literature
Ismene Brown
Once upon a time... for a child there is always an attic, with a rocking-horse, a wardrobe, an old clock and granny’s huge chair. And there's always a story to be found there about being monstrously bad and naughty, and being forgiven. This is the delight of the irresistible staging of The Wind in the Willows at the Royal Opera House’s subterranean Linbury Studio Theatre.Out of the cupboard drawer you can drag a stripey river, from the wonky rafters you can pull down green willow fronds, and inside a rolled-up old carpet there sleeps a myopic, shy Mole. Now 10 years old, the production with Read more ...
graeme.thomson
What is truth? Is it fixed or fluid, personal or universal? Does it require hard evidence or merely faith? These are the areas of interest poked and prodded in this co-production between the Traverse and Peepolykus, the company which previously brought The Hound of the Baskervilles to the stage. The result is an eccentric romp through the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, a famously ridiculed figurehead for the spirit world in his later years, which ponders – none too deeply, but with immense good humour – the conflict between fideism and rationalism.Doyle’s story is presented here as an Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You could hardly wish for a better subject for Imagine than Jeanette Winterson. When we see her at the Edinburgh book festival, promoting her recent autobiography Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?, she’s got the audience eating out of her hand: they get the full "experience". Elsewhere, though, she’s quieter, reflecting on a short enough life - born in 1959, she’s only just over the half-century mark – that has been so full that Roger Parsons’ immaculate 80-minute programme took a 25-year intermission in the middle.We jumped from the end of her Oxford years, culmination of that strangest Read more ...
David Benedict
Confession time: I’m a sucker for a romantic reunion. When lost-presumed-dead twins Sebastian and Viola finally rediscover one another alive and well at the end of Twelfth Night, you’ll find me in tears. And, yes, the late, great Nora Ephron’s New Year’s Eve climax in When Harry Met Sally works every time. All of which makes me more than well-matched for the musical-theatre version of the epistolary romance Daddy Long Legs. Dear Reader, I remained dry-eyed.For their musical version of Jean Webster’s 1912, Anne of Green Gables-tinged bestseller, composer/lyricist Paul Gordon and bookwriter/ Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
From the makers of Little Miss Sunshine comes a funny, ethereal love story in the same vein as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Sunshine’s not all they have in common.Calvin Weir-Fields (smash the surname and you get Weirds) is a bestselling author - or was, back in the day when he was a teen. Now, he’s in second novel hell. As played by Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood), Calvin's tall, nervy, nerdy, sweaty and only occasionally confident. His psychiatrist (nicely cast Elliot Gould) is there to help him through writer’s block until the “muse” appears. And so she does. Unlike Sharon Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
As long as Simon Callow is around, London’s theatre scene will never be short of one-man shows, nor of Shakespeare. A new pretender to the Shakespearian throne, a rival for the hollow crown (and, just occasionally, the hollow laugh) has however emerged in the form of Roger Rees’s What You Will – a brisk hour-and-a-half’s trot through Shakespeare’s greatest hits, with a little autobiography and a lot of accents thrown in.A veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Rees can spin an anecdote with style, has plenty to tell, and the elegant shamelessness to steal them when they are not his own. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Apart from “I did not have sex with that woman” and maybe “It’s the economy, stupid”, Bill Clinton seems never to have said anything quite as memorable. Indeed, of all the phrases with his name attached, none is quoted quite so tremulously as Clinton's description of an event that takes place annually on the border between England and Wales as May makes way for June.Clinton’s “Woodstock of the mind” is actually a misnomer. The Hay Festival, which is celebrating its 25th birthday, is much closer to a Glastonbury of the mind. It occupies its place in the calendar with an ever greater sense of Read more ...
ash.smyth
Next week sees the release of Shimon Peres, the second instalment in Spirit Level Film’s The Price of Kings series. A president of Israel who refers to leadership as “not a very happy engagement,” a Nobel Peace Prize-winner who says he has never slept easy, Peres is about as good a subject for a political doco as you’re likely to get. He’s the world’s oldest elected head of state (his political career having begun in the early Fifties!) and the only Israeli PM (two-and-a-half times) to have made it to the top step in their political pantheon. Most famously, though, he shares his Nobel laurels Read more ...
ash.smyth
If you’re one of those readers who likes to believe that a novelist’s work and the life he leads have little or nothing to do with one another, then I trust you were watching last night’s Arena: The Dreams of William Golding.After an upbringing of lower-middle state schooling, immersion in the Classics and archaeology, uncompromising atheism (father) and superstitious eclecticism (mother), eventual Nobel Laureate William Golding was spat out into the world – with a reference from Oxford marked “Not Top Drawer” – chippy, resentful, and deeply susceptible to the wishy-washy of the unconscious. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
No choreographer so divides American and British critics as Russia's only international dancemaker, Boris Eifman. He's "an amazing magician of the theatre", according to the late, great US critic Clive Barnes. He "flaunts all the worst clichés of psycho-sexo-bio-dance-drama with casual pride," according to the masterly New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay. Both views come from Englishmen working in America, hence a contradictory weathervane as to how his ballets will be received in Britain on this tour. Whichever side one comes down on (and one does, one does) what is undoubtedly Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Lord count was perhaps surprisingly high in the first instalment of Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture. Among the talking heads I counted there was only one who wasn’t a life peer or a “proper” hereditary one, and there was only one who was neither Lord, Lady or Dame (though she did have a CBE). That hereditary baron Ferdinand Mount was not only squeezed into the minority corner but never actually uses his title was, I suppose, a telling comment in itself about contemporary Britain and our egalitarian self-image, but more so the fact that two of the lifers, Lord Bragg and Peter Hennessy, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
With most horror films the monster gets flushed down the metaphorical toilet - blown up, spat out, switched off. In this one you must live with the monster forever. As most people know, We Need to Talk About Kevin is about a boy who becomes a multiple murderer. That’s established in the opening shot (using barrel-fuls of tomato passata, I'd guess) with a vivid repellency and realism that you only slowly realise has drawn you deep into his mother’s mind - where you will stay for the rest of the story.Lionel Shriver’s novel seemed to me somewhat too schematic and clever in its treatment of her Read more ...