Working on the principle that a good parent should occasionally try doing what their kids are up to, I committed myself to taking the Grade 5 piano exam. If the six-year-old, the nine-year-old and the 11-year-old are all doing grades on a variety of instruments, surely I should do, too. And as most parents committed to state education will know, music is now a tool for educational proficiency. Push your [...]

Is there anything duller than the modern-day digital camera? They cope with any subject matter from the Alps to an ant. They take all the artful cleverness of great pictures away from their owner, since they are so clever themselves. They even rob you of the surprise of finding out what you have taken, since you see the results instantly. And when did you last hold a photograph in your [...]

With remarkable synchronicity, it seems everything in the expense bracket of "unattainable" has gone on a self-induced purge. We now have cut-price holidays in the Caribbean and half-price champagne; I got a letter yesterday from Queen Ethelburga's prep school, a York-based establishment, offering the junior members of the family a free first term and school uniform. Even Heston Blumenthal, the chef whose tasting menu at the Michelin triple-gilded restaurant, the Fat Duck [...]

On Sunday 13 April, I was standing in a pen with thousands of other people. We were all greased with Vaseline and clad in singlets. A few of us were in fancy dress: Snow White, a fully togged-up morris dancer, a Womble, a Masai warrior. Actually, the Masai warriors were in their normal clothes. The London Marathon is habitually called a "festival". I suspect this accolade is given by those [...]

What's necessary in a Christmas show? Entertainment, naturally. A feel-good message, perhaps, and something visually arresting to gawp at. Children's theatre is particularly strong this Christmas, but then it should be. If there was ever a season to welcome tots in round-collared coats into the foyer and to hear delighted giggles emanating from the auditorium, it's this one.

So much has already been said about War Horse (National Theatre, London [...]

Perhaps as a reaction against his acclaimed version of Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother, for which the stage was crammed with transvestites, mothers, nuns, daughters and divas, Samuel Adamson has decided to prune everything back for his new play, Some Kind of Bliss. In fact, there is only one person on stage - Rachel (Lucy Briers), a "small-time hack and seeker of minor adventure". The play, which lasts a [...]

Why is it that whenever someone has a successful, but obviously irreproducible idea, everyone rushes to imitate it? Mamma Mia! is a blissful show that inventively uses Abba hits to tell a cheesy tale about mothers and daughters. To date, that idea has been ripped off by musicals offering the back catalogues of Madness, Culture Club and Boney M in various silly ways. Yet, compared with Desperately Seeking Susan, they [...]

Since London theatres are currently full of somewhat youthful audiences, it was almost with a sense of nostalgia that I saw those attending Henry V at Stratford-upon-Avon's Courtyard Theatre were resoundingly middle-aged. This is the way things were when theatre was unhip and resolutely traditional. Indeed, when the Chorus (Forbes Masson) begins Michael Boyd's period-dress production, one could almost sense a pleasurable inhalation of untroubled expectation.

Indeed, at first [...]

Simplicity, and a growing sense of horror, are the two key notions arising from an utterly compelling production of Peter Weiss's The Investigation, by a Rwandan company, Urwintore. Seven actors, all Rwandan, take to the stage. Speaking clearly and calmly, mostly in French (with English surtitles), and an occasional moment in African dialect, they give eye-witness accounts of a genocide, from the arrival of bewildered prisoners at the extermination camps, [...]

Power play and the time-wasting antics of a reluctant workforce come under the spotlight in Five Tanks, a new play by Lab Ky Mo set on one day in a call centre somewhere in London. Four hapless telephone interviewers, their supervisor and their boss are stuck in a sweaty basement. The callers are paid £7 an hour to cold-call interviewees all day; there are targets to meet and bonuses to [...]