David Lister

A founder member of The Independent David Lister joined the paper in 1986 as Assistant Home News Editor. He became the paper's arts correspondent in 1988 and is now Arts Editor and writes a column each Saturday. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

David Lister: The Week in Arts

There is an illness that afflicts leading lights in the arts, an illness that you rarely encounter elsewhere. I call it "cultural paranoia". It involves major celebrities taking popular and populist stances, and then convincing themselves that they are being persecuted for doing so. Vanessa Redgrave suffered from this debilitating disease for several decades. And this week the celebrated actor Mark Rylance appeared to be showing symptoms.

Recently by David Lister

David Lister: The Week in Arts

Saturday, 3 May 2008

As Gordon Brown licks his wounds, it might be some consolation to him that his miseries and mistakes are unlikely to be portrayed on stage. OK, in the pain of post-election depression that's a fairly small consolation. But to those of us interested in how theatre portrays and analyses contemporary life, it is puzzling that playwrights fail to be inspired by the travails of the Prime Minister.

David Lister: The Week in Arts - Would you keep your Elvis moment a secret?

Saturday, 26 April 2008

A few years ago I wrote a story for this paper about a plaque being placed at Prestwick airport in Scotland to mark the only time that Elvis Presley set foot in Britain. It was a brief stop-over on his way to Germany.

David Lister: The Week in Arts

Saturday, 19 April 2008

Now here's a scene I find hard to imagine happening at Covent Garden. It occurred this week in Oslo at the opening of a splendid new opera house, the national home for Norway's opera and ballet companies. At the opening gala, in front of several of Europe's crowned heads, foreign dignitaries and an invited audience, the final speech from the stage came not from the culture minister, but from the minister for defence. She (I'm not sure we'd see that over here either) proclaimed to a thunderous ovation: "Without culture we have nothing worth defending."

David Lister: Director's troubles are partly self-inflicted

Wednesday, 16 April 2008

For the artistic director of the English National Opera to lament the state of opera in London is a bit like the head of British Airways criticising the state of baggage handling at Terminal 5. If it isn't your fault, whose fault is it exactly?

David Lister: The Week in Arts

Saturday, 12 April 2008

The first thing that struck me about the release of the Proms programme this week was what an odd attitude we have to anniversaries these days. The Proms will honour the composers Messiaen (born 100 years ago), Vaughan Williams (died 50 years ago) and Stockhausen (would have been his 80th birthday if he had not died last year). I cling to the old belief that anniversaries should be anniversaries of a birth, not a death, and even then only the numbers 50, 100 and multiples of 100 should apply.

David Lister: The Week in Arts

Saturday, 5 April 2008

The most surreal television comedy sketch I have ever seen was not in Monty Python's Flying Circus or any of the other shows we see repeated regularly. It was by the Sixties comic Marty Feldman. It had a householder phoning his local council because his house had woodworm. A few minutes later, Feldman, dressed as a Chicago cop with gun and back-up team, burst through the door shouting: "Where's da woim?" A shoot-out then occurred between Feldman and the woim.

David Lister: The Week in Arts

Saturday, 29 March 2008

As the snow fell over Easter, the summer cultural highlights seemed a long way away. Perhaps that is why the arts world largely ignored an announcement pertaining to the Edinburgh Festival. But the statement from the four top Fringe venues that they would be joining forces this year to start the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, playing 250 comedy shows, was rather important. For a start, the new jamboree will, according to its organisers, be the largest comedy festival in the world. More importantly, it dramatically changes the texture of the Fringe, and means the end of the Fringe as we know it.

David Lister: The Week in Arts

Saturday, 22 March 2008

Tony Hall, the chief executive of the Royal Opera House, has outshone his predecessors in widening access to performances, and this week he took his boldest step yet on ticket prices. He put them up. OK, that's only half the story. He put up the prices of the best seats so that he could lower the prices of the cheaper seats. More than half the House's tickets will be priced at £50 and below, and 40 per cent will be priced at £30 or below. Mr Hall says: "A quarter of our seats will cost £30 or less, which is bloody brilliant compared with football."

David Lister: The Week in Arts

Saturday, 15 March 2008

Tomorrow The South Bank Show on ITV1 has an absorbing look back at the political and cultural turmoil of 1968. But, with all such things, I tend to wonder how good people's memories are of the time. In pre-publicity for the programme, Tariq Ali was quoted in one article recalling a conversation with John Lennon, in which the Beatle apparently made excuses for not coming on the anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Grosvenor Square in the spring of 1968.

David Lister: The playwright is a complex creature, not just a guy on a soapbox

Thursday, 13 March 2008

One of the great, and only possibly apocryphal, stories about theatre tells of a rich man going to a playhouse in New York and spying a beggar on the pavement outside. He says to him pompously: "'Neither a borrower nor a lender be.' William Shakespeare." The tramp responds: "Fuck you! David Mamet." Mamet has been one of the earthiest, most challenging and most provocative of American playwrights. But his plays, while on the surface "liberal", are too complex to be summed up in such a reductive way.

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