Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

A world apart | 4 October 2018

The most inspiring voice on radio this week belongs to Hetty Werkendam, or rather to her 15-year-old self as she talked to the BBC correspondent Patrick Gordon Walker in April 1945. He was with the British soldiers who entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and witnessed the horrors of that scene: dead bodies in piles with no one to bury them, living people lying beneath them too weak to move, or using them as pillows. Hetty was one of several children interviewed by Gordon Walker, her voice so strong and resolute and light in spirit, in spite of all that she had seen and experienced. Talking now, aged 88, to Mike

Deborah Ross

Gaga over Gaga

This version of A Star Is Born, starring Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, is the fourth iteration (Janet Gaynor and Frederic March, 1937; Judy Garland and James Mason, 1954; Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, 1976). So it’s a remake of a remake of a remake and overly familiar, you would think. Oh God, not another fella who can’t take it when her career eclipses his, boo hoo. Would a reboot with the genders flipped but the age gap preserved ever get made? Not a hope, is the short answer. But, but, but… I did cry, and Lady Gaga is truly sensational, fabulous, a revelation. I had no idea. Cooper directs,

Alexandra Coghlan

The naked and the dead

Yes, Oscar Wilde never wrote it. No, Strauss didn’t intend it. In fact, the composer famously demanded the Dance of the Seven Veils be ‘thoroughly decent, as if it were being done on a prayer mat’. But that doesn’t stop this striptease and musical money shot being the look-but-don’t-touchstone of any Salome. A blonde, blank-faced Barbie doll in gym knickers, vest and shiny trainers stands in a spotlight, a baseball bat in her hands. Strauss’s oboe begins its suggestive arabesques but Salome remains quite still, her eyes fixed impassive, unblinking on the audience. Eventually her hips begin to twitch, her back arches and she goes sullenly through the motions of

James Walton

Mother’s ruin

It’s a radical thought I know, but I sometimes wonder what it would be like if a new TV thriller began by carefully introducing the characters and basic situation, before proceeding chronologically from there. In the meantime, though, there’s BBC1’s The Cry, which didn’t just start with the traditional blizzard of time-shifts, but continued like that for the next hour. In one of the more prolonged of Sunday’s many opening scenes — it lasted at least 60 seconds — main character Joanna (Jenna Coleman) explained to an unseen listener that ‘that’s when this began, with two faces’. When the scene was replayed 55 minutes later, we discovered that she was

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

God and monsters

The drop-curtain resembles a granite slab on which the genius’s name has been carved for all time. The festival of Pinter at the Harold Pinter Theatre feels like the inauguration of a godhead. And it’s not easy to separate the work from the reverence that surrounds it. Pinter One consists of sketches and playlets written in the period after 1980 when the author abandoned his anarchic underclass comedies and set about analysing power and its abuses. But his originality deserted him and he began to write like a student troll with a sadistic streak. In Press Conference a newly appointed minister discusses murdering dissidents’ children by snapping their necks. In

Saturday

Stephen Markeson

The story behind my famous picture of Margaret Thatcher

I was surprised and delighted to find Morten Morland’s wonderful imitation of a photograph of Margaret Thatcher peering through the curtains of Number Ten on The Spectator’s cover. It reminded me of one of my memorable experiences as a photographer with the ‘Iron Lady’. I was a staff photographer at the Times for about 15 years covering some very memorable events worldwide. In November 1990, I was called into Simon Jenkins’ office, the editor at that time, who wanted to see me for a ‘very important’ assignment. The Times had been given the exclusive news that Margaret Thatcher had been ousted as Prime Minister and would be leaving No.10. Simon told me he

Thursday

Michael Hann

Not easily Suede

‘I always think they’re not lusting after me,’ Brett Anderson says of the middle-aged fans who still turn up to see his band Suede and leave the shows a little flushed and excited. ‘They’re lusting after something that doesn’t really exist. They’re remembering their wild youth. It’s faintly comical to me when I think about myself in the 1990s and the sexuality of it. That got a bit out of control, I suppose. And it’s odd, because I’m quite a reserved person in lots of ways, so I don’t really know what was going on there.’ Oh, Brett, you do yourself a disservice. Look at yourself! Not an ounce of

Martin Gayford

Doors of perception

A reflection on still water was perhaps the first picture that Homo sapiens ever encountered. The importance of mirrors in the history of art has been underestimated. Alberti, Vasari and Leonardo recommended them as a tool for painters. Van Eyck delighted in them. Caravaggio had one in his studio. And they haven’t stopped fascinating artists. Shape Shifters, the new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, might as well have been entitled ‘Modern Art through the Looking Glass’. Consequently, you see yourself all over the show, generally in surprising forms and positions. Early on, for example, you come across Anish Kapoor’s ‘Non-Object (Door)’ (2008), a rectangular block of highly polished stainless steel,

Louise Levene

Divine comedy | 27 September 2018

‘Ballet is woman’ insisted George Balanchine, but ballet can also be a big man in a dress as any fan of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo will testify. The Trocks began life in 1974, dancing for a select few in pop-up performance spaces in Manhattan, but the troupe’s irresistible blend of low comedy and high art soon outgrew its coterie audience. By the mid-1980s it was a fixture on the national and international tour circuit. Japan, with its ancient tradition of cross-dressing onnagata, is practically a second home. Classical ballet has long been a soft target for physical comedy — think of Freddie Starr retrieving a packet of Rothmans

James Delingpole James Delingpole

High five

What a load of utter tripe Bodyguard (BBC1, Sundays) was. Admittedly, I came to it late having missed all the sex scenes with Keeley Hawes and Robb Stark, which may have dazzled me in the way they seem to have dazzled many impressionable viewers. Sex scenes in TV drama are a bit like the chaff used by fighters to distract radar-guided missiles. You’re so busy feeling simultaneously awkward and embarrassed and half-titillated, covering your eyes with your fingers, wishing your other half wasn’t watching with you because then it would be proper porn and you could enjoy it, that you sometimes forget to notice what convoluted, implausible tosh the surrounding

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

It gets my vote

Sylvia, the Old Vic’s musical about the Pankhurst clan, has had a troubled nativity. Illness struck the cast during rehearsals. Press night was postponed by a week. On the evening of the delayed performance, the show was cancelled just before curtain-up. We were told that a ‘concert version’ would be presented with understudies filling certain roles and with scripts on stage to prompt imperfect memories. I saw no scripts. And the absence of key performers made no discernible difference. This looked to me like the A-team. The director, Kate Prince, has a terrific show on her hands and although the introductory run has ended, the material can only get stronger

Alexandra Coghlan

Murderer or Madonna?

At the end of Act Two of Tosca there are some 30 bars of orchestral music — accompaniment to a very specific set of stage directions. During this time Tosca takes two candles and places them on either side of the dead Scarpia’s head. She then removes a crucifix from the wall and lays it on his chest. The tableau is a messy, bloody one, but the message is clear: here the politics of religion and the religion of politics are one and the same. A pietà or the body of a thug? A murderer or a Madonna? It’s all just a matter of spin. In a year of embattled

Deborah Ross

Close encounter | 27 September 2018

The Wife is an adaptation of the Meg Wolitzer novel (2003) and stars Glenn Close. Her performance is better than the film, but it’s such a magnificent performance that it more than carries the day. She is stunning. Close plays Joan Castleman, wife of Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce), a literary giant who has always been lionised, and for reasons we’ll discover she is simmering with rage. We’ve seen Close do rage before, but this time the rage is multilayered, nuanced, subtly restrained. No bunnies are boiled, in other words, although having said that, if I were Joan, I’d have boiled Joe’s bunny and whatever else was to hand, like his

Kate Chisholm

Get Carter | 27 September 2018

The writer Angela Carter (born in 1940) grew up listening to the wireless, her love of stories, magic and the supernatural fed by Children’s Hour, and especially a strange, frightening and yet captivating dramatisation of John Masefield’s novel Box of Delights. In the introduction to Sunday’s Drama on Three, which gave us two of her plays written for radio, Carter (voiced by Fiona Shaw) says that what she particularly likes about the medium is the way the listener has to (or is allowed to) contribute to the narrative, adding their imagination, their mind-pictures, their own way of seeing. Carter, just like Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter or Howard Barker, really understood

Tuesday

Ian Marcus Corbin

Let’s hear it for the ladies who paint

This article was originally published on Spectator USA. It has been several decades since the art world – that swirling miasma of idealism, virtuosity, pretense and money – has recognised the men of the New York School, also known as the Abstract Expressionists, as truly great artists. Paintings by Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning have long been in high demand, now more than ever; their canvases regularly fetch hilarious sums, well into the eight and nine figures. But that’s just the men. Paintings by their differently chromosomed colleagues have been going for a relative song. Now, thankfully, that’s changing. Our understanding of this rough and raw, wildly inventive

Thursday

Craig Raine

‘Search me, squire’

I think everyone was a little nervous of Harold. Including Harold, sometimes. He was affable, warm, generous, impulsive — and unpredictable. Like his plays, where the hyper-banal surfaces — the synthetic memories and false nostalgia of Old Times, the aural drivel of Rose in The Room, the bogus familial warmth of The Homecoming — are fragile and about to be displaced by something ugly and authentic, something obscure and violent. Plays where on countless occasions — think of Lenny in The Homecoming or the alcoholic Hirst in No Man’s Land — a speech will take off into dramatic Tourette’s, unstoppable and at the edge of sense. The plays are edgy,

Martin Gayford

Shock and gore

Last year my wife and I were wandering around the backstreets of Salamanca when we were confronted by a minor miracle. The iron gates of the convent of the Agustinas Descalzas — generally chained and padlocked — were ajar. Quickly we slipped through before they closed again. Inside was a vast 17th-century church, slightly dusty and completely deserted. On the high altar and the walls of the transepts were paintings by Jusepe de Ribera, a great master who is today half-forgotten. His art has seemed perhaps too gory, too dark — in short, too Catholic — to appeal to British tastes. But that may be about to change: next week,

Claudia Massie

A soldier’s-eye view

The first world war paintings of Paul Nash are so vivid and emotive that they have come to embody, as readily as any photograph, the horrendous, bitter misery of the trenches. His blighted landscapes represent the destruction of a generation of soldiers, men who were blasted apart as carelessly as the bomb-shattered mud in ‘The Mule Track’ (1918) or the reproachful twists of blackened wood and pocked land in ‘Wire’ (1918/9). These works are fixtures in our visual understanding of that war. It is strange, then, to see an exhibition of first world war art that excludes Nash, his brother John, and indeed any of the other artists we associate

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Round the horn

After the England football team beat Tunisia at this summer’s World Cup, they celebrated with a swimming-pool race on inflatable unicorns. Purple hooves, rainbow manes, cutesy eyes, yellow horns like upended Cornetto cones. The millennial unicorn is unrecognisable from the medieval. The proud unicorns of bestiaries and courtly romances have become the twinkling Bambis of Instagram. Search #unicorn (more than nine million posts) and canter into a pastel clearing of long lashes, swishy tails and crystal horns. ‘My favourite colour,’ announces one unicorn, pink, prancing, wide-eyed, ‘is glitter.’ Compare the simpering My Little Unicorn of the emoji palette with the noble creature in the ‘Unicorn Tapestries’ (c.1500), which hang in