Books and Arts – 23 March 2017
Arts Reviews
The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions
Thursday
What’s That Thing? Award for bad public art 2017
Imagine climbing the hills that surround Belfast and stumbling upon this 11-metre-high steel bollock. ‘It will be visible from a number of different points throughout the city,’ coos the Arts Council. Haven’t the people of Northern Ireland suffered enough? ‘Origin’ is the winner of our second What’s That Thing? Award for the worst new public art of the past year. The creators claim the six-metre ‘raindrop’ stuck on top of a five-metre pole represents the ‘elegant flow’ of the Farset River and ‘appears to hover’. Hover? Do you think they know what the word means? Clumsy, aggressive, cheap-looking (despite costing £100,000), it’s the very opposite of a raindrop. Like the
Hide and seek | 23 March 2017
Two films for you this week, one of which is surprisingly good and one of which does not surprise in the least. Shall we be unsurprised first? OK, Another Mother’s Son, set during the second world war on Nazi-occupied Jersey, is based on the true story of Louisa Gould, who took in an escaped Russian PoW for the course of the war. Louisa Gold, what a mensch — she would later be named a ‘Hero of the Holocaust’. But it’s the kind of story that has been told countless times (I blame Anne Frank), and here it’s told in such a perfunctory, plodding way that it brings nothing new to
Bravura bling
There was a nasty sound of pens being sharpened last week as Royal Ballet runaway Sergei Polunin prepared to unveil his latest venture. The reviews were as dire as the show but the overriding mood was one of regret that so great a talent should have lost its way. Project Polunin’s triple bill was cannily timed to coincide with the release of the documentary film Dancer, which follows the young Ukrainian prodigy’s progress after his snap resignation from the Royal Ballet in 2012. The film’s director, Steven Cantor, had no dance background and was a pushover for all the bravura party tricks that dominate the movie’s dance footage. This, together
Beyond belief | 23 March 2017
As we know from all those newspaper articles and actress interviews, there’s a scandalous lack of high-profile British TV dramas starring women over 40. Indeed, if it wasn’t for No Offence, Unforgotten, Silent Witness, Last Tango in Halifax, The Fall, NW, Agatha Raisin, Broadchurch, Happy Valley and Apple Tree Yard, there’d really only be Vera, which returned to ITV on Sunday. The Vera in question is DCI Vera Stanhope, who, in the teeth of fierce competition, may well be the most implausible cop on television — even if she does fit snugly into a thriving sub-genre featuring sharp but kindly policewomen whose male colleagues spend much of the time shaking
Royal prerogative
No one should complain that My Country; a work in progress is a grim night out. It’s rare for a good play to be written by royal command. The co-authors are the Queen’s personal minstrel, Carol Ann Duffy, and the director of her Royal National Theatre, Rufus Norris. These inspiring artistes have sent their vassals beyond the security of London to annotate ‘the words of people across the UK’ in the hope of understanding a humanitarian disaster: Brexit. The show makes its prejudices clear by dedicating the script to a Remain voter, Jo Cox, who was murdered by a Leave supporter. And it promotes the view, common among Remainers, that
Let’s hear it for the boys
Girls creator Lena Dunham has received criticism from all sides. Detractors on the right see her as an exhibitionist provocateur. Those on the left see her as a privileged narcissist, who can’t help but see feminism through a white middle-class prism — and who unforgivably rooted for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. The HBO show that made Dunham’s name, which she has written and starred in since her early twenties, is on its final season. It has portrayed the young lives and friendships of four millennial women trying to succeed, or just subsist, in New York, and how their dreams either lose grandeur when they come true or don’t come
Going underground
When Wireless Nights hit the Radio 4 airwaves in the spring of 2012, I was not at all sure about Jarvis Cocker’s particular, not to say eccentric, manner of presentation, butting in, making his presence felt, never letting us forget that it’s his programme, he’s in charge. His coy comments were too self-conscious for my taste. He didn’t sound natural; his after-dark meanderings felt too contrived. Now I realise I had completely missed the point. Cocker’s deliberate mannerisms, his upside-down way of looking at things, his curiosity and desire to share with us his thoughts are all very much part of who he is, and once you get used to
Denial has rarely looked so good
Ceci n’est pas une Partenope. Forget the warring classical kingdoms of Naples and Cumae: this is surrealist Paris in the 1930s and imminent invasion is the stuff of conversational parenthesis, barely worth interrupting a rubber of bridge for, let alone an embrace. Man Ray, Lee Miller and their androgynous associates slink and affect their way around a monochrome salon with its suggestively curved central staircase, offering up the performance of themselves as a living exhortation to make art, not war. As a response to Handel’s most Shakespearean of comedies, Christopher Alden’s production is inspired — more now, if anything, than in 2008 when it was new. There’s a new kinship,
Thursday
The odd couple | 16 March 2017
Only once did Michelangelo sign a sculpture. It was the ‘Pietà’ of 1497–1500, and he did so using an incomplete sentence in the past imperfect: ‘Michelangelo Buonarroti the Florentine was making…’. The implication was that actually completing a perfect masterpiece was an unattainable goal, so instead he just had to leave off (a great many artists still feel the same about finishing a picture). The ‘Pietà’ is included in Michelangelo & Sebastiano, a remarkably ambitious new exhibition at the National Gallery: not, of course, the original marble, which remains in St Peter’s, but a plaster cast from 1975. Nonetheless, in some ways, the cast gives you a better view than
The return of the What’s That Thing? Award for bad public art
Wouldn’t it be nice, in these divided times, for humanity to have a common enemy – preferably an inanimate one. Welcome to the What’s That Thing? Award. We’re in our second year, hunting down the most execrable new pieces of public art that have appeared in the past year in this country and this time we’ve teamed up with the Architecture Foundation. The prize grew out of a report I wrote six years ago when we were at peak public-art-as-urban-panacea and every council was desperately clambering over itself to add a bit of swanky tat to their portfolio of local amenities. (I remember going to a public art ‘consultation exercise’ in John O’Groats where two artists delivered a powerpoint presentation to
Assayas’ Personal Shopper is slick, unnecessarily complex and totally irrelevant
Creaking doors, rustling leaves and leaky taps make up the soundtrack of Olivier Assayas’ improbable horror film Personal Shopper. But the most unnerving (and grating) sound in this supernatural fashion show are the iMessage alerts that may or may not be coming from the beyond. If that sounds ridiculous, that’s because, like so much else in this baffling film, it is. Assayas has made some excellent films over the past two decades and more, and I think his nosedive with Personal Shopper can be explained by his latest muse, Kristen Stewart. Sure, she’s pretty – if that emaciated-junkie look turns you on. But why the former Twilight star has turned
Fatal distraction
I don’t think that I have left a theatre many times feeling as depressed and irritated as after the Royal Opera’s Die Meistersinger, in the new production by Kasper Holten. The run of the Royal Opera’s recent productions of Wagner — appalling Tristans, a dire succession of Parsifals, mediocre Rings — hadn’t prepared me for so deep an abyss of irrelevant idiocy as this. I thought I had reached the stage where, having seen so many fearful operatic productions of works I love, I was able to enjoy myself purely on account of the music, almost inured to what I was seeing. On this occasion, the musical level was uneven
Mirror, mirror | 16 March 2017
The exit signs were switched off and the stalls were in utter darkness. One by one, 15 invisible dancers, their joints attached to tiny spotlights, began to colonise the far end of the hall, forming fresh constellations with every pose. The audience smiled in wonder, like tots at a planetarium. Tree of Codes, which had its London première at Sadler’s Wells last week, was originally commissioned in 2015 for the Manchester International Festival. It combined the talents of Wayne McGregor, resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet, mixer and DJ Jamie xx and the Danish/Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. The trio took as their text Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, which
Got the message?
To cut to the chase, my ten-year-old daughter really liked Beauty and the Beast. And given you’re probably going to be watching this as a child’s plus-one, I’d say hers is the view that matters. Her favourite character was Le Fou, the baddie’s gay sidekick, though I’m not sure she realised. But then the gay scene that Disney’s been making such a fuss about, in which the adorably camp and chubby Josh Gad gives Luke Evans — the fabulous Gaston — a bit of a shoulder massage when they’re relaxing at the inn, honestly isn’t such a big deal. Sorry. This would be a digression, except that there’s been so
To die for
Down the Mighty River with Steve Backshall (BBC2) was perfect Sunday-night TV — one of the most enjoyable adventure travelogues I’ve watched in ages. So I was quite surprised to see it reviewed lukewarmly by another critic. One of the critic’s objections was that the scene where Backshall spots a bird of paradise through his binoculars by the Baliem river in Papua New Guinea was a bit crap. Why couldn’t we have seen it in loving close-up detail, as you would on a David Attenborough? But this is precisely what I loved about the documentary. It had a roughness, an unpredictability, a spontaneity that you rarely find on TV any
Tail-end Terry
It is often said that Terence Rattigan’s ‘thing’ was his homosexuality and that his disguising of it coloured everything he wrote. But he had, I think, another secret up his sleeve that is still little known. He was a tailgunner in the RAF. Indeed the service was his family and a thread of blue serge runs through his career. He died in 1977, aged 66. After Harrow and Oxford, the war rudely interrupted his dazzling entrée as a dashing young Thirties playwright. After basic training, Rattigan was assigned as a wireless operator and airgunner to a squadron of Sunderlands, hunting enemy submarines in the Atlantic. One moment he was banking
A matter of life and death | 16 March 2017
It was the crime story that showed us just how much China has changed since its years of social, political and economic isolation. The discovery on 16 November 2011 of the dead body of the British businessman Neil Heywood in Room 1605 of the Lucky Holiday Hotel in the Chinese city of Chongqing was not in itself so shocking. Sordid maybe, as it was declared by the Chinese authorities that he had died of excessive alcohol consumption. But nothing more than that. The revelations that followed, though, transformed the case into an international cause célèbre, the inner workings of Chinese politics unravelling before the greedy eyes of the foreign media.
His dark materials | 16 March 2017
The enticingly subversive films of Paul Verhoeven were very tempting to me as a schoolboy. When I hit 14, the Dutch director released RoboCop and the excitement among me and my friends at catching two hours of unmitigated ultra-violence reached fever pitch. He did not disappoint. That was in 1988 and it was interesting later on to read several newspaper articles accusing Verhoeven of having made a fascistic screed in favour of zero-tolerance law enforcement. This was not something any of us had considered up to that point, but satire, yes, even back then we had an inkling of what that was and RoboCop seemed to fit the bill nicely.
Saturday
Buffy the Vampire Slayer made me the man I am
Buffy the Vampire Slayer turned 20 yesterday, which will make millennials feel as old as the actors who supposedly passed for teenagers back then. When Buffy came out I was eight. At first I was hooked by the horror aesthetic. Later I began to appreciate how it dealt with adolescent crises through supernatural allegory. But only now do I realise how lucky I was to have grown up with an empowered feminist to look up to (and have my first crush on). For those who didn’t watch Joss Whedon’s show between 1997 and 2003, Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a popular cheerleader type who falls in social status after she finds out she
