Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Beyond the grave

If proof were needed that radio will survive the onslaught of the new (or rather now not-so-new) digital technologies, albeit somewhat battered and slimmed down, then series like Radio 4’s Unforgettable (produced by Adam Fowler) should clinch it. Each episode is self-contained, and only 15 minutes long (the perfect length for podcasting). It’s cheap to make, requiring just a single guest, and inspired by a really simple idea — to create a conversation between a guest in the studio and someone they once knew who has died. You could make it at home, except that you probably couldn’t because an advanced editing machine is required, and an incredibly skilled operator.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

God save us from the King

Gandalf, also known as Ian McKellen, has awarded himself another lap of honour by bringing King Lear back to London. Jonathan Munby directs. His eccentric decision to hire actors who don’t resemble their characters will baffle anyone who hasn’t studied the play in advance. The casting may be ‘colour-blind’, but the audience isn’t. Anita-Joy Uwajeh (Cordelia) evidently has no white ancestry and therefore cannot be Lear’s natural daughter. A newcomer might deduce that the king’s cruelty towards her stems from her second-class status as an adoptive child. And anyone trying to unravel that mystery will be equally baffled by Sinead Cusack’s Kent. Of the four women on stage in the

Martin Gayford

Living the highly expensive life

It was Le Corbusier who famously wrote that ‘A house is a machine for living in’ (‘Une maison est une machine à habiter’). But it was a visit to a masterpiece of his great rival among modernist architects — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe — that brought home to me how literally accurate that celebrated aphorism was. His Villa Tugendhat at Brno is one of the great monuments of early modernism. To run smoothly, however, this luxurious dwelling required almost as much machinery as a small ocean-liner. The building has been restored with rigorous scholarship to look exactly as it did when its first owners, Fritz and Grete Tugendhat, moved

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Top Trump

The thing I most regret having failed ever to ask brave, haunted, wise Sean O’Callaghan when I last saw him at a friend’s book launch was ‘So tell me about Shergar.’ It has long been known, of course, that the legendary racehorse — one of the five greatest in the last century, according to Lester Piggott who rode him to victory in the Irish Derby — was kidnapped in 1983 by the IRA and never seen thereafter. What I didn’t realise, till after O’Callaghan died last year, was that the ex-IRA man is the only insider ever to have gone on the record as to his fate. Turns out that

Thursday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How does your garden grow?

What could be more British than nosying around someone else’s private property while munching on a slice of cake? The National Garden Scheme allows you to do both, opening up people’s back gardens to the public and offering them a lovely homemade afternoon tea while they’re at it. I grew up poring over the pages of its famous Yellow Book of open gardens, envying the fat borders of geraniums and delphiniums in the rural area where we lived. But the NGS doesn’t just do big walled gardens and sweeping lawns; it has a London Yellow Book, too, and while the gardens are far smaller, the plants, the cakes and even

Claudia Massie

Outsider art

The complexities of Schleswig-Holstein run deep. Here’s Emil Nolde, an artist born south of the German-Danish border and steeped in the marshy mysteries and primal romanticism of that landscape. In 1920, he sees his region, and himself, become Danish following a post-Versailles plebiscite. An already well-established German nationalist bent — pronounced despite, or perhaps because of, his shifting national identity and shaky grasp of the German language — is inflamed. He moves back across the new border before eventually joining the local branch of the Nazi party and writing a volume of autobiography entitled, Jahre der Kämpfe in which he rails against the Jewish dominance of the art world. National

Richard Bratby

Ariadne’s thread

‘They’ve dined well, they’ve drunk their fill, their brains are dull and slow. They’ll sit snoozing in the dark until they hear some applause, and then, out of courtesy, they’ll wake up’. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s words, not mine. I’ve never bought the notion that Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier somehow predicts the first world war. But what’s screamingly obvious is that their next collaboration, Ariadne auf Naxos, precisely skewers the non-existent (in 1916) world of English country-house opera. A millionaire patron has hired an opera company and a comedy troupe for an evening of champagne-fuelled hospitality, and he wants them both finished in time for the fireworks. Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s

James Walton

Full circle

After just one episode, The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco (ITV, Wednesday) seems certain to stand out from the crowd. In an age when most television dramas range from the perfectly fine to the extremely good, it already looks like a proper old-fashioned stinker. Admittedly, one of its more obvious problems is bang up-to-date: by adhering so spinelessly to the mantra of ‘women and black people good, white men bad’, the programme not only creates an overwhelmingly dreary sense of déjà vu, it also deprives itself of any possibility of genuine dramatic tension. But there are plenty of more traditional flaws too, including such classics as wooden dialogue, leaden humour and

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The NHS at 70 (plus)

Alan Bennett’s new play, Allelujah!, is an NHS drama set in a friendly hospital in rural Yorkshire. Colin, an ambitious local boy turned metropolitan yuppie, has arrived from London to visit his sick father and he takes the opportunity to assess the efficiency of the hospital on behalf of his bosses at the health department in Whitehall. Meanwhile, a TV crew has found evidence that a staff member is murdering elderly patients to create vacant beds for new arrivals. Bennett’s sentimental adoration of the NHS leads him to misrepresent a couple of political issues. It’s false to suggest that any well-run hospital is bound to be flogged to the commercial

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Sacha Baron Cohen

Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest series Who Is America? isn’t funny. But then, nor was his terrible 2016 movie The Brothers Grimsby. Nor was his rubbish 2012 film The Dictator. Nor, let’s be honest, were his classic original characters Borat, Brüno or even Ali G. Obviously, they had their moments: the ‘mankini’ — that bizarre, electric green, giant-thong-like swim wear worn by Borat; the classic late-Nineties catchphrase ‘Is it because I is black?’ And sure it must have taken some nerve — even in character — to explain to a clearly impatient and unimpressed Donald Trump his business plan for some anti-drip ice-cream gloves. But how often, even at his best,

Kate Chisholm

Primal screams

Raw, earthy, ear-piercing. It’s hard to decide which was more terrifying and unsettling: the roar of the elephants in Living with Nature on the World Service, or the screaming women and men who we heard letting rip in Garrett Carr’s Radio 4 documentary, The Silence and the Scream. The elephants were recorded by sound engineer Chris Watson, and his producer Sarah Blunt in northern Kenya in the first of their new series in which they use sound as their tour guide and listening as their way of experiencing the landscape. We couldn’t see the golden orb of the sun rising over the miles of flat grasslands peppered with acacia groves

Deborah Ross

Keeping the faith | 26 July 2018

For many years I would chat genially with our local Jehovah, Stephen, who came door-to-door every few months or so, always hopeful that one day I would let Jesus into my life. (Will he babysit, I would always ask. Will he pair socks? Will he interrupt me during dinner LIKE YOU?) Then I actually read one of the Watchtower magazines he always left behind and discovered that if your husband is violent and beating you then you need to ask yourself: am I being a sufficiently loving wife? Next time Stephen appeared he was doing his rounds with a teenage girl so I looked her in the eye and said:

Tuesday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Thomas Cole’s allegorical landscapes chronicling the decline of civilisation are sublime – but wrong

For Americans, Thomas Cole is a household name. He painted America’s wild landscapes and lamented its destruction by the country’s early industrialisation. Yet the Lancaster-born Cole is little known in Britain, living stateside for most of his adult life. The National Gallery has been working with the Met to bring home Cole and his works. And what a homecoming it is. Inspired by Turner and Constable, Cole was a self-made man, learning to paint through tenacity and a small collection of books. Like Constable, Cole obsessed over nature and ideas of decay (Constable’s crumbling ‘Hadleigh Castle’ was a favourite). From Turner and Claude, Cole learned for the first time that

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

On the offensive

‘I’m an amateur,’ Barry Humphries tells me. The Australian polymath uses the word in its older sense of ‘enthusiast’ rather than ‘bungler’ and he feels no need to point out the distinction. He’s in London to perform a three-week residency at the Barbican — Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret — with his fellow Australian Melissa Madden Gray, who uses the stage name Meow Meow. The show was inspired by Humphries’ fascination with Germany’s culture during the interwar years. ‘It was the last song before the nation slid into moral squalor. And I have a long-standing interest — I won’t say “passion” because one gets “passionate” about deodorants — but I have

Martin Gayford

Beasts from the East

One area of life in which globalism certainly rules is that of contemporary art. Installation, performance, the doctrine of Marcel Duchamp, conceptualism — nowadays these flourish throughout the world and nowhere more so than in the Far East. Plenty of evidence for this is on view in an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery by the South Korean artist Lee Bul. But though the idioms are familiar, the works themselves can seem outlandish to an occidental eye. Just inside the door you are confronted by a sculpture entitled ‘Monster: Pink’ (2011). It looks like one of those oddly shaped vegetables that are sometimes displayed at village fêtes — but running riot

Deborah Ross

Streep show

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again aims to do what it says on the can. That is, be Mamma Mia, going again. But while many of the elements are the same as in the original —beautiful Greek island scenery; the actors frolicking among local folk and falling off boats; the knowing cheesiness; Pierce Brosnan singing his little heart out (alas) —you will be asking: where the hell is Meryl Streep? She’s on the poster but there’s no sign and no sign and no sign until, finally, at about 100 minutes in, she makes an appearance, and is wonderful. You do get Cher in an extended cameo, which is thrilling, but

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Bank account

Stefano Massini’s play opens with a man in a frock-coat reaching New York after six weeks at sea. The year is 1844 and young Henry Lehman has just emigrated from Bavaria to make his fortune. He started modestly with a general store in Montgomery, Alabama, serving local farmers. When wildfires destroyed the cotton crop on which the community relied, Lehman’s business ought to have failed but he saw his opportunity. Whatever possessions the farmers had lost they would have to purchase again. From him. He was joined by his brothers, Manny and Mayer, and they invented the profession of brokerage, ‘middle-men’ they called themselves, buying raw cotton from farmers and

Kate Chisholm

Profit and loss | 19 July 2018

There’s been a lot of fuss and many column inches written about levels of pay at the BBC, as revealed in its latest Annual Report. Who gets too much? Why are women presenters still paid less than their male counterparts? What can be done to create more equality at the BBC? But all this controversy about money and gender is a red herring, diverting attention away from what we should be far more concerned about. Quietly, without fanfare, the BBC has been changing the way it makes and delivers its programmes. As the report also reveals, BBC Worldwide, set up in the 1990s as the ‘commercial’ wing of the BBC,

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Bearers of bad news

When President Trump refused to take a question from a CNN reporter at the Chequers press conference last week, I imagine a lot of British viewers thought —as Theresa May clearly did — that he was being graceless, capricious and anti-freedom of speech. But I think we’re in danger of underestimating the extent to which the media landscape has changed in the past few years. Gone are the days — if they ever existed — when political interviewers were dispassionate seekers-after-truth on a mission to get the best out of their subjects. Now, it’s mostly activism-driven, the aim being to advance your preferred narrative while showing up your ideological opponents

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The real reason Scarlett Johansson abandoned her ‘trans role’

There is so much euphemistic reporting about Scarlett Johansson’s decision to drop out of a film in which she would have portrayed a trans man. Ms Johansson ‘quits role’, headlines tell us. She has ‘stepped away’ from ‘trans role’, we are informed. It all makes it sound like she had a simple change of heart, or maybe found herself drawn to a different movie project. The truth is rather different. The truth is Ms Johansson was hounded out of the trans role by an intolerant online mob hurling invective at her. She didn’t merely ‘quit role’ — she ‘quit role’ under pressure from an unforgiving gang of identitarians who think