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Reviews
Apart from a few nips and tucks, age has not withered Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Anyone who can remember the original steamy adaptation of Andrea Newman’s fine novel will recognise the changes. Prue, no longer the manipulative cow who graced…
Last night was the third and probably last time this 21-year-old Nashville songstress will grace the humble Windmill pub in Brixton with her charismatic yet down-to-earth presence. Not because the gig wasn’t a sell-out and an unqualified success, but because…
One Proms blockbuster effortlessly reached its goal last night when Paul Lewis crowned his Beethoven piano concertos series with a diamantine "Emperor". Two more suggested themselves in a challenging quartet of big works programmed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's…
Is it an example of our cultural insularity that no one I know has ever heard of Wajdi Mouawad? Born in Lebanon, he’s the most performed contemporary French-language playwright and his 2003 masterpiece, Scorched, has been staged all over the…
If Cold Comfort Farm and Hot Fuzz got chatting down their local one night, the conversation might go something along the lines of Tamara Drewe. Putting the “sex” in Wessex, Stephen Frears’s latest film loosens the corsets of the Hardy…
I suspect that more than half the audience that goes to see Dirty Dancing on stage has seen the 1987 movie, and that quite a few of them have seen the stage version more than once. There’s a strange feeling…
The difficulty with fashioning real-life events as drama lies in the temptation to turn the central players into characters that an audience will naturally warm to. But real life isn’t like that. Bad things can happen to people you wouldn’t…
Sometimes you get the impression the Beeb wishes religion would quietly go away. You see it in the gradual transformation of the Sunday morning slot from the lightweight Heaven and Earth Show to Nicky Campbell’s lighter-weight Big Questions and now…
We should lie down to listen to music much more often. Gravity pulls away the thought and frown lines, smoothes the intellectual tracks and folds on the face, while you feel the blood in your head pumping lushly to dreamier…
Few artists can creep you out like Gregor Schneider. His work is scary and it’s absurd. But even as you giggle nervously when confronted with its less than subtle deployment of shock-horror tactics, a more profound disquiet creeps up on…
My abiding memory of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra’s second Prom under Simon Rattle on Saturday will be of 6,000 people listening with rapt, or at any rate silent, concentration to Schoenberg, Webern and Berg. Has it ever happened before? Perhaps…
Call me a paradoxically wary old Mahler nut, but I reckon that given 24 months of anniversary overkill, it might keep things fresh to catch each of the symphonies live no more than once a year. So, having heard an…
“Do you realise what you’re letting yourself in for?” is surely the worst thing to say to someone in order to put them at their ease, especially when they are about to step into the subconscious unknown. But down-to-earth fireman…
The American Dream is a great subject for theatre. Not only is it a powerful myth that animates millions, but it is also vulnerable to being subverted by generations of playwrights. Like an aged boxer, it is liable to being…
It’s funny how things turn out. Of the four former members of Led Zeppelin, John Bonham is dead, John Paul Jones is an odd and unpredictable figure, popping up only occasionally with an album or a collaboration, while Jimmy Page…
There's a fascination that comes with films/ plays/ you choose the art form that contain within them their own critique: the sort of thing you find, for instance, in Chekhov done badly when one character or another opines about how…
Ever since his award-winning debut From London to Brighton (2006), Paul Andrew Williams has been an exemplary British filmmaker of sparky, low-budget genre tales. Cherry Tree Lane is Straw Dogs in suburbia, a schematic and brutal home invasion film, full…
The keyboard player usually associated with Paul Weller is "Merton" Mick Talbot, who, after leaving mod revival band The Merton Parkas, filled out The Jam’s sound in their twilight days and accompanied Weller’s journey through the Style Council. Andy Crofts…
New viewers begin here: even if you know nothing of the previous five series of Waterloo Road, you could start to enjoy the drama set in a failing comprehensive in Greater Manchester with the opener to series six, as the…
JasperRees Not long now till Tony Blair faces interrogation by A Marr. GraemeAThomson and I tweeting a live review GraemeAThomson Nice to see they’ve scheduled it straight after Restoration Roadshow. Someone at the Beeb with a GSOH? GraemeAThomson Marr's gone…
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New articles
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Bouquet of Barbed Wire, ITV1
Apart from a few nips and tucks, age has not withered Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Anyone who can remember the original steamy adaptation of Andrea Newman’s fine novel will recognise the changes. Prue, no longer the manipulative cow who graced our screens back in 1976, has been made-over as an unworldly innocent, while husband Gavin – still a deeply unpleasant…
Written on Tuesday, 07 September 2010 15:23
Read more...
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RSNO, Denève; Ensemble Matheus, Spinosi, Royal Albert Hall
One Proms blockbuster effortlessly reached its goal last night when Paul Lewis crowned his Beethoven piano concertos series with a diamantine "Emperor". Two more suggested themselves in a challenging quartet of big works programmed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's brilliant music director Stéphane Denève. I now hunger for concert performances here conducted by Denève of Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini and…
Written on Tuesday, 07 September 2010 15:15
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Q&A Special: Writer-composer Richard Thomas
Richard Thomas wrote Jerry Springer, The Opera, as everyone knows - and he is soon to unveil Anna Nicole, the opera. Can this be the same Richard Thomas who’s written a dance show at Sadler’s Wells, with a cheesy poster, called Shoes? It hardly seems likely. Flames, expletives, scabrous lines, suppurating satire - that’s what makes a Richard Thomas show,…
Written on Tuesday, 07 September 2010 08:30
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Film: Tamara Drewe
If Cold Comfort Farm and Hot Fuzz got chatting down their local one night, the conversation might go something along the lines of Tamara Drewe. Putting the “sex” in Wessex, Stephen Frears’s latest film loosens the corsets of the Hardy pastoral, pitting town and country against one another in the dirtiest and most gleefully anarchic of fist-fights. Heaving bosoms, brooding…
Written on Tuesday, 07 September 2010 14:00
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