Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

India in a day

Bold programming by the powers-that-be at Radio 4 meant it was possible to listen to all seven episodes of Ayeesha Menon’s adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in a single day on Tuesday, exactly 70 years since independent India was born, and Pakistan created. Four and three-quarter hours of meticulously crafted drama (directed by Tracey Neale and Emma Harding) ingeniously slotted into episodes of different lengths throughout the day, some just 15 minutes, others a full hour (the adapter having to create and sustain pace in a variety of ways to suit the different lengths). Such cavalier treatment of the schedule would have been unthinkable a few years ago; there’d

Louise Levene

Not vintage Mariinsky

Not really a vintage Mariinsky season — an odd choice of repertoire and some hit-and-miss male casting — but the Covent Garden run ended on a glorious high. Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère is a lightly curried love triangle about a handsome warrior torn between his betrothed (a Rajah’s daughter) and a beautiful temple dancer. Old-fashioned? You bet. But the scenery is chewed with such relish and the choreo-graphy delivered with such radiant commitment that the three hours roll by in a lime-lit haze — you half expect an audience in dress uniforms and tiaras. The scenery, a pick-and-mix from the 1877 premiere and the 1900 revival, adds to the sense

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Norway’s noir

Valkyrien (C4, Sunday) is the hot new Scandi-noir series, which is being billed as Norway’s answer to Breaking Bad. In this case, the anti-hero having his mid-life crisis is a brilliant surgeon called Ravn (Sven Nordin). He has become disenchanted with The System because the fancy hospital where he works won’t let him use the potentially life-saving treatment he has devised on his dying wife. (It might kill her, they say — which Ravn, quite understandably, considers a ridiculous, faux-ethical excuse.) So off he goes to sulk in his Batcave — a disused nuclear bomb shelter, accessible via an underground station — for what will no doubt be a series

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The many sides of satire

Brexit the Musical is a peppy satire written by Chris Bryant (not the MP, he’s a lawyer). Musically the show is excellent and the impressions of Boris and Dave are amusing enough, but the storyline doesn’t work and the script moves in for the kill with blunted weapons. Everyone is forgiven as soon as they enter. Boris swans around Bunterishly, Dave oozes charm, Theresa May frowns and pouts in her leather trousers, and nice Michael Gove tries terribly hard to be terribly friendly. Andrea Leadsom, known to the public as a furtive and calculating blonde, is played by a sensational actress who belts out soul numbers while tap-dancing in high

Alexandra Coghlan

Grimes triumphant

‘Peter Grimes!’ Ranked high above us in the Usher Hall — a mob smelling blood, hot for the kill — the chorus let forth those three primal cries, and we were all lost. The modesty-curtain of civilisation was torn away, and our basest human urges — hate, revenge, suspicion of difference, delight at weakness — were exposed. Looking up at those faces, shielded by no proscenium, separated by no stage lighting, I don’t know when I have ever felt more horrified, more shaken by a performance. ‘A staged concert,’ writes conductor Ivan Fischer, ‘looks for complete harmony and coordination between music and theatre… for organic unity in which vocal and

Thursday

Arthur House

Acid reign | 10 August 2017

In 1988–9, British youth culture underwent the biggest revolution since the 1960s. The music was acid house, the drug: Ecstasy. Together they created the Second Summer of Love — a euphoric high that lasted a year and a half and engulfed Britain’s youth in a hedonistic haze of peace, love and unity. At the end of a decade marked by social division and unemployment, acid house transcended class and race, town and country, north and south. Amid the smoke and lasers, an entire generation came up together. How did it happen? The story starts in Ibiza, which by the mid-1980s had outgrown its roots as a hippie commune and was

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

London calling | 10 August 2017

What is the Edinburgh Fringe? It’s a sabbatical, a pit stop, a pause-and-check-the-map opportunity for actors who don’t quite know where to go next. Alison Skilbeck has written a ‘serio-comic celebration’ of Shakespeare and her performance attracts a decent crowd for a show that starts at noon. She plays a fruity-voiced thesp, Artemis Turret, who delivers lectures about the Bard’s older females to groups of layabout pensioners gathered in a scout hut. It’s pure Joyce Grenfell. Good fun, too, but without much potential beyond the fringe. Dominic Holland’s show, Eclipsed, is about his life as a fallen comedy god. In the 1990s he was on telly all the time and

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The joy of sex

Your typical Trollope-loving, Brahms-bothering Spectator reader probably won’t be aware that the most recent winner of Big Brother was a girl called Isabelle Warburton, but her victory was a joy to behold — and a lesson to be learned. The unemployed 21-year-old had a tan so orange it made Oompa-Loompas look pale and interesting, and on her first night in the house she was already wisecracking about how she’d caught an STD in Ibiza from a fellow contestant. Everyone presumed she was an air-headed bimbo, but she went on to display the most extraordinary decency — the only word for it — with her honesty, self-sacrifice and boldness. She took

Richard Bratby

Classy and classic

The Edinburgh International Festival began with a double helping of incest. Curiously, Greek — Mark-Anthony Turnage’s East End retelling of the Oedipus myth, which was greeted with universal acclaim at its premiere in 1988, and which has gone on to be one of British opera’s biggest export success stories — was tagged on the Festival website as being suitable for ‘risk takers’. Whereas Wagner’s Die Walküre — which ends its first act in ecstatic celebration of a sex act so transgressive that even in 2017 it can draw appalled gasps from an audience — was described as being ideal for ‘traditionalists’. Bizarre. Perhaps brothers and sisters sleep together all the

Kate Chisholm

Big Auntie

It’s sneaky, the way in which the BBC, so much regarded as part of the family as to be nicknamed ‘Auntie’, has introduced the need to login (or register) whenever you want to listen to something on iPlayer. Maybe I’m doing something wrong because the alert message assures me I will be kept logged in, and that I should only have to login once. But even that is once too much. After all, until now, we’ve had the chance to listen again to whatever we fancy with very little fuss and almost instantly. That freedom feels very different if you have to rummage around in your memory for the password

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Cathedral of creation

Sometimes, it pays to rediscover what’s already under your nose. I’ve been umpteen times to the Natural History Museum but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it properly, not even at the evening parties I’ve been to under Dippy-the-Dinosaur, until now. I visited the new and refurbished Hintze Hall and it was a revelation. The thing that strikes most visitors is that there isn’t a dinosaur any more — Dippy is on tour — and he’s been replaced by Hope, who is a) a blue whale, b) female and c) genuine (the dinosaur was fake). Swings and roundabouts. We have lost a dinosaur, but we’ve gained an entirely new perspective

Monday

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

Game of Thrones has its first winner: Bronn

For the third episode in a row, Game of Thrones has devoted its final act to the sort of blockbuster battle sequence that would’ve been unthinkable on TV a few years ago. Now it’s a weekly treat, and the dish presented to us in ‘The Spoils of War’ was the most visceral, disarming battle since Jon Snow and Ramsay Bolton went head to head in the sludge at Winterfell. Indeed, the sequence – led by a shot of Bronn in the chaos which owes a lot to the opening scene of The Revenant – overshadows all that comes before it. Raised eyebrows abound as Jon and Dany enjoy a deeply flirtatious

Thursday

Michael Hann

His dark materials | 3 August 2017

Randy Newman is already struggling to keep up with himself. His dazzling new album, Dark Matter, was written before the changes of the last year, and no matter how pointed and current some of it is, there’s something missing. ‘There was a newspaper article that said Donald Trump is like a character in a Randy Newman song,’ he says. ‘I didn’t think there were any real people like the guy in “Political Science” or “My Life Is Good”. But he’s close.’ He’s had a bash at something for the Potus. ‘I just had an idea for a Trump song,’ he says, sounding rather like Yogi Bear’s rather smarter brother. ‘But

Martin Gayford

Object lesson | 3 August 2017

Why did Henri Matisse not play chess? It’s a question, perhaps, that few have ever pondered. Yet the great artist provided an answer, which is quoted in the catalogue to Matisse in the Studio, a marvellous new exhibition at the Royal Academy. He did not care, he explained, ‘to play with signs that never change’. It’s a revealing reason in several ways. For one thing, it underlines how different Matisse was from his younger contemporary Marcel Duchamp: the most celebrated chess-player in art. Duchamp loved logic, so his work tended to turn into a series of theorems. Matisse, in contrast, lived and worked in a beautiful muddle, surrounded by clutter

Kate Chisholm

Separation anxiety

As Europe remembers Passchendaele, India and Pakistan recall Partition, just 70 years ago, when Britain so hastily abandoned its Indian empire, exhausted by the costs of war in the world and troubled by the upsurge in violence between Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs as the campaign for Britain to Quit India took root. In Partition Voices on Radio 4 (produced by Mike Gallagher, Tim Smith and Ant Adeane), we heard from those who witnessed the bloody terror that broke out across the subcontinent as it was divided on religious, not political, ethnic or communal grounds, many of whom fled to Britain to make new lives for themselves. Harun, who was a

Louise Levene

Mad about the boy | 3 August 2017

Tall, handsome boys with long legs and beautifully arched feet do not grow on trees (if only). Every ballet director knows this and yet tall, handsome Xander Parish spent five years blushing unseen in the Covent Garden chorus. The London critics soon spotted him — a rogue tulip in the ensemble — but it was only when the Mariinsky’s Yuri Fateyev was guest coaching the Royal Ballet in 2010 that his potential was realised. Within months he had joined the Mariinsky in St Petersburg — the first British dancer ever to do so. After four years he was made soloist, then first soloist and, last Thursday, on the Royal Opera

Deborah Ross

An inconvenient truth | 3 August 2017

Maudie is a biopic of the folk artist Maud Lewis (1903–70) who is, apparently, beloved in Canada, and while Sally Hawkins is superb in the title role, and she will win you over (eventually), you do have to buy it as ‘a beautiful love story’. I bought it, hook, line and sinker — such a beautiful love story! — but then I read up on Maud (damn the internet) and had to significantly unbuy it. Does it matter that it may not be ‘the truth’? Or that a woman who was, in fact, severely disabled is presented mostly as someone with a slight hobble? I don’t know, frankly. But I

James Delingpole James Delingpole

In praise of Netflix

All this week I have been trying, with considerable success, to avoid being bludgeoned by TV programmes telling me in various sensitive and imaginative ways just how brilliant, heroic and historically maligned homosexual men are. I achieved this by sticking to Netflix. One of the great things about Netflix (whose annual subscription costs just half the BBC licence fee, by the way) is that though it’s probably run by lefties it doesn’t try to ram its politics down your throat. Maybe this is one reason why its 100 million-plus subscribers are so much less resentful than BBC viewers: they’re being offered choice, variety, entertainment — not worthiness, race, gender quotas

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Starting block

Conor McPherson’s new play is set in dust-bowl Minnesota in 1934. We’re in a fly-blown boarding house owned by skint, kindly Nick who has designs on a sexy widow with a big inheritance coming. Good opening. Roll the story. But there’s more. Nick’s useless son is a depressed novelist entangled with a beautiful governess betrothed to a rich man she doesn’t love. An even better opening. Roll the story. But wait. Nick has a black maid called Marianne whom he rescued as a baby and raised as one of the family. An interesting complication. Roll the story. No wait. Marianne claims to be pregnant but declines to reveal whether the

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Show up and show off

The Edinburgh Festival was founded as a response to war. The inaugural event, held in 1947, was the brainchild of Rudolf Bing, the manager of Glyndebourne Opera, and Henry Harvey Wood, a British Council grandee. Both were convinced that a festival of music and theatre was needed to restore the artistic heritage of Europe after six years of devastation. Edinburgh recommended itself as the host city because of its cultural prestige, its picturesque location (to rival Salzburg), and its ample store of theatres and hotels that could accommodate hundreds of performers and thousands of visitors. That the Luftwaffe hadn’t flattened the city was a significant mark in its favour. The