Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Christopher Howse

Carols are much weirder than we think

Why, my sharp-minded colleague Tom Utley once asked after a Telegraph Christmas Carol service, should anyone think God would abhor the Virgin’s womb? He was talking about the line in ‘O come, all ye faithful’ that goes: ‘Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb.’ Wasn’t it a bit weird? At last I found the answer in a book, Redeemer in the Womb, by the theologian John Saward, which brilliantly explores the unusual subject of what writers in the early Church thought about the months spent by Jesus in the Virgin Mary’s womb. A pagan presumption in the ancient world was that women’s insides were nasty and shameful. Behind ‘O come,

Rupert Christiansen

Superb: Ruination, at the Linbury Theatre, reviewed

Ruination begins with an ironic prologue in which a choric figure warns the audience that what follows makes unlikely matter for the festive season: look elsewhere if you’re after light entertainment, he says, because this is going to shake you up a bit. And it does. This is genre-defying physical theatre, ‘devised’ by Ben Duke, in which spoken text is combined with episodes of dance and interludes of song, playfully satirical in tone and uprooted from any boundaries of realism or historical period. Although it is somewhat pretentious, I pretty much loved it The choric figure is Hades, and his realm of death is the setting. Jason and Medea have

Richard Bratby

Meet the king of comic opera 

John Savournin has been busy. That comes with the territory for a classical singer – things often get a little hectic as the music world barrels towards Christmas. But with Savournin, it’s sometimes hard to keep track of which theatre – which city – he’s in on any given night. ‘This week has been Pirates of Penzance rehearsals at English National Opera,’ he says: we’re a fortnight away from opening night, and he’s playing the Pirate King. ‘On Thursday I was bobbing up to the Lowry in Salford for Ruddigore with Opera North.’ He’s been swirling his cape as Sir Despard Murgatroyd since late October. ‘And yeah – whenever I

Richard Bratby

Vivid, noble and bouyant: AAM’s Messiah reviewed

More than a thousand musicians took part when Handel’s Messiah was performed in Westminster Abbey in May 1791. It wasn’t the only item on the bill, either; it was part of a day-long blow-out that lasted from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and also included the whole of Handel’s Israel in Egypt. The crowd came prepared. According to Adalbert Gyrowetz, a Bohemian composer then living in London, the audience munched on ‘hard-boiled eggs, ham and roast meat’ during the intervals. ‘One had almost to wade through a mass of eggshells and other rubbish on the way out of the church,’ he noted. Romaniw was everything you’d want in a Tosca:

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Sumptuous but musically unmemorable: Elton John’s The Devil Wears Prada musical reviewed

The Devil Wears Prada is a fairy tale about an aspiring female novelist, Andy, who receives a job offer from Runway, the nastiest and most influential fashion magazine in America. Miranda, the editor, is a Botoxed uber-bitch who doesn’t really want to hire Andy, but does anyway. And Andy doesn’t really want to work in fashion, but does anyway. Slightly odd. Visually, the show is a sumptuous treat that offers Olympic-standard costumes, set and lighting designs Andy is like Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall, a bland but trustworthy cipher who bears witness to a fascinating world of excess and corruption. She’s barely a character, more a device. The best

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Tirzah Garwood just isn’t as good as her husband Eric Ravilious

Tirzah Garwood, wife of the more famous Eric Ravilious, is having a well-deserved moment in the sun, benefiting from this era of equality in which artists’ and composers’ wives and sisters (such as Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn and Elizabeth Siddal) are having the spotlight shone on their under-appreciated works. It’s not profound art but it’s a pleasure to look at, created to delight all ages Garwood is not quite as good as Ravilious, in the same way that Clara and Fanny are not quite as good as Robert and Felix, but she is nonetheless a pleasure to encounter, with an infectious, playful delight in everyday sights of her time, such

Jasper Rees

‘Was I cast because you couldn’t get anyone else?’ Cate Blanchett discusses Rumours

At last, a film about the G7. There have been more movies than you can shake a stick at set in the Oval Office and No. 10 and other citadels. But not once has cinema gathered democracy’s prime septet in the same frame, the way the annual Group of Seven summit does. Until Rumours. ‘Did you cast me because you couldn’t get anyone else to do it?’ Blanchett asks To play the leaders of the free world at this geopolitically sensitive moment, Rumours has attracted stars of magnitude. Cate Blanchett is the German chancellor, Charles Dance the American president. Roy Dupuis plays Canada’s pin-up prime minister and Alicia Vikander gives

Deborah Ross

Guadagnino is a true master of erotic desire: Queer reviewed

Queer, which is based on the novella by William S. Burroughs, is the latest film directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Challengers) and stars Daniel Craig as an American expat who is gay, horny, sweaty, drug-addled and becomes infatuated with a younger man. It’s not exactly Christmassy, but it is very Burroughsy, and it may be the best performance of Craig’s career. I can’t think of any other actor who could have shaken off Bond in such a sexually daring way, not even Roger Moore. I can’t think of any other actor who could have shaken off Bond in such a sexually daring way – even Moore

James Walton

Leavisites should stay away: Sky’s Bad Tidings reviewed

Reviewing Sky’s The Heist before Christmas last year, I suggested that all feature-length festive television dramas begin with credits announcing a starry cast and end with a redeemed protagonist gazing up at some suddenly falling snow. Reviewing Sky’s Bad Tidings this year, I can rather smugly report that there’s no need to revise my theory. But just in case that isn’t enough television tradition to be going on with, here we also get that other Yuletide stand-by: the characters’ plans for the big day go hideously wrong, yet they still end up having the Best Christmas Ever. Viewed pleasantly drunk, I concede, Bad Tidings might just hit the spot The

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre contains terrible art – but is filled with magic

For a press tour of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem – the Church of the Resurrection, the Mother of churches, site of the last four stations of the Cross – you must apply to the Patriarch. This being Jerusalem, there are three: the Latin, the Armenian and the Greek Orthodox. The process of accreditation is like a scene from an Olivia Manning novel. If you receive an acknowledgment of your email from the Greek Patriarchate – the Latin and the Armenian were otherwise engaged – you turn into Greek Patriarchate Street and present yourself at the Patriarchate palace. It is pale limestone, silent, a home to spoilt

Saturday

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Alexandra Shulman, Sean Thomas, Matthew Parris, Adrian Dannatt and Philip Hensher

34 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Alexandra Shulman reads her fashion notebook (1:13); Sean Thomas asks if a demilitarised zone in Ukraine is inevitable (6:02); Matthew Parris argues against proportional representation (13:47); Adrian Dannatt explains his new exhibition Fresh Window: the art of display and display of art (21:46); and Philip Hensher declares he has met the man of his dreams: his Turkish barber (28:17).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Rupert Christiansen

‘La Scala was maddening’: an interview with John Macfarlane, the finest set designer of his generation

Pantomime season is upon us, and unless your taste in colour runs no further than Smarties, there is no more magnificent spectacle on offer than Birmingham Royal Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker – performed so many hundred times since its première in 1990 that two years ago it disintegrated and required reconstruction. Its scenery and costumes are the work of John Macfarlane, a softly spoken Glaswegian who is ranked worldwide as one of the great stage designers of his generation. They demonstrate in abundance a quality that characterises all his work: a brooding chiaroscuro, in which nightmarishly surreal flickers of ruin and decay are shot through with gorgeous sensuality. There

James Ball

The latest Dragon Age game is unbearably right-on

Like all other forms of culture, video games offer a way to escape from, or reflect on, reality through fiction. Unlike almost any other form of culture, they are interactive – you, the player, control the experience. Nowhere is this more true than with immersive role-playing games (RPGs), in which the player embodies a character forced to make moral (or wildly immoral) choices in a fictionalised world, which change the narrative of the game for good or ill. That might sound nerdy (it is), but it’s big business. Baldur’s Gate 3 has comfortably topped $1 billion in global sales, and won numerous industry awards. Baldur’s Gate 3 gives you lots

Richard Bratby

Spellbinding: Herbert Blomstedt’s Mahler 9 reviewed

Ivor Cutler called silence the music of the cognoscenti. But there’s silence and there’s silence, and a regular concertgoer hears a fair bit of both. The ability to fold silence into a musical line – to create the impression that a conductor is somehow sculpting a sound which doesn’t exist – is an indicator of high artistry on the podium. This was real: the concentrated hush of 2,700 people listening as if the silence was part of the symphony Conversely, there’s the embarrassing strained silence when, at the end of a work, a conductor decides to keep the baton raised and see how long he can hold back the tide

Deborah Ross

The best film about a woman turning into a dog that you’ll see this year

Nightbitch stars Amy Adams as a mother who is so full of rage about her loss of identity it makes her feral and she starts turning into a dog. It’s weird and there is nothing I can say to make it sound less weird – she grows a tail! Extra nipples! – but it’s actually a more regular and less wild story than you might have imagined. In other words: once you get over the dog, it’s fine(ish). If you can’t get over the dog, forget it. It is directed by Marielle Heller (Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood) and

Adrian Dannatt

Warhol, Rauschenberg, Johns and Tinguely all started out as window dressers

Christmas, and in every city already crowds congregate around the festive department store displays in defiance of the apparent disappearance of the ‘high street’. For despite digital merchandising and online delivery, adults as much as children delight in this annual extravaganza, and such windows prove more popular than ever precisely because they cannot be enjoyed other than physically, in person. For many, these windows remain an indelible early metropolitan memory and perhaps the first experience of a work of visual art, something specifically conjured to arrest the attention, intrigue and entertain. The performance artist Martina Morger likes to lick those delicious luxury Paris store windows And now just in time

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Dune: Prophecy is much worse than you will believe possible

Do you remember that nagging sense of mild disappointment as you sat through Dune 2? You’d been impressed by Dune: bit of a recondite plot if you hadn’t read the book but great to look at, with an austere art-house aesthetic, like Star Wars for people with an IQ. But then the sequel sold out. It turned a minor character from the book into the heroine of a stereotypical Hollywood romance, which not even the excitement of the sandworm-riding scenes could quite redeem. No disrespect to Brian Aldiss,but I think of ‘Brian’as a sort of joke name Anyway its latest screen incarnation, Dune: Prophecy, is worse, much worse. To give

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

This Muslim playwright believes Yorkshire is headed for civil war

Expendable, at the Royal Court, is an urgent bulletin from the front line of the grooming gang scandal in the north of England. The setting is a kitchen in Yorkshire where Zara is trying to keep her family together after her son, Raheel, was outed as a rape suspect by a national newspaper. White thugs dump parcels of excrement on their porch and Zara cowers under the kitchen table, too scared to answer the door. The racists have mounted a mass demonstration, supported by the cops, which causes local bus services to be cancelled. Every Muslim in town is terrified of a white vigilante gang who recently targeted a blameless

Daisy Dunn

Why space is the perfect subject for podcasts

The podcasts I’m recommending to everyone at the moment are Nasa’s Curious Universe and the Royal Astronomical Society’s The Supermassive Podcast. Both have me convinced there’s no topic better suited to the oral medium than space. Not even history. Unless you happen to be an astronaut, you’ll find much of what is described so alien, that your imagination will go into overdrive. What does a Brown dwarf look like? What is the ‘tadpole’ orbit of a quasi-moon? The icy surface of Europa has red furrows which make it look like ‘a giant dragged its fingernails’ across it. How did those furrows get there? You will probably find the images summoned

Friday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Kate Andrews, Mark Galeotti, Adrian Pascu-Tulbure, Michael Hann and Olivia Potts

31 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Kate Andrews examines the appointment of Scott Bessent as US Treasury Secretary (1:20); Mark Galeotti highlights Putin’s shadow campaign across Europe (7:10); Adrian Pascu-Tulbure reports on the surprising rise of Romania’s Calin Georgescu (15:45); Michael Hann reviews Irish bands Kneecap and Fontaines D.C. (22:54); and Olivia Potts provides her notes on London’s Smithfield Market, following the news it may close (27:28).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.