Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Scottish power

‘Perhaps in this world nothing ever happens without purpose,’ sings old, blind King Arkel in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, and that at least is something to hold on to. God knows, you need it. Peel away the fairy-tale trappings of Maeterlinck’s original play, and the world of this opera is profoundly cruel. Its characters are often passive observers of their own fate (Pelléas admits before his final scene that he’s never yet returned his beloved Mélisande’s gaze). And yet Debussy pretty much compels you to feel for them, in a score of all-but-unbearable tenderness and beauty. It’s only once you’ve left the theatre that, wrestling with the pieces of this

Thursday

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

From page to stage

Reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet is a heady experience. You not only see, hear, know her characters — you can almost taste them. The villain of the first of the four books, which follow the friendship of mercurial Lila and striving Lenù from childhood into their sixties, is Don Achille, an ‘ogre’ who sweats the smells of ‘salami, provolone, mortadella, lardo and prosciutto’. Lila herself, always wriggling free of the nets of others, is ‘skinny, like a salted anchovy’. Nino, loved by both Lila and Lenù, is ‘an anomalous, sweet fruit’. Naples itself, the backdrop to the books, acting as a succubus, pulling the characters back when they try to

Martin Gayford

Snap happy

These days the world is experiencing an unprecedented overload of photographs, a global glut of pictures. More and more are taken every day on smartphones and tablets. They zip around the world by the billion. When I went to Wolfgang Tillmans’s exhibition at Tate Modern, the galleries were full of people taking snaps of the exhibits. Some visitors posed to have their pictures taken in front of the larger ones — huge photographic prints of such diverse subjects as the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, a weed growing in a London garden and a hugely enlarged close-up of a male bottom. These, and a great many more, are shown in

Mary Kenny

Dublin’s Jewish museum

I love small museums, and the Irish Jewish Museum in Dublin is a little gem, located in the neighbourhood once known as ‘Little Jerusalem’, a centre of Jewish life around the South Circular Road. The museum itself is a converted terraced house at 3 Walworth Road, within walking distance of the streets so evocative of Leopold Bloom’s Dublin. It is crammed with impressive artefacts from Jewish life in Ireland — Torah scrolls, a menorah in the shape of a harp — but also with small details and modest memorials of Irish Jewish life, which is now so sadly in decline. (There are estimated to be hardly 1,000 Jews in Ireland

Michael Tanner

Statue-esque

Why set a supremely great play to music? The Winter’s Tale, the play of Shakespeare’s that I love most, has much of his most beautiful and intelligent poetry, as well as some of his most condensed and puzzling lines. Ryan Wigglesworth, in several of the innumerable interviews about his new opera, says he has been obsessed by the play for decades. So have I, but if I were a composer I think that would be a reason for leaving well alone. Wigglesworth has made his own libretto by using snippets of Shakespeare, enough to remind one of the original, but frustrating, most of the time, in producing a strip-cartoon version

Jasper Rees

Parting shots

Gurinder Chadha’s modern comedies have fun with cultural divides. Girls kick footballs in Bend It Like Beckham. A gaggle of Punjabis hit Blackpool in Bhaji on the Beach. Jane Austen goes to Bollywood in Bride & Prejudice. In all these films (we may discount Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging), Indians and Britons grapple with the knotty ongoing project of mutual comprehension. But there are only so many perky scripts anyone can shoot about multiculturalism. In Viceroy’s House Chadha spools back 70 years to Partition, when the price of India’s independence from her colonial master was to be sundered in two, unleashing what remains the planet’s largest ever migration of refugees.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The terrible truth

Here’s the bad news. One day you or someone like you will be shopping in a mall or enjoying a concert or about to catch a train when the first sudden, sharp crack will rend the air and your world will change forever. Around you, people will start to crumple and as the panic and horror finally dawn the screams will begin while the automatic rifle fire escalates and those still standing will begin to flee — but where to? If you run away from the gunfire you’re being herded into a trap. If you run towards it you’ll be shot, either killed immediately, or casually, later, as you lie

Kate Chisholm

All in the mind | 2 March 2017

At the third UK International Radio Drama Festival held last week in Herne Bay, entitled ‘And Let Us Listen to the Moon’, the entries included an Australian play about Chekhov, the limericks of Edward Lear translated into Serbian, a Czech version of Hamlet in which the palace at Elsinore is transformed into a sporting arena, and a play from Palestine in Arabic about three female political activists. Fifty dramas from 17 countries and in 15 different languages were broadcast at various venues across the Kentish town. Not quite Cannes in May — tea and scones stood in for champagne and caviar — but the festival’s success goes to show that

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

All that jazz | 2 March 2017

It’s every impresario’s dream. Buy a little off-West End venue to try out stuff for fun. Andrew Lloyd Webber has snaffled up the St James Theatre (rebranded The Other Palace), which he intends to run as a warm-up track for new musicals. First off the blocks The Wild Party, a New York import set in the 1920s. We meet a couple of vaudeville veterans, Queenie and Burrs, whose romance has hit the rocks. To rekindle the flame they invite everyone they know around for a party. Hang on. A party? Booze, drugs, flirtation, seduction: the recipe for destroying a romance, not salvaging it. But never mind. The guests have started

Monday

Deborah Ross

Moonlight richly deserved to trump La La Land. Here’s why

Moonlight is, in fact, a traditional story about identity, and finding out who you are, but it has rarely been better told, or more achingly, or while navigating a subject that hasn’t come up much at the cinema, if at all. (Being black and gay.) True enough, everyone expected La La Land to win best picture at the Oscars, but it’s Moonlight that deserved the award – and every award going (aside from the one that’s been put aside for Annette Bening). I liked La La Land well enough at the time, but someone please make it go away now. The film is written and directed by Barry Jenkins, as

Thursday

Richard Holmes

Snap, crackle and pop

As you go into the new Wellcome Collection exhibition, Electricity: The Spark of Life, you might have in mind a sentence from Mary Shelley’s original electrifying novel Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus: ‘I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.’ A copy of the 1831 edition of her book, with its startling anatomical frontispiece, awaits you, among many other wonders. The exhibition, a collaboration between the Wellcome, the Teylers Museum of Haarlem and the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, is packed with electrical instruments, together with models, artefacts, books, film loops and

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

On the make

Rudolfo Paolozzi was a great maker. In the summer, he worked almost without stopping in the family’s ice-cream shop, making gallon after gallon of vanilla custard. In the slack winter months, when the shop made its money on cigarettes and sweets, he built radios from odds and sods. It was on one of these homemade radios that he heard Mussolini’s declaration, on 10 June 1940, that Italy, the country he had left for Scotland 20 years before, had entered the war. That night a mob attacked the ice-cream shop at 10 Albert Street, off Leith Walk in Edinburgh. The family lived above the shop and later, Rudolfo’s son Eduardo, then

Martin Gayford

American psyche

The latest exhibition at the Royal Academy is entitled America after the Fall. It deals with painting in the United States during the 1930s: that is, the decade before the tidal surge of abstract expressionism. So this show is a sort of prequel to the RA’s great ab ex blockbuster of last autumn. It might have been called, ‘Before Jackson Began Dripping’. Not much in this selection, though, can compare to the power of the abstract expressionists at their peak in the Forties and Fifties — not even an early work by Pollock himself. But it does include a couple of masterpieces by Edward Hopper, plus several pictures so brashly

Deborah Ross

Pump up the volume | 23 February 2017

Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World is one of those angst-ridden dramas focusing on what is commonly referred to as a ‘dysfunctional family’ as if there might be any other kind and it isn’t just a question of degree. This family certainly doesn’t hold back. This family has everyone shouting at everyone else for 95 minutes, blurting out brutal truths that might equally be brutal untruths (hard to tell). It has not been rapturously received. It was jeered at Cannes (even though it won the Grand Prix) and has been described by various critics as ‘insufferable’ and ‘intolerable’, which can only make you think that they haven’t

Michael Tanner

Tough love | 23 February 2017

Frank Martin is one of those composers whose work seems to survive only by virtue of constantly renewed neglect. His quite large body of work is well represented in the CD catalogues, but rarely performed in the UK. One of his most powerful works is Le Vin herbé, though his fully-fledged opera on The Tempest also deserves revival. Welsh National Opera, ever adventurous, has mounted a staged version of Le Vin herbé, and despite its being more of a cantata than an opera and in English. The text is based on Joseph Bédier’s version of the Tristan myth, so some reference to Wagner, in discussing it, is inevitable. Written at

Kate Chisholm

Olden but golden | 23 February 2017

This weekend Brian Matthew will present his last-ever Sounds of the 60s show on Radio 2. Now 88, he’s been in charge at breakfast time on Saturdays since 1990, his gravelly voice deepening and getting hoarser with the years. You could tell he was well past his clubbing prime, or for that matter being able to dance along to Bryan Ferry. Yet this has never mattered. Matthew’s band of devoted listeners have cherished his weekly two hours on air precisely because of his age. It has meant he was there when those classic Sixties’ records were made. He met the Beatles in their prime, and Dusty Springfield, Steve Winwood, Alan

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Let’s talk about sex | 23 February 2017

What does it take to become a prostitute? Youth, beauty, courage, sexual allure, a love of money, a need for hard drugs, an addiction to risk? None of these, according to this fascinating show written and performed by London sex workers. What prostitutes need is the right mindset: humane, adaptable, tolerant, altruistic. Sex work is one of the caring professions. And it attracts operatives of any age, creed or physical configuration. An elegant 67-year-old rent boy explains, with touching humour, that his clients tend to be married men who just happen to be interested in fellatio. ‘Will you put your penis inside my body?’ a shy punter once asked him.

James Walton

Occupational hazard

Rival law-enforcement agencies arguing about which of them should investigate a murder has, of course, been a staple of crime dramas for decades. Rather less common, though, is for the agencies in question to be the Metropolitan Police, the Gestapo and the SS. SS-GB (BBC1, Sunday), based on Len Deighton’s novel, poses the undeniably interesting question of what this country would have been like in 1941 if Germany had won the Battle of Britain. Its primary answer is that — in every way — it would have been very murky indeed. Again, plenty of crime dramas over the years have created a suitably noirish atmosphere, while cunningly saving on the