Beauty: what is it good for? The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel, tries to isolate beauty, fence it off from morality, procreation, the body's decay. As the hero's putrefying portrait suggests, it isn't that easy. Matthew Bourne's eagerly anticipated dance version of the story for his New Adventures company updates the setting to contemporary London, focusing on a lad who becomes a billboard icon. Like Dorian himself, [...]

Alberto Manguel has an awful lot of books. In a previous house, they were piled in such pro fusion that his children complained they needed a library card to enter their own home. Now living in the Loire, the Argentinian-born cultural critic has designed a library for his needs. A space for methodical research during the day, at night it fosters a sense of immersion, of errant inspiration and the [...]

George Balanchine might easily have lost himself in New York when he arrived in 1933. In Europe, his St Petersburg schooling had been heightened by the sophistication of the Ballets Russes: classical artistry, avant-garde attitude. In America, however, the émigré embraced the sass and speed that might have swamped him, forging an art of intense athleticism and refinement. His company, the New York City Ballet, exemplified these qualities, and his [...]

In 1726, William Brown was arrested in the cruising grounds of Moorfields for fumbling a police agent provocateur, and protested: "I think there is no crime in making what use I please of my own body." The uses people make of their bodies, and on what terms, animate Mother Clap's Molly House, a glinting new play by Mark Ravenhill.

Wonderfully played by Deborah Findlay in a ruminative dither, the newly [...]

"Do servants still exist?" asks the hero's fiancee brightly. Although moving the action forward to the early Sixties, Neil Bartlett's adaptation of Robin Maugham's The Servant (1947) retains a sense of distance, of a creepy tale living beyond its time. At the Lyric Hammersmith, a red-and-gilt gem in a concrete shell, Bartlett has excelled in uncosying a drama that preceded the angry young men. Bartlett's inspired direction digs for the [...]

"We have all waited long, but it's not over yet," warns Odysseus, several hours into this marathon venture. Twenty years in the writing, John Barton's Tantalus, an elliptical epic of the Trojan war, was finally produced this winter by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. After a fractious production process, Peter Hall and his son Edward now direct, with additional material by Colin Teevan. [...]

Whether or not Fiona Shaw is well received in the title role of Medea, about to open in London, her performance will surely be mesmerising. Shaw creates figures who stick in the mind, provoking keen and prickly discussion. From the myth of the mother who kills her own children, Euripides mined a character who, in her alienation and resolve, still seems striking. When Deborah Warner's production opened at the Abbey [...]

"You watch people dying as you die," offers Jonathan Kent, explaining theatre's particular appeal. "It exists in real time, it is a metaphor for mortality." The observation seems unexpectedly mordant from Kent, who, with Ian McDiarmid, is joint artistic director of the Almeida, the small Islington theatre that has done little but flourish during their 11-year tenure. Famed for its intrepid repertoire and for attracting the cream of stage and [...]

Harold Pinter has just turned 70, and theatrical cele- brations continue throughout the winter. They include not only Michael Gambon in a revival of The Caretaker, but also an adaptation at the National Theatre of an unfilmed screenplay based on Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Faber & Faber's birthday present gathers together affectionate, wary tributes from friends and colleagues in Harold Pinter: a celebration. They touch on many subjects [...]

No writer is more disappointing than Oscar Wilde. We expect so many irreconcilable things of him: both the first modern celebrity and a queer radical before his time; popular entertainer and harbinger of the avant-garde; Irish outsider and English wit. Subversion and sentiment equally stipple his fairy tales and drawing-room melodramas, while his capacity to challenge seems reduced by the facile flip of paradox.

One hundred years after his [...]