London
Adam Sweeting
Despite having been a rock star since the late Seventies, Chrissie Hynde seems to be an introverted, elusive sort of person. If this Arena profile was anything to go by, she lives as a virtual recluse, positively revelling in solitariness. Like the film, her last album was called Alone.“I spend all my time alone,” we saw her telling Sandra Bernhard, evidently a close friend. “I have nothing else to do. It’s my choice, I like it.” Well good for her, and it does mean she has plenty of time to pursue her recently-found passion for painting (which she’s pretty good at, too). But it didn’t really Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Jonas Kaufmann’s legion of admirers could rest content. A well-received Lieder evening last week demonstrated that the world’s hottest tenor property had returned, both to London for a three-concert residency at the Barbican, and indeed to singing after burst blood vessels had forced several months of rest and cancelled concerts.A welcoming party duly cheered away before he had sung a note of the Wesendonck-Lieder. They had to wait until two lines of the fourth song before savouring the peculiar joys of Kaufmann’s voice at full throttle – appropriately enough, on the phrase "Glory of the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Pigeons were described in this riveting programme as man’s best feathered friends, as well as an urban pest: the 35,000 of them that used to flock round Trafalgar Square deposited some 390 tons of unharvested guano – bird poo, in simpler words – annually that had to be cleaned up, until bird feeding was banned. Mess and noise made the same bird, so loved by pigeon fanciers, into dreaded flying rats, a leading public menace.But pigeons, like rats, are infinitely adaptable, hence their remarkable survival, underlined by an amazing capacity to breed. And until the 1840s, when the telegraph was Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Philip Ridley has one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary theatre. His imagination is laced with sci-fi images and an East End gothic sensibility, and his mastery of storytelling continues to surprise and delight. In 1991, he kicked off his playwriting career – having already written several books and the script for The Krays – by penning The Pitchfork Disney, a stunning example of leftfield writing that still dazzles with its intensity and its magical vision. This revival is by wonderboy Jamie Lloyd, and includes Hayley Squires (who occasionally lit up the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Francis Bacon died in April 1992, aged 82, but heaven knows how he managed to live that long. The tortuous story of his life is now fairly well known, but Richard Curson Smith's documentary marshalled a formidable array of critics, biographers and celebs including Marianne Faithfull, Damien Hirst and Terence Stamp to create a portrait of a man capable of effervescent wit and charm, yet fuelled from within by a monstrous darkness.The film lit the blue touch paper by looking at Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which, when exhibited in London in 1945, did little to Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Only the final 60 seconds of this first episode of Apple Tree Yard could have been described as a psychological thriller. We know Dr Yvonne Carmichael is in the dock – the genetic scientist was shown handcuffed in a prison van right at the start – but we don’t know what she is supposed to have done. The remaining 55 minutes comprised a familiar tale of middle-class adultery and low-lit longing. Seen from the viewpoint of the female protagonist (who provides the voiceover) this is very much “one for the ladies”.Dr Carmichael (Emily Watson) has just finished addressing a Select Committee at the Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Symphony is a word carrying heavy historical baggage. It’s understandable when composers dig for inspiration elsewhere. All the same, Mark-Anthony Turnage has grasped the symphonic nettle with Remembering – In memoriam Evan Scofield which received its first performance last night. Many more will follow, I’d venture.The shock of recognition was not slow in arriving with the opening movement’s construction, bright and angular as steel girders, finding the LSO at their most incisive. There followed an Allegretto-type elegy, then a twisted waltz with trio and repeat. Like Haydn, no less than Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
"Oh what a beautiful morning! Oh what a beautiful day!" Curly the cowboy sang in the opening scene of Oklahoma!, the first musical from Rodgers and Hammerstein (1943). In the midst of war here was sheer optimism and celebration set – with some nods at reality ("there’s a bright golden haze on the meadow, the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, an’ it looks like it’s climbin’ clear up the sky") – in the American West. It was also a fully integrated show – music, book, lyrics, choreography (Agnes de Mille, Cecil B DeMille’s niece) and set design with everything pushing the narrative, another Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Historic unsolved murders have become their own mini-genre, with the likes of Cold Case lurking in the small print of the schedules and Silent Witness still going strong in its 20th series. A hit the first time out in 2015, Unforgotten is back with a new investigation of another mystery cadaver.This time, the deceased was dredged out of the River Lea in north-east London, having been crammed into a suitcase (post-mortem, one hopes). Detectives Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) were promptly down on the riverbank, poking at the mysterious plasticky skin of the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Gather round the fire, friends: no Santa down the chimney this Christmas Eve, but the curiously comforting Alan Bennett, with his sardonic and occasionally optimistic diaries. The latest published instalment has the slightly wry title Keeping On Keeping On; Bennett tells us the original title was to be Banging On Banging On.Bennett is 82 now, and lives much of the time in NW1 – the very street once home to the Lady in the Van, who parked in his front garden, in a neighbourhood memorialised in the Mark Boxer comic strip, Life and Times in NW1. Now much has gone: the real-life Mr and Mrs String Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Advent is as profitable for choirs as it is tricky to programme. How to delight the palates of carol-hungry audiences while offering them new treats? How to reconcile the fairy-lights of ubiquitous consumption and satiation with the Biblical call of the season as a time to wait, take stock and look forward?Without a "Ding-Dong" in earshot, Siglo de Oro appeared at the Spitalfields Music Winter Festival and brightened up a wet and windy evening in east London with unfailingly polished accounts of Advent antiphons at either end of a half-millennium. Pearls of 16th-century polyphony gleamed in Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Howard Brenton (Christie in Love) and Ruth Rendell (Thirteen Steps Down) are just two of the many writers inspired by the sordid goings-on in 1940s Notting Hill. John Reginald Christie was a postman, a policeman and a psychopath who, as a back-street abortionist, enjoyed killing for company. A fantasist with an iron grip, he ensured that his lodger, Tim Evans, was the first to be hanged for his crimes.Ludovic Kennedy’s 10 Rillington Place, which highlighted the miscarriage of justice, ensured that Christie’s necrophiliac corpse would never rest in peace. It took 10 years for Kennedy’s book – Read more ...