sex
theartsdesk Q&A: Actress Julianne MooreSaturday, 24 July 2010![]() Julianne Moore (b. 1960) is a true rarity. It’s not just that her hair flames like no other star since Katharine Hepburn. Or that alone of her generation she seems impervious to middle age’s indignities. There’s something else. Having worked with... Read more... |
Prince, Super Rock Festival, LisbonFriday, 23 July 2010![]() Travelling along at 140kph in a Mercedes in a police convoy on the wrong side of the road with Prince, and Portuguese fado singer and his new protégé Ana Moura in the front, plus the artist’s agent and Rolling Stones sax player Tim Ries, is pretty... Read more... |
BluebeardSaturday, 17 July 2010![]() Sex, blood and shocking - these are the things Catherine Breillat does well. So long as she's busting taboos wide open you can forgive her the longueurs, the wilful refusal to attend to fundamental principles of storytelling, her characters'... Read more... |
Paula Rego: Oratoria, Marlborough Fine ArtWednesday, 14 July 2010![]() I must admit that I enjoy killing things and, since the target of my murderous instincts are clothes moths, fruit flies and, occasionally, rats or mice, society condones my bloodthirsty instincts. But while I get some satisfaction from my exploits,... Read more... |
Salome, Royal OperaWednesday, 07 July 2010![]() The first time I saw David McVicar's production of Strauss's hypersensuous shocker, I gaped in horrified wonder at the Pasolini Salò-style mise en scène but didn't find the action within it fully realised. When it came out on DVD, the close-ups won... Read more... |
Reunited, BBC OneWednesday, 30 June 2010![]() It occurred to me halfway through Reunited that you could map the characters of This Life – the epochal house-share drama of the Nineties – on to those featured in Mike Bullen’s one-hour pilot feature and see little change in the terrain. All the... Read more... |
HeartbreakerWednesday, 30 June 2010![]() Oh, how we like to moan when the inevitably grubby world of Hollywood gets its mitts on one or another European "classic". The Birdcage, we're told, wasn't as good as La Cage aux Folles (actually, I preferred it), and the 2001 Tom Cruise vehicle,... Read more... |
Salome, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 24 June 2010![]() The last time I saw Oscar Wilde’s biblical tale it was performed by dancer Lindsay Kemp at the Roundhouse in London, back in the 1970s, in a production that was high on dope, incense, strange vocal drawling - and which transported you very quickly... Read more... |
Lulu, Gate TheatreThursday, 17 June 2010![]() What kind of play is Frank Wedekind's Lulu? The answer is a very odd one, with a fractured writing history. Wedekind subtitled his original five-act exploration of raw femininity, in 1894, "A Monster Tragedy", then divided it into two: Earth Spirit... Read more... |
Le nozze di Figaro, Royal OperaTuesday, 01 June 2010![]() The opening night of Le nozze di Figaro was not so much an opera of two halves as an opera of two teams. In the pit we had Sir Colin Davis and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House offering a crisply incisive rendering of Mozart’s score; onstage we... Read more... |
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, BBC TwoTuesday, 01 June 2010![]() The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister joins an ever-lengthening list of dramas detailing the joys, the struggles of lady-on-lady love. It’s never quite clear who these entertainments are for. Blokes, as we know, have a response to this stuff that... Read more... |
Sex and the City 2Friday, 28 May 2010![]() There are, in urban myth, those moments when a runway model – leggy, impassively superhuman and dressed in some impossibly haute garment – catches a heel and collapses, foal-like, into a heap of fragile legs. It’s a moment that Sex and the City the... Read more... |
