10 reasons to remain cheerful in your armchair
As we move into lockdown, our writers recommend culture treats that you will be happy to stay in for
Comedy
The Stay At Home Festival
If laughter is the best medicine, good news – a bunch of top comics have banded together to launch this free online festival, hosted by Robin Ince. Live-streamed highlights include Sherlock writer Mark Gatiss (Mon), Jo Brand (Wed) and Sara Pascoe (Thur), as well as Ince’s co-star from Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage, physicist Brian Cox (Tue).
cosmicshambles.com/stayathome Tristram Fane Saunders
Film And Then We Danced
Hastened to Curzon Home Cinema where it can be eagerly lapped up, this heady romantic drama, set in Tbilisi, is about the sexual awakening of an ambitious young Georgian dancer, played in a ferociously lithe acting debut by Levan Gelbakhiani. His desire for a charismatic rival drives a story that never goes quite where you expect, and the photography is radiantly lovely. curzon.com
Tim Robey
Books
Oliver Jeffers
Children’s author and illustrator Oliver Jeffers, whose books – Lost & Found;
Stuck – are treasured classics for bedtime reading, has launched #stayathomestorytime on his Instagram Stories. At 6pm UK time each day he will read aloud one of his books and talk about its making. Videos will be posted on his website and children can ask Jeffers about each book via his Facebook page. “We are all at home, but none of us alone. Let’s be bored together,” he says. oliverjeffers.com/books#/abookaday/
Lucy Davies
Art
Aubrey Beardsley by Stephen Calloway
This gorgeously produced book was published to accompany the new Tate exhibition – and it’s arguably better than being there. Many of Beardsley’s most beautiful black-and-white drawings for The Yellow Book, the naughty fin de siècle magazine that published Oscar Wilde. By reproducing them in book form, for up-close private perusal, the Tate has put them back where they belong. Tate Publications, tions, £25
Tristram Fane ane Saunders
Opera
OperaVision
This excellent Freeview platform will be streaming two productions by Mozart this coming week: on Tuesday, Lucio Silla from Brussels’ Théâtre de la Monnaie featuring the excellent British tenor Jeremy Ovenden in the title role; and on Friday Le Nozze di Figaro in John Cox’s delightfully traditional staging from m Garsington Opera. Both then remain available on demand for six months. operavision.eu
Rupert Christiansen
Dance Akram Khan’s
Giselle
This marvellously imaginative reworking of the 1841 Romantic masterpiece made a strong impression upon its 2016 unveiling, since when it has matured like a robust burgundy. It sets the doomed central romance (originally playing out in the Rhineland of the Middle Ages) amid a tragically 21st-century-feeling migrant crisis, and boasts – thanks to English National Ballet’s marvellous corps – the most genuinely terrifying army of spectres around.
Available on DVD from Opus Arte Mark Monahan
Pop Baxter Dury: Night Chancers
The talented son of Ian Dury, Baxter Dury’s sixth album mixes spoken word and slinky grooves on a series of surrealist late-night vignettes. Dury essays the provocative ambiguity of a Pinteresque lounge lizard prone to evasive circumlocution and parodic gangsterism, all set to gorgeous bass-heavy dub beats conjuring Eighties Grace Jones.
Available from Heavenly Recordings Neil McCormick
Classical Berlioz’s Requiem
The Orchestre de Paris and the Orchestra of the Paris Conservatoire, two choruses and heroic-voiced Bryan Hemel join forces to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Berlioz’s death with a performance of his Requiem. Sky Arts, today, 10.00am – 12.00pm Ivan Hewett
Theatre Into the Woods
Stephen Sondheim turns 90 this weekend, so it’s only proper to hit “play” on his witty and wise (if inclined to the didactic) fairy-tale mash-up from 1986, lovingly brought to arboreal, al fresco life at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in 2010 by Timothy Sheader to mark his 80th. Listen out for Judi Dench as the (puppeteered) giant and hug close the newly poignant sentiments of: No One is Alone. digitaltheatre.com
Dominic Cavendish
Film/dance Cunningham
Released in cinemas just weeks ago, Alla Kovgan’s film about Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) is available on the self-isolation-friendly Curzon Home Cinema. Blending original footage of him both in conversation and action, it is also packed with otherworldly performances by his celebrated Dance Company, and makes for a fascinating voyage through the mind and work of one of dance’s great iconoclasts. curzon.com
Mark Monahan