Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Deborah Ross

An algorithmic zero-to-hero narrative: Military Wives reviewed

Military Wives is a British comedy drama starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan. It is based on the true story of the service spouses who formed a choir (and were the subject of a BBC documentary series in 2011) and it’s wholly in the style of Calendar Girls, The Full Monty, Brassed off, Kinky Boots etc, but that’s OK as we love all those films. This does shamelessly play you — you’ll laugh; you’ll cry! You may even cry from four minutes in! Like I did! — but you’d be disappointed if it didn’t, just as you’d be disappointed if it didn’t end with Sister Sledge belting out ‘We

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Too edgy and clever to be wasted on kids: Netflix’s Locke & Key reviewed

One of my perpetual gnawing terrors is that I’ll recommend a series that looks initially promising but turns out to be total rubbish, meaning I’ll for ever have thousands of viewers’ wasted lives and disappointment on my conscience. But my even greater fear is that I’ll peremptorily condemn something after one or two episodes which subsequently reveals itself to be a near-masterpiece. This almost happened with Locke & Key (Netflix). ‘You realise I’m watching this on sufferance. The second you’ve seen enough to review, we’re moving on to something else,’ declared the Fawn. And I could sort of see her point. Not only does it take a while to get

Saturday

Norman Lebrecht

Antonio Pappano on diversity, a new Ring cycle and defending Verdi from dodgy directors

The horse beats me to the stage door by a short nose. Known as Tiz, it’s an opera specialist who comes up from Norfolk for 10 a.m. rehearsal and is driven back home each night. Tiz is on call right through the Fidelio rehearsals — unlike, as Sir Antonio Pappano points out, the star tenor who does not show up for the first act. This is a fairly sore point, and I wait until late in our conversation to probe it. There has been a media hoo-hah about Fidelio tickets going to ROH friends, leaving hardly any for the general public. Pappano, the quiet man of opera, suddenly shoots up

Martin Gayford

Strange, sinister and very Belgian: Léon Spilliaert at the Royal Academy reviewed

The strange and faintly sinister works of the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert have been compared — not unreasonably — to those of many writers, Edgar Allan Poe among them. But as I walked round the Spilliaert exhibition at the Royal Academy, it was not any of these that came to my mind. It was the Father Brown detective stories by G.K. Chesterton. I wasn’t thinking of the neatly paradoxical plots, but rather of Chesterton’s mastery of atmosphere. Consider The Absence of Mr Glass (1914), which takes place in a ‘desolate’ seaside resort. As Father Brown investigates, ‘…the afternoon was closing with a premature and partly lurid twilight; the sea was

John Phipps

An Al-Qaeda double agent explains what’s really going on in Middle East

When will the definitive history of the modern Middle East be written? For 20 years and more, a continent has been torn apart by invasion, upheaval and civil war. It took hundreds of years for balanced histories to be written of the Reformation, European history’s most obviously comparable period. If you want the whole story of the modern Muslim world, written from a dispassionate, God’s-eye view, you may be waiting a long time. For the moment, more personal accounts will have to suffice, and Conflicted, a series of amiable hour-long conversations between the Middle East expert Thomas Small and former jihadist Aimen Dean, makes a strong case for just this

Deborah Ross

Deeply romantic and wildly sexy: Portrait of a Lady on Fire reviewed

Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is set on a remote, windswept Brittany island in the late 18th century. It’s about two women falling in love and it’s rapturous, scorching, ravishing and will lock your eyes to the screen. I’ve seen it three times and on each occasion my eyes were locked to the screen. At this point I could also say it’s a film that tells the male gaze to go take a running jump, then follow up with one of my lectures on post-structural feminism, as I know you are keen on all that, but ‘rapturous, scorching and ravishing’ will do for now. Plus it is

Sara Veale

A bruising encounter: Pina Bausch’s Bluebeard reviewed

Pina Bausch’s best work always hovered between the familiar and the unknown. The late choreographer revelled in borders and thresholds, the hinterlands where fantasies collide with reality. The gulf between men and women — their conflicting desires, instincts, clout — was one of her favourite trenches to plumb, so it’s no wonder she was drawn to Bluebeard. Her 1977 production was shown for the first time in the UK this month. The show’s full title — Bluebeard. While Listening to a Tape Recording of Béla Bartók’s Opera ‘Duke Bluebeard’s Castle’ — is the first hint at its tangled drift. Splintered into cryptic scenes, some buoyant, some disturbingly visceral, it doesn’t

James Walton

Sharp family saga with a thriller uneasily attached: ITV’s Flesh and Blood reviewed

As in many thrillers, the characters on display in Flesh and Blood (ITV, Monday to Thursday) often seemed locked in a fierce competition as to which of them we could trust the least. The early front runner was Mark (Stephen Rea), a retired surgeon whom the not-long widowed Viv (Francesca Annis) introduced to her three grown-up children as her new boyfriend. But was Mark all he appeared to be? And if not, was this necessarily a bad thing — given that what he appeared to be was spectacularly shifty? Soon, though, the grown-up children had plenty of other people to worry about, including themselves, as they messed up their lives

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Comedy gold: The Upstart Crow at the Gielgud Theatre reviewed

A Moorish princess shipwrecked on the English coast disguises herself as a boy to protect her virtue. Arriving in London, she’s hired by William Shakespeare as an assistant to his maidservant Kate, who instantly falls in love with the exotic cross-dressing newcomer. This absurdity, familiar to fans of Twelfth Night, is the opening move in Ben Elton’s exquisite Shakespearean remix, The Upstart Crow. It’s 1604 and the Bard is in poor creative form. ‘I have banged out a few clunkers of late,’ he admits, referring to Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. ‘Should have been All’s Well That Ends Crap,’ suggests a lackey. Enter a Puritan who

Saturday

Mark Mason

I regret my bust-up with the Bee Gees: Clive Anderson interviewed

‘The really tricky thing,’ says Clive Anderson as we discuss the topic of being recognised in public, ‘is when they say, “I love your programmes —that thing you did with Margarita Pracatan…” Do I say now that that wasn’t me? Because if you let them carry on about how they loved your Postcards From…, and the Japanese game show, and then you tell them, they get very indignant and say, “Well, why did you let me give you all that praise?”’ It’s easy to understand the mistake in the abstract — indeed The Spectator’s arts editor made it himself in his email to me: ‘Could you interview Clive James for

Mark Hudson

Slight: Steve McQueen at Tate Modern reviewed

Steve McQueen’s ‘Static’ (2009) impresses through its sheer directness — and it’s very far from static. A succession of helicopter-tracking shots around the Statue of Liberty, it’s the first film you encounter in this quasi-retrospective from the Turner Prize-winning conceptual artist-turned-Oscar-winning film director. Shot shortly after the monument reopened after the 9/11 attacks, it offers the eye an exhilarating whirl of light and colour, while the mind — given the potency of that historical context — goes on an equally dizzying train of associations through the notion of American liberty. While you bring these associations yourself, they seem to emanate naturally and directly from what you’re seeing. It’s that essential

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Why foreign-language series will always have the edge over American ones

An office worker stands on the ledge of an open window about to leap. Two colleagues enter, ignoring him completely. They sit at symmetrical desks and read reports about the man’s background while he clings to the window frame, poised between life and death. This is the opening of Samuel Beckett’s Rough for Theatre II, starring Daniel Radcliffe and Alan Cumming. Stewart Laing’s beautiful design places the window centre-stage with the man standing in isolation between his two colleagues, like Christ and the thieves at Calvary. Beckett would have approved. For the first ten minutes of this bizarre play, the Old Vic audience sat in polite silence tittering only at

Deborah Ross

In this instance, greed isn’t good: Greed reviewed

Greed is Michael Winterbottom’s satire on the obscenely rich and, in particular, a billionaire, asset-stripping retail tycoon whose resemblance to any living person is purely intentional. (Hello, Sir Philip Green.) Plenty to work with, you would think. Low-hanging fruit and all that. But as the characters are so feebly sketched and the ‘jokes’ — ‘jokes’ in quotation marks; always a bad sign — are so heavy-handed it drags (and drags) rather than flies. Greed is good, greed works, Gordon Gekko famously said in Wall Street. But in this instance it isn’t. And doesn’t. Greed is good, Gordon Gekko famously said in Wall Street. But in this instance it isn’t It

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The appeal of psychopaths

Ever since the end of Gomorrah season four (Sky Atlantic) I have been bereft. I eked it out for as long as I could, going whole weeks without watching an episode — rationing it and savouring it as you do when you’re down to your last Rolo. But eventually I could put off the climax no longer, I watched them all die — as everyone always does in Gomorrah, so I’m not spoiling anything — and now I’m on the hunt for a substitute. So far the most obvious candidate is Narcos: Mexico season two (Netflix). This contains most of the same key ingredients: bling, convoys of vehicles ripe for

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The rancid meanderings of a long-spent wankpuffin: Justin Bieber’s Changes reviewed

Grade: D– For my first review of popular music releases in 2020 I thought I’d deposit this large vat of crap over your heads. This is the fifth album from Canada’s androgynous, tattooed bratlette — purveyor of corporate trap dross to the world’s pre-pubescent thots, skanks and wannabe hos. Trouble is, even for the dumbest of the world’s unter-mädchens, Bieber’s schtick has long since worn a little thin. So his new album is called Changes, which is the only echo of David Bowie you will find within. But as Justin puts it on the title track: ‘Tho I’m goin thru changes, don’t mean that I’ll change.’ No indeed, well put.

Saturday

Claire Harman

Some of the best Austen adaptations are the most unfaithful

The new Emma film by Autumn de Wilde is the latest in a very long line of Austen adaptations, but by no means the strangest. Even in Austen’s lifetime there were pirated editions and translations of her books that took liberties with the originals, and the first illustrated editions raised howls of objection, too, at their ‘lamentable’ interference (as E.M. Forster thought) with the sacred text. Early stage versions all made free with ‘Divine Jane’ according to whim. The very first motion picture of an Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice (1940), rather flaunted its carelessness about accuracy, transposing the action into the 1850s to accommodate the costume designer Edith Head’s

Laura Gascoigne

Pyramids of piffle: Tate Britain’s British Baroque reviewed

British Baroque: it was never going to fly. Les rosbifs emulating the splendour of le Roi Soleil? Pas possible. Still, we had a go and the evidence is assembled in British Baroque: Power and Illusion, Tate Britain’s survey of the art of the Stuart court from the restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the death of Queen Anne in 1714. An awful lot happened in those 54 years — the Glorious Revolution, the union of England and Scotland, endless wars in Europe, the rise of party politics — but through it all the Frenchified taste for ‘Wonderful Figures and Whirligigs… that are of no manner of use but to

James Walton

Odd but gripping: BBC1’s The Pale Horse reviewed

Not much was clear in the opening scenes of The Pale Horse (BBC1, Sunday), which even by current TV standards were admirably committed to confusing us with a series of baffling fragments. One thing that did seem apparent, though, was that Mark Easterbrook (Rufus Sewell) wasn’t having much luck with the ladies. In one fragment, he cradled the corpse of his new wife who’d just electrocuted herself in the bath. A few fragments later — some of them featuring an old woman lying in bed with her hair falling out — he woke up in a Soho starlet’s flat to find a rat dead in the sink and the starlet

Robert Jackman

This is how theatre should work post-Brexit: Blood Wedding reviewed

Blood Wedding, by the Spanish dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca, is one of those heavyweight tragedies that risks looking a bit ridiculous when you take it out of its period setting. With rival families, murdered patriarchs and Albanian-style blood feuds — not to mention a talking moon — modern adaptations often come across as implausibly melodramatic. Hats off, then, to Barney Norris for his decision to strip back much of the excess drama for his West Country rewrite of Blood Wedding. Norris stays loyal to the play’s central arc — a frenzied bride torn between her husband-to-be and her bad-boy ex-boyfriend — but decides to dispense with much of the baggage

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

You’ll laugh, cry, cringe and covet the hats and bedspreads: Emma reviewed

‘Too pretty,’ blithers Miss Bates in the Highbury haberdasher as she plucks at a silken tassel. ‘Too pretty’ goes for all of Autumn de Wilde’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. If there were an Academy Award for patisserie and passementerie, Emma would win it. The look is Tinkerbell Regency. Emma’s Hartfield is a Barbie Dreamhouse by way of Robert Adam. Her earrings should have their own Instagram account. Any risk of sweetness is salted by exaggeration. This is Emma styled by Gillray, not Gainsborough. The first we see of Mr Knightley is the fly of his breeches, then his boots, then his fine, bare gentleman-farmer’s bottom. Emma lifts up her