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Saul/Glyndebourne

Producing Handel’s oratorio Saul sets challenges but offers opportunities too. Like most oratorios, biblical music composed for rendition in a church or chapel, there was initially nothing more than the music so any director has total licence. There is no composer or operatic tradition on his/her [...]

August 4, 2018 // 0 Comments

A Shot in the Dark

Novelist Lynne Truss is an interesting writer. She worked as a sportswriter, wrote an international best seller Eats Shoots and Leaves and has now written this comic detective novel based on her radio plays and set in Brighton in the fifties. It’s not really a homage to Graham Greene’s [...]

August 3, 2018 // 0 Comments

The Entertainer

That this 1959 film of the John Osborne play was broadcast at midday on BBC2 says it all. The schedulers are never going to put it up against Love Island. It’s an irony that the very playwrights – Terence Rattigan and Noel Coward – that the angry young men cast aside and critic Ken [...]

August 1, 2018 // 0 Comments

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be

The art of making people laugh is a funny – that’s to say odd – thing. Sometimes comedy gold travels well down the generations and sometimes – often to some surprise among those who were fans ‘first time around’ – it just doesn’t. Sometimes when we look back at the great [...]

August 1, 2018 // 0 Comments

A Night To Remember

Yesterday – 18 hours after the heatwave had broken in London courtesy of a very welcome thunderstorm whose best/worst effect somehow seemed to pass Mon Repos – I was faced with a still airless weekend and not much more upon the agenda than a food shop, a visit to my local bank branch (assuming, [...]

July 29, 2018 // 0 Comments

Weimar Cabaret /The Barbican Theatre

In my last post I reviewed a nonogenerian still going strong (Burt Bacharach) and now an octogenarian Barry Humphries, still performing with aplomb. Born in Melbourne in 1934, law and philosophy graduate Humphries is something of a renaissance man. He starred in Oliver! as Fagin in the sixties but [...]

July 27, 2018 // 0 Comments

It’s all somebody’s Fake News, if you think about it

I suspect like many others I’ve lived the bulk of my life in a warm bubble of perception in which – broadly speaking, despite growing evidence to the contrary as from the late 19th Century onwards as Britain slid from a Grade A imperial power into something a little more mundane – at least [...]

July 26, 2018 // 0 Comments

“Don’t tell him, Pike!”

Some people I know positively hate it, but at the end of this month the BBC’s Dad’s Army – still a staple of ‘repeat show’ channels the world over – will reach the milestone of passing the fiftieth anniversary of its first-ever broadcast – a distinction that few still-popular TV [...]

July 25, 2018 // 0 Comments

Our Friends in Berlin/Anthony Quinn

At The Rust we do have our pet topics and debates: sporting attendance v TV watching; Simon Campion-Brown’s anarchic – some might say sclerotic – view of the body politic; and here in the book review department these last few months we have become rather obsessed with British fascism [...]

July 24, 2018 // 0 Comments

A viewer’s view

We coach potatoes have our likes and dislikes when it comes to commentators and analysts. I sometimes wonder that one of the reasons why the Rust advocates no attendance as it saves sending out the chief sports correspondent, normally one of the highest paid on the paper, possessed of a creative [...]

July 22, 2018 // 0 Comments

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