sex
mark.hudson
That artists didn't just respond to the rapacious commercialism of the late 20th century, but actively contributed to it is hardly news. That the marketing of art can be part of the art itself is something everyone now implicitly understands, even if it’s only through hearing Tracey Emin wittering about herself on television.Yet if the fact that Tate Modern has chosen to base its major autumn exhibition around such chronically over-exposed figures as Emin, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons seems at first almost incredible, such Read more ...
charlotte.macmillan
Charlotte MacMillan photographed the Royal Ballet's Mayerling, with choreography by Kenneth MacMillan, music by Franz Liszt, and designs by Nicholas Georgiadis, which opens at the Royal Opera House on Wednesday. The cast is headed by Edward Watson as the death-obsessed Crown Prince Rudolf of the Hapsburg imperial dynasty and Mara Galeazzi as his partner in death, the court groupie Mary Vetsera.Ismene Brown writes: Kenneth MacMillan’s most narratively ambitious three-act drama ballet, premiered in 1978 at the Royal Ballet, is a feast of pomp, royal hypocrisy, sex, drugs and suicide - a far cry Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Can elections cause erections? In Jack Thorne's new 90-minute play, 2nd May 1997, Tony Blair's historic landslide victory over the Tories is the background to three stories about sex and love. As the media pumps out the election results, including the memorable Portillo moment, three very different couples in three very different bedrooms react very differently to the dawning of a new political age.The first couple is seventysomething Tory MP Robert and his wife Marie. He's about to lose his seat and defeat forces him to admit that his career has been less than glorious, while at the same Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Adrian Lyne met controversy in the cinema with it head on, while Vladimir Nabokov's novel prompted one of the resounding Broadway flops of Edward Albee's stage career. (Trust me: I am among the few who caught its 1981 New York run.) So here is Lolita once more, this time filleted and distilled into a one-person show suspended somewhere between a stage reading and an actual play. Call it what you will, the result is mesmerising.By letting Nabokov's own sly, ever-shifting narrative voice do the talking, Richard Nelson's adaptation cuts to the quick in a way that the various other Lolitas simply Read more ...