One of the stars of the National Gallery’s Vermeer show, The Guitar Player, is usually on permanent display, free, in a room which includes work by Frans Hals and one of the most moving self-portraits Rembrandt ever made. Their home is the glorious Robert Adam house, Kenwood, on Hampstead Heath, which is just round the…
There is no small measure of comedy in watching one National Treasure taking a shot at another. Playwright Alan Bennett (of History Boys fame) could well be considered one of Britain’s National Treasures, with his uncanny ability to capture the essence of the English. And one of their favourite pastimes is to visit National Trust…
The lights come up. Tumultuous applause. A full house audience undecided only whether to give a standing ovation or not. It’s a moment when most actors can breathe a sigh of relief. Not John Lithgow, playing the title role in the National Theatre production of The Magistrate, however. No, he has to take a deep…
Soviet oligarchs may take up riotous living once they settle in the West, but the Soviet Union isn’t a place one really associates with levity. The full irony of the title Gaiety is The Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union: New Art from Russia, however, doesn’t actually hit one until you have seen the extended…
A name that brings to mind the grand landscapes of America is photographic pioneer Ansel Adams, who grew up with a Kodak in his hands. As an awkward boy, barely into his teens, he was capturing the great wilderness areas of his country, and continued throughout his long life to capture the magnificence of nature,…
It’s hard to fathom why Zeng Fanzhi is hailed as one of China’s superstar artists when you see his enormous paintings at Gagosian’s Britannia Street gallery (until Jan 19). Nine may be a lucky number, but it leaves the walls looking quite bare in what is one of his first showings in the West. True,…
There’s a reason you have never seen a production of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. It’s not his best play. It’s not even his, or rather, his alone, but probably a collaboration with Thomas Middleton. An awkward work that falls between tragedy and fable, it’s not surprising that it is seldom seen: huge cast, lots of…
South African artist William Kentridge is featured in a touring show from the Hayward Gallery, which travels across the UK but also in what seems to me the first really successful use of the circular walls of the Tate Modern’s Tanks: I am not Me, the Horse is not Mine (until 20 Jan). In Kentridge’s…
Leo Tolstoy famously said, in the opening lines of his novel Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That may not be quite true, seeing people laugh with a sense of recognition at the play The Last of the Haussmans. No-one’s family can be quite like…
Curious, isn’t it, that we can understand how a blue sky can make one happy, but find it more difficult to see why five red cars could give one a super good day? For Christopher Boone though, while red cars are good, a yellow car heralds all the gloom of a dark storm cloud. Describing…
London Letter 