Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Michael Tanner

Lessons in refrigeration

There is no such thing as a moderately good performance of Madama Butterfly, or, to be more precise, it’s not possible to be slightly or rather moved by a performance. As with some of Shakespeare’s plays, and most of Wagner’s music-dramas, one is either shaken and overcome, or refrigerated and indifferent. So it’s sad to report that Glyndebourne’s first ever Butterfly, toured in 2016 but now settling on home ground, is a stolid, undistinguished affair, with some decent moments and much that seems routine and a fair amount that is worse than that. Is it a good idea to update an opera that is set in Nagasaki to the 1950s,

Louise Levene

Wings of desire | 24 May 2018

The Royal Ballet’s 2016 Frankenstein was a masterclass in how not to make narrative dance and the news that Liam Scarlett had been chosen to spring-clean and ‘reimagine’ Swan Lake had many balletomanes reaching for the smelling salts (it doesn’t take much, to be honest). It was sighs of relief and trebles all round when the new production premièred at Covent Garden last week: proper tutus; gorgeous designs; first-rate dancing. The critical response has been largely positive but not everyone had a five-star evening. The Daily Telegraph gave it a niggardly three stars, finding the designs ‘variable’ and bewailing the absence ofa dramaturg (which has to be some sortof first).

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Art in the wrong tense

The Bridge’s big summer show is Nightfall by prize-winning newcomer Barney Norris. Widowed Jenny wants her grown-up kids, Lou and Ryan, to help her run their farm in Hampshire following their dad’s death. But Lou’s boyfriend, Pete, has been offered work abroad. That’s the only major snag in this low-wattage rustic melodrama. The back story involves a secret abortion and a criminal assault for which the wrong person was imprisoned, but the plot centres on clingy Jenny’s desire to curb her nippers’ wanderlust. She’s a needy chatterbox who isn’t entirely without charm, and the same could be said of the other ho-hum characters who pass their time sprawling on a

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Notes on a scandal | 24 May 2018

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little, so you can imagine how sickened I was by the magisterial TV adaptation of John Preston’s A Very English Scandal (BBC1, Sundays). I’ve known Preston for years. It’s himI have to thank for the compendious collection of CDs rotting in my attic, from the ten years or so I spent working under him (he was the arts editor) as the Sunday Telegraph’s rock critic. But though I’ve hugely enjoyed all his quirky, low-key, sardonically amused novels — loosely on the theme of ‘quiet desperation is the English way’ —I never imagined he’d luck out quite so spectacularly as he has with

Kate Chisholm

Faulty connection | 24 May 2018

‘Do you ever imagine your audience?’ was a question thrown at James Ward, creator and presenter of The Boring Talks podcast, at a recent seminar on podcasting organised by the BBC. ‘I try not to,’ Ward replied.‘I wouldn’t want to meet them.’ Such antipathy is all part of Ward’s alternative persona. The Boring Talks’s USP is to explore those topics usually considered too dull to explore, let alone talk about for half an hour. It’s become very popular, emerging from the Boring Talks conferences that have been held annually now for eight years. But his comment was very revealing. You can really tell when listening to his show that he

Martin Gayford

Academic questions

What is the Royal Academy? This question set me thinking as I wandered through the crowds that celebrated the opening of the RA’s new, greatly extended building. After all, there is nothing else quite like this institution anywhere else in the world. It was a terrific party: a mêlée of artists, journalists, politicians and media types such as I have not seen since the inauguration of Tate Modern 18 years ago (with the unexpected addition of DJs and high-volume music). The whole gang was there, and rightly so. This is a significant addition to the amenities of London, including, among other things, two new suites of galleries at 6 Burlington

Friday

Agnes

Cannes had many strong films but only one deserves the Palme d’Or

The Italian film director Alice Rohrwacher’s rise to the top has never been more obvious than this week at the Cannes Film Festival. Her third feature film, Happy as Lazzaro, which she wrote and directed, stunned the critics gathered in Cannes for what has been a very strong 71st edition. A distinctive and yet quiet talent since her first film Corpo Celeste was selected at Cannes’ Directors Fortnight in 2011, followed three years later by her second film The Wonders, Alice Rohwacher has reached, at just 36, a maturity and force that echoes both Pier Paolo Pasolini and Ermanno Olmi. Conceived as a diptych, Happy as Lazzaro is a poetic

Mette Leonard

Lars von Trier’s latest film rightly resists the idea that art must be morally correct and inoffensive

Danish director Lars von Trier is back at Cannes Film Festival, proclaiming that ‘it’s all good – we had a little misunderstanding for seven years’ and worrying that his new serial killer movie, The House that Jack Built, isn’t divisive enough. In fact, the reception of the film has indeed revealed an divide in the mentality of contemporary culture. More than a hundred members of the audience walked out in protest at the film’s première and a similar number did the same from the press screening this week. Nonetheless, Von Trier received a lengthy standing ovation on his arrival to the première, and those who stayed till the end acknowledged

Thursday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The greenhouse effect

The glasshouses at Kew Gardens are so popular that they can be quite unbearably busy at weekends. And why shouldn’t they be? They’re beautiful structures and the plants they shelter are so marvellous that they deserve the attention they get, whether from botany nerds, schoolchildren, or millennials dressed for Instagram and posing for selfies in the steamy leafy heat. But for the past five years, the biggest member of the Kew family has been closed to the public. Hidden under an enormous awning that the botanic gardens boasts could have covered three Boeing 747s (one of those area-the-size-of-Wales facts that mean very little), the Temperate House has been undergoing a

Richard Barnett

You know the drill

In his Physiognomische Fragmente, published between 1775 and 1778, the Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater insisted that ‘clean, white and well-arranged teeth … [show] a sweet and polished mind and a good and honest heart’, while rotten or misaligned teeth revealed ‘either sickness or else some melange of moral imperfection’. Whatever one might think of the notion that one can read human character directly from the face, Lavater reminds us that dentistry has never been just about teeth. Possession of a functional, pain-free mouth is a practical necessity — we all must breathe and eat and talk — but it is also central to our sense of self. Pain in

Ella Whelan

Award for the most right-on awards ceremony goes to Cannes

There’s nothing that screams 2018 feminism more than a bunch of celebrities holding hands on a red carpet. This year’s Cannes festival is the latest opportunity in a long string of awards ceremonies for the rich and famous to gain some brownie points. If there were an awards ceremony for the most right-on awards ceremony (please no one take me up on that), Cannes might well win. This year’s tote bags contained a flier emblazoned with #NeRienLaisserPasser (or, roughly, don’t let anything happen). ‘Let’s not ruin the party’ it said in French, warning attendees to watch their behaviour. Along with this, there was a new Cannes sexual-harassment hotline, set up

Michael Tanner

English Touring Opera’s Il tabarro was the most convincing I have seen

Il tabarro & Gianni Schicchi Cambridge Arts Theatre English Touring Opera brought its production of two of the operas in Puccini’s Il trittico to Cambridge recently, as well as Figaro, which unfortunately I wasn’t able to go to. The production and performance of Il tabarro was the most convincing I have seen. Usually I feel that with this opera Puccini is worthily doing something different from any of his previous operas, and incidentally creating the only work which can justly be said to be verismo – a term ludicrously used for such markedly untruthful works as  Andrea Chenier and Adriana Lecouvreur, as well as Puccini’s earlier works. With Il tabarro he virtually becomes the

Kate Chisholm

The sense of an ending | 17 May 2018

The timing of the Today programme’s series about hospices could not have been more apt, coming as it did so soon after Tessa Jowell’s death was announced with its array of tributes and the poignant interview with her husband and one of her daughters. In themselves such personal testimonies are not always that helpful — everyone’s situation is individual and the actual outcomes necessarily different. But what Jowell’s family said about her last hours and their evident acknowledgment and acceptance of their situation gave a real sense of purpose on Monday to Zoe Conway’s report from the North London Hospice. This was part of the Dying Matters campaign, urging us

James Walton

Sins of the father | 17 May 2018

Warning: if you haven’t seen it yet, the first episode of the much-anticipated Patrick Melrose (Sky Atlantic, Sunday) contains scenes of drug-taking. Further warning: it contains an awful lot of them. The series is adapted from the five justly celebrated autobiographical novels by Edward St Aubyn, which trace the long-term effects on Patrick of an upper-class childhood in which his psychotic father intersperses horrifying emotional cruelty with regular bouts of rape. By his early twenties, Patrick is a full-blown drug addict, and even when he marries and settles down, what he settles down to is mostly depression and alcoholism. All of which might make the books sound punishingly grim. In

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Roll up, psychos

Describe the Night opens in Poland in 1920 where two Russian soldiers, Isaac and Nikolai, discuss truth and falsehood. Next we’re in Smolensk, 2010, where some strangers scream at each other about a hire car. Next Moscow, 1931 (or 1937 — the surtitles are illegible), where Nikolai, now a top soldier, asks Isaac, now a successful screen-writer, to audition his wife for a movie. Isaac improvises a scene with the wife and then fondles her bottom as they perform a weirdly sexless dance that is supposed to symbolise something, but it’s unclear what because everything that preceded the dance was indecipherable. Then the interval. I looked for enlightenment in the

Martin Gayford

Rock stars

In Tamil Nadu we found that we were exotic. Although there were some other western tourists around, in most of the places the great majority of visitors were Indian. My wife Josephine, who is tall and fair-haired, appeared to be particularly unusual-looking. As we walked around a temple, she would frequently be invited to pose for photographs with groups of sari-clad women. Exoticism is one of those qualities that exists in the eye of the beholder. To western Europeans, this area at the tip of the Indian triangle has been the epitome of that quality for more than 2,000 years. The Romans came here, and some even settled — the

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Mourning glory | 17 May 2018

They enter two by two. Grannies, mainly. Headscarved, mainly. Some locking arms. A bit glum. Like rejects from Noah’s ark. Passing through two vertical beams of light, they appear then disappear, shuffling into the darkness. From concrete caves, they begin to wail for the dead. We’re witnessing Artangel’s latest extraordinary commission, ‘An Occupation of Loss’, by Taryn Simon. The piece draws together professional mourners from all corners of the earth — China, Armenia, Ghana, Ecuador — and deposits them under a block of flats in Islington High Street. The Azerbaijanis wallop their thighs as they wail. The Venezuelans sob behind full face veils, the fabric vibrating in sympathy. Some pace

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Buried treasure | 17 May 2018

Imagine a French museum that’s second only to the Louvre when it comes to paintings, with an eye-watering collection of manuscripts. Add to that a grand château with a turbulent history going back to the 16th century. Plus period kitchens (one tragic chef committed suicide when it seemed that the delivery of fish for the court’s Friday dinner would not arrive in time. It did arrive but only after he’d thrown himself on his kitchen knife). Imagine, too, that it’s in splendid grounds, with formal gardens and naturalistic landscape beyond. Then throw in the biggest, grandest stables in Europe, housing a museum all about horses — from their history to

Deborah Ross

This will end badly

On Chesil Beach is an adaptation of the Ian McEwen novella set in 1962 when ‘conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible’ and a young couple suffer a disastrous wedding night from which there will be no return. This is surefooted, mostly, and literary and tasteful and sad and English, and it also stars the ever-remarkable Saoirse Ronan. But it does take a giant misstep at the end — the ending is plainly horrible — plus the book’s frustrations don’t magically disappear. One crap shag and that’s it, it’s over? It worried you then and it will worry you now. Adapted by McEwan, and a first film directed by Dominic