A couple of years ago, on a drive through the picture book hills and lakes of Connemara, my pal (his car, his driving, his choice) played a compilation of Frank Sinatra’s hits on the music system. He sang along lustily, as I contemplated the contrast with the landscape and wondered about how long it would be before I could suggest a bit of Van Morrison, The Pogues, Val Doonican…Because I’ve never really got "The Chairman of the Board". I see what others see, but it’s all too clean, too consciously produced, too overweening in its sheer Frankness for me to engage. Every song was Sinatra first Read more ...

The best thrillers have not one, but two twists. Often, there’s a predictable twist, and an unpredictable one. So it is with The Guilty, Chloë Moss’s adaptation for the stage of the 2021 film of the same name by Antoine Fuqua, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, which is itself an English version of the 2018 Danish original, Den Skyldige, by Gustav Möller and Emil Nygaard Albertsen. Currently playing at the Donmar Warehouse, it’s a 60-minute monologue performed with compelling intensity by Russell Tovey. As with all the finest thrillers, it constantly keeps us guessing, asking what’s next?The set up is Read more ...

The “hiding in plain sight” technique has proved appallingly effective for a list of notorious sex offenders. When in doubt, get yourself a prominent slot on the BBC and hang out with royalty, and you can get away with almost anything.The newsreader Huw Edwards is the latest in this roll-call of infamy, though he has vowed to challenge “misleading or fabricated claims” made about him, but Edwards seems like a mere amateur when compared with Rolf Harris. As we learn in this Australian-made two-part documentary, Harris hailed from the Perth suburb of Bassingdean, came to London in 1952, studied Read more ...

You might think the spy thriller is a genre which has been worn out and abused to death, but this second series of The Agency is here to tell you otherwise. Once again penned by the prolific Butterworth brothers Jez and John-Henry, it brings us back to the CIA London station helmed by the laconic Bosko (Richard Gere) and his morose and curmudgeonly deputy Henry Ogletree (Jeffrey Wright).The star turn among their agents is the man codenamed Martian (Michael Fassbender), who remains haunted by his love affair with Sudanese anthropologist Sami Zahir (Jodie Turner-Swift, pictured below with Read more ...

Post-Covid British theatre has a crush on adaptations, especially those with a star actor. So it’s easy to see why National Theatre chief Indhu Rubasingham is staging the latest sparkling verse play by Martin Crimp, whose electric version of Cyrano de Bergerac with James McAvoy conquered the West End in 2019. This time Crimp revisits Molière’s 1666 masterpiece, The Misanthrope, with Canadian superstar Sandra Oh taking on the main role, her terrific performance turning the original’s Alceste into a very contemporary Alice – I couldn’t take my eyes off her.Oh’s character, a Booker-Prize-winning Read more ...

Currently on show at the Barbican is a video that makes your hackles rise. Two “savages” are on display in a cage surrounded by punters who happily pay a dollar to pose for photographs with these exotic natives or else to watch them dance. These hideous interactions are being played out in museums in supposedly civilised countries including America, Spain and Australia.You don’t have to be Einstein to smell a rat, though; the signs are there for all to see. Along with her grass skirt, the woman wears shades and sneakers while the man’s Mayan-style breast plate and head gear are accompanied by Read more ...

After his record-breaking and warmly remembered Love On Tour, Harry Styles is back with a fresh, slightly more experimental twist on universal, blockbusting live pop. The revision of his performance style is subtle enough that Together, Together feels comfortable and familiar but the minor rebrand that came with his latest album Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. sufficiently spices things up. Following a glittery, feel good singalong with Shania Twain to warm things up, “Are You Listening Yet?” opens the show, with tangible gratitude flying through the stadium from Styles in the Read more ...

“Do we really need another Anish Kapoor exhibition?” I asked myself on hearing of the Hayward Gallery’s plan to show the sculptor a second time. (He exhibited there in 1998 and has also had major shows at the Royal Academy and Tate Modern along with numerous Lisson Gallery exhibitions, while his Orbit Tower continues to overlook the Olympic Park in Stratford.)Having just visited the exhibition, though, the answer is a resounding “YES”! I’m still buzzing with delight at Kapoor’s majestic take-over – the show is more like an occupation than an exhibition. On entering, for instance, your way is Read more ...

You’d watch Hamnet for the visuals alone, director Chloé Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal flooding the screen with lush greens and browns, 16th century rural England brought to physical life with an eye-popping attention to detail. We first meet Jessie Buckley’s Agnes in dense woodland gathering plants, a gift for falconry signalling her otherness. Though the locals whisper that she’s the daughter of a witch, she proves irresistible to glove maker and Latin tutor William (Paul Mescal). He charms her with his storytelling abilities and she reciprocates by reading his palm, hinting at a Read more ...

Can you remember what you were doing on 23 June 2016? You might well have been out to cast your vote in the EU referendum, which has thrown its interminable shadow over our benighted country ever since.Or maybe you just stayed in bed, which wouldn’t have been a bad choice because after all the shouting, campaigning, anger and bitterness, nobody got what they wanted. Remainers failed to remain, and Brexiteers didn’t get anything they considered worthy of the name “Brexit”. President Obama had theatrically flown in to warn us to remain or else, but he must have been disappointed when nobody Read more ...

Judy Garland's Carnegie Hall comeback concert on Sunday, 23 April 1961 has often been lauded as "the greatest night in show business history", though that judgment surely depends on where Garland sits in one’s personal pantheon. Elvis’s made-for-television 68 Comeback Special, the king lean in leather, must be up there, and likely Sinatra at Madison Square Garden in 1974. Whatever, the sold-out performance featured some 25 standards, Garland backed by a 40-piece orchestra conducted by Mort Lindsey. Marilyn Monroe, Richard Burton, and Julie Andrews were in the audience. The album, Judy at Read more ...

There’s not – and never has been, really – that much discourse about commercial dance music as music. It’s either talked about by ageing doomers (“oh the kids just want to film on their phones, they don’t dance any more”), as spectacle or social phenomenon, without ever really differentiating EDM from big room house from bassline from whatever else. Not that musicians like Sonny Fodera probably care, mind. Over 13 years and now six albums, racking up quarter-billion stream songs at a time, and ubiquitous in pop radio as much as mega-raves, Fodera has constantly trodden an interesting line Read more ...