Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Harry Mount

Britain’s Gothic cathedrals owe everything to Notre-Dame

No wonder we feel the agony of Notre-Dame so acutely in Britain. Not only does the cathedral hold a special place in British hearts. But our greatest cathedrals and churches owe a huge stylistic debt to Notre-Dame. Most of Britain’s great cathedrals are Gothic – and the Gothic style was born in northern France. And the greatest global example of French Gothic is poor, torched Notre-Dame. The Gothic style began in northern France in the 12th century AD. Notre-Dame wasn’t quite the first Gothic building. That honour goes to Saint Denis Cathedral, four miles outside the Paris city centre. In 1144, Saint Denis was the first church in the world

Deborah Ross

Men behaving very badly

Fans of Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo, The Great Beauty (which won an Oscar) and his HBO series, The Young Pope, will have been keenly anticipating Loro, his take on the life and times of Silvio Berlusconi, the media tycoon and former Italian prime minister who has been involved in one lurid scandal after another. But if you were expecting some kind of blistering take-down, or satire, it isn’t that, and if you were expecting to somehow get under Berlusconi’s skin, heaven forbid, it isn’t that either. Hard to say what it is, beyond a sprawling mess that caters so exclusively to the male gaze it makes The Wolf of Wall

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Sweet nothings

Nigel Slater is popular because he’s an exceptionally meek cook. Not for him the sprawling restaurant empire or the transatlantic TV career to excite envy and loathing. He writes about his trade in simple vivid prose and his bestselling memoir, Toast, has become a play. Young Nigel enters as a 1960s schoolboy, with shorts and a side parting, living in a posh suburb of Wolverhampton. Dad is a kindly but remote presence, an alien in his own home. Mum is a braindead kitchen-limpet who encourages Nigel’s first culinary experiments. The family are adventurous. They try spaghetti bolognese. Dad takes charge at the dinner table and loads each plate with a

James Walton

Goodbye to all that | 17 April 2019

If you’ve ever faced the social embarrassment of having to admit that you’ve never seen Game of Thrones (Sky Atlantic, Monday), then imagine what it’s like when you’re a TV reviewer. The customary excuse of ‘There really isn’t time to keep up with everything on telly’ might work for most series. But now that GoT is officially a programme that everybody watches (apart from all the people who don’t), it’s beginning to feel a bit feeble for this one. So it was that, after swotting up as best I could on the scores of backstories over the weekend, I decided to give the final series a go. I was, of

Kate Chisholm

Hard lines

As if in defiance of the BBC’s current obsession with programming designed to entice in that elusive young and modish audience, Radio 4 has set us an Easter challenge. Each afternoon over the weekend Jeremy Irons is reading a chunk from The Psalms for half an hour, without illustration (except a bit of music), explication or deviation. It’s a discomfiting listen, at times harsh, unrelenting. The supple but rigorous language of the King James Version of the Bible is both daunting and uplifting. ‘Keep me as the apple of the eye’ is one of my favourite images, and ‘hide me under the shadow of thy wings’ has helped me through

Thursday

Ismene Brown

Capturing a moment | 11 April 2019

On Tuesday, thousands of miles apart, in three great cities, London, New York and Los Angeles, 75 dancers will dance 100 solos in each venue in honour of the late iconoclastic choreographer Merce Cunningham, who would have turned 100 that day. It is a spectacularly ambitious wake for the choreographer who for 70 years denied dance a dramatic or expressive face, and threw all norms of beginnings, middles and ends, of meaningful sequence or physical logic, into a bonfire of expectations. This fabulous celebration, involving dancers of the whole spectrum from contemporary to the Royal Ballet, is a declaration of intent for posterity by the Cunningham Trust, established since his

Martin Gayford

The art of repetition

An eyewitness described Edvard Munch supervising the print of a colour lithograph in 1896. He stood in front of the stones on which the head of a masterpiece was drawn. He then closed his eyes tightly, stabbed the air with his finger, and gave his instructions. ‘Print… grey, green, blue, brown.’ Then he opened his eyes and remarked, ‘Now it’s time for a glass of schnapps.’ The whole performance, including the air of melodrama and that shot of spirits, was highly characteristic. The resulting colour lithograph, ‘The Sick Child’, is one of the artist’s masterpieces. It is on show in Edvard Munch: Love and Angst at the British Museum —

Kate Chisholm

People power | 11 April 2019

He is said to ‘have changed the sound of speech radio’, not just by giving voice to those who until then (the 1960s) had not been given air time, the richness of their county accents too far removed from Broadcasting House’s Received Pronunciation. He won awards for his pioneering use of the new midget tape recorders, taking his microphone out of the studio and down the mines, to the fishing harbours, into the boxing rings and talking to teenagers. He was also a genius at editing, able to cut away an errant ‘s’ or insert a single note into the soundscape with the rudimentary tools then available, a sharp razor

Deborah Ross

Dreaming of Nashville

Jessie Buckley is the actress who, you may remember, was ‘phenomenal’ in Beast — I am quoting myself here so it must be true — and she is also phenomenal in Wild Rose. She plays a Glaswegian, ex-jailbird single mum who dreams of Nashville and making it as a country star and, good grief, the pipes on her. Sensational. And you can quote me on that. Indeed, I wish that you would. Bit fed up, frankly, of always having to quote myself. Like I don’t have enough to do! Directed by Tom Harper (War and Peace, BBC) and written by Nicole Taylor (Three Girls, also BBC), this opens with Rose-Lynn

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Planet propaganda

If you liked Triumph of the Will, you’ll love this latest masterpiece of the genre: Our Planet. The Netflix nature series exploits the prestige, popularity and swansinging poignancy of Sir David Attenborough to promote an environmental message so relentlessly dishonest and alarmist it might have been scripted by the WWF. ‘Walruses committing suicide because of global warming.’ That was the nonsense from episode two repeated uncritically by all the newspapers, none of which seems to have been much interested in questioning the veracity of the claim. You’ll never guess what it was that really drove those walruses over the edge of the cliff… Ironically, the likely culprits were polar bears

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Rising to the top

Caryl Churchill’s best-known play, Top Girls, owes a large debt to 1970s TV comedy. It opens with a Pythonesque dinner party in which noted female figures from myth and history get drunk while swapping gags and stories. We meet a Victorian explorer, an emperor’s concubine, a 16th-century Flemish battle-axe and a long-suffering Italian peasant girl. The scene has no internal logic or dramatic direction and, just like a Python routine, it’s besotted with its own inventiveness and it relies on erudite banter and verbal shocks to sustain our interest. The central figure, Pope Joan, is thought to have served as pontiff in the 9th century, and she delivers a tragi-comic

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Electrifying and strange

‘Where was the Kahlo brow?’ asked my guest in the first interval of English National Ballet’s She Persisted, a triple bill celebrating female choreographers. She was right: Frida had been plucked. It was an odd decision for a production that does not otherwise shy from ugliness. Broken Wings, a ballet inspired by the life of Frida Kahlo by Belgian-Colombian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, was first performed in 2016 and is revived here in a carnival of Tehuana skirts, antler bonnets and capering day-of-the-dead skeletons. The surrealist André Breton likened Kahlo’s art to ‘a ribbon around a bomb’ and that is Katja Khaniukova’s Kahlo: silken and explosive. We see her first

Thursday

Daniel Swift

Moonstruck

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a group of slightly ramshackle workmen decide to put on a play. The play they choose — The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe — is famously and funnily terrible, as is their handling of it. Its central scene takes place at night, so they decide to dress up one actor with a lantern and a thorn bush: the idea is that light might shine through the thorns and convey the illusion of moonlight. This is an elegant solution, but Peter Quince, who is directing the scene, adds that the actor must explain to the audience that ‘he comes

Douglas Murray

Capital punishment

Is now a good time to talk about Jews and money? The Jewish Museum in London thinks so, and perhaps it is right. Motifs of Jewish financial chicanery that have never really gone away are back. The internet age has allowed memes about Rothschilds, rootless financiers and other thinly veiled claims of Jewish duplicity to thrive as they haven’t for several generations. A film at the start of this new exhibition at the museum in Camden gives some context, with clips of recent anti-Jewish statements from the likes of Louis Farrakhan and other conspiracy theorists. It also includes Donald Trump talking about ‘elites’ draining power from America, which strikes me

Deborah Ross

I’m sorry I haven’t a clue

Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro sets out as a neorealist tale of exploited sharecroppers, but midway through the story it falls off a cliff (literally) and returns as magical realism, although we mustn’t hold that against it. Or should we? I was sad to see the first narrative go, frankly — come back! Come back! — and the second half rather lost me. This film is beguiling and intriguing and poetic (she says, defensively) but God knows why it couldn’t have carried on as it began, and God knows what it adds up to. I haven’t the faintest. Written and directed by Rohrwacher (The Wonders, Corpo Celeste), the film won

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Bad blood | 4 April 2019

The Phlebotomist by Ella Road explores the future of genetics. Suppose a simple blood test were able to tell us how long we will live and what disease will kill us. If the tests were compulsory and the results publicly available, a new hierarchy based on life expectancy would emerge. Citizens facing chronic illness or early death would struggle to find jobs and spouses. The scientists who administer the tests would come under pressure to falsify the results. And alpha citizens with high-grade DNA would be murdered, and their blood harvested to create fake genetic identities. This gruesome, ingenious and all-too-believable scenario is presented through a squeaky-clean romance between two

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Menace and magnificence

Two households, both alike in dignity. Capulets in red tights, Montagues in green. Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet opens in a piazza where the clash of swords makes a fifth section of the orchestra. Strings, woodwind, brass, percussion… and steel. If Shakespeare’s young bloods and blades once seemed remotely Renaissance, made romantic by distance, Verona’s knife-crime crisis is now horribly real and present. Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio (Matthew Ball, Valentino Zucchetti and James Hay) make a convincing gang: pumped-up, freewheeling, anarchic. They goose the harlots, twit the nurse and goad each other in reckless acts of lads, lads, lads bravado. Their bragging, ragging gatecrashers’ dance is a tour de force.

James Walton

The wisdom of the crowd

On Sunday a drama began with ED905 being stolen by an OCG who’d faked an RTC that required IR, little realising that they had a UCO in their midst. So yes, Line of Duty (BBC1) is back in all its jargon-laden glory — and, judging from the first episode, it’s lost none of its ability to grip either. For those a bit rusty on their police abbreviations, that opening scene featured the female member of an organised crime group pretending she’d crashed her car with a baby inside, causing the woman in charge of a passing police convoy to stop and help. The rest of the gang then appeared in