
Former Brighton busker lacks hidden depths
Reissue CDs Weekly: John Mayall - The First Generation
Massive box-set tribute to the important British musical visionary
Album: Sleaford Mods - Spare Ribs
A searing scream in the face of Boris, the virus and the shit show that is 2020s Britain
classical
Apartment House, Wigmore Hall online review - introspective music for isolated times
Serene lockdown listening in three concerts dedicated to Morton Feldman
Classical CDs: Janáček, Myaskovsky, Prokofiev, John Wilson
An arboreal opera, two Soviet symphonies and some rarely heard English string music
Gillam, Hallé, Bloxham, Hallé online review - music of poetry
Turbulence, calm, and long, slow melodies in a concert commemorating 2020
opera
Best of 2020: Opera
With no touching from mid-March onwards, this art-form was hard hit - but ingenuity ruled
Royal Opera Christmas Concert online review – pajama party around the Nutcracker tree
Vivacious opera and cheesy carols under the lively baton of Mark Wigglesworth
Pagliacci, Opera Ensemble, Longborough review - stripped down but live
Finding the essence of a minor masterpiece
theatre
Peter Pan: The Audio Adventure review - the perfect bedtime story
Sharon D Clarke and Olivia Colman sparkle in delightful radio play in aid of Great Ormond Street Hospital
Dick Whittington, National Theatre at Home review - colourful and amiable entertainment
Free stream of the NT's Covid-affected pantomime
Best of 2020: Theatre
Out of pandemic-driven chaos and confusion came moments of clarity - and "Blindness"
dance
The Nutcracker: an end-of-year obituary
It's been a rough ride for the seasonal cash cow. Here's how ballet companies coped
The Seven Deadly Sins, Opera North online review - viscerally thrilling
Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's indictment of capitalism in a vibrant new production
comedy
Comedy podcasts round-up 2: from home and abroad
Lively chat, masterful spoofing and behind-the-scenes fun
Books
Raven Leilani: Luster - portrait of the artist as a black millennial woman
Diamond-cut debut catches every glint of our modern malaise
Mark Fisher: Postcapitalist Desire - The Final Lectures review - imagining the alternative
An eye-opening exploration of the relationship between capitalism and desire
Julia Bell: Radical Attention review - a clear rendering of our withering attention spans
Bell’s essay is timely and insightful, but how radical can small acts really be?
visual arts
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Tate Britain review - enigmatic figures full of life
When is a painting not a portrait?
Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch, Royal Academy review - juxtapositions that confuse rather than clarify
Similar themes, different sensibilities
latest comments
I couldn't agree more! It wil be sorely missed
Completely agree with your elegant,editorial...
Been a fan for years, have been to a live show...
No, Perez didn’t go back to wealthy businessman’s...
I cannot comment on how accurate your review is...
"And in the 21st century the radical right called...
Sorry, under-caffeinated morning key hitting (and...
Maybe in another 30 years; time, at the VPOs slow...