The Times - UK (2022-05-28)

the times | Saturday May 28 2022 saturday review 3

Jennifer Connelly and Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick. Below: Inger in Sunshine (1888) by Edvard Munch

Cover story 4-5

The best art to see outdoors

this summer, from wooden

elephants to Henry Moore,

picked byJade Cuttle

What the critics are watching and listening to

showing this week

Contents

My culture fix 6

The actress Emilia Fox lets us

into her cultural life

Books 12-21

Life inside Berlin’s tumultuous

20th century; plus, the case

against the sexual revolution

TV & radio 23-51

Borgen returns on Netflix; BBC1’s

Elizabeth: The Unseen Queen

Puzzles 52-55

Crosswords, sudoku, Scrabble

and your favourite brain teasers

Cover photograph

© Waddesdon, A Rothschild

House & Gardens. Photo

Chris Lacey

SPLASH NEWS; KODE BERGEN ART MUSEUM, THE RASMUS, MEYER COLLECTI

ON

Hugo

Rifkind 7

“Four seasons

in, I reckon it

has never

been better”:

Stranger

Things series

four, reviewed

Jubilee books 8-10

From Atonement to Wolf Hall —

the 50 best novels of the past

70 years, from Britain, Ireland

and the Commonwealth

cludes such ubiquitous favourites as Shape

of You, Sing and Bad Habits. Principality

Stadium, Cardiff, tonight; Stadium of Light,

Sunderland, Fri (edsheeran.com)

Will Hodgkinson

Visual art

Edvard Munch: Masterpieces

from Bergen

There’s more to Munch than that scream.

As the collection of his patron and admirer

Rasmus Meyer comes on loan to this

country, we are offered an opportunity to

see Norway’s most angst-ridden artist in

the round. Here, in 18 pictures painted

across 25 years, is Munch at his peak.

Follow him from his first flirtations with

the sort of impressionism you find in

the Courtauld’s permanent collection to

masterworks (several never shown before

in this country) that exemplify his signa-

ture expressionist style. Courtauld Gallery,

London WC2 (courtauld.ac.uk), to Sep 4

Rachel Campbell-Johnston

Love Actually kid) as Malcolm McLaren

and Anson Boon capturing some of John

Lydon’s Rotten charisma. Disney+, Tue

Ben Dowell

Opera

Parsifal

This was put back by a year due to Covid,

but good things come to those who wait —

as any Wagnerite knows. Opera North ap-

plies its acclaimed concert staging format

to Wagner’s last opera, a mystical drama

about guilt, redemption and sexuality. It’s

conducted by Richard Farnes with the cast

including Toby Spence in the title role,

Brindley Sherratt as the grizzled knight

Gurnemanz and Katarina Karneus as the

seductive, damned Kundry. Grand, Leeds,

Wed-Jun 10, then touring to Manchester,

Nottingham, Gateshead and London

(operanorth.co.uk)

Neil Fisher

Dance

Like Water for Chocolate

The choreographer Christopher Wheel-

don adapts Laura Esquivel’s magic-realist

Mexican novel for the dance stage in the

biggest premiere of the Royal Ballet’s

season. The story, set on a ranch at the

start of the 20th century, focuses on the

thwarted love affair between Tita and

Pedro — a relationship with bizarre and

devastating consequences. Joby Talbot

provides a new score; Bob Crowley is

handling the designs. Royal Opera House,

London WC2 (roh.org.uk), Thu-Jun 17

Alex O’Connell

Pop

Ed Sheeran

Ed Sheeran must be the luckiest man in

music. For the past four years he has been

filling stadiums on his own with little

more than an acoustic guitar and a loop

pedal. With all of that money saved he

has invested in a backing band and a

pyrotechnics-filled live show, beefing up

his sound for a greatest-hits set that in-

Film

Top Gun: Maverick
“Trust your instincts. Don’t think. Just do.”
That’s the new mantra of the fighter pilot
Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) in
this belated, glorious sequel to the 1986
blockbuster that made Cruise a megastar
and defined an era of Hollywood film-
making. With cameras inside cockpits and
strapped to wings and nose cones, the
director Joseph Kosinski has delivered a
vertiginous, pulse-quickening monster of
a movie. See it on the biggest screen poss-
ible. Then see it again. In cinemas
Kevin Maher

Theatre

Bleak Expectations
It’s Charles Dickens, but not quite as we
know him. A long-running hit on Radio 4,
Mark Evans’s wickedly inventive parody of
Victorian melodrama gets an outing on
the stage. One of the joys of the original
Sony award-winning series was how clev-
erly it wove together Dickensian senti-
ment and plot twists and outrageous,
Pythonesque blasts of surrealism, the cast
of characters including the villainous Mr
Gently Benevolent and the Hardthrasher
clan. The show also provided an early
vehicle for that wry comic actor Tom
Allen. His role as the endlessly ingenuous
Pip is here taken by Dom Hodson, with
Rose Basista as his sister, Pippa. Watermill,
Newbury (watermill.org.uk), to Jul 2
Clive Davis

Television

Pistol
Any biopic of this much-discussed (and
extremely short) period of British cultural
history was likely to attract a few Sid
Vicious-style sneers. It’s not one for the
punk purist, perhaps, but Danny Boyle’s
playful drama still works because it doesn’t
take itself too seriously. It’s essentially the
story of the guitarist Steve Jones (Toby
Wallace) with a capable supporting cast in-
cluding Thomas Brodie-Sangster (yes, the