Last updated on September 1st, 2018Pablo Picasso’s output in 1932 was so prolific that Tate Modern was unable to list all of these in the seven-page chronology for its formidable new exhibition, Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy, which opened today. I am greeted by a quote when I enter the first room: “the work…
Portrait of an Art Addict
Last updated on April 22nd, 2018One of my recurring fantasies is the Dinner Party where the living and the dead, my gods and goddesses, come together for dream dinner banter. My table is a large one, admittedly, and it includes Peggy Guggenheim. I’m not even sure I would have liked Peggy, but boy did she…
Review: The Birthday Party
Last updated on February 3rd, 2020Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party is very, very funny, but it’s also totally doolally. The play had its London premiere at the Lyric Opera House (now the Lyric Hammersmith) in 1958. It was shut down after eight performances, thanks to a raft of disastrous reviews. It’s now considered a classic and has…
Art Review – Modigliani at Tate Modern
Last updated on April 22nd, 2018I am doing something remarkable. I am a voyeur in an artist’s studio in Paris – in Montparnasse to be exact – for a full six and a half minutes. But, I am actually in London. I am gazing out of Amedeo Modigliani’s studio window, towards the smoky chimney tops…
I’m MAD AS HELL and I’m not going to take it anymore
Last updated on February 3rd, 2020In 1976, a film called Network cleaned up at the Oscars, winning four Academy Awards. Written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by the great, late Sidney Lumet, the black comedy was written and released during the Watergate Scandal and the Vietnam War, poking fun at the lengths to which the…
Soutine’s Culinary Artistry
Last updated on April 22nd, 2018Monsieur Soutine had a knack for finding good staff. And he certainly liked a man in uniform. Bellboys, waiters, valets, pastry cooks and the occasional maid, would make their way from the grand hotels and restaurants of Paris’s Roaring Twenties onto his fiery canvases. London hasn’t seen a Soutine show…
Potty for Harry at the British Library
Last updated on March 6th, 2019Can you believe it’s been 20 years since ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ was first published? And just in time for Halloween, there’s an enchanting exhibition opening at the British Library. Harry Potter: A History of Magic is a treasure trove of rare books, manuscripts, magical objects and illustrations that will…
Egypt Uncovered at the Soane Museum
Last updated on March 14th, 2018As if you needed an excuse to go and visit one of London’s best-loved museums, but I’m about to give you one. Over at the Soane Museum in Holborn, you can meet an Italian circus strongman turned Egyptologist, and discover tales of robbed tombs and a celebrity Pharaoh. Add to…
Venus in Fur at the Theatre Royal Haymarket
Last updated on March 14th, 2018Aphrodite is in the house at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in a hair-raising erotically-charged production of David Ives’s Broadway hit, Venus in Fur. Natalie Dormer treads the boards as the feline Vanda Jordan, and David Oakes of Victoria fame has parked his Prince Ernest to reveal a magnetic Thomas Novachek…
Theatre Review: Labour of Love
Last updated on March 14th, 2018Love is all around us at the Noël Coward Theatre this autumn. It’s Labour intensive and dirty, and you can catch it in James Graham’s latest blockbuster, the political romcom Labour of Love. Starring Martin Freeman and Tamsin Greig, the play is not just a history lesson of the Labour…