Arts Reviews

Is it possible to write a feminist opera about Jack the Ripper? Composer Iain Bell thinks it is, and his Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel tries very, very hard to prove it. But while the result is respectful, topical and agonisingly, paralysingly sincere, it’s also a sheep in wolf’s clothing. You can’t have your victims and kill them too. You have only to look at the opera’s title, bent awkwardly round its central colon, to see the conflict. Front and centre you have Jack the Ripper — a marketing department’s darling, promising Gothic horror and lashings of gore. Following behind (in slightly smaller type) you have his victims,

Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, says that the success of a gallery should not be judged by its number of visitors. He is defensive because the visitor figures at the NPG have fallen (by nearly 120,000 from 2016-17). Dr Cullinan is right. Anyone who likes going to galleries would always say, ‘The smaller the visitor numbers, the merrier for those who want to see the pictures.’ But what he says now would seem to go against his vision for the gallery’s future. It is currently trying to raise £35.5 million for its new ‘Inspiring People’ project. Launching the appeal in January, Dr Cullinan enthused about how the

The ethics of the private patronage of arts institutions has never been straightforward issue. But as the preoccupation with transparency and corporate responsibility has grown, wealthy benefactors can nowadays turn from pillars of respectable society to moral pariahs in the blink of an eye. Such is the fate of the fabulously rich Sackler family, major philanthropists with fingers in arts institutions across the UK, in the face of mounting criticism over its close links to Purdue Pharma, the family-owned US pharmaceuticals giant and maker of the opioid painkiller OxyContin – the drug now the focus of outrage over the opioid epidemic that has made addicts of thousands in the US

In March 1968, Frank Zappa released an album called We’re Only in it for the Money. Presumably, then, Zappa — who died a little over a quarter of a century ago — would be delighted to discover that he begins his latest tour next month, with a series of shows in the US followed by a visit to the UK in May, including a show at the Palladium in London. Zappa will be appearing in holographic form, using footage filmed in a Los Angeles rehearsal space in 1974, his disembodied voice backed by a live band. The show is to be made up of ‘footage that no one has ever