Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Talking heads | 16 November 2017

Under the central dome of UCL — an indoor crossroads where hordes of students come and go on their way to lectures and lunch — there’s an intriguing exhibition on at the moment about death. ‘Human remains are displayed in this exhibition’, it says in white lettering on the floor atall four entrances, to warn any passing snowflakes. The real head of Jeremy Bentham, who died in 1832, glass eyes staring out at you from behind a vitrine, is indeed a bit queasy-making. This is the central object of the exhibition. Bentham still has his long dark-grey hair at the back and sides of his bald pate, and his whole

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Worse for wear

Erté was destined for the imperial navy. Failing that, the army. His father and uncle had been navy men. There were painters and sculptors on his mother’s side, but they were thought very frivolous. Romain de Tirtoff (‘Erté’ came from the French pronunciation of his initials) was born in 1892 at the St Petersburg Naval School where his father Pyotr was inspector. When he was a little boy, his aunt bought him a set of wooden soldiers. Instinctively, he hated war, violence and, above all, uniforms. He burst into tears and threw the box out of the window. What he liked best was to play with his mother’s old perfume

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Dark side of the Moomins

Tove Jansson, according to her niece’s husband, was a squirt in size and could rarely be persuaded to eat, preferring instead to smoke fags and drink whisky. And when she did eat, it was usually salted cucumbers — to go with the drink. You know, this late in life, I may have encountered my role model. We were at the launch of an excellent edition of four books in her Moomin series at the Finnish embassy. London is in the grip of a kind of Moomin madness right now, what with the books, a Moomin event at the South Bank and a new exhibition of Tove Jansson’s artwork at the

Kate Flint

Darkness visible | 16 November 2017

All photography requires light, but the light used in flash photography is unique — shocking, intrusive and abrupt. It’s quite unlike the light that comes from the sun, or even from ambient illumination. It explodes, suddenly, into darkness. The history of flash goes right back to the challenges faced by early photographers who wanted to use their cameras in places where there was insufficient light — indoors, at night, in caves. The first flash photograph was probably a daguerreotype of a fossil, taken in 1839 by burning limelight. For the next 50 years, photographers experimented with limelight, which was familiar from theatre illumination, with portable battery-driven lights — which Nadar

Hannah Zafiropoulos

The play’s the thing | 16 November 2017

‘It’s all wizards and elves, right? Dungeons & Dragons stuff?’ Such is the general response when you mention larp, or live-action role-play — the peculiarly Scandi pastime that conjures up images of people dressed up in the forest play-fighting with sticks. Well, they wouldn’t be completely wrong. It’s a weird world and with the help of artists it’s becoming even weirder. In the past few years, larp has become more visible in mainstream culture. And in Britain, it has noticeably begun to infiltrate the art world, becoming popular among artists interested in the potential of play. Major institutions such as Tate, the V&A and Serpentine Galleries have worked with artists

Deborah Ross

Golden oldie

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is plainly wonderful, and stars Annette Bening, who is plainly wonderful, as Gloria Grahame, a one-time Hollywood movie star who in later life hits on hard times — ‘a big name in black and white. Not doing too well in colour,’ comments her landlady at one point — and embarks on a romance with a young English actor who is 30 years her junior. It is based on a true memoir. It is a love story, told tenderly, bravely, smartly, movingly. And believably. Older women, it seems, can be interesting, complicated, vital, attractive and sexual. Who knew? (But don’t spread the word, or they’ll

Louise Levene

Ill wind

A kindly cowboy, an East Coast bride, adultery, murder and madness. The Wind, Dorothy Scarborough’s 1925 Texas gothic novel (and Sjöström/Gish movie), offers rich pickings for dance narrative and was selected by Arthur Pita for his Covent Garden main stage debut. What could possibly go wrong? Pita has made some terrific dance dramas — notably 2011’s Metamorphosis for a treacle-glazed Edward Watson — but The Wind is a massive disappointment, looking thin and underwritten despite hefty production values. A miniature railway dollies pointlessly around the stage perimeter and the wind of the title is supplied in tedious abundance by two custom-built threshing machines (the cold front could be felt in

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Disappearing act

There are many wonderful scenes in the film version of David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross, but my favourite comes towards the end, between the broken and desperate real estate salesman Shelley ‘The Machine’ Levene, played by Jack Lemmon, and his vile manager John Williamson, played by Kevin Spacey. Levene, facing not merely the sack but probable imprisonment, is pleading for help, cringing and cowering. But he has gone to the wrong man. When he asks Williamson why he won’t help, the manager replies with a magnificent finality: ‘Because I don’t like you.’ And Spacey’s face, almost deadpan for most of the film as he suffers the abuse thrown at

James Walton

Adult entertainment | 16 November 2017

Any readers of the Sun who excitedly tuned in to Howards End on Sunday night with their pause button at the ready will, I fear, have been in for a disappointment. Before the programme went out, the paper had assured them that this new BBC1 adaptation would ‘do a Poldark’, with ‘a hot cast’ providing ‘a sexed-up remake’ of the 1992 Merchant Ivory film. (The sub-editors may have missed a trick by not headlining the piece, ‘It’s E.M. Phwoar-ster!’) In the event, what they got was a quietly thoughtful exploration of Edwardian intellectual life. The first episode, in fact, didn’t differ very much from the non-sexed-up film version — and

Kate Chisholm

Local heroes | 16 November 2017

It’s 50 years since the first local radio stations were launched by the BBC in yet another instance of the corporation working hard to stay ahead of the game, on this occasion responding to the challenge of the pirate stations, whose audiences were local and known to be very loyal. Radio Leicester was the first to go on air on8 November 1967, launched by a very plummy-voiced postmaster-general as ‘the first hometown radio station in Britain’. (The BBC executive behind the idea, Frank Gillard, had spent time in America and been impressed by local radio there, wishing to replicate its homespun feel.) Others followed quickly, dependent on whether the local

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Faking it | 16 November 2017

David Mamet’s plays are tough to pull off because his dialogue lacks the predictable shapeliness of traditional dramatic speech. He prefers the sort of meandering, oblique, backtracking and self-deluding conversation you might overhear in a hotel dining-room. Glengarry Glen Ross opens in a restaurant, where a handful of realtors are discussing the perils and joys of their craft. The scene culminates in one of the landmarks of American drama. Top salesman Ricky approaches a potential customer in disguise and delivers a sales pitch that sounds like a poetic meditation on destiny and existence. It’s impossible to say what darkness this little masterpiece emerged from but Christian Slater (Ricky) captures all

Thursday

Selina Mills

Bring up the bodies | 9 November 2017

The moment you invite friends to some new ‘cutting-edge’ disability theatre or film, most swallow paroxysms of social anxiety. What if it’s dull? Am I allowed to yawn? What if I hate it? How interminably politically correct will it be? Do I want to think about ‘disability’ on a fun night out? While most objections can be overcome by a convincing performance, it is interesting to ask whether disability makes a difference to art, or does art transcend disability? If the current crop of plays and films, not to mention disability production companies, is anything to go by, the answer is yes to both, and we should want more of

Martin Gayford

The apple of his eye

The critic and painter Adrian Stokes once remarked on how fortunate Cézanne had been to be bald, ‘considering the wonderful volume that he always achieved for the dome of his skull’. It’s a good joke, and all the better for being perfectly true — as is demonstrated by the superb sequence of self-portraits included in Cézanne Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. These are the finest hairless craniums in the history of art. That, however, is only one of the attractions of the exhibition. This is the most impressive array of work, by one of the greatest of all painters, to be seen in London in more than 20 years.

Deborah Ross

Child’s play

The Florida Project is a drama set in one of those cheap American motels occupied by poor people who would otherwise be homeless. It’s sad but not depressing, bleak but also joyful, and features one of the best and truest child performances you will ever likely see. Also, it is captivating without ever being condescending — I think. It is always so hard to know, but if you get too hung up on that, cinema will never be allowed to say that poverty exists, or deal with stories that don’t regularly get told, and that’s the end of my lecture for this week, you will be delighted to hear. The

Iain Hollingshead

Country music | 9 November 2017

Americans may be able to draw on only 250 years of history, but they’re not shy of making a song and dance of it. In early December, Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s $1 billion-grossing, hip-hop and show-tune extravaganza about one of the country’s founding fathers will finally open to sold-out crowds in London. It joins the Menier Chocolate Factory’s sold-out revival of Sondheim’s Assassins, the Tony Award-winning musical about the cranks and misfits who have, to paraphrase its opening number, exercised their right to follow their dreams by attempting to assassinate US presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan (but not, yet, Trump). Both shows fit neatly into the American tradition of making successful

Kate Chisholm

Ulysses on speed

It’s always odd to hear a familiar voice on a different programme, playing an alternative role. They never sound quite as comfortable behind the mike, as if they are wearing clothes that don’t quite fit. The voice has a different timbre, as it did on Sunday when Garry Richardson, who since 1981 has been keeping Today listeners updated on all the latest sports news, revealed his other passion. Since he was ten, when he was first taken to see the man from Knotty Ash at Blackpool in 1967, he’s been a fan of that extraordinarily tenacious star of the entertainment world, Ken Dodd. In Sir Ken Dodd: What a Beautiful

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

To hell and back

The Exorcist opened in 1973 accompanied by much hoo-ha in the press. Scenes of panic, nausea and fainting were recorded at every performance. Movie-goers showed up to witness mass hysteria rather than to enjoy a scary movie. This revival, produced by Bill Kenwright, targets the early 1970s demographic. At press night, the stalls were thronged with pensioners eager to relive a lurid evening from their adolescence. As one who dislikes shocks of any kind, I sat through this ordeal with my eyes bent towards the floor and my fingers wedged so firmly in my ears that their tips turned crimson. The show opened with a CRUMP loud enough to shake

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

May’s day

You may think you don’t know May Morris, daughter of William, but you’ll probably have come across her wallpaper. Her honeysuckle design was and remains a Morris & Co. bestseller, and it not only features in homes to this day, it’s been nicked by designer Jonathan Anderson for a Morris-inspired range for the very expensive fashion house Loewe. It’s all a bit dispiriting for a woman whose aesthetic sensibility, like her father’s, was bound up in her socialism. But it was embroidery that was May Morris’s art and craft and now a new exhibition at the Morris Gallery in Walthamstow lets us see it in its own right. The gist