Arts Reviews Archives

Saturday

8 Feb 2020

SAS: Who Dares Wins is harsh, gruelling and transgressively countercultural

SAS: Who Dares Wins (Channel 4, Sundays) is literally the only programme left on terrestrial TV that I can bear to watch any more. And I’m only slightly exaggerating. Where else, anywhere from the BBC to Channel 4, would you see a woman being punched in the face and made to cry by an ex-SAS soldier for your amusement and delectation? Where else would the competition not be rigged in one way or another so as to ensure that the appropriate race and gender mix made it through to the end? Yes, of course it was shocking a few weeks back watching midwife Louise Gabbitas, 29, get thumped several times

Daisy Dunn

Why do writers enjoy walking so much?

Writers like walking. When people ask us why, we say it’s what writers do. ‘Just popping out to buy a pencil,’ we cry, before tootling along the tarmac à la Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin or George Sand. BBC Radio likes walking, too, to judge by the number of programmes dedicated to the pursuit this fortnight. Some revolve around mental health and the environment; Clare Balding saunters over Berkshire’s Winter Hill in Ramblings with Steve Backshall and Helen Glover discussing wellbeing, parenthood and sewage. More involve the walking writer, with five authors retracing memorable ambulations on Radio 3, and Professor Jonathan Bate taking us on an altogether more dreamlike journey for

Lloyd Evans

A terrific two-hander that belongs at the National: RSC’s Kunene and the King reviewed

The Gift is three plays in one. It opens in a blindingly white Victorian parlour where a posh lady, Sarah, is teaching her clumsy maid to serve tea correctly. Both characters are black. Sarah’s prosperous husband, also black, arrives home and the scene continues as the gauche skivvy (Donna Berlin, brilliant) makes more and more hilarious blunders. What is this play? Perhaps a neglected Victorian comedy revived with colour-blind casting. In fact, the script is inspired by a historical character, Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a Yoruba princess born in Nigeria in the 19th century, who was adopted by Queen Victoria and raised as an English gentlewoman. A drama about a solitary

Saturday

1 Feb 2020

Laura Freeman

Spiralling tributes to air, flight and lift-off: Naum Gabo at Tate St Ives reviewed

‘Plunderers of the air’, Naum Gabo called the Luftwaffe planes. In Cornwall, during the second world war, Gabo kept cuttings of the attacks over London. One newspaper photo, pasted in his diary, was taken from the Golden Gallery of St Paul’s after a night of incendiary bombs. London looks like Pompeii. Enemy planes were a betrayal. Gabo was entranced by flight. His sculptures are spiralling tributes to air, light and lift-off. After an hour in the Naum Gabo retrospective at Tate St Ives, the first major show of the artist’s work for more than 30 years, you feel a certain springiness about the knees as if you could push off

Richard Bratby

The joy of Radio 3’s Building a Library

So, you’ve fallen in love with a piece of classical music and you want to buy a recording. The problems begin when you hit Amazon. Any reasonably established classic will have been recorded numerous times: do you go for the performer you’ve already heard of? The crackly vintage recording with the gushing five-star reviews? Or the budget-priced unknown with the vaguely Slavic name; after all, it’s the same music. Isn’t it? Radio 3’s Building a Library sorts it out so you don’t have to. Tucked away within Record Review each Saturday morning, the format is simple: every week, the BBC details a critic to listen to as many recordings of

Michael Hann

You have to be a terrific snob not to see the appeal of Slipknot

Every development in heavy music is derided by mainstream critics. When Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin emerged in the late 1960s, they were sneered at for their lumpen, troglodyte stupidity. A decade on, AC/DC were reviled for precisely the same reasons. When Metallica and Slayer helped lead the thrash metal movement in the mid-1980s, it was at first only enthusiasts for extreme noise who cheered them on. The disdain never lasts. People who grew up listening to those bands became critics or editors or broadcasters or musicians, and each of them was absorbed seamlessly into the rock canon. That’s precisely what’s happened to the Iowa band Slipknot, too. The nu-metal

Lloyd Evans

Strong performances in a slightly wonky production: Uncle Vanya reviewed

Uncle Vanya opens with a puzzle. Is the action set in the early 20th century or right now? The furnishings might be modern purchases or inherited antiques, and the costumes are also styled ambiguously. It soon becomes clear from Conor McPherson’s script, which uses colloquialisms like ‘wanging on’, that this is a contemporary version. It’s always a risk to update Chekhov and the director Ian Rickson pulls it off. Never once did I wonder why these chattering idlers didn’t have broadband or mobile phones. But the casting is awry. Vanya is a middle-aged Hamlet, a thinker, an observer, whose dreams are smashed to pieces in the course of the action.

James Walton

Understated, unashamedly patriotic and heartbreaking: The Windermere Children reviewed

One of the many astonishing things about the BBC2 drama The Windermere Children (Monday) was that the real-life story it told isn’t better known already. In August 1945, 300 Jewish children, who just a short time before had been starving in Nazi concentration camps, arrived at a converted seaplane factory in the Lake District. None, as far as they knew, had any family left, and none could speak any English. Waiting to welcome them was Leonard Montefiore of the Central British Fund for Jewish Relief who’d raised the money to turn the factory into a carefully thought-out rehabilitation centre — and amid the wreckage of Eastern Europe had liaised with

Deborah Ross

Mad but terrific: The Lighthouse reviewed

The Lighthouse stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson (and a very nasty seagull) in a gothic thriller set off the coast of Maine in 1890, and it’s terrific. Mad, but terrific. It is gripping, intense, extraordinarily written — someone is accused of smelling like ‘curdled foreskin’ at one point — and is about two fellas thrown together. But unlike most odd-couple scenarios there is no bonding. So get bonding right out of your mind. Instead, they drive each other full-on (and marvellously) insane. It’s a mad film about madness, in short. The writing is so dazzling it may well blow your mind It is directed by Robert Eggers (The Witch)

Lara Prendergast

The art of pregnancy

In 1622, Elizabeth Joscelin wrote a letter to her unborn child. This was fairly common practice in Elizabethan England; pregnant women were encouraged to write ‘mother’s legacy’ texts in case they did not survive the birth. ‘It may… appear strange to thee to receyue theas lines from a mother that dyed when thou weart born,’ she wrote. Her daughter Theodora was born on 12 October 1622, and following a violent fever Elizabeth died nine days later. Her letter — which urged her child to pray, avoid temptation and be charitable — was discovered posthumously in her writing desk and published in 1624 by an Anglican clergyman called Thomas Goad. The

Saturday

25 Jan 2020

Laura Gascoigne

Dazzling and sex-fuelled: Picasso and Paper at the Royal Academy reviewed

Picasso collected papers. Not just sheets of the exotic handmade stuff — though he admitted being seduced by them — but any scrap that could inspire, support or become part of an image. He jettisoned muses like there were endless tomorrows but clung on to Métro tickets, postcards, restaurant bills, bottle labels. When the thrill of a muse was gone her creative possibilities were exhausted, but you never knew, with synthetic cubism, when that old Métro ticket might come in handy. In a garret he would have had a hoarding problem. ‘Picasso throws nothing away,’ reported one lover. There was no filing system: a photograph in the exhibition shows a

Simon Ings

The history, power and beauty of infographics

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868, three years after the official end of slavery in the United States. He grew up among a small, tenacious business- and property-owning black middle class who had their own newspapers, their own schools and universities, their own elected officials. After graduating with a PhD in history from Harvard University, Du Bois embarked on a sprawling study of African Americans living in Philadelphia. At the historically black Atlanta University in 1897, he established international credentials as a pioneer of the newfangled science of sociology. His students were decades ahead of their counterparts in the Chicago school. In the spring of

Michael Hann

Best gig of the week: the fuzzy, slacker melodies of teenage quintet Disq

Come January, when the proper pop stars are all in the gym working off the pounds before they emerge, blinking and svelte, into the watery winter sun, the small venues of London attempt to pack in the curious by filling their schedules with seasons of up-and-coming artists. In east London this past week, the excellent promoter Eat Your Own Ears ran three free nights of new acts. In Islington, the Lexington offered first the Winter Sprinter — five nights of sweet-toothed indie pop, where you might have caught the Portland Brothers, the occasional duo featuring Steven Adams, once of the Broken Family Band, and the best songwriter almost no one

Stuart Jeffries

Radio 4’s new H.P. Lovecraft adaptation will give you the chills

Of all the many things I’ve learned from the radio so far this decade, the most deranging is that the universe is the dream of the god Azathoth. Not unreasonably, Azathoth yearns to wake up and visit his creation. In The Whisperer in Darkness (Radio 4), a crusty coven of drug-addled neopagans seek to realise this wish by summoning Azathoth through a mystic portal they’ve opened — just off the B1084 in Suffolk. Fools! Don’t they realise that they risk unleashing forces they don’t understand? Waking Azathoth would mean there will be no dreamer to dream the dream and so not just Suffolk but all reality would be obliterated as

James Delingpole

Netflix’s Messiah is a great concept undermined by implausible politics

Sky’s latest bingewatch potboiler Cobra can’t quite make up its mind whether it wants to be an arch, knowing House of Cards-meets-The Thick Of It satire about parliamentary intrigue. Or a full-on post-apocalyptic thriller in the manner of Survivors or The Walking Dead. It ends up succeeding in neither. The premise is that a powerful solar flare is heading towards Britain, leaving the government little time to prepare, and subsequently causing all manner of chaos: plane crashes, hotel fires, escaped prisoners, mass blackouts. Will mild, likeable Conservative prime minister Robert Sutherland (a miscast Robert Carlyle), his fractious cabinet and his civil service prove up to the job of extricating Britain

Lloyd Evans

Sweeping, sod-you comedy – irresistible: Billionaire Boy reviewed

Falling In Love Again features two of the 20th century’s best-known sex athletes. Ron Elisha’s drama covers a long drunken night spent by Marlene Dietrich and Edward VIII at Fort Belvedere, near Windsor, on the eve of Edward’s abdication in December 1936. It sounds like a contrived premise for a play but Elisha, who researches his material thoroughly, says this encounter actually took place. Marlene (played by Ramona von Pusch as an enigmatic adventuress in green lipstick) claims to have fled the Savoy where Rudolf Hess is bombarding her with flowers in the hope of luring her home to make films for the Third Reich. Marlene refuses because she can’t

Saturday

18 Jan 2020

Deborah Ross

One of those films that never seems to end: A Hidden Life reviewed

Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is a historical drama based on the true story of Franz Jäggerstätter, an Austrian who refused to fight for the Nazis in the second world war and was later beatified by the Catholic church. It isn’t peak Malick as it’s linear rather than associative — let’s not pretend we aren’t mightily relieved — but otherwise it’s business as usual in the sense that it’s visually beautiful, poetic, philosophical, theological and slowly, slowly, slowly meditative. In fact, it’s so slowly, slowly, slowly meditative it’s one of those films that feels as if it’s been playing for ever when there is still an hour to go. As

Lloyd Evans

People expecting punishment won’t be disappointed: Almeida’s Duchess of Malfi reviewed

The Duchess of Malfi is one of those classics that everyone knows by name but not many have witnessed on stage. So a production is likely to attract theatre-goers who feel they ‘ought to’ see it rather than ‘want to’. This may have affected the Almeida’s version which is opaque and almost impossible to follow. Yet audience members who are expecting punishment rather than entertainment will not be disappointed. The play by John Webster was first presented in London in 1613 (or possibly a year later), and it relies on events that occurred in Italy more than a century earlier between 1508 and 1513. So even the original London audience

Stuart Jeffries

Enchanting but outrageously expensive: Tutankhamun reviewed

Like Elton John, though less ravaged, Tutankhamun’s treasures are on their final world tour. Soon these 150 artefacts will return permanently to Egypt. Nearly a century after Howard Carter disrupted their 3,000-year rest in the Valley of the Kings, they are to be retombed in the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza. But first they undergo their final ordeal, an outing in London. The genius of the Saatchi show, curated by Tarek El Awady, is to simulate the trials the pharaoh’s mummified corpse endured in the netherworld. After having his brain pulled out through his nose, Tutankhamun had to pass through 12 gates guarded by snakes, crocodiles, vultures and supernatural

James Walton

Undeniably eye-popping: BBC2’s Louis Theroux – Selling Sex reviewed

Victoria, a single mother in her early thirties, is getting her children ready for school — ensuring an equitable distribution of toast and issuing a series of determinedly patient instructions. (‘Listen to Mummy, you need to put your socks on.’) Once they’re gone, she then heads to a hotel to meet the first man that day who’ll be paying her £250 for sex. ‘It’s the perfect job for me,’ she explains cheerfully. ‘Very flexible.’ Victoria was one of three women featured in Louis Theroux: Selling Sex (BBC2, Sunday) for which Louis furrowed his familiar brow, adopted his finely honed bemused expression and set off to investigate transactional sex in digital-age