Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Friday

Deborah Ross

Loving salute to a book I wouldn’t touch: The Thursday Murder Club reviewed

Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, which is set in a retirement village and features pensioners solving murders, was a publishing sensation. (There are now four books in the series, with combined sales of more than ten million copies.) I’ve never read it. ‘Cosy crime’, as it’s called, is either your bag or it isn’t. This adaptation, however, feels exactly like the book that I haven’t and would never read. I hope Mr Osman et al. will take this as praise. In other words, the film knows what it is doing, who it is for, and fans will, I’m convinced, be delighted. It’s reminiscent of Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five,

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Svitlana Morenets, Michael Simmons, Ursula Buchan, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, Richard Morris & Mark Mason

37 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Svitlana Morenets says that Trump has given Zelensky cause for hope; Michael Simmons looks at how the American healthcare system is keeping the NHS afloat; Ursula Buchan explains how the Spectator shaped John Buchan; Igor Toronyi-Lalic argues that art is no place for moralising, as he reviews Rosanna McLaughlin; Richard Morris reveals how to access the many treasures locked away in private homes; and, Mark Mason provides his notes on bank holidays. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Richard Morris

The masterpieces on your doorstep

I do not, if I can help it, catch a train to anywhere on a Sunday. Yet there I was at 9.14 a.m. heading out from Woodbridge in Suffolk towards Cambridge to view a painting by Walter Sickert, a work I had not seen before and whose vital statistics – what even the work was of – I had no way of knowing; its owner had refused to send a photograph or describe it over the telephone. Arriving at the owner’s address, I was met by a neighbour who told me that in the name of letting go and embracing surprise, they had decided to visit a relative in Scotland

Digby Warde-Aldam

I’ve had it with Anselm Kiefer

August is always a crap month for exhibitions in London. The collectors are elsewhere, the dealers are presumably hot on their heels, and the galleries are filled with makeweight group shows staged to hold the fort until the end of the holidays. This year, however, even events of that kind are thin on the ground: many establishments have simply shuttered for the month – and given the dire state of the art market, I’m inclined to wonder how many will reopen come September. The doom-auguring sunflower paintings here would look great on the cover of a Metallica record Still, I caught the two Anselm Kiefer shows running concurrently. Kiefer famously

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Alien: Earth is wantonly disrespectful to the canon

I once spent a delightful weekend in Madrid with the co-producer of Alien. His name was David Giler (now dead, sadly, I’ve just discovered) and he’d hit upon the bizarre idea of trying to get my anti-eco-lunacy book Watermelons made into a Hollywood movie. The film project never came off but I did learn an important lesson in our time together, hanging out in nice restaurants and pretending to work: if you want a happy life cushioned from financial care, the secret is to wangle yourself percentage points of a successful franchise. Another example of this is Franc Roddam, with whom I once spent an even stranger weekend in Accra,

Michael Hann

The Seeds are primitive but magnificent

I have nothing but admiration for those men who burn a candle for the music of 1966. Partly because, like them, I believe 1966 to be pop’s greatest year, but mainly because being a psychedelic hipster requires a commitment that invites ridicule. It’s one thing to be an ageing fella who likes rock’n’roll – sharp denim and a well-tended quiff can look just fine. And you can never really tell the age of a metalhead – they just look like a metalhead. But to wear your hair in an outgrown bowl cut, and to strut around in tight red trousers as Seeds singer Paul Kopf does, is inevitably to invite

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

A new Beethoven cycle to keep – but hide

Grade: C In the 1990s the young Italian pianist Giovanni Bellucci gave us a reading of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata whose thrilling athleticism bore comparison with those of Maurizio Pollini and Charles Rosen. A few years later Bellucci began a complete cycle of the piano sonatas – but, rather than include his existing Hammerklavier, he produced a version that was in keeping with the style of the cycle: deliberately perverse, reinterpreting (that is, ignoring) the composer’s precise instructions in the score. Only now has Bellucci finished the cycle, explaining in his pretentious liner notes that he was held up by his meditations on Beethoven’s true intentions. So, for example, the first

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Glorious: Good Night, Oscar, at the Barbican, reviewed

Good Night, Oscar is a biographical play about Oscar Levant, a famous pianist who was also a noted wit and raconteur. The script starts as a dead-safe comedy and it develops into a gripping battle between the forces of anarchy, represented by Oscar, and the controllers of NBC who want to censor his crazy humour. The backstory is complicated. Oscar has been secretly committed to a mental asylum and his wife gets him released for a few hours so he can do an interview on Jack Paar’s TV show. It takes two long scenes to explain this improbable set-up but it’s worth it because Oscar (Sean Hayes) is such a

Daisy Dunn

The mystical hold of the 1990s over Gen Z

At some point during the past decade and a half, it was decided that the 1990s were a golden age. While Britpop, New Labour and acid house do not immediately evoke the same spirit as, say, Versailles under Louis XIV or Augustan Rome, compared with what followed they were certainly characteristic of something. Appetites for what the energetic Sawyer calls ‘the last nutty pre-internet age’ have never been greater Members of Gen Z who have known only the colourless, anodyne first years of the new millennium speak of the Nineties in mystical tones. At a party last week, I found myself holding court over some twentysomethings who’d discovered that I

Rupert Christiansen

The decline of Edinburgh International Festival

Edinburgh International Festival was established to champion the civilising power of European high culture in a spirit of postwar healing. But its lustre and mission have now been largely eclipsed by the viral spread of its anarchic bastard offspring, the Fringe. In competition with the latter’s potty-mouthed stand-ups and numberless student hopefuls, the dignified old Festival proper struggles to make much mark on the hordes who descend on the city in August, inflating prices and infuriating the residents. Perhaps the kids will love it, but if this is the future of ballet, then count me out Nicola Benedetti, a splendid woman and a wonderful violinist, is now in her third

Richard Bratby

A Brigadoon better than most of us ever hoped to see

The village of Brigadoon rises from the Scotch mists once every 100 years, and revivals of Lerner and Loewe’s musical are only slightly more frequent. The last major London production closed in 1989; and if you know Brigadoon at all it’s probably through the lush 1954 movie. The new staging at Regent’s Park takes a very different approach. The songs, the basic story and the heather (lots of it, pink and looking only slightly artificial) are all still there, but the director Rona Munro has rewritten the book, backdating the action to the second world war and turning Lerner and Loewe’s American tourists into a pair of shot-down bomber pilots.

Thursday

Richard Bratby

How the railways shaped modern culture

Cue track seven of Frank Sinatra’s 1957 album Only the Lonely and you can hear Ol’ Blue Eyes pretending to be a train. It’s not that he’s a railway enthusiast (though Sinatra, like many musicians, was an enthusiastic collector of model trains). No, it’s written into the words and music of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s song ‘Blues in the Night’: ‘Now the rain’s a-fallin’, hear the train a-callin’ “whoo-ee”.’ And so Sinatra sings it, just as Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Louis Armstrong sang it. It’s an American classic, defined by the sounds that permeate the soul of American popular music: the sounds of the railway. Two hundred years

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The problem with psychiatrists? They’re all depressed

Edinburgh seems underpopulated this year. The whisky bars are half full and the throngs of tourists who usually crowd the roadways haven’t materialised. There’s a sharp chill in the air too. Anoraks and hats are worn all day, and anyone eating outdoors in the evening is dressed for base camp. Perhaps tourists don’t want to travel because they’re too depressed. That’s the specialism of Dr Benji Waterhouse, an NHS shrink, who writes and performs comedy about his patients. Dr Benji is an attractive presence on stage with his crumpled Oxfam clothes and his dreamy, half-shaven look. He could be the guy who tunes up U2’s guitars. His act is very

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I love how awful My Oxford Year is

The punters are saying My Oxford Year is a disaster. ‘Predictable, uninspiring and laughable,’ complains some meanie on Rotten Tomatoes. But they’re missing the point. My Oxford Year may be a work of accidental genius, but it’s a work of genius nonetheless. You will squirm, you will laugh derisively, you will cringe. By the end, though, you will be forced to admit that you secretly enjoyed every moment, for this is the very examplar of a so-bad-it’s-good masterpiece. You know it’s going to be awful from the very first frame: a still representing the bookshelf of our handsome, clever and poor heroine Anna De La Vega (Sofia Carson) who has

Deborah Ross

Woody Allen without the zingers: Materialists reviewed

Celine Song’s first film, the wonderful Past Lives (2023), earned two Oscar nominations. So expectations were riding high for Materialists. Perhaps way too high. And, yes, it’s a letdown. It feels like an early Woody Allen but blunter, shallower, with no zingers, and a lead character that’s hard to care about. Dakota Johnson is our lead, playing a matchmaker who has two dreamboats (Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal) vying for her hand and throughout I was thinking: I should have your problems, love.  Should she be seduced by Harry’s penthouse or return to broke John? (Harry! He has silk sheets!) It’s billed as a romcom but those who expect that will

Graeme Thomson

Ultimately hard to resist: Elbow reviewed

Our relationships with bands are often very like our relationships with people. Some are pure and lasting love. Some start promisingly but spoil. Some are quick, thrilling flings, others a more meaningful yet distant connection. Elbow are the kind of band you enjoy having a pint with every few months. Not always the most exciting company, perhaps, but smart, convivial and good hearted. Thoughtful. Reliable. They might arrive – bang on time – for your latest rendezvous armed with a funny story about a beleaguered colleague, but they’re unlikely to announce they’re running off to Brazzaville with the intern. You know where you are with Elbow – in this instance,

Richard Bratby

Disconcerting but often delightful new Bach transcriptions

Grade: B Everyone loves the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Rather fewer people love the sound of an unaccompanied organ, so a cottage industry has developed among conductors and composers, retrofitting Bach for full orchestra. From Elgar and Mahler to showman-maestros like Stokowski and Henry Wood, orchestral Bach transcriptions have tended towards the spectacular, and they annoy all the right people. When Wood arranged the D minor Toccata and Fugue for a super-sized orchestra, he pre-empted the backlash by crediting it to a fictional Russian modernist, ‘Paul Klenovsky’. The critics duly raved.  Still, who knew that the late Sir Andrew Davis – the closest thing we had to a latter-day

Craig Raine

Modest, interesting – no masterpieces: Millet at the National Gallery reviewed

Jean-François Millet (1814-75). One Room. 14 items. Eight paintings. Six drawings and sketches. Modest, interesting. No masterpieces. The show appeals to the contemporary English preference for the unassuming, the humble, the unpretentious. Take ‘The Wood Sawyers’ (oil on canvas, 1850-2). Two figures are sawing a tree trunk with a long two-man bucking saw. Two thick sections have already been cut and the sawyers are busy with a third. The simplified trunk is like a salami, the bark corresponding to the floury skin. The main foreground figure with his blue rump has his foot braced against the trunk and commands our immediate attention. You can see the folds of flesh gathered

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

The rise of cringe

No one wrote programme notes quite like the English experimentalist John White. ‘This music is top-quality trash,’ proclaims his 1993 album Fashion Music. ‘We kindly ask the users of this CD to play it at the volume of a suburban Paris soundmachine or a London underground discman earphone as used by the kid next door.’ Track titles included ‘Epaulette’ and ‘Latin Flutes’. From what I remember – my copy vanished a long time ago – the music was cheap and very funny: tinny and dumb. I was reminded of White recently because trash is back. Everywhere I go, I find composers producing shamefully terrible music. Some deliberately, some inadvertently. What

Thursday

Adam Scovell

Rattigan’s films are as important as his plays

A campaign is under way to rename the West End’s Duchess Theatre after the playwright Terence Rattigan. Supported as it is by the likes of Judi Dench and Rattigan Society president David Suchet, there’s evidently a desire to right a historical wrong. Author of classics such as The Browning Version, The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables, Rattigan was known for his poise, melancholy and restraint, all of which put him at odds with the coterie of upstart writers of the 1950s – still amusingly known as the Angry Young Men. It’s an oft-repeated chapter of theatre history that arch-kitchen-sinkers such as John Osborne made the environment virtually impossible for Rattigan