Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Monday

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

Game of Thrones returns with more of a whimper than a bang

Like an ex-politician with a hot take on Brexit, Game of Thrones is back. The first episode of this seventh, and penultimate, series – ‘Dragonstone’ – saw the entire ensemble of familiar faces return, as the finely poised situation in the show was laid out for all to see. The first six seasons charted the War of the Five Kings, but now, with the Targaryen heir returned to Westeros, and the White Walkers almost at The Wall, we are heading towards the War of the Two Wars – and ‘Dragonstone’ is the start of an inexorable motion towards the show’s final showdown. But by Game of Thrones’s own rollicking standards,

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Who cares that the new Doctor is female?

Jodie Whittaker: what an inspired choice for the new Doctor. Not only is she a very fine actress, whether she’s playing stricken with grief, as she did in Broadchurch, or a comedically exasperated trainee nurse stressed out by aliens and chavs in the wonderful little film Attack the Block. She also exudes that quality every good Doctor needs: the everyman touch. Or everyperson touch. The sense that while this creature might be a Time Lord with two hearts and a police-box time machine, he — now she — is nonetheless like us. Special but connectable. Otherworldly but worldly. Whittaker can do that. I think she’ll be brilliant. But my joy

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Let there be light | 13 July 2017

If you’ve never heard the John Wilson Orchestra, it’s time to experience pure happiness. Buy their 2016 live album Gershwin in Hollywood — seriously, just do it. Play the first track: a medley arranged by Ray Heindorf for Warner Brothers’ 1945 Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue. One by one the great melodies glide past and you’ll already know them, of course: ‘Swanee’, ‘Embraceable You’, ‘I Got Rhythm’. There’s something different, though, about the way they sound here. The brass swaggers; the strings melt and swoon. It’s a sound that most of us have only ever heard through the crackle of a vintage-movie soundtrack, or on a Capitol-era Sinatra LP. But

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 15 July

Marlborough, New Zealand, is one of the wine world’s sweet spots. One of the sweetest spots in fact, famed in particular for its spectacular, world-beating Sauvignon Blancs. But there’s much more to this beautiful region than just Savvy Blanc, and in the right hands other varieties thrive here too, positively beaming with delight in the Kiwi climate and conditions. Wheeler & Fromm are most certainly a pair — or, rather, two pairs — of such hands. A joint venture between Johnny Wheeler, chairman of Mr. Wheeler (formerly MD of Lay & Wheeler), and Swiss winemaker Georg Fromm, Wheeler & Fromm are famed for the extremely high quality and the sheer

Martin Gayford

A tale of two artists

Wherever one looked in the arts scene of the 1940s and ’50s, one was likely to encounter the tragicomic figure of John Minton. Whether he was dancing to the trad jazz of his pupil Humphrey Lyttelton — who recalled his style on the floor as ‘formidable and dangerous’ — or drinking at the Colony Room where Francis Bacon once poured champagne over his head, the painter and illustrator was ubiquitous. Even if he never produced a great picture, Minton deserves the exhibition at Pallant House, Chichester, marking the centenary of his birth, and the fine accompanying book by Frances Spalding and Simon Martin. In its way, failure can be as

Alexandra Coghlan

Risk assessment

Someone at the Buxton International Festival had a wry smile on their face when programming this year’s trio of operas. To sandwich together Verdi’s Macbeth and Mozart’s Lucio Silla — charged tales of political tyranny, both — with Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring is a juxtaposition as canny as it is risky. Dictatorship takes many forms, it says, and whether your choices are prescribed, your desires proscribed, by a Roman dictator or by the tweed-bosomed ‘self-appointed chief constable’ of a small Suffolk village makes little difference. But comedy is the drawing pin to the balloon of tragedy, bathos beats pathos nearly every time, and while Britten’s exquisite satire on parochial politics

Deborah Ross

This charming man | 13 July 2017

Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled is set during the American Civil War and is about a wounded Union solider, Corporal John McBurney, who seeks refuge in a girls’ school in Virginia and basically sets a sexual bomb under the place. It’s based on a 1966 novel by Thomas Cullinan, which was first filmed by Don Siegel in 1971 starring Clint Eastwood, whose McBurney forces himself on a 12-year-old girl in the opening scene. ‘Not too young for kisses,’ he says, before moving in for a long, deep snog. WTF! Thus far, I have not heard it said that Coppola’s remake does not capture the original, probably because it’s a blessed mercy.

James Walton

Candid camera?

Channel 4’s Catching a Killer offered the rare TV spectacle these days of a middle-aged white male copper leading a murder inquiry. Then again, it was a documentary rather than a drama. In its resolutely sober way, it also proved a riveting one, if at times piercingly sad. The programme followed the Thames Valley police as they investigated the killing of Adrian Greenwood in April 2016. The fact that Greenwood was an Oxford historian and book-dealer, and that the motive was the theft of a first edition of The Wind in the Willows, led one detective to suggest early on that ‘It’s like an episode of Morse.’ In the event,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The good Palestinian

Shubbak, meaning ‘window’ in Arabic, is a biennial festival taking place in various venues across London. The brochure reads like an A to Z of human misery. All the tired phrases from the Middle East’s history lurch up and poke the onlooker in the eye: ‘revolution’, ‘dystopia’, ‘cries of pain’, ‘ruins’, ‘waking nightmare’. The agony is leavened with slivers of earnest pretention. Corbeaux is a ballet designed for Marrakesh railway station by dancers who ‘take possession of public spaces’. Ten women with hankies over their hairdos move in ‘geometric alchemical arrangements’ making ‘piercing sounds and extraordinary cries’. I decided to give that a miss and plumped instead for Taha at

Kasia Maciejowska

Yes sir, we can boogie

It’s dance — but not as you know it. A giddy mass of flying limbs, sashaying hips and pouty faces. Hands now stretched up high and fluttering as in flamenco, now on the ground buttressing cantilevered bodies and holding on to legs that seem to want to escape their owners. ‘I saw things I never saw before,’ David Byrne said after viewing a voguing battle in 1989. Don’t be fooled by the playfulness of the camp. Voguing is an art, a sport, a way of life — a combative display of agility that grew out of the American drag ball. Its first blaze of mainstream glory was in the 1980s,

Kate Chisholm

Stitches in time

When Martha Ann Ricks was 76 she travelled from her home in Liberia to London to meet Queen Victoria. The daughter of a slave, who had purchased freedom for his family from his American owner and taken them to west Africa, she wanted to honour the Queen whom she believed had played a pivotal role in abolishing slavery. ‘She stoops,’ Ricks told a reporter from the Pall Mall Gazette of that meeting in a corridor at Windsor Castle on 16 July 1892, ‘and I don’t stoop though I’m older than her… But she has had troubles, great troubles. No wonder her shoulders are bent.’ Ricks considered herself fortunate that aged

Thursday

Tanya Harrod

Grain of truth

We routinely feel emotional about materials — often subliminally. Which is why new substances and techniques for manufacturing have provoked vivid writing, particularly during the design-reform debates of the 19th century. Think of John Ruskin on the evils of cut as opposed to blown glass or his views on wrought iron as opposed to cast iron — the latter emblematic in his view of a ‘sophisticated, unkind, uncomfortable, unprincipled society’. For the designer Gottfried Semper man’s very inventiveness was a loss. We were losing our understanding of discrete materials. Then there was, and is, our perfectly justified anxieties about the plastics family, beautifully chronicled in Jeffrey Meikle’s American Plastic: A

Laura Gascoigne

Repo women

Aren’t you getting a little sick of the white cube? I am. I realised how sick last week after blundering around White Cube Bermondsey, where the walls are so pristine no label is allowed to sully them, struggling to work out what I was looking at. I was reduced to photographing the works in order and tracing my itinerary in ink on the ground plan — shoot first, ask questions later — and even then I had to keep getting the attendants to tell me where exactly on the plan I was. One of them admired my wiggly drawing. Well, it was a surrealist exhibition. Dreamers Awake sets out to

James Delingpole James Delingpole

In praise of braindead filth

Melvyn Bragg on TV: The Box That Changed The World (BBC2, Saturday) was just what you would have expected of a critical appreciation of 75 years of TV, filmed at Bafta and presented by one of the BBC’s pre-eminent house luvvies. As an antidote I had to switch over to ITV2 to watch Love Island. Yes, I hate Love Island too — every episode leaves me feeling soiled. It’s a mating game show, in which couples compete to shag one another in Majorca for a £50,000 prize, and, with ratings of around 1.7 million, it’s probably the most talked about programme on TV, which fashionable people are pretending to enjoy

Daisy Dunn

Match made in heaven | 6 July 2017

Tennis is best played with a wooden racket on a shady lawn somewhere close to Dorking. There is no need for trainers, an umpire, or a scoreboard. No need for rules at all. After Wimbledon, the tea-and-jam, grass-stained, Sunday-afternoon scenario from A Room with a View is the only one to emulate. In 1908, when E.M. Forster published his novel, lawn tennis was not yet 50 years old. Although the origins of the game reach back to the 12th century, the version played by Miss Honeychurch and Reverend Beebe and most of us today was said to have been pioneered on a croquet lawn in Edgbaston in 1859. It was

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Animal crackers | 6 July 2017

The Vaults at Waterloo are gallantly trying to pose as the party spot for hipsters in the world’s coolest city. Brickwork alone may frustrate this goal. The venue is half-buried in a warren of arches beneath the western approaches to the terminus. The foyer is scruffy, poorly lit, and its dank air is scented with mildewed plaster and decaying concrete. It stinks, to be blunt, of tuberculosis. The auditorium features balding velvet pews salvaged from a condemned Odeon. Each seat receives its burden with a groan of reluctance. Every few minutes a train passing overhead rattles out a tom-tom beat. This is the unpromising location for King Kong (A Comedy),

Michael Tanner

Dressed to thrill

Mitridate, re di Ponto was Mozart’s fifth opera, written and first produced when he was 14 years old. Absolutely amazing. Now we’ve got that out of the way, what about the work? Is it worth reviving, and if so how? The Royal Opera evidently thinks so, since it is reviving for the second time Graham Vick’s production from 1991. There are, of course, several Graham Vicks, the magnificent one who founded Birmingham Opera Company and has adventurously staged many extraordinary productions, in line with his view that opera needs to change radically if it is to survive, and not be a mere plaything for the idle rich; the one, somewhat

Wednesday

Tiffany Jenkins

Antony Gormley has no right to complain when the public interacts with his public art

Antony Gormley is not amused. The artist who has installed hundreds of life-sized, cast-iron sculptures of his naked body in cities all over the world is affronted with the way a mysterious member of the British public has responded to one of the artworks. The piece in question, which could be known as ‘Narcissism’ but is in fact called ‘Another Place’, consists of 100 figures, spread over 2 miles of coastline, on Crosby Beach, north of central Liverpool, looking out to sea. Someone has given it a make over: at least nine of the statues were recently adorned. One, standing upright at just over 6 feet tall, appears to be wearing

Tuesday

Niru Ratnam

Hepworth Wakefield’s latest show is grossly irresponsible – the museum doesn’t deserve any sort of prize

Last week the exhibition Painting India by the late Howard Hodgkin opened at the Hepworth Wakefield. Hodgkin started collecting Indian miniatures as a schoolboy at Eton and first visited the subcontinent in 1964, travelling with Robert Skelton, the then assistant keeper of the Indian collection at the V&A. Hodgkin would return there many times during his life. He would later say to David Sylvester ‘I think my main reason for going back to India is because it is somewhere else.’ The exhibition at the Hepworth features over 35 works by Hodgkin which take their cue from his visits. The promotional text on the museum’s website notes that the exhibition ‘takes