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1 week ago | 
spectator.com.au | Rupert Christiansen
Oliver Messel: Designer. Maker. InfluencerGlyndebourne, until 24 August Through the grey downbeat years of postwar austerity, we nursed cheering fantasies of a life more lavishly colourful and hedonistic.
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1 week ago | 
spectator.com.au | Rupert Christiansen
Ballet Nights 008Cadogan HallK2CO: A Thing of BeautyMayflower, Southampton, and touring until 3 July Paralysed rather than empowered by the heavy hand of Big Brother Arts Council, the major subsidised dance companies are running scared and gripped by dismally risk-averse and short-termist attitudes.
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1 week ago | 
spectator.co.uk | Rupert Christiansen
Paralysed rather than empowered by the heavy hand of Big Brother Arts Council, the major subsidised dance companies are running scared and gripped by dismally risk-averse and short-termist attitudes.
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1 week ago | 
spectator.co.uk | Rupert Christiansen
Through the grey downbeat years of postwar austerity, we nursed cheering fantasies of a life more lavishly colourful and hedonistic. Oliver Messel fed them: born into Edwardian privilege, the epitome of well-connected metropolitan sophistication, he doubled up as interior decorator and stage designer, creating in both roles a unique style of rococo elegance and light-touch whimsy that sweetened and consoled – ‘a gossamer world of gilded enchantment’ as Roy Strong soupily put it.
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1 week ago | 
telegraph.co.uk | Rupert Christiansen
"Genius" has become a widely devalued concept: it can describe a goal by Mo Salah, Sally Rooney's latest novel, or the geek who fixes your computer. One reason for this, as Helen Lewis suggests in her breezy and entertaining new book The Genius Myth, is that the idea of genius has always been hazy.
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1 month ago | 
spectator.com.au | Rupert Christiansen
Ballet to Broadway: Wheeldon WorksRoyal Opera House, until 27 May Christopher Wheeldon must be one of the most steadily productive and widely popular figures in today’s dance world, but I’m yet to be persuaded that he has much gift for narrative.
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1 month ago | 
spectator.co.uk | Rupert Christiansen
Christopher Wheeldon must be one of the most steadily productive and widely popular figures in today’s dance world, but I’m yet to be persuaded that he has much gift for narrative. His adaptation of the novel Like Water for Chocolate was a hopeless muddle; his response to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is mere vaudeville; and I’m praying to St Jude that nobody is planning to import his dramatisation of Oscar Wilde’s downfall, premièred in Australia last year.
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1 month ago | 
spectator.com.au | Rupert Christiansen
BRB2: Diaghilev and the Birth of Modern BalletSadler’s Wells EastIn C; Rambert x (LA)HORDE: Bring Your OwnQueen Elizabeth Hall Although I doff my hat to Carlos Acosta’s BRB2, Birmingham Royal Ballet’s junior troupe, for a reminder of what is owed to the Ballets Russes – nothing less than the creation of a new art form – the programme it’s presenting in Diaghilev and the Birth of Modern Ballet is neither well balanced nor coherent.
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1 month ago | 
spectator.co.uk | Rupert Christiansen
How do you make assisted suicide safe? In recent months, a large part of Kim Leadbeater’s answer has been to point to the involvement of psychiatrists. Having a psychiatrist sign off each death, Leadbeater said, would ‘add expertise’. They would be part of a much-touted ‘multidisciplinary’ approach. In particular, they would be able to check
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1 month ago | 
telegraph.co.uk | Rupert Christiansen
I grew up in a polite, orderly middle-class suburb in the 1960s, where today's idea of belonging to a broader, vaguer "community" was unheard of. Neighbourliness was confined to morning greetings and borrowing a pint of milk. What was paramount was "minding your own business": behind your front door, your life was your own. We knew that "an Englishman's home was his castle," and only a search warrant could breach it.
