Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

Joker: Folie à Deux makes me long for the Joker of my childhood

Joker: Folie à Deux is the sequel to Joker (2019), and you have to admire Todd Phillips for returning with a jukebox musical, co-starring Lady Gaga, and not giving fans what they expected – or wanted. (There were quite a few walkouts where I saw it.) It feels like a film that hates its audience. And itself But it’s not what anyone else wanted, either. It’s so inert and pointless that if staying the course isn’t the issue it’s only because staying awake is. I don’t blame Joaquin Phoenix; no one has worked harder at trying to sing since Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia!. He deserves some recognition for that

Richard Bratby

The BBC Singers Centenary Concert was toe-curling

When does a new opera enter the repertoire? Judith Weir’s Blond Eckbert has only had a couple of UK productions since its première at English National Opera in 1994, but it’s been doing reasonably good business on the continent, where its source material – a story by German writer Ludwig Tieck – presumably has more cultural currency. In any case, it’s back now, as part of English Touring Opera’s autumn roster, and both the staging (by ETO’s general director Robin Norton-Hale) and the performances deserve to make Weir’s haunted, oddly unsettling opera a lot better known. If my toes had curled any harder I think I’d have dropped a shoe

Graeme Thomson

I agree with pop’s war on iPhones – but King Canute might want a word

Before each show on the recent The The tour – reviewed in these pages last week – the pre-recorded voice of singer Matt Johnson politely asked the audience to refrain from using mobile phones when the band was performing. In Edinburgh, while Johnson was speaking, the chap next to me was preoccupied filming an empty stage. A sea of screens can be priceless in a genuine emergency but that’s about it As it happens, most of the crowd complied most of the time, but proscribing phone use at concerts is increasingly challenging. A few artists are up for the fight. As they enter the venue, fans attending Bob Dylan’s forthcoming

Robert Jackman

At Las Vegas’s Sphere I saw the future of live arts

Does Elon Musk have a good eye for the aesthetic? Earlier this month, the Tesla magnate took a break from his incessant political posting to praise something he described as a ‘work of art’ – the Las Vegas Sphere. He then treated his 200 million Twitter followers to a video of an awed crowd, desperately angling their phones to capture the supposed majesty of the Sphere. Admittedly, it was hardly the first time that the Sphere has gone viral on social media. Since its grand opening last autumn, this very modern monument has had a knack for conquering the internet, with videos of its optical illusions prompting both awe and

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

A stone-cold banger: Black Myth – Wukong reviewed

Grade: A Remember the mad 1970s TV series Monkey? Here, excitingly, is the closest you’ll get to it in videogame form. In a pre-credit sequence, you are the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, and you not only fly about on a little cloud but suffer from that headache-inducing circlet on your bonce. The main game is set much later. Sun Wukong is locked in a stone egg and you take command of a monkey warrior – the Destined One – in search of the magic objects which will revive him.   Black Myth: Wukong is the first AAA blockbuster game to come out of China, and it’s what I believe the

Deborah Ross

Melodramatic body-horror – but I don’t regret seeing it: A Different Man reviewed

Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man is ‘a darkly comic psychological thriller’ that plays like an inverted Beauty and the Beast. What happens when the handsome prince turns out to be not all that? The three central performances are magnificent, and there’s a wry absurdist humour at work but unless you’re a fan of body horror it’s not an easy watch. I often had to look away. I can’t, therefore, say I particularly enjoyed seeing it, but now I have seen it I don’t regret it. Is that, dear readers, fudged enough for you? Sebastian Stan stars as Edward, an aspiring actor who lives in New York and has neurofibromatosis, the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Faultless visuals – shame about the play: the National’s Coriolanus reviewed

Weird play, Coriolanus. It’s like a playground fight that spills out into the street and has to be resolved by someone’s mum. The hero is a Roman general whose enemies conspire to banish him so he takes revenge by joining forces with a foreign power and laying siege to Rome. Coriolanus’s mother shows up on the battlefield and begs him to drop his vendetta and come back home. Later he dies but without delivering a big speech. The Roman soldiers have plastic swords that go ‘clack’ rather than metal ones that go ‘ching’ The key difficulty is that Coriolanus’s tragic flaw, a lack of ambition, is really a virtue. He’s

Richard Bratby

Heartfelt and thought-provoking: Eugene Onegin, at the Royal Opera, reviewed

The curtain is already up at the start of Ted Huffman’s new production of Eugene Onegin. The auditorium is lit but the stage is in darkness and almost bare. Gradually, as Tchaikovsky’s prelude sighs and unfurls, the stage brightens and the theatre grows dim. But not before Onegin (Gordon Bintner) – tousle-headed and in a designer suit – has walked out, bowed to the house and retired to a chair at the back of the stage, to wait for the story to call him to life. Any competent maestro can whip up a big noise, but it’s a lot harder to make meaning out of silence Russophiles have grumbled for

James Walton

Have today’s TV dramatists completely given up on plausibility?

In advance, Ludwig sounded as if it was aimed squarely at the Inspector Morse market. Set among spires of impeccable dreaminess (in a cunning twist, those of Cambridge), it has a main character who solves crimes and cryptic crosswords with equal efficiency. Once the series began, though, it was clear that its sights were set a little lower than that. Instead, the show seems content to take its place as the latest proof that plausibility is out of fashion in TV drama these days. (In my last column I reviewed Nightsleeper, which had no time for it at all.) One reason this detective feels like the traditional fish out of

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What has become of the Wellcome Collection?

In 2022 the Wellcome Collection caused a stir by closing its Medicine Man exhibition on the grounds that it was ‘based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language’. Director Melanie Keen had previously talked of reinterpreting the collection but had now evidently decided it was beyond redemption. ‘We can’t change our past,’ she said in a statement at the time. ‘But we can work towards a future where we give voice to the narratives and lived experiences of those who have been silenced, erased and ignored.’ I felt sorry for Sir Henry Wellcome, now dismissed by the organisation bearing his name as an evil colonialist Anyone who wasn’t quite

Michael Hann

The world is on fire – yet navel-gazing still reigns in pop

There is no better cultural weather vane than pop. It’s not that pop singers possess incredible analytical skills – they don’t. It’s more that it’s in their interests to reflect some prevailing mood. And what people call a vibe shift can often be gleaned by comparing two artists. Take those featured this week: one very much au courant, the other regarded as a searing commentator on 1980s Britain. It’s a very good album, one for sitting down and listening to rather than standing in a vast shed to hear Over the past couple of years, Raye – a 26-year-old Londoner – has become rather a star. You may remember that

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

‘Some pianists make me shake with anger’: Vikingur Olafsson interviewed

At the BBC Proms this year, an Icelandic pianist dressed like a Wall Street broker played a slow movement from a Bach organ sonata that had the audience first gasping and then stamping their feet. This was an encore to a performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto that neither milked the poetry nor romped thrillingly through the finale – and that, too, nearly had the Prommers throwing their underwear at the shy soloist. How do you explain the phenomenon of Vikingur Olafsson? At first glance, he fits the mould of the bespectacled scholar-pianist who recoils from vulgarity – a young Alfred Brendel or Richard Goode, say, whose Beethoven or Schubert

Saturday

Rachel Johnson

Rachel Johnson, James Heale, Paul Wood, Rowan Pelling and Graeme Thomson

34 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Rachel Johnson reads her diary for the week (1:19); James Heale analyses the true value of Labour peer Lord Alli (6:58); Paul Wood questions if Israel is trying to drag America into a war with Iran (11:59); Rowan Pelling reviews Want: Sexual Fantasies, collated by Gillian Anderson (19:47); and Graeme Thomson explores the ethics of the posthumous publication of new music (28:00).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Michael Hann

How some of the most derided bands of all time are making a comeback

The fate of the pop musician – at least the pop musician below the top tier of stardom – has historically been to fall from fashion. At some point in their rise they will be of the moment, the spirit of the age, and then they won’t be. At best, they’ll have a slow but perfectly lucrative fade, as their fanbase dwindles to the zealots. At worst they’ll become a punch line, a raised eyebrow: ‘What were we thinking?’ Every hit, every sold-out show, is just another step closer to irrelevance. ‘There’d be 800 teenagers in a club in Minneapolis, which felt absurd: we’re old enough to be their parents’

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

The fascinating mechanics of striking a deal

If you wish to know how to become a master negotiator, a formidable body of books will now offer to train you in that art, but I’m not entirely sure it can be taught. The greatest natural asset, I suppose, is the ability to enjoy the game: the performative mulling, tough-talking, buttering-up, pitching of curve balls and – when absolutely necessary – flamboyant execution of a real or bluff exit. Yet even for those of us who are clumsy and reluctant hagglers, the mechanics of striking a deal can be fascinating. This is the stuff of the Dealcraft podcast, hosted by Jim Sebenius, a professor of the Harvard Business School,

Laura Gascoigne

The art inspired by the 1924 Paris Olympics was a very mixed bag

George Orwell took a dim view of competitive sport; he found the idea that ‘running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue’ absurd. ‘Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play,’ he wrote in Tribune after scuffles broke out during the Russian Dynamo football team’s 1945 tour. ‘It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war without the shooting.’ Suzanne Lenglen’s loose-fitting knee-length tennis dresses inspired the new ‘style sportif’ of Coco Chanel Baron Pierre de Coubertin, visionary founder of the modern Olympics, took the opposite view: to him the three

Graeme Thomson

The ethics of posthumous pop albums

‘At the record company meeting/ On their hands – at last! – a dead star!’ Back when Morrissey was more concerned with writing a decent lyric than sour internet tirades, ‘Paint a Vulgar Picture’ by the Smiths summed it all up rather neatly: a living pop star is all well and good, but a dead one is far less troublesome – and considerably more profitable. Some artists only really get going once they’re dead. Commercially speaking, Eva Cassidy’s entire career has been posthumous; the Van Gogh of the lustreless Radio 2 ballad. The motive feels pure: a family’s wish to keep their sibling alive through her art Death has been

Robert Jackman

Like The Joker, but less pretentious: The Penguin reviewed

Doctor Who fans may remember that after the show’s triumphant return in the early 2000s, we found out that showrunner Russell T. Davies had agreed with BBC mandarins to rid the franchise of some of its more unwieldy elements in order to make it palatable to casual viewers. Gotham City has long been the perfect backdrop for old-fashioned noir, and the city is on fine fettle here Watching the debut episode of The Penguin, HBO’s new crime series (available on Sky Atlantic), based on a popular Batman villain, I suspected a similar game was at play. The series might be visibly set in the Batman universe, but it’s also very

Deborah Ross

Baffling and plainly nuts – but worth it: Megalopolis reviewed

Megalopolis, which draws parallels between the fall of the Roman empire and modern-day America, is a film by Francis Ford Coppola – and it couldn’t, in fact, be more by Francis Ford Coppola if it tried. He wrote, produced, directed and self-financed it ($120 million; ouch) and even found the time to be its greatest fan. On the film review sharing platform Letterboxd he has awarded it five stars. Way to go, Francis. We’re behind you even though, to be honest, you lost us quite early on. The movie is often baffling, and plainly nuts, but I’d prefer to see something baffling and plainly nuts by Francis Ford Coppola than,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The show belongs to Jonathan Slinger and Ben Whishaw: Waiting for Godot reviewed

Waiting for Godot is a church service for suicidal unbelievers. Those who attend the rite on a regular basis find themselves wondering how boring it will be this time. A bit boring, of course, but there are laughs to be had in James Macdonald’s production. The set resembles a Gazan bombsite with a tree-stump stranded in a pit of ashen rubble. Didi is played as a goofy English toff by Ben Whishaw who supplied the voice of Paddington in the movies. The bear is back. Whishaw gives an engaging, high-energy performance, like a Blue Peter presenter with a theology degree Whishaw gives an engaging, high-energy performance, like a Blue Peter