Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Bad blood

‘How did this mild-mannered eye doctor end up killing hundreds of thousands of people?’ someone wondered about Bashar al-Assad in BBC2’s extraordinary three-part documentary A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad (BBC2, Saturday). It’s a question we’ve all occasionally pondered as the Syrian body count rose — 500,000 thus far — and as six million refugees fled the country. The answer is so lurid and complex that it could have come from one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Chinless, studious, polite Bashar was never meant to become president of Syria. His thuggish military officer father Hafez, who seized power in 1970, had earmarked the job for his dashing equestrian soldier son Bassel. But

Louise Levene

Stranger danger

Like it or not, provincial ballet audiences love a story they can hum and any director planning to tour a swan-light, sugar plum-free menu has always done so at their peril. Tchaikovsky isn’t compulsory: a really well-known story, however undanceable, can usually do decent business (Northern Ballet’s extremely silly Three Musketeers is a reliable granny-magnet). But less familiar titles can be box-office poison — as English National Ballet is forever discovering. When the former Royal Ballet star Tamara Rojo took over in 2012, she immediately set about breaking down the vanilla tastes of ENB’s regional fanbase with a lavish new production of Le Corsaire. The 1856 pirates-and-slave-girls romp had everything

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Baby love | 25 October 2018

Stories by Nina Raine is a bun-in-the-oven comedy with a complex back narrative. Anna, in her mid-thirties, had a boyfriend 12 years younger than her but the relationship died just as Anna was ready to sprog. Aged 38, and desperately broody, she needs to get preggers pronto. We join her on a Sperm Quest. Though Anna could easily arrange a casual bareback fling, she insists on divulging her goal to her prospective lovers before they drop their Y-fronts and deliver the oats. The action opens as a family drama with Anna’s Dad (Stephen Boxer) pottering around the kitchen, drink in hand, making sarky comments about Anna’s sex life while she

Kate Chisholm

Words and sentences

‘I’m not here to rehabilitate,’ says Pamela, who teaches creative writing to prisoners in Northern Ireland. She doesn’t think of her work as being about bars, bare walls and what happens when they leave jail. It’s all about meeting the prisoner as a person. She soon realised ‘how different prison writing is’. It’s much more direct, heartfelt. Jamie wrote a poem after just half an hour in Pamela’s class. He gave it the title ‘My journey in the care system’. More than a quarter of all prisoners were brought up in care, a figure that rises to almost half for those aged under 25. To Jamie it was a relief,

Alexandra Coghlan

On the road | 25 October 2018

Wolverhampton; Workington; Blackburn; Sheffield; Lancaster; Hackney. Every year English Touring Opera does what our national opera company doesn’t: packs up its props and takes to the road, bringing opera to the bits of the UK other companies don’t even think about reaching. And not just Traviatas and Toscas either, but properly interesting, often unusual, repertoire. With a core staff you can pretty much count on your fingers, and ticket prices that would scarcely buy you a sandwich at the Royal Opera House, let alone a seat, the whole operation is one of those minor miracles of the arts world — a company where a little bit of funding goes an

Thursday

Martin Gayford

All together now | 18 October 2018

‘About suffering’, W.H. Auden memorably argued in his poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, the old masters ‘were never wrong’. Great and terrible events — martyrdoms and nativities — took place amid everyday life, while other people were eating, opening a window or ‘just walking dully along’. As an example, Auden took ‘The Fall of Icarus’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. As it happens, Auden himself was wrong there, because the work he cited is no long thought to be by the painter after all. This picture is not, therefore, included in the exhibition Bruegel at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. However, the fact that Icarus has now been consigned to the

Laura Gascoigne

Girls from the black stuff

‘They did not look like women, or at least a stranger new to the district might easily have been misled by their appearance, as they stood together in a group, by the pit’s mouth.’ As opening sentences go this is a cracker, but few modern readers of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s That Lass O’Lowrie’s get far beyond it because the novel’s characters speak in a Lancashire dialect that makes Mark Twain’s Huck Finn sound like a Harvard preppy. In real life, though, it wasn’t the Lancashire pit girls’ lingo that put contemporaries off so much as their costume. For these ‘pit brow lasses’, as they were known around Wigan, strutted about

Claudia Massie

Poster boy

You don’t need to be much of a psychologist to understand the trajectory of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Born to aristocratic first cousins, in a family never shy of consanguinity, he was blighted by congenital deformities and weaknesses. When his brittle legs broke in his teenage years, they stopped growing altogether, leaving the adult Lautrec tiny as well as weird-looking, with his heavy lips and thick-lidded eyes. Fortunately, Montmartre was waiting for him, offering a boozy and bosomy refuge from his peculiar family and woeful self-regard. In the dance halls of the capital, Lautrec found his people, and in his art they found themselves. His paintings tell the story best, all

Melissa Kite

‘I should just shut up’

Lounging confidently on the sofa of a Soho hotel suite, Dominic West has been beaming at me, but now his handsome smile dissolves into a hurt look. I have just asked him to explain why he, in common with so many actors, feels the need to voice his political views. ‘I should just pipe down and carry on acting?’ he asks, leaning forward to pour tea. I don’t like to be rude, so I raise my eyebrows and shrug as the most polite way of saying, ‘Well, it’s an idea.’ West, who is giving interviews to promote his new film Colette, has also made a campaign video calling for a

Michael Snodin

Walpole’s world

We can’t know what Horace Walpole would make of the continuing popularity of serendipity, a word he coined in 1754 to describe the accidental happy discovery of a Renaissance portrait he had long been seeking. In 2001 it became the title of a romantic comedy and this year of a song by a South Korean boy band, which has had 74 million hits on YouTube. But we can imagine that he would be pleased that his lifelong effort to leave his mark on posterity has been so successful. He was born (in 1717) with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, the youngest son of the all-powerful Sir Robert Walpole,

Richard Bratby

Top scorer

Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess springs to life fully formed, and pulls you in before a word has been sung. A whirlwind flourish; the hectic bustle of violins and xylophone, and then a quick fade into an image of a woman cradling a child and ‘Summertime’, the very first number we hear sung. The aria’s fame actually serves the drama. The thrill of musical recognition as the curtain rises on an unfamiliar world is replaced by astonishment at the dramatic instinct that allows Gershwin to expend a melody like that before his story has even started, in the certain knowledge that what follows can, and absolutely will, live up to what

James Walton

Novel gazing

At the beginning of Barneys, Books and Bust Ups: 50 Years of the Booker Prize (BBC4), Kirsty Wark’s voiceover promised us ‘a tale of fierce rivalries, bruised egos and, most importantly of all, countless brilliant books’. In the event, though — as the title perhaps suggested — those countless brilliant books proved rather less important to the programme than Kirsty’s edifying words had led us to believe. At one point, it noted in passing that Midnight’s Children is a very good novel. At another, it lamented the melancholy fact that Booker ‘voting intrigue and judges’ fallings-out’ have sometimes overshadowed ‘the books themselves’. But once those duties were discharged, it soon

Kate Chisholm

Shining circles and silver spools

Flies buzzing, strange rustling, crunching sounds, and then the most chilling screech you’ll have heard all week. Vultures were feeding off the carcass of a zebra in Kenya, recorded by Chris Watson. He had been up before dawn, on the look-out for a suitable carcass to attract the scavenging vultures. He was lucky to find one and clipped two microphones to the ribcage, running the cable to his recording vehicle 50 yards away. By break of day the vultures had appeared and were taking their breakfast. Watson believes that recording sound at such close quarters ‘really fires our imaginations in a unique way’. He was not the only contributor to

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

This is a man’s world

Sir David Hare’s weird new play sets out to chronicle the history of the Labour movement from 1996 to the present day. But it makes no mention of Corbyn, Momentum, the anti-Semitism row or rumours of a breakaway party. The drama is located in the dead-safe Miliband era and it opens with talk of a leadership election. The two best candidates, Pauline and Jack, are old lovers from university. Pauline is a doctor who entered politics when budget cuts threatened the hospital where her mother was being treated for cancer. Jack is a colourless Blairite greaser, a sort of Andy Burnham without the mascara, who is still besotted with Pauline

Deborah Ross

Man bites man

Matteo Garrone’s Dogman, which is Italy’s entry for the foreign language Oscar next year, is bleak, unflinching, oppressive, masculine (very), violent (shockingly) and basically everything you’d expect me to hate. Except I didn’t. It is out of the ordinary. It has a magical central performance. It is tense, as you wait for the little man to face down the big man, if he does. Plus there are lots of lovely dogs, which always helps, and none are harmed. Aside, that is, from the yapping chihuahua thrown into a freezer to shut it up. So there is that, too. Garrone, who is known for the terrific Gomorrah, and also the highly

Tuesday

Timmy Fisher

Banksy’s stunt wasn’t even original – and why we should support ads on Sydney Opera House

It was announced last week that the woman who bought Banksy’s ‘Girl With Balloon’ will be going through with the purchase. And who could blame her? The prospect of owning a piece of ‘art history’, as she called it, is an enticing one to any investor, regardless of its condition. The video documenting Banksy’s triumph has clocked over 12 million views since it was uploaded to his Instagram account, and one could certainly argue it highlights the disconnect between the intrinsic value of art and that ascribed to it by ever-changing tastes. But it would be wrong to give artistic credit for what is essentially a publicity stunt. Not least

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Houses of ill repute

Architects and politicians have a lot in common. Each seeks to influence the way we live, and on account of that both, generally, are reviled. But architecture is more important than politics. Unless you are an anchorite or a polar bear, it’s unavoidable. And it lasts longer. The best architecture affects our mood. Exaltation, if you are lucky. And the worst influences our behaviour: a riot with burning Renaults, if you live in a French banlieue. But, as a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection suggests, architecture may also, in one way or another, affect our health. At ground level, this is quite obvious. Damp, foul air, extreme temperatures, bad

Martin Gayford

Lost in the Pacific

At six in the morning of 20 July 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson first set eyes on a Pacific Island. As the sun rose, the land ‘heaved up in peaks and rising vales’. The colours of the scene ‘ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive’, rising into ‘opalescent clouds’. The whole effect was a ‘suffusion of vague hues’ shimmering so that mountain slopes were hard to distinguish from the cloud canopy above. Oceania, the new exhibition at the Royal Academy devoted to the region’s arts and cultures, is almost as beautiful as that dawn landscape, and just about as difficult to make out with any

Richard Bratby

Ring leader

‘On Brünnhilde’s rock I drew the breath that called your name; so swift was my journey here.’ It’s Act Two of Götterdämmerung. Siegfried, entoiled in evil beyond his comprehension, has unwittingly committed the betrayal that will tip the whole vast drama into its final collapse, and at this point Covent Garden’s Ring cycle really does feel like it’s swept by in a breath. True, Keith Warner’s 2007 production is looking creaky. But there’s still no mightier assertion of an opera company’s ambition than to stage all four music-dramas of Der Ring des Nibelungen in the space of a week; and no artistic experience remotely comparable to witnessing it. So, about