Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Martin Gayford

The shock of the nude

Early in the 16th century, Fra Bartolomeo painted an altarpiece of St Sebastian for the church of San Marco in Florence. Though stuck full of arrows, the martyr was, according to Vasari, distinctly good-looking in this picture: ‘sweet in countenance, and likewise executed with corresponding beauty of person’. By and by the friars of San Marco discovered through the confessional that this image was giving rise to ‘light and evil thoughts’ among women in the congregation. It was removed and eventually sold to the King of France (who was presumably less bothered by that sort of thing). So even during the heyday of Michelangelo and Raphael depictions of human bodies

Deborah Ross

Double trouble | 21 March 2019

Us is a second feature from Jordan Peele after his marvellous debut Get Out, which was more brilliantly satirical than scary and may well be the best ever horror film for non-horror people (i.e. me). Us has also garnered five stars everywhere, as well as, at the time of writing, a 100 per cent rating on the aggregate review site Rotten Tomatoes, so I’m out of step, I know, but I found it disappointing. The second act is essentially a zombie-style, home-invasion splatterfest that goes on and on and on. Allusions that you think will pay off don’t. It’s ultimately baffling and although I’m fine with baffling as a rule,

Richard Bratby

Resistance is futile

You can see Graham Vick’s work at La Scala or the New York Met. But if you want to be directed by him, you need to go to Birmingham. The Tower Ballroom is a sticky-floored former nightspot out by Edgbaston Reservoir, artfully trashed by Block9, the people behind Banksy’s Dismaland. You crunch across the tarmac, pass the humanoid rats and the drug dealer with his prostitute cards (‘Sonyetka: Exotic Dancing – Russian Lessons’) and enter the crowd. Suddenly Vick’s on you: barking under his breath that you need to move and, should you fail to comply, shoving you firmly out of the way. Seconds later, a double bed careens through,

Justin Marozzi

Horror show | 21 March 2019

OK, Archers fans out there. All five million of you. Ask yourselves a straightforward question. Why on earth do you — do we — listen to this show full of completely awful people? Why do we subject ourselves to this 13 minutes of daily torment, not to mention the Sunday omnibus, wallowing in the lives of fictitious characters who, let’s be ruthlessly honest, are almost universally loathsome? Don’t get me wrong. I love The Archers. I have lain in bed sweating with a fever in Mogadishu, glued to the comings and goings in Ambridge. In 2005, as al Qaeda’s bearded bombers did their worst in Baghdad, I hunkered down in my

Kate Chisholm

Black magic | 21 March 2019

‘You’re thinking these girls all wrong,’ Miss Mai tells Enid in Winsome Pinnock’s play Leave Taking, adapted from the recent Bush Theatre revival for Radio 3 (and produced by Pauline Harris). ‘They don’t know where they come from.’ Miss Mai continues: ‘These girls got Caribbean souls,’ but they’re living in south London. Viv and Del have been taken to see Miss Mai, known locally as an obeah woman, by their mother Enid for a palm reading, a prediction, or perhaps a casting out of demons. Del has got into bad company, has lost her job at the burger bar for being cheeky, and fears she must be pregnant. Viv was

James Walton

Mummy porn

What can parents do about the avalanche of pornography available to their children on tablet, phone and laptop? This question was the starting point for a documentary series that began on Wednesday — and the answer proved unexpected. Having gathered five mothers together and shown them a hair-raising selection of online filth, the programme blithely declared that the best way for these women to ‘make a change’ was ‘by making their own mum-approved porn film’, which they’d then screen for their families and friends. If this premise struck anyone involved in Mums Make Porn (Channel 4, obviously) as at all questionable, they didn’t mention it. Instead, the programme simply went

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Great expectations | 21 March 2019

No menace, no Venice. This new production of Pinter’s Betrayal is set on a bare stage with scant regard for the play’s physical requirements. The script specifies a handful of furnished locations: a pub, a study, a flat, a hotel bedroom, a living room. But instead we get an off-white void where three youngish actors prowl in circles, ogling each other. This is Pinter’s finest work, a tense romantic tragedy with flashes of comic fireworks, and it differs from the rest of his output by revealing its themes directly to the audience, by delivering an intelligible plot full of suspense and surprises, by focusing relentlessly on the human duel at

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

Dream on | 14 March 2019

Art movements come and go but surrealism, in one form or another, has always been with us. Centuries before Freud’s scientific observation that the stuff of dreams will out, artists were painting it. The English have never been much cop at surrealism — too buttoned up; the Celts are better. The Scottish painters Alan Davie and John Bellany, jointly celebrated in Newport Street Gallery’s latest show, Cradle of Magic, were both surrealists in different ways. Both attended Edinburgh College of Art — Davie in the late 1930s, Bellany in the early 1960s — and both came out fighting in a punchy style of painting combining expressionistic brushwork with strong colour.

Steve Morris

Everyman

Toby Jones shuffles into the café in Clapham where we are meeting. He’s wearing a duffle coat and a hat and carrying a rucksack. He looks just like one of those unsung characters that he specialises in, the kind of person you don’t take much notice of unless you have to. Today we are talking about his new ‘vehicle’ (sorry), Don’t Forget the Driver. It’s an everyday tale of an everyday coach driver (Peter Green) from Bognor Regis, his daughter Kayla, who turns ennui into an artform, and mother Audrey, who’s going downhill fast with Alzheimer’s. It is going to twang the nation’s heartstrings. What makes it different is that

Tom Ball

Gaming isn’t art, whatever fans might say

I was hooked once too. I also used to gun down civilians, do battle with the LAPD and win the Premier League before I’d even had my breakfast, a small pyjamed boy sat breathless in the front room, smarting behind the eyes from three hours of close-range televisual retina damage. I knew it was killing me and robbing me of my youth – which is not even to mention the drain it was on my one-pound-a-week pocket money – but I couldn’t stop. The power of my addiction to video gaming was too strong. I dabbled in most things, but what really did it for me was a street drug named

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Secrets and lies | 14 March 2019

Halfway through the first part of Channel 4’s extraordinary documentary Leaving Neverland (Thursdays), I flicked through the comments on social media in order to gauge the global reaction. Surely, I thought, Michael Jackson’s reputation will never recover from these bombshell revelations. If you sat, squirming, though Dan Reed’s excruciatingly prurient documentary you’ll know what I mean. Lots of those who didn’t have been justifying their decision to ignore it with excuses like ‘Yeah, but we knew this already. Michael Jackson was a paedo. It’s hardly news, is it?’ But this strikes me as glib and dishonest. Sure, Wacko’s fondness for prepubescent boys — such as Jimmy Safechuck, the ten-year-old Australian

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Brideshead revisited

Nicholas Hytner’s new show, Alys, Always, is based on a Harriet Lane novel that carries a strong echo of Brideshead. A well-educated journalist, Frances, becomes entangled with the wealthy Kyte family (the closeness to ‘Flyte’ is doubtless intentional), and she befriends the silly daughter, Polly, before setting her sights on the enigmatic father, Laurence, a famous scribbler who never gives interviews. This slow-moving tale is intercut with scenes from Frances’s day job at a failing newspaper where the staff keep getting the boot. But Frances, mystifyingly, retains her post. How come? Floppiness is her most conspicuous quality. She’s a watchful sponge with no wit, charm or intellect, and for most

Alexandra Coghlan

Deft and daft

Operas are like buses. Both are filled with pensioners and take ages to get anywhere, but more importantly they always seem to arrive en masse. You wait ages for a Magic Flute, then five come along at once. Opera North started us off in January, Welsh National Opera and English National Opera are currently following suit, with Scottish Opera and Glyndebourne covering the summer shift. It’s a mess and, when you consider that at least four of these are touring with inevitable overlap, a wanton, self-destructive splitting of an already small opera-going audience. With more Flutes than a school wind-band to choose from this season you can afford to be

Louise Levene

Some like it hot | 14 March 2019

Blame Kenneth MacMillan. The great Royal Ballet choreographer of the 1960s, 70s and 80s was convinced that narrative dance could and should extend its reach beyond boy meets sylph and began wrestling with heavyweight essay subjects such as the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire (Mayerling) or the last of the Romanovs (Anastasia). And now look: Queen Victoria, the pointe shoe years, a bold, good-looking ballet that almost triumphs over the absurdity of its premise. Cathy Marston’s latest work for Northern Ballet follows the success of her 2016 Jane Eyre, a spare, clever reworking of the novel that will be danced by American Ballet Theatre in New York this June. Victoria,

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Short circuit

Choreographer Richard Alston is now 70 and his latest outing at Sadler’s Wells is a greatest hits medley. As with all clip shows, some of it is super, some soporific and some merely meh. We begin with Martin Lawrance’s Detour, first performed last year. The piece is a powerful hybrid of fluid dance and martial arts: kung fu meets pas de deux. The raking lamps by designer Zeynep Kepekli spotlight dancers in washed indigo and ochre tunics. The final image of a male dancer spinning his female partner like a storm-warning weather vane is striking. The trouble with minimalist soundscapes (very Tubular Bells) is that unless the dancers control both

Kate Chisholm

Only connect | 14 March 2019

It’s not surprising given the way that electronic communication has taken over so much of our daily business, minimising human contact wherever possible, that podcasting (or what might be called aural blogging) has taken off in such a big way, anything from Griefcast to Love + Radio via The Breakup Monologues and To the Woman. We crave the sound of a human voice talking to us and no one else, and even better when it comes in disembodied form, stripped of all physical expression. This intense aural connection has been radio’s chief selling point since the 1920s, technology enhancing human interaction, the need to tell and listen to stories. Don

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Will Self and Mark Francois bust-up on Politics Live

It’s something of an understatement to say that Brexit has incited passions in the past two years, even on live TV. But today Mr S thinks we came the closest we’ve seen yet to a full on fight breaking out in the studio, between the author Will Self and the Brexiteer MP Mark Francois on Politics Live. The argument began when Self made the rather inflammatory suggestion that: ‘Your problem really Mark is not that you have to be a racist or an anti-Semite to vote for Brexit, it’s just that every racist and anti-Semite in the country did.’ In response, Francois called for Self to ‘apologise on national television’ for

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

Master of white

Artists can be trained, but they are formed by their earliest impressions: a child of five may not be able to draw like a master but he can see better and more intensely. The light of Valencia was burnt into Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida’s mental retina and he could not get it out of his mind: ‘I live here like an orange tree surrounded by heaters,’ he told an interviewer in Madrid in 1913. Never a studio painter, he worked best under the lamp of his native sun and returned to Valencia from wherever he was living every summer to set up his easel on the beach. His ambition was