Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Deborah Ross

O brother, where are thou?

Sunset is French-Hungarian writer-director Laszlo Nemes’s follow-up to his astonishing Oscar-winning debut, Son of Saul. This time round the film is set as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is on the brink of collapse, and it is confounding, but not in a good way, as it’s as turgid as it is baffling. I’ve seen it twice now, and it was as turgid as it was baffling on both occasions. Disappointing, I know, but on the plus side the backdrop is a high-end millinery establishment, so the hats are fab. Truly. It opens seductively enough, in bustling Budapest in 1913. It opens as if this were a Dickens or Dostoyevsky, but it’s not

Hermione Eyre

Serial genius

‘It’s no use at all,’ says Posy Simmonds in mock despair, holding up her hands. ‘I can’t tell my left from my right.’ She is ambidextrous. ‘This hand [her right] writes and draws; and this hand [her left] cuts out, sharpens pencils, throws balls, plays tennis… I can’t drive. I’ve never taken a test. I’m always on the wrong side of the road.’ Looking at these wonderful hands, elegant and almost limp, one would never suppose they had created, over the past 50 years, such a large volume of intensely enjoyable and astute drawings. Reliably funny and wise, her work ranges from Fred (1988), about the secret rock-star life of

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Poetry in motion | 30 May 2019

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is full of music and movement. The players, such as they are, slip, slide, shake, tumble, wrestle, leap, kick, whirl, fold and kneel. There are lines like stage directions: ‘stillness’, ‘quick now’, ‘the dancers are all gone under the hill’. In her rendering of Four Quartets, the American choreographer Pam Tanowitz has denied reviewers the satisfaction of ‘Eliot in leotards’ jokes. Her dancers wear diaphanous ruched onesies. No Cats spandex here. In collaboration with the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and the New York artist Brice Marsden, Tanowitz’s Four Quartets is a remarkable recasting of Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’, ‘East Coker’, ‘The Dry Salvages’ and ‘Little Gidding’ —

Kate Chisholm

Acts of settlement

‘Put yourself in their shoes,’ says Zahra Mackaoui, a British-Lebanese journalist who has been following the stories of refugees from Syria for five years, catching up with them as they move on restlessly, searching for a place to settle. ‘Ask yourself, what would I have done?’ That question echoed through her series of documentaries for the World Service as we heard from those who have been exiled by a war in which they have played no part except as victims. What would I have done? In Beyond Borders (produced by Craig Templeton Smith), the open, frank honesty of Hani, Ayesha, Doaa Al Zamel and Fewaz gave us an opportunity to

Laura Gascoigne

Gerald Scarfe meets Dr Seuss

Holding the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 was a coup for the British avant-garde, putting newbie surrealists such as Paul Nash and Roland Penrose on an equal footing with founding members of the European movement. But André Breton, who opened the show, was unimpressed by Nash, Penrose and co. Instead, he singled out two complete unknowns, Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff, as ‘the best and most truly surrealist’ of the British contingent. Pailthorpe and Mednikoff came out of nowhere. He was the artist son of a Russian-Jewish tinplate maker from the East End; she was the daughter of a Sussex stockbroker and had served as a surgeon during

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

Up Pompeii!

One afternoon in AD 79 an unusual cloud appeared above Vesuvius in the Bay of Naples. ‘It was raised high on a kind of very tall trunk,’ recalled Pliny the Younger, likening it to an umbrella pine tree, ‘and spread out into branches.’ When, finally, the cloud collapsed and the sky grew dark, some people raised their hands to the gods. Others reasoned that ‘there were now no gods anywhere and that the night would last for ever and ever across the universe’. There are corners of the ancient cities that have not seen daylight since they were buried in volcanic debris. While excavations officially began in Pompeii and Herculaneum

Claudia Massie

Memories, dreams, reflections | 23 May 2019

This mesmerising retrospective takes up three floors of the City Art Centre, moving in distinct stages from the reedy flanks of the Pentland Hills through fractured half-views of Venice and Scotland and into fresh, twilit forests. Mirrors and windows reflect and refract, rigid faces stare from the shadows, animals flit and bare branches twist. It’s 50 years of painting, and half a century of observing, finding, losing and remembering. Victoria Crowe, born in England but long since adopted by Scotland, is one of our more distinguished painters. She is a respected portraitist but it is her other work that dominates this show, and rightly so. We see the trajectories of

Deborah Ross

Cheesy feat | 23 May 2019

There have been claims that Rocketman, the biopic of Elton John, is ‘cheesy’ and ‘clichéd’, but, in truth, you do want these films to be a bit cheesy and clichéd. (In Bohemian Rhapsody if a record executive had never cried: ‘Nobody wants to listen to a six-minute opera song with words like “Galileo” in it!’ I’d have walked away in a huff.) So I’m fine with that — would you want a musical biopic without a montage of concert dates and newspaper headlines whirling past? — plus this is more than just that, as it’s also a fun, visually dazzling, extravagantly camp romp. And while the script is, generally, platitudinous,

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside

It was bucketing it down in Venice, yet the beach was heaving. Families, lovebirds, warring kids, a yappy mutt, all strewn across a sandy expanse, basking on beach towels. Balls were bounced, crosswords filled, timelines scrolled. Out of this idleness, songs would bubble up, light billowy airs — speaking now to suncream mundanities, now to geological anxieties — whisked up to our ears as if on a cooling breeze. We were in the Lithuanian Pavilion inside a dilapidated former military storehouse in a corner of north Venice, being given a god’s-eye view on an extraordinary new opera, Sun & Sea (Marina), by a Lithuanian trio: composer Lina Lapelyte, director Rugile

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Blond ambition | 23 May 2019

The opening of Jonathan Maitland’s new play about Boris purports to be based on real events. Just before the referendum, the Tory maverick invited some chums over to help him decide whether to opt for Leave or Remain. Mrs Johnson was present along with Michael and Sarah Gove and the Evening Standard’s owner, Evgeny Lebedev. For a bit of fun, the writer adds spectral appearances from three ex-prime ministers, Blair, Thatcher and Churchill. This is amusing at first but it slows the play down because the fantasy figures can’t affect the real-life action. There are dazzling performances here. Tim Wallers plays Evgeny as a name-dropping simpleton with naked ankles and

Kate Chisholm

By George

At last a podcast that takes the medium to its limit, created by someone who loves listening, understands how it can take the imagination to places visual images alone cannot, and wants to make use of this, not just for fun but with real intent. Have You Heard George’s Podcast? was last week awarded UK Podcast of the Year, and rightly so. I’ve never heard anything quite like it. At times George’s playfulness and gift for exploring the full meaning of the words he uses reminded me of early Tom Stoppard; other episodes were more like a Radio 1Xtra documentary about life on the street or the rise of drill.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Get your kit off

After its new costume drama You Go, Girl! (Sundays) about how amazing, empowered and better-than-men women are, especially if they are lesbians, the BBC ran its first ever Nike ad. At least that’s what I thought initially: rap music, moody shots of athletes, very high production values. Then I saw they were all grim-faced women and the word ‘RISE’ in flames and I thought: ‘Big new drama series? About girls who’ve been sucked into this very strict Christian cult, a bit like the Handmaid’s Tale, maybe?’ Then I noticed they were all wearing football kit and kicking balls around, and went back to my original Nike idea. Finally came the

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Double vision | 16 May 2019

The best double acts — Laurel and Hardy, Gilbert & George, Rodgers and Hart — are often made up of two quite different personalities. So it was with the painters William Nicholson and James Pryde, who worked together under the names of J. & W. Beggarstaff. Their similarities and dissimilarities are the subject of a highly entertaining exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Nicholson (1872–1949) and Pryde (1866–1941) are sometimes dubbed the ‘Beggarstaff brothers’. They weren’t really siblings, but they were brothers-in-law. At the age of 21, in 1893, Nicholson eloped to Ruislip with Pryde’s sister Mabel. The couple set up house in an ex-pub, the Eight Bells  at Denham,

Jean Mcneil

Ghost writer

East Anglia, the rump of the British Isles, has inspired a disproportionate number of writers: Robert Macfarlane, Daisy Johnson, Mark Cocker, Sarah Perry, to name but a few. Towering over them all is the ghost of a soft-spoken man with a shoe-brush moustache and sardonic eyes. Eighteen years after his death, W.G. Sebald’s reputation only grows. Few writers have inspired the commemoration industry Sebald has given life to while still so recently claimed by the past tense. Before he was killed in a car accident in 2001 at the age of 57, Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald enjoyed several years of fame as a writer of what he called ‘prose fiction’

Jasper Rees

Weed thriller

You don’t come across too many films from Colombia, but every few years one wriggles its way through the festival circuit and on to an arthouse screen, fingers crossed near you. Any film that survives that Darwinian journey will be robustly fit for purpose. Such is Birds of Passage (original title: Pajaros de verano), which with startling freshness tells a tale of gruelling familiarity. There tend to be two Colombian subjects that work for distributors: the international drugs trade or, for more rarefied tastes, indigenous tribes. What are the chances of encountering a film that fuses both? Slim, you’d suppose. And yet this narco-ethnographic thriller is inspired, we are advised,

James Walton

Thinking inside the box | 16 May 2019

These days, a common way of introducing radio news items is with the words ‘How worried should we be about…?’ The trouble with this formula is not just the strange notion that anxiety has apparently become some sort of moral duty — even a badge of honour. It’s also that we generally know what the answer will be: we should be very worried indeed. Now, in Russell T. Davies’s Years and Years (BBC1, Tuesday), the same formula serves as the premise for a television drama. The first episode began by introducing us to three adult siblings, scrupulously chosen to represent modern Britain — at least as seen on TV. (The

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Labour pains | 16 May 2019

Colour-blind casting is a denial of history. The Young Vic’s all-black version of Death of a Salesman asks us to believe that an ordinary African-American chap living in Brooklyn in 1928 might have owned a Chevrolet, and that a black businessman in the 1940s would consider asking a friend for ten grand to purchase a ranch in Texas. Younger viewers may assume that US society has been racially integrated for nearly a century. Is that the right message? Willy Loman, the duffer at the play’s core, is one of American drama’s least attractive heroes. A preachy, devious, boastful, fawning, angry, narcissistic misery guts, he’s professionally incompetent and morally bankrupt. His

Kate Chisholm

Women on top | 16 May 2019

On returning from a brief trip to Istanbul, where inside the mosques women are still very much kept to one side, only allowed to look on from an angle, unable to contemplate the full mystery of the space created within those extraordinary domes, I was intrigued on Sunday to happen upon Heart and Soul (produced by Lindsay Leonard) and to hear a Muslim woman leading the prayers to Allah. She sounded so natural, so intent, her voice modulated and firm, uplifting and authoritative. But how, I wondered, is this possible? Where is this female imam allowed to practise? It turned out that Samira Ahmed (from Radio 4’s Front Row) was