Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Michael Tanner

From first to last

As the dreaded season of goodwill approaches, the Royal Opera has mounted two revivals of pieces that are interestingly contrasted: Puccini, in the first characteristic and successful opera of his career, though with a lot still to learn, and Offenbach, with the incomplete last work of his career, but a radical departure from all the successes he had had before, and a work that is ultimately a noble flop. Les Contes d’Hoffmann is one of the Royal Opera’s most venerable productions, dating from 1980 and having its eighth revival, with William Dudley’s elaborate sets. One might even call them cluttered, and their major disadvantage is that they necessitate not only

James Walton

Closing credits

BBC1’s The Missing has been one of the undoubted TV highlights of 2016. Yet, even thrillers as overwhelmingly thrilling as this one have been known to blow it in the concluding episode, when the biggest revelation of the lot turns out to be that the writers couldn’t really answer all the questions that previous episodes had so intriguingly raised. And of course, The Missing had raised more than most, with its fiendish plotting ranging across three timeframes — until last week, that is, when it added a fourth. So could Wednesday’s finale possibly avoid giving us that sense of outraged disappointment that comes from realising we’ve spent weeks looking forward

Kate Chisholm

On the road | 1 December 2016

‘We’re going to get lots of negative attention from environmentalists,’ he cackled, great puffs of blue-grey smoke emerging from the exhaust of his two-stroke car. Will Self was crossing Tower Bridge in a Trabant, that most potent symbol of the East German socialist state, bending almost double to fit himself round the steering wheel (he’s six foot five inches in his socks) and cursing the lack of wing mirrors. Things could only get worse as he and his old friend Michael Shamash set off on their 700-mile trek across the Channel to Zwickau, in the former GDR, home of the Trabant car. Imagine trying to merge on to a German

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Of ice and men

An ice floe. Two anglers. Months to kill. That’s the premise of Nice Fish by Mark Rylance and Louis Jenkins. The off-beat script is full of bleak and quirky insights. Rylance, who stars as the bungling Ron, admits that sometimes he gets so bored he bangs nails through frozen bananas. His pal compares dogs with wolves by observing that wolves are pessimists, jaws low to the ground, like homeless scavengers, whereas dogs are chin-up go-getters, natural corporate players, keen to win promotion in a worldwide enterprise called ‘Man’s Best Friend’. There’s a piece of obsessively nerdy rhetoric about 36-hour fishing permits which sounds like Peter Cook at his best. These

Jasper Rees

No peace, no pussy

The bizarro concept of a ‘President-elect Trump’ came to pass despite the wishes, clearly stated on the stump, of the entertainment-industrial complex. They all came out for Hillary — Queen Bey, the Boss, Jay-Z, J-Lo, SJP, Kimye, Madge, Meryl, Gaga, Lena D, old uncle Team Clooney and all. How the alt-right cackled when this star-spangled nobility got in-yer-faced by a basket of deplorables from the West Virginia coalfield. In the circumstances, now is maybe not a propitious moment for Spike Lee (who felt the Bern) to unleash a finger-wagging homily about America and guns. Chi-Raq, you wouldn’t be alone in not knowing, takes its title from the alternate name lately

Thursday

Martin Gayford

The beast in man

Ernest Hemingway loved going to the zoo, but not on Sundays. The reason, he explained, was that, ‘I don’t like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.’ He would probably have enjoyed Animality, an entertaining exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, Lower John St, W1. It contains quite a few jokes, but generally the laugh is on Homo sapiens. The humour tends to comes from an age-old ploy: birds, reptiles and mammals wearing clothes. It was the basis, for example, of many works by the caricaturist J.J. Grandville of cats, bears and other such fauna dressed up as early 19th-century French

Neil Armstrong

Screen grab

St James’s Palace. 1953. A dynamic Duke of Edinburgh is relishing a ding-dong with the antediluvian fossils of the Coronation Committee. He wants to embrace modernity by allowing the BBC to televise the ceremony. The ‘grey old men’ want to continue doing things in exactly the same way that they have been done since 1066. Modernity prevails and the coronation is the biggest television spectacular there has been. This episode, splendidly recreated with a little artistic licence in The Crown, Netflix’s epic about the Queen, was a tipping point in terms of the public’s acceptance of the medium of television. Many viewers acquired their first sets for the sole purpose

Deborah Ross

You’ve lost that loving feeling

A United Kingdom is based on the greatest love story you probably didn’t have a clue about. I know I didn’t. It’s based on the true story of Seretse Khama, heir to the African kingdom of Bechuanaland (now Botswana), and Ruth Williams, a typist, who fell in love in 1940s London and married despite everyone and everything trying to separate them, including a vicious colonial British government. But this, sadly, is not the greatest film about the greatest love story you didn’t have a clue about. It’s OK. It does the job. It’s serviceable. It won’t be the biggest disappointment in your life. The story’s too good for it to

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Faulty ignition

Apart from the next Game of Thrones, there’s nothing I’ve been looking forward to quite as much as The Grand Tour (Amazon Prime). I like Clarkson, Hammond and May, I like banter, I like political incorrectness, I like exotic scenery, I like cars, I like puerile jokes and I liked Top Gear. Take the same ingredients but with a £4.5-million-per-show budget — more than four times what they had with the BBC — and you’d have to ask yourself: ‘What could possibly stop this from being the greatest TV show ever?’ Well, I hate to be a party pooper but it’s definitely not there yet. We had some friends staying

Alexandra Coghlan

All’s well that ends well

The last ten minutes of any Don Giovanni tell you more about a director than the previous two hours. Mozart’s elastic ‘dramma giocoso’ can take a lot of pulling about, can be stretched taut into tragedy or squeezed into the tight confines of a farce, but whatever option (or combination of options) you choose, those final moments are the test of success — the point at which the dramatic threads either sag, snap or hold firm. Oliver Mears’s production — first seen at the Bergen National Opera and now at NI Opera in Belfast — lets them fall limp. Seemingly unsure which choice to make, he makes no choice at

Kate Chisholm

Interest-free credit

When did you last experience a boring Sunday afternoon? If you’re over 16, probably not since you were last 16 and stuck at home, raindrops sliding down the window pane, nothing on TV until five o’clock, nowhere to go because everywhere is shut. But boredom, says Phill Jupitus, has become an endangered emotion. Now that we have smartphones, at a gentle swipe, the touch of a button, we have access to any amount of diversion, 24 hours a day. We need never find ourselves with nothing to do, nothing to read that takes our fancy, no one to talk to. He’s not happy about this. In Being Bored: The Importance

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Precious metal

Who could resist School of Rock? For me it was a chance to see a heavy-metal musical written by the best-known headbanger in the House of Lords, Julian Fellowes. The movie features Jack Black as a failed rock guitarist who bluffs his way into a private school and turns a class of robotic snoots into a prize-winning band. It’s one of the most joyous stories ever filmed. This version, faithfully scripted by his lordship, rises to the same level and delivers a night of sheer rapture. The thing is like a drug. Every performance sends skyrockets of happiness zinging up and down your spine. David Flynn has an echo of

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Serious concerns

It’s funny, isn’t it, how a dust jacket on a book can draw you to it from the other end of a room — always supposing the illustration is by Edward Ardizzone. In fact, is there anything more suggestive of delight than a book illustrated by him? It’s the Midas touch even for unprepossessing authors. The exhibition of his work at the House of Illustration finishes off with a wall lined with them: The Little Grey Men, Jim at the Corner, Italian Peepshow, Johnny’s Bad Day, Eleanor Farjeon’s Book… you’ll recognise lots. And there’s something utterly distinctive about every one: the boy’s upturned nose, the rounded line of a motherly

Phil Adams

A love letter to the lyrics of Levi Stubbs’ Tears by Billy Bragg

With the money from her accident she bought herself a mobile home. That is not your average opening line. Most pop songs don’t get all in your face from the get-go, certainly not with a masterpiece of compact, single-sentence story telling such as this. Billy Bragg dispenses with the pleasantries in favour of a narrative gauntlet. He throws down the most heavily loaded of lyrics. It is a complete and self-contained twelve word story, but it begs so many questions about possible pasts and possible futures and possible protagonists. You could rewind from here, or fast forward. You could pull out or zoom in. You want to do all of these

Bob Colacello

The woman who invented selfies

It took a while for Brigid and I to get to know each other, not to mention like each other. But then it was total lifelong devotion. At first, when I started out at Interview, in 1970, Brigid would give me The Glare, which was the negative equivalent of Nancy Reagan’s The Gaze. One or two seconds of that killing look were enough to put across Brigid’s message: stay away. But a few years later, she gave up speed, moved to a proper apartment on East 22nd Street, and took a steady job as receptionist and transcriber of Andy Warhol’s tapes at the new Factory at 860 Broadway. That was

Charles Foster

Where the wild things are

‘What is man, that thou art mindful of him?’ asks the Psalmist. It’s a good question. God Himself doesn’t give a very satisfactory answer. In one breath he insists that humans are a little lower than the angels, made in His own image, but also (in a formulation as bleak and more terse than any modern reductionist’s) that they are made of dust, and to dust they will return. Darwin tells us a similar story. We don’t have to flip back too many pages in our family albums, he says, before we see furry, feathered and scaly faces. But then he draws an exuberantly branching tree of life, rooted in

Kate Chisholm

Whodunnit

Barbed wire, concrete, razor blades, passports, Bakelite and the sewage system are all crucial to the way we live now yet what do most of us know about who, when, how they were invented? In an ambitious new series for the World Service, 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy, Tim Harford intends to put us straight, taking one thing each week over the next year and in just nine, tight, well-ordered minutes giving us its potted history. This weekend, for instance, Harford introduced us to the Haber-Bosch process, which he argues is ‘the most significant invention of the 20th century’, allowing the world’s population to grow exponentially from four

James Walton

Old stamping ground

If I tell you that on Monday there was an hour-long documentary about the history of stamp-collecting, then you probably don’t need this column’s usual bit in brackets saying which channel it was on. Indeed, at times Timeshift: Penny Blacks and Twopenny Blues seemed determined to be the most BBC4-like programme in the history of BBC4: cheerfully niche, heroically indifferent to all notions of cool and so old-school in its production style that any mention of France was introduced with a blast of accordion music. Above all — and unlike so many other documentaries elsewhere — it was wholly confident that its viewers would be interested in interesting things without