Arts Reviews Archives

Saturday

7 Mar 2020

The gloriously indecent life and art of Aubrey Beardsley

Picture the young aspirant with the portfolio of drawings pitching up nervously at the eminent artist’s studio, only to be turned away at the door by a servant; then the master catching up with him, inviting him in and delivering the verdict on his portfolio: ‘I seldom or never advise anyone to take up art as a profession; but in your case I can do nothing else.’ Within two short years of this fairy-tale meeting in the summer of 1891 between Edward Burne-Jones and the 18-year-old Aubrey Beardsley, the self-taught insurance clerk who had fallen under the Pre-Raphaelite spell had turned himself into the most talked-about artist in London. Van

Daisy Dunn

Every bit as well observed as Rembrandt – and often funnier: Nicolaes Maes reviewed

Nicolaes Maes (1634–93) relished the simple moments of daily life during the Dutch Golden Age. A woman peeling parsnips over a bowl; a young girl threading a needle; a peasant lugging pails of milk to sell on the doorstep. His paintings are sensitive, not showy, and, as you would expect from a pupil of Rembrandt, rendered with the most exquisite use of light. Maes was apprenticed to the Dutch master for about five years in his teens. He returned to Amsterdam later in life, but worked for two decades in his hometown of Dordrecht, 11 miles southeast of Rotterdam. Several of his paintings, including ‘The Apostle Thomas’ and ‘Christ Blessing

Tanya Gold

‘I feel compelled to be disgraceful’: Miriam Margolyes interviewed

I meet Miriam Margolyes in her large Victorian house in Clapham. She is very small and round, with a shock of grey hair, and the clear and open gaze of a curious child. There is an innocence to her, like someone who has not quite grown up. She has a wonderful voice, which bought this house. When it rests it is low and serious; but when she is telling a good story it takes flight. She is best known, now, for Harry Potter films and Blackadder; and for The Graham Norton Show which she dominates by speaking filth while looking delighted. This is deceptive though. When she wants, she can

Nina Power

Oracles, perverts and the Dirtbag Left

For 500 years the State Oracle of Tibet has worked as a kind of angry immortal advisor to the Dalai Lama, a Tibetan hybrid of Dominic Cummings and John Dee. The current incumbent, like all previous ones, alternates between his human incarnation and his spirit version. ‘In Tibetan Buddhism, the unseen parallel world of spirits is not to be taken lightly,’ explains anthropologist David Sneath on Heart and Soul (BBC World Service). ‘There are so many other living species,’ the Minister of Religion and Culture tells Sneath, ‘many of which we don’t even see.’ Sneath interviews the cheerful sixty-something State Oracle (living in exile in Dharamsala), various government ministers, sincere

Lloyd Evans

Unimpressive: The Prince of Egypt reviewed

The Prince of Egypt is a musical adapted from a 1998 Dreamworks cartoon based on the Book of Exodus. So the original writer is God. The show opens with a troupe of fit young athletes working on Pharaoh’s latest tomb. And they look like the best-fed slaves in history. A meat-rich diet and round-the-clock access to a gym and a sauna must have been written into their contracts. The tanned abs of the male slaves ripple and gleam. The lithe females are bendier than hosepipes. Presumably these cartwheeling ballerinas are able to limber up in an air-conditioned dance studio before each shift. The only drawback is lugging blocks of stone

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

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

29 Feb 2020

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

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

22 Feb 2020

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

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

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

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.