Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Perishable goods

  Labour of Love is the new play by James Graham, the poet laureate of politics. We’re in a derelict colliery town in the East Midlands where the new MP is a malleable Blairite greaser, David Lyons. He arrives to find the office in crisis. The constituency agent, Jean, has handed in her notice but David is smitten by her acerbic tongue and her brisk management style so he asks her to stay. She agrees, reluctantly, and they settle into a bickering rivalry underpinned by affection. But is there more? Possibly, yes, but both are held back by their natural reticence and by fate. Secret declarations of love go astray.

Alexandra Coghlan

Soap opera

Previously on Giulio Cesare… English Touring Opera’s new season caters cannily to the box-set generation by chopping Handel’s Egyptian power-and-politics opera in two, playing each half on consecutive evenings as edge-of-your-seat instalments in a sort of baroque House of Cards. Will Cleopatra outwit her wicked brother? Will she and Cesare ever get together? Will Sesto ever stop dithering and do the deed? Tune in tomorrow night to find out. If that sounds like the kind of pacy, racy entertainment you’ve always longed for in the opera house, be warned; this is Giulio Cesare: the Director’s Cut, doggedly and absolutely complete, down to every last recitative, aria and interlude. By way

Wednesday

Luke Haines

I’m never happier than when an arts show on TV is cancelled

I am, to paraphrase myself, ‘a freethinking middle aged rock ‘n’ roller, still on the toilet circuit hoping it’s a good walk-up.’ Actually, unless I live to be 99 the bit about being middle aged is rather optimistic. Tomorrow it is my half century birthday, but today I hit the road with my Scottish tour manager Jim bound for Ramsgate – Brexit central control. Kent seaside towns are where it all happens: Ted Heath, satanism, Charlie Hawtrey cottaging in maritime pubs. Time stands still in Kent. It’s a very 21st-century kind of place. I am booked on a short tour of the UK to celebrate the release of a new

Friday

Peter Hoskin

In preserving its heritage gaming is maturing as an art form

Want to feel like a kid again? Now, if you’re of a certain age, inclination and fortune, you can. Last week, Nintendo launched its SNES Classic Mini, a modernised and miniaturised version of a console that it first released over 25 years ago. It comes loaded with 20 games from back then, including Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and it has gamers palpitating. The SNES Classic Mini sold out a few frantic minutes after it was first made available to order. Anyone who missed out will have to face the merciless price inflation of eBay. This sort of harkening-back is nothing new

Thursday

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Savage beauty

Could it, at times, be frustrating to have taken one of the world’s most famous photographs? Steve McCurry’s ‘Afghan Girl’ (1984) is, according to the Royal Geographic Society, the most recognised photo on the planet. You can summon it to mind in a trice: a beautiful young refugee of about 12, her head covered with a rough red shawl, stares out at the camera with those pale green eyes. But what Steve McCurry’s vast, World Atlas-sized new retrospective portfolio shows is just how many other, perhaps even better, photographs he’s taken of the country over the past 40 years; how many other Afghan girls there are in the shadow of

Richard Bratby

Pole position | 5 October 2017

Did you know that they used to make the Fiat 126 in the Eastern bloc? They did, apparently. There was a plant at Bielsko-Biala, and the car was widely driven throughout Poland in the 1970s, when you only had to wait a couple of years to buy one. It became an emblem of personal freedom, and Poles even gave it a nickname: Maluch, or ‘little one’. That’s the principal insight that I gleaned from director Karolina Sofulak’s decision to set Cavalleria rusticana in communist Poland. She explains her thinking in the programme book: essentially, 19th-century Sicily was Catholic and repressive, and 1970s Poland was Catholic and repressive, so why not?

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Verbal diarrhoea

In Beckett’s Happy Days a prattling Irish granny is buried waist-deep, and later neck-deep, in a refuse tip whose detritus inspires a rambling 90-minute monologue. ‘An avalanche of tosh’ was the Daily Mail’s succinct summary. Wings is similar but worse. Mrs Stilson (Juliet Stevenson), an American pensioner sheathed in white, hovers over the stage on ropes and talks non-stop gibberish. ‘Three times happened maybe globbidged, rubbidged uff to nothing there try again window up!’ Thus begins her battle with intelligibility. ‘And vinkled I,’ she goes on, ‘commenshed to uh-oh where’s it gone to somewhere flubbished what?’ The cause of her aphasia is unclear but vague images of scudding clouds and

Deborah Ross

Back to the future | 5 October 2017

Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner first came out in cinemas 35 years ago, which I was going to say probably makes it older than some readers, although this being The Spectator, perhaps not. It wasn’t successful in its day, but has since become a beloved classic (rightly), whereas this sequel, Blade Runner 2049, will likely do great box office today, but no one will give a fig tomorrow, once all the silly hype has died away. This is Blade Runner as a dull mainstream blockbuster populated by men who are the epitome of masculine cool and women who are needlessly sexualised fembots. And Harrison Ford doesn’t even appear until the

James Walton

Playing it safe | 5 October 2017

BBC1’s latest Sunday-night drama The Last Post, about a British military base in Aden in 1965, feels like a programme on a mission: that mission being to avoid getting shouted at by either the Guardian or the Daily Mail. To this (possibly doomed) end, it goes about its business very gingerly, with an almost pathological devotion to balance, and a safety-first reliance on the trusty methods of the well-made play, where each scene makes a single discrete point and the characters are as carefully differentiated as the members of a boy band. The first episode opened with the base’s new captain landing at Aden airport with his wife. ‘It must

Louise Levene

Pretty vacant

Alice is at it again. Christopher Wheeldon’s 2011 three-act ballet began another sell-out run at Covent Garden last week. It’s a joy to look at and packed with featured roles that show off the Royal Ballet’s strength in depth. If only it weren’t such a bore: thinly written characters; anodyne choreography and zero dramatic tension. To be fair, the episodic dream logic of the original doesn’t make for a coherent or involving narrative. Wheeldon and his scenarist, Nicholas Wright, have done their best to correct for this by tacking on a Wizard of Oz-style prologue in which the Caterpillar, Dormouse et al. are human guests at an Oxford tea party.

Kate Chisholm

Split decision | 5 October 2017

Think back to that morning in September 1967 when the Light Programme was split in two, Tony Blackburn launching Radio 1 with a jaunty new jingle announcing it was all ‘Just for Fun’ while staid old Radio 2 went on with the Breakfast Show and told its listeners to ‘Wake Up Easy’. What is so surprising is just how radical the changes at the BBC were. On that unsuspecting morning, as the Pope urged for peace in Vietnam and a cannabis farm was discovered in Bristol, the Beeb’s radio output was completely overhauled. It was not just that a new station was launched, addressing the problems posed to the BBC’s

Thursday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

No pain, no gain | 28 September 2017

The best episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm are the ones that make you want to hide behind the sofa, cover your ears and drown out the horror by screaming: ‘No, Larry, no!’ I’m thinking, for example, of the one where our hero attends a victim support group for survivors of incest and, in order to fit in, decides to concoct a cock and bull story about how he was sexually abused by his uncle. This, of course, comes back horribly to haunt him when out one day with his blameless real uncle… But no, I shan’t try to elaborate, for the plots in Curb Your Enthusiasm are as convoluted as

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

I spy | 28 September 2017

Where was Degas standing as he sketched his ‘Laundresses’ (c.1882–4)? Did he watch the two women from behind sheets hanging to dry? Or was he hidden by steam from the basins? The laundry women are unselfconscious, unguarded. One reads aloud from a list, calling out shirts, collars, cuffs to be washed and ironed. Another leans over her workbench, staring into the placket of a folded shirt like Narcissus into his pool. Neither is the least bit bothered by the artist making a rapid chalk sketch to be worked up later in pastel. Nor the two men in ‘At the Café de Châteaudun’ (c.1869–71), reading a newspaper with monocle and magnifying

Kate Chisholm

Woman of a thousand voices

‘On air, I could be the most glamorous, gorgeous, tall, black-haired female… Whatever I wanted to be, I could be… That was the thrilling part to me,’ said Lurene Tuttle, talking about her career as a star of American radio in its heyday from the 1930s to the 1950s. She was known as ‘the Woman of a Thousand Voices’ because of her talent for voicing any part, from child to OAP, glamour puss to gangster moll, hard-nosed executive to soft-hearted minion. On Saturday we heard her in full flow on Radio 4 Extra in an episode of Suspense, brought out of the archive from June 1949 for the three-hour special

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Bloody minded

Tristan Bernays loves Hollywood blockbusters. His new play, Boudica, is an attempt to put the blood-and-guts vibe of the action flick on the Globe’s stage. The pacy plotting works well. Boudica revolts against the Romans who have stolen her kingdom. The queen is imprisoned and flogged while her two maiden daughters are savagely violated. Vowing revenge, she allies herself with the reluctant Belgics and they attack and destroy Camulodunum (Colchester). The first half is a rip-roaring crowd-pleaser. After the interval, an anticlimax. London is sacked but the Romans cling to power and when Boudica dies, her bickering daughters fight rather tediously over the succession. What counts here are the externals:

Jasper Rees

Unhappy days

Scriptwriters love to feast on the lives of children’s authors. The themes tend not to vary: they may have brought happiness to millions of children but their stories — sob — were fertilised by unhappiness. Saving Mr Banks: Mary Poppins author was a bossy shrew because her alcoholic father died young. Miss Potter: Peter Rabbit creator never found love. Finding Neverland: Peter Pan playwright cheered up grieving family. Enid (made for BBC Four): Miss Blyton was a monster traumatised by her upbringing. And so it will presumably go on. We can probably not expect a family film about Charles Dodgson taking cute snaps of little Alice Liddell, but one day,

Stephen Bayley

Vital signs

Exhibit A. It is 1958 and you are barrelling down a dual carriageway; the 70 mph limit is still eight years away. The road signs are nearly illegible. You miss your turning, over-correct, hit a tree and die. The following year, graphic designer Margaret Calvert is driving her Porsche 356c along the newly built M1. The motorway signs are hers. It is information design of a high order, possibly even life-saving. The clarity and intelligence of Calvert’s British road signs remain unmatched nearly 60 years later. And the font she created became the NHS, and later rail and airport, standard. Exhibit B. The French are worried about nuclear waste. Given

Thursday

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

iAddicts

For many years The Spectator employed a television reviewer who did not own a colour television. Now they have decided to go one better and have asked me to write a piece to mark the tenth anniversary of the iPhone. I have never owned an iPhone. (In the metropolitan media world I inhabit, this is tantamount to putting on your CV that you ‘enjoy line dancing, child pornography and collecting Nazi memorabilia’). But, even though I’m a diehard Android fan, I still cannot help paying attention to every single thing Apple does and says. I don’t think this happens in reverse. I doubt Apple owners pay any attention to the