Titus Andronicus review — Simon Russell Beale doesn't get the blood pumping
All this and Simon Russell Beale in the title role too. His faded Roman warrior will see two sons killed and a daughter raped and mutilated. He will hack off his own hand too before finally feeding his enemy's sons to her in a pie. Shakespeare's first and bloodiest tragedy is brutal, and bananas.
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Edinburgh Reporter
23 minutes ago
- Edinburgh Reporter
The museum's on the tram!
The National Museum of Scotland invites you to take the tram around Edinburgh – but particularly the Museum Tram as they have commissioned a wrap both inside and out turning one of the trams into a moving source of facts about the museum. The moving museum will travel through the city for the next two years, introducing passengers to some of the best-loved objects from the National Collection and giving them a taste of what it's like to visit the National Museum of Scotland. Patsy Convery, Head of Marketing and Communications at National Museums Scotland told us about the idea behind the latest marketing venture. She said: 'We have over 25,000 objects on display at the National Museum – and what we really wanted to do was to show the breadth of the treasures that we have in there. We have items here that are from Scottish history, the natural world, from Art and Design, science and technology, and also global cultures. And what we want to do is to inspire people to find out a little bit more about the collection, but also to visit and hear more about the stories that they can tell. 'It's the first museum wrap. But we wanted to do more than just wrap the tram – we wanted it to be an experience in itself, and that's why we're inviting people to step inside as though they're visiting the museum up on Chamber Street' Sarah Singh, Head of Service Delivery at Edinburgh Trams, said: 'We're delighted to have the National Museum of Scotland represented on one of our trams for the next two years. The museum offers an incredible space for exploring Scotland's history and place in the world in a meaningful way, and we're proud to offer some small extension of that. Look out for a 3,000-year-old toy mouse and a Saltire which has been to space – some of our favourite additions to the design!' A short walk from the Princes Street tram stop, the National Museum of Scotland attracts over 2.3 million visitors each year. It is Scotland's most-visited attraction and the most popular museum in the UK outside London. The museum is currently staging the world's biggest exhibition of primate behaviour, Monkeys: Our Primate Family and hosts a programme of seasonal events and activities. Mary Queen of Scots and a not so friendly companion Members of Museum staff are very happy with the new tram Credit Duncan McGlynn The unlikely sight of a Roman centurion driving a tram… Like this: Like Related
Spectator
13 hours ago
- Spectator
2713: Outdressed
Clockwise round the grid from the square between 6 and 7 runs a quotation which could have referred to the three unclued lights, and its source (7,2,3,3,5,3,3,7,4,3,2,5,5). Across 9 Top part is the place to go in ships (5) 10 Wild party girl cycling (4) 11 Ex-president twice cut back tropical plants (5) 12 Unbounded profusion bewildered lunatic (7) 13 Article on devilish debonair Michael Gove? (10) 15 Microstate near heart of Burundi hoards gold (5) 18 He might steal object inside present (8) 19 But for squaddies we may serve mocktails (6) 21 Rebecca's boy, second in hunt after sea snakes (4) 24 Primrose played this role in Twelfth Night (5) 25 Monarch astride a wild ass (5) 26 Sea duck finally fears what cats often do (4) 28 Trainee aboard three-master (6) 29 Tramline altered Liverpool Street perhaps (8) 34 Arboreal beast – it's one of the deadly ones (5) 36 Mignonne quality? It's Dianne's when dancing (10) 37 Goddess turned male punches wandering boffin (7) 38 Old fools, they could be upside-down (5) 39 English actor and Irish poet leaving hotel (4) 40 Brother and father crossing drowned valley (5) Down 1 One of a duo warming up cold listeners? (7) 2 Famous novelist has had coats of granular leather (10) 3 Spiteful poet hides bill of exchange (6) 4 Broadway star ejects male wastrel (5) 5 Praiseworthy Bella disturbed about proscribed group (8) 6 Rascal headed own goal? (5) 7 Roman poet's nothing like Humpty-Dumpty (5) 8 Seabird kebab's sound (4) 14 Aged tree encroaches on another tree (5) 20 Trained assassin somewhat often in jail (5) 22 Capital godly sort meets Venetian villain (8) 23 White wine roused no rector (4) 27 Corner in first half of untroubled game (7) 30 Old German unclothed in country (6) 32 Be stingy towards tax in Troon (5) 33 Fruit and veg Romeo ingested (5) 34 Cross old actor (4) Download a printable version here. A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on 11 August. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@ or post to: Crossword 2713, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery.
Spectator
13 hours ago
- Spectator
Beguiling grot, TfL surrealism and Insta-art: contemporary art roundup
Last month, I got the train down to Margate to interview the Egyptian-Armenian artist Anna Boghiguian (b. 1946), whose exhibition The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories was about to open at the Turner Contemporary. Long story short, the conversation did not go well: Anna reacted to my questions with some irritation, swatting them away like low-flying bluebottles. I got flustered, she got bored, and eventually so did I. We wrapped things up around the 20-minute mark and I ran away to stare into the abyss. It was a shame, because the show was, for the most part, really good. A political scientist by training, Boghiguian makes installation art that examines how the complex historical, social and political forces that shaped the modern world came into being, often taking an unorthodox point of reference as a means to work her way into the twisty narratives she spins out across her gallery-filling set pieces. There are three such here, the best of which, 'The Salt Traders' (2015), is the first thing we see. For this, Boghiguian decided to look at the history of commerce and empire through the prism of salt, a commodity once so valuable that it gave us the word 'salary'. The aesthetic is resolutely DIY and grungy as hell. The floor is covered with bags' worth of sea salt, and a good third of the space filled with a wooden structure posing as a Roman shipwreck, its sail bearing the image of a map displaying historical trade routes. There are grease-stained swathes of fabric, grimy sheets of paper onto which Boghiguian has scrawled notes on medieval economics, colonialism and god knows what else; there are also 30 worn-out beehives. Everything looks as though it's spent a decade at the bottom of a used ashtray, and that grottiness works on a visceral level. I'm still a bit annoyed, but my verdict is thus: she's 79, and she can probably do what she wants. Back in London, I heard Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964) had an exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ in Soho. The Swiss-born artist is a blue-chip favourite and a prime peddler of photo-friendly spectacle. He works across a bewildering range of media, sometimes falling back on a handful of visual signatures – cutesy sculptures that look like the Easter Island heads as imagined by Pixar; monumental Day-Glo land art – sometimes not. The only thing that really unites his diverse body of work is a slightly winsome quality, and the fact that every time I see his art, I come away feeling that something's missing: call it substance, call it ballast – hell, call it 'soul' if you like; I don't detect it. This show is probably Rondinone's most Instagram-friendly yet: the entire gallery is decked out in violently bright rainbow colours from floor to ceiling, the space interspersed with life-sized polychrome sculptures of ballet dancers in repose or mid-move. It is, in the literal sense, spectacular: the assault on the eyes will leave them adjusting to the real world long, long after you've left, and when I visited, the place was full of tourists taking selfies from every conceivable angle. Still, it left me cold. If the aspiration here is to create a kind of visual poetry, the effect is rather like watching an artist perform an after-dinner magic trick to the thunderous applause of a chalet full of oligarchs. Or worse still: like 'accessible' art as imagined by some terrifying, AI-generated curator of the future. This got me down, but not half as much as what I had in store: a 25-hour visit to Paris in order to end my marriage. I had planned to get blind drunk afterwards but was instead directed to visit Mark Leckey's exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations. If you're not familiar: Leckey (b. 1964) is a ferociously intelligent autodidact who mines the margins of pop culture without slipping into Banksy-like inanity or pseudo-academic overthinking. Instead, his films and installations blend everything down into a murky purée of sound, vision and atmosphere. That last word is key here. For starters, the whole, massive space is lit like a motorway underpass at 3 a.m. on a December morning, as muffled rave basslines and booming, slowed-down voices seemingly emanate from the bowels of the building. For a moment it feels like the worst psychedelic drug experience in history, but your senses adjust and you're suddenly on a planet where Transport for London's ubiquitous road-safety posters carry strange symbolist poetry and slogans; where a map of the artist's local park comes labelled with visionary symbols; where, in one film, shiny pink CGI-generated toys invade a hallucinatory version of Margate. Leckey is an artist so English that it's a wonder the famously Anglo-averse Paris art world ever let him in. For my sake, thank god they did.
