When Soft Cell first appeared on Top of the Pops in summer 1981, miming along to their version of Gloria Jones’s ‘Tainted Love’, it felt like a moment of palpable newness. Well, it certainly did if you were prepubescent and really had no idea what sex actually was. Romantic love — in either its glory
Sometimes Andrea Mantegna was just showing off. For the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, he painted a false ceiling above the Camera degli Sposi. Around a great trompe l’oeil oculus, apparently open to the sky, assorted gawpers and cherubs lean nosily over the parapet: ‘What’s going on down there, then?’ Only the Duke and Duchess of
William Forsythe has been called a lot of things in his four decades as a dancemaker: wilful provocateur, ‘pretentious as hell’, even ballet’s Antichrist. But nothing, he claims, to warrant US government officials showing up, unannounced, at his door and threatening him with arrest. Had he been reported by an angry dance purist, perhaps? After
The drop-curtain resembles a granite slab on which the genius’s name has been carved for all time. The festival of Pinter at the Harold Pinter Theatre feels like the inauguration of a godhead. And it’s not easy to separate the work from the reverence that surrounds it. Pinter One consists of sketches and playlets written
Yes, Oscar Wilde never wrote it. No, Strauss didn’t intend it. In fact, the composer famously demanded the Dance of the Seven Veils be ‘thoroughly decent, as if it were being done on a prayer mat’. But that doesn’t stop this striptease and musical money shot being the look-but-don’t-touchstone of any Salome. A blonde, blank-faced
It’s a radical thought I know, but I sometimes wonder what it would be like if a new TV thriller began by carefully introducing the characters and basic situation, before proceeding chronologically from there. In the meantime, though, there’s BBC1’s The Cry, which didn’t just start with the traditional blizzard of time-shifts, but continued like
This version of A Star Is Born, starring Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, is the fourth iteration (Janet Gaynor and Frederic March, 1937; Judy Garland and James Mason, 1954; Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, 1976). So it’s a remake of a remake of a remake and overly familiar, you would think. Oh God, not another
The most inspiring voice on radio this week belongs to Hetty Werkendam, or rather to her 15-year-old self as she talked to the BBC correspondent Patrick Gordon Walker in April 1945. He was with the British soldiers who entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and witnessed the horrors of that scene: dead bodies in piles with
