Arts Reviews

Ballad of a Small Player opens with Lord Doyle, played by Colin Farrell, hiding from security in his trashed casino suite in Macau. After they’re gone, he slips into the corridor and sees a trolley holding a bouquet of flowers and a knife. I kept my eyes on the knife, expecting the jittery, paranoid gambling addict to grab the weapon. Instead he places a white rose in his green velvet lapel. Director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front, Conclave) enjoys playing these games of misdirection. It feels appropriate. Casinos – with their chandeliers, gaudy frescoes and croupiers in black tie – are contradictory places. Opulence in these temples

Tracy Letts’s Mary Page Marlowe is a biographical portrait of an emotionally damaged mother struggling with romantic and family problems. Susan Sarandon shares the lead with four other actresses which makes the show a little hard to follow. And the timeline is jumbled up so that the audience has to find its bearings at the start of each new episode. Why? Perhaps to give the material a complexity it doesn’t deserve. We first meet our heroine, aged 40 (played by Andrea Riseborough), as she tells her kids that they’re moving to Kentucky without their dad. This unpromising scene is hilarious because the word ‘Kentucky’ is repeated so often that it

Is there anything menopausal women can’t do (on television)? Last Sunday, as a couple of them were still working on the daring theft of a Salvador Dali painting in ITV1’s Frauds, BBC1 launched Riot Women in which five others form a punk band. Meanwhile, two regular features of British TV remain actresses lamenting the lack of older women starring in drama series – and older women starring in drama series. Virtually all these shows also recall the headline from the American satirical magazine The Onion: ‘Women empowered by whatever a woman does.’ And that’s certainly true of Riot Women, written by Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley, Gentleman Jack etc.) and therefore

When Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian Library wrote to John le Carré asking if the writer would leave it his papers, he got more than he could ever have bargained for. Le Carré not only responded with enthusiasm, explaining that ‘Oxford was Smiley’s spiritual home, as it is mine’, but also sent along 85 boxes of neatly arranged papers and memorabilia. After le Carré’s death in 2020 came a second larger tranche; the total archive consisted of more than 1,200 boxes. This was a writer who threw nothing out. Selected fruits of this vast haul can be seen in a new and impressive exhibition in the Bodleian’s Weston Library (formerly

Waldemar Januszczak and Bendor Grosvenor’s art podcast has returned after nearly five years. It is, says Januszczak, ‘the podcast they could not stop – but they did have a jolly good try’. What happened? It isn’t clear; there are teases that it revealed too much, which is anyway a good ploy for attracting listeners. ‘Subversive’ is not the first word that springs to mind when tuning in to the two unlikely chums. Their regular feature, ‘Shocking News from the Artworld’, is more Apollo than Nigel Dempster. For example: Christie’s has closed the digital art department that dealt in NFTs, the crypto tokens going the way of the dodo. And Gabriele

At the receptionist’s desk in Cosprop’s studio and costume warehouse, a former Kwik Fit garage, the sloping bleakness of Holloway Road is held at bay by a small chandelier, brassy lighting and a bound guest book. It’s a bit stagey, like a filmset for a cheap foreign hotel or an expensive shrink’s office, quite out of place in the real north London high street. But as the entrance to a costume house that builds worlds and people out of bits of fabric, feathers and jewels, it’s appropriate. Suspend all disbelief, ye who enter here. Cosprop was founded by the costume designer John Bright in 1965. What began as a small

The National Railway Museum is 50 years old, and it’s come over all literary. A quote from Howards End stands at the entrance to the newly refurbished Station Hall: railway termini, proclaims Forster, ‘are our gates to the glorious and the unknown’. T.S. Eliot salutes you on the way out: ‘You are not the same people who left that station.’ Big claims, but as it turns out, largely to the point. The changes to the Station Hall are subtle but numerous, making the argument that as well as being the foundational technology of modern civilisation, railways are a culture in their own right. The aim, say the curators, is to

R:Evolution is a pun, presumably intended to suggest that tradition is not static and the obvious truth that change always grows out of what has come before. A useful idea, of course, even if it’s one that the four short works selected under this title by English National Ballet doesn’t smoothly illustrate. The management is, however, due a pat on the back for trying; budget cuts and the power of the grey men in marketing means that such programming is becoming increasingly rare, victim of the regressive fashion for full-length narratives and fairy tales. ENB starts by juxtaposing two works conceived in 1947. Balanchine’s Theme and Variations is one of

I have my routine down to a science. At 6.59, I’m sitting in the stairwell, typing on my laptop or scribbling in a book. At 7.01, I’m speeding down the hall to Dressing Room 18, where the rest of the girls are semi-apparelled, laughing, blasting out Tyla; or some days, silent, headphones in, munching pre-show snacks and staring blankly into space. From 7.01 to 7.05, I’m putting on my costume as the ambient noise of my cast mates getting dismantled by the demogorgon plays over the intercom. At 7.07, I’m sprinting down the dozens of stairs between Dressing Room 18 and the ground floor. And at 7.09, I’m stepping out