Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

Some like it hot | 13 June 2019

‘Playing God is indeed playing with fire,’ observed Ronald Dworkin. ‘But that is what we mortals have done since Prometheus, the patron saint of dangerous discoveries.’ There’s no Prometheus in the RWA’s new exhibition Fire: Flashes to Ashes in British Art 1692–2019, but there are plenty of flames, some dangerous, some not. The third in the Bristol gallery’s trilogy of shows on elemental themes, following The Power of the Sea (2014) and Air (2017), Fire features the most dramatic of the four elements, and the most fun to paint. Artists love playing with fire. It’s a subject that has held audiences in thrall since medieval worshippers were kept on the

Martin Gayford

Double diamond | 13 June 2019

‘It is no easier to make a good painting,’ wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, than it is ‘to find a diamond or a pearl.’ He was quite correct. Truly marvellous pictures are extremely rare. To make one, Vincent went on, you have to ‘stake your life’ (as he, indeed, was doing). Well, there is just such a jewel of a painting — only one by my count — in Francis Bacon: Couplings, an exhibition at Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill. In some cases, the title of the show is literal. Several pictures depict two naked men in a ferocious sexual tangle. As a subject, this is perhaps still

Deborah Ross

Fallen god

Diego Maradona, Asif Kapadia’s take on the poor boy from the slums of Buenos Aires who became a footballing god, is gripping if heartbreaking. It’s one of those scenarios where a stunning natural talent is exploited rather than protected. He even put me in mind of Judy Garland (minus the large and devoted gay following). But for all that, it is not wholly satisfying and it sent me scurrying to Wikipedia. What happened to his marriage? What were his ties with the mafia exactly? Plus, from what I read there, was he also a bit of a shit? Kapadia is an exceptional documentarian and, as with his previous films, Senna

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on

Sometimes it’s hard to describe a play without appearing to defame the writer, the performer and the theatre responsible for the production. Here’s what I saw. A semi-naked woman lurks in a corner, with her back to the audience, shaking. Rap music pounds. The woman shakes and shakes. Then she shakes a bit more. And a bit more. As her weird spasms enter their 17th uninterrupted minute, the spectators glance anxiously at their watches. Finally the woman’s twitching ceases. Speaking in a New York accent, she recites a conversation between an inquisitive child and an older girl. The theme is explicit sex chat. We aren’t told the girls’ names, or

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Doing time

Nine on a Thursday morning is University Hour for those of us who don’t commute to an office every day. We time the clearing away of breakfast to coincide with Radio 4’s In Our Time. Melvyn Bragg, with his deadpan questioning, is our Thursday educator. Last week’s programme was a classic of the genre: about an obscure 17th-century physician I’d never heard of, Sir Thomas Browne — and here were three university professors who’d devoted their entire working lives to studying him. ‘With me to discuss…’, Melvyn said, introducing them all. These professors (one male and English, two female and American) would propel the nation’s knowledge-graph of Sir Thomas Browne

James Walton

Stranger things

Usually, the return of Killing Eve would be pretty much guaranteed to provide the most unconventional, rule-busting TV programme of the week — where genres are mixed so thoroughly as to create a whole new one. This week, though, there were two new series that were even harder to classify. One was ITV’s Wild Bill: a show so bonkers that the fact it stars Rob Lowe as the recently appointed chief constable of East Lincolnshire mightn’t be the weirdest thing about it. When the resolutely American Bill Hixon (Lowe) first arrived in Boston, Lincs, it looked as if we’d be in for a standard fish-out-of-water comedy, with the traditional differences

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Twitter: no country for old men

As I write these words, I regret to inform you, John Cleese is on his way to being cancelled. Now there’s a sentence that straddles a generation gap. Many people very familiar with John Cleese will have only the dimmest idea of what ‘cancelled’ means; while people who are all about cancelling celebrities will tend not to know what ‘John Cleese’ means. If anything saves him from cancellation, it will be the hope that he can snuggle down and hide in that gap until it’s all over. The cancellers won’t try too hard because they didn’t know who he was in the first place; others will register the row, furrow

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Ring without the bling

At Longborough Festival Opera, Richard Wagner is on the roof. Literally: his statue stands on top of the little pink opera house, surveying the Evenlode valley from beneath a stone beret. He’s not alone, mind. A figure of Mozart looks up indignantly. On the other side of the pediment stands Verdi, arms folded, glowering huffily at the floor. But Wagner is on top: a permanent reminder that this is the company that took on the greatest musical-dramatic challenge in the operatic universe, and in 2013 staged a full production of Der Ring des Nibelungen in a converted barn. And next week, they’re going to start all over again. The 2019

Martin Gayford

The possibilities of paint

‘The possibilities of paint,’ Frank Bowling has observed, ‘are endless.’ The superb career retrospective of his work at Tate Britain demonstrates as no words could that he is correct, and that the obituaries of this perennial medium — so often declared moribund or defunct — are completely wrong. This presents more than half a century’s virtuoso exploration of what pigment on canvas can achieve. After his first decade of work, Bowling (born 1934) became what is called an abstract artist. But that is a vague and unsatisfactory category. His early, figurative pictures such as ‘Cover Girl’ (1966) could be labelled ‘pop’. It features an image of a Japanese supermodel garnered

Richard Bratby

Sunny delight | 6 June 2019

So it’s the start of the summer opera season at Wormsley and we’re sitting there in evening dress in the middle of the Getty estate, looking at a beautifully detailed replica of a rundown English village hall. It’s superbly done: the canvas chairs and austerity-drab paintwork in Paul Curran’s new production of The Bartered Bride could surely have been found in any number of church halls in this corner of the Chilterns, at least in the 1950s when this production seems to be set. And then, having gone to painstaking lengths to relocate this definitive Slav national opera to rural England, Garsington flips our expectations straight back at us and

Deborah Ross

More, please

Late Night is a comedy starring Emma Thompson as a chat-show host in America whose ratings are in decline and who hires her first female writer. This is Molly, who is welcomed by the bank of male writers, not. They initially mistake her for someone who has come to take their food orders and greet her with: ‘I’ll have the soup.’ So it’s that. And then it’s quite a lot more of that, one way or another. And, you know, good. A woman-centred comedy that satirises the white male stronghold on comedy? Count me in! And it does have its terrific moments, plus Thompson is absolutely superb, and clearly having

Kate Chisholm

She hasn’t stopped dancing yet

It’s not often you hear the voice of a 104-year-old on the radio. You’re even less likely to hear one so clear in thought, so spirited and full of enthusiasm for life. Eileen Kramer’s voice crackles with age, with the years she has lived, but from what she says, and the energetic way she says it, she could be at least 30 years younger. ‘I don’t know how long I will go on living,’ she says, but she’s still excited by the present: ‘There’s so much going on. I’m living in that period when a lot is being discovered about everything.’ Kramer is a dancer, artist, performer, famed in Australia

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Poetic and profound

Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote the movie Manchester by the Sea, shapes his work from loss, disillusionment, small-mindedness, hesitation and superficiality, all the forgettable detritus of life. The Starry Messenger is about Mark, a disappointed astronomer aged 52, who gives public lectures at a city planetarium. He loves his subject even though it let him down and every week he tackles the daft questions of his pupils with superhuman patience. The same two pests always raise their hands. One is a burly misanthrope who disbelieves all experts, the other is a high-flying oddball who craves attention. Mark starts a slow-burn affair with Angela, a single mum who needs a role model

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Blast from the past | 6 June 2019

How many people do you think died at Chernobyl? 10,000? 50,000? 300,000? The correct answer, according to the never knowingly understated World Health Organisation — in a thorough report released nearly 20 years after the 1986 explosion — was ‘fewer than 50’. Ah, but what about all the mutant babies who ended up with two heads and webbed feet? What about the inevitable epidemic of cancers? Well, yes, it’s true that 4,000 more cases of thyroid cancer were loosely attributable to Chernobyl, mainly in children and adolescents. But the survival rate was 99 per cent. Because I’ve long been familiar with these facts — mainly as an antidote to all

Thursday

Simon Ings

Our flexible friend

Plastics — even venerable, historically eloquent plastics — hardly draw the eye. As this show’s insightful accompanying publication (a snip at £3) would have it, ‘Plastics have no intrinsic form or texture, thus they are not materials that can be true to themselves.’ They exist within inverted commas. They can be shell-like, horn-like, stony, metallic — they do not really exist on their own behalf. Mind you, the first vitrine in Raw Materials: Plastics at the Nunnery Gallery in east London contains an object of rare beauty: a small, mottled, crazed, discoloured sphere that looks for all the world like the planet Venus, reduced to handy scale. It’s a billiard

Quentin Tarantino

Shooting star

This is an edited extract from the Foreword to Christopher Frayling’s Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece (Reel Art Press), based on a long conversation between Frayling and Tarantino from January 2018.  The movie that made me consider filmmaking, the movie that showed me how a director does what he does, how a director can control a movie through his camera, is Once Upon a Time in the West. It was almost like a film school in a movie. It really illustrated how to make an impact as a filmmaker. How to give your work a signature. I found myself completely fascinated, thinking: ‘That’s how you do

James Walton

Here comes the sun

When you see the opening caption ‘4.6 billion years ago’, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re watching a programme presented by Professor Brian Cox. And so it proved again this week, as his latest exploration of the solar system began on BBC2, with an episode about Mercury and Venus. Being an officially designated ‘landmark’ series, The Planets (Tuesday) has many of the features you’d expect: lush music, an impressive CGI budget, a ten-minute behind-the-scenes segment at the end. More surprising is Cox’s willingness to anthropomorphise the planets — and to regard the ones that aren’t lucky enough to be Earth with a touching level of sympathy. After all, it’s

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The spying game | 30 May 2019

Arts Council England takes money from almost all of us and spends it on culture for almost none of us. Among its clique of favoured writers is Ella Hickson whose work has twice been staged at the subsidised Almeida. Her first effort was a historical sketch show about oil-drilling, the second looked at the problem of elderly gropers who commission scripts from vulnerable tragediennes We have the NT to thank for her latest, Anna, a title that’s unlikely to set the pulse of theatreland racing. Viewers take their seats and are asked to don headpieces. The stage is shielded from the auditorium by a soundproof membrane of glass that stays