Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The lying game | 27 October 2016

‘Adam Curtis believed that 200,000 Guardian readers watching BBC2 could change the world. But this was a fantasy. In fact, he had created the televisual equivalent of a drunken late-night Wikipedia binge with pretentions to narrative coherence…’ You really must watch Ben Woodhams’s brilliant 2011 Adam Curtis-pastiche mini-documentary The Loving Trap, which you’ll find on YouTube. It’s so devastatingly cruel, funny and accurate that when I first saw it I speculated that Curtis would never be able to work again. But this was fantasy. Of course, I knew that Curtis would be back, not least because to be parodied in this way is not an insult but a sure sign

Richard Bratby

A night at the circus

The Royal Opera’s latest production is Shostakovich’s The Nose and to paraphrase Mark Steyn, whatever else can be said about it, you certainly get a lot of noses for your money. Noses are tossed from character to character, noses kneel in prayer and noses stroll casually past in the background. They poke through curtains, mingle in crowds, and form a high-kicking, tap-dancing all-nose chorus line. At one point, a little tiny nose toddles unaided across the vast, almost-empty stage. Around them swirls bustling, multicoloured madness: bearded ladies and moustachioed cops, women dressed like dayglo matryoshka dolls, and a couple of pigtailed cartoon Chinamen who might have wandered in from an

Bryan Appleyard

Net effect

As a documentary-maker, Werner Herzog is a master of tone. His widely parodied voiceovers — breathy, raspy, ominous — are cunningly ambivalent. The interviews he conducts are seldom less than strange, often shocking, and the pacing and tenor of his films are subtly modulated. Never more so than here. Lo and Behold is divided into chapters. The first is a fairly conventional documentary about the beginnings of the internet. Herzog talks to the people in California who made the first computer-to-computer connection in 1969, asking them reasonable questions and generally making them seem like comfortable, all-round good guys. This is then subverted by the appearance of Ted Nelson, a cyber-pioneer

Kate Chisholm

Identity crisis | 27 October 2016

You may not listen to them every year. Or even to every lecture in the current series. But the survival of the annual Reith Lectures on Radio 4 from the old days of the Home Service and Radio 3 (they were established in 1948 to honour what Reith had done for the corporation) is crucial to the existence of the BBC. Strictly Come Dancing and The Fall might pay the bills in overseas sales (not that a lecture series, no matter how costly to stage, edit, produce and broadcast, is a great burden on the licence fee) but without the Reith Lectures, perceptively chaired by Sue Lawley, it would be

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Sweet and sour | 27 October 2016

Great subject, terminal illness. Popular dramas like Love Story, Terms of Endearment and My Night With Reg handle the issue with tact and artistry by presenting us with a single victim and a narrative focus that reveals as much about the survivors as about the patient. Crucially, the disease is omitted from the title for fear of discouraging the punters from mentioning the work in conversation. A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer violates all these strictures. Half a dozen characters seated in a hospital ward shout at us about their failing health. These disjointed gobbets of testimony are interspersed with repetitive zombie dances and noisy songs with lyrics

Niru Ratnam

March of the makers

Until earlier this year, a squat sculpture nestled rather unobtrusively outside 20 Manchester Square in Marylebone, an address once made famous by the cover of a number of albums by the Beatles. The building has since been renovated into smart, slightly anonymous offices and the sculpture suited it. Few knew that it was a work by Tony Cragg, who towards the end of the 1980s was one of Britain’s best known artists, winning the Turner Prize in 1988 and representing the country at the Venice Biennale the same year. Last winter the sculpture, titled ‘Under Circumstances’, was taken away. There was no fanfare or report as to why, or where,

Wednesday

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

Emma Rice was never as radical as she thought she was

Towards the end of Emma Rice’s recent production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of the mechanicals decides to give us a piece of her mind. ‘It’s a visual concept!’ screams Nandi Bhebhe’s Starveling (for it is She), as the young lords and ladies mock her costume in the play within a play. ‘Why is everybody so obsessed with text?’  This was Rice’s gauntlet, thrown to her critics as she arrived as the controversial new artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe. But Rice, as usual, was tilting at a straw man. None of her serious critics in theatreland have a problem with textual experiment, nor with Rice’s yen for cross gender

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Face time

As a chat-up line it was at least unusual. On 8 January 1927, a 46-year-old man approached a young woman outside the Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris and announced, ‘You have an interesting face; I would like to do your portrait. I feel we are going to do great things together.’ The approach was successful, even though the woman in question, Marie-Thérèse Walter, was bewildered by his subsequent announcement, ‘I am Picasso!’, since she had never heard of the famous artist. Undeniably, great works did result from this chance meeting — as well as an intense affair, which lasted for years. Several are included in the splendid Picasso Portraits

David Hockney & Martin Gayford

Shady past

David Hockney: It is a kind of joke, but I really mean it when I say Caravaggio invented Hollywood lighting. It is an invention, in that he quickly worked out how to light things dramatically. I’ve always used shadows a bit, because that’s what you need below a figure to ground it, but mine are more like Giotto’s than Caravaggio’s. I use shadows that you see in ordinary lighting conditions; you don’t find ones like Caravaggio’s in nature. But there are other varieties of Hollywood lighting. The ‘Mona Lisa’ is one of the first portraits with very blended shadows. That face is marvellously lit, the shadow under the nose, and

Kate Chisholm

The power of song | 20 October 2016

‘I went in at seven and came out aged 22,’ said Brian as he looked back on the day in October 1966 when his primary school in Aberfan was smothered in a great black wave of coal slurry. On that day, of his small school of just 141 pupils, only 25 children survived. Brian lost his older sister; he escaped because he refused to get under the desk as the teacher instructed when they heard this extraordinary, unexplained, overwhelming noise, ‘like an aeroplane coming into land’, getting louder and louder. He later joined the Ynysowen Male Voice Choir, formed in Aberfan a couple of years after the disaster as the

James Walton

Digging for the truth

The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb may well be one of the 20th century’s great stories — but naturally that doesn’t mean a television drama won’t want to jazz it up a bit. Or, in the case of ITV’s lavishly produced but distinctly corny Tutankhamun, quite a lot. The programme gives us a Howard Carter younger and considerably hunkier than in real life. It throws in a couple of smitten hotties to emphasise the fact. Above all, it transforms Carter into the archaeological equivalent of a maverick TV cop: a man who doesn’t play by the rules, isn’t afraid to follow wild hunches but, by God, gets results. In Sunday’s opener,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Ziggurat of bilge

Ella Hickson’s new play analyses our relationship with oil using the sketch format. First, there’s a candlelit soap opera set in Cornwall, in 1889, with a lot of ooh-arr bumpkins firing witless insults at each other. Next, a bizarre Persian scene, set in 1908, where a Scottish footman (who uses the celebrated Edwardian colloquialism ‘OK’) rescues a ditzy waitress from a sex-maniac serving in the British army. Then we move to Hampstead, in 1970, where a female oil magnate is visited by a Libyan diplomat seeking to nationalise her wells by waving documents at her, in her kitchen, while teenage kids pop in and out performing oral sex on each

Alexandra Coghlan

High and low

‘Besides feeble writing, there is a mixture of tragic-comedy and buffoonery in it, which Apostolo Zeno and Metastasio had banished from serious opera’. You can always rely on Charles Burney (the celebrated musicologist, who spent most of the 18th century being professionally underwhelmed) to find fault. But writing here about Handel’s Xerxes he has a point. The opera’s blend of lighter and more serious elements, though typical of Venetian opera, was by no means the norm for the Londoners who were its audience. They didn’t like it then, and nearly 300 years later it’s something we still seem to struggle with, as English Touring Opera’s latest season makes unexpectedly clear.

Deborah Ross

Loach at his most Loach

I, Daniel Blake is a Ken Loach film about a Newcastle joiner who can’t work but faces a welfare bureaucracy that won’t listen, humiliates him, grinds him down, so it’s fun, fun, fun all the way. Yes, it is that Ken Loach film, but as that Ken Loach film is more powerful than most other films — and this is fearsomely moving (I cried), and fearsomely tender (I cried again) — you’re just going to have to suck it up. It has been 50 years since Cathy couldn’t come home and 47 years since Billy buried that bird at the bottom of the garden and while Loach has strayed into

Thursday

Justin Marozzi

Muslim magic

In 1402, when the Turkic conqueror Temur, better known in the West as Tamerlane, was poised to do battle with the mighty Ottoman Sultan Bayazid I, the greatest power in the Muslim world, he called in the astrologers. Knowing which side their bread was buttered on, the court officials duly pronounced that the planets were auspiciously positioned and gave a green light to attack. Temur was victorious. Not for nothing was he known as lord of the ‘Fortunate Conjunction of the Planets’. Half a century later, in 1453, Bayazid’s great-grandson Mehmet II stood at the gates of Constantinople. Anxious to galvanise his siege-weary troops, he summoned court astrologers, diviners and

Martin Gayford

Overshadowing all the rest

We don’t know what Caravaggio himself would have made of Beyond Caravaggio, the new exhibition at the National Gallery which is devoted to his own work and that of his numerous followers. But, by chance, we do have a very good idea what he would have said at least of one exhibit: ‘The Ecstasy of St Francis’ (1601) by Giovanni Baglione. Two years after this was painted, in 1603, Caravaggio stated in a disposition to a Roman court that he didn’t know of any other artist ‘who thinks Giovanni Baglione is a good painter’. Very few of Caravaggio’s own words survive, and those that do are mainly in the records

Deborah Ross

Going nowhere fast – and loud

As a general rule, I would not wish to spend nearly three hours in a mini-van with young people who turn up the music real loud. As a general rule, being the age I am, I would go to any lengths to avoid such an experience. But American Honey is a film by Andrea Arnold and even though it does require you to spend nearly three hours in a min-van with young people who turn up the music real loud, you will not, in fact, regret it. Or at least not regret it entirely. A bit, perhaps, but you’ll get a good two hours regret-free. This is the first American

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Revenge of the robots

The other day James Lovelock, the sprightly 97-year-old inventor of Gaia theory, told a mildly surprised Guardian interviewer that he wasn’t remotely worried about climate change any more. A far more plausible threat, he explained, were all the killer robots that would soon emerge and find no use for us inconvenient humans. Apparently this is a fashionable worry. It has to do with something called the ‘singularity’, which is the theoretical moment when machines become so sophisticated than they can outthink us, then advance at such a pace that we become powerless to stop them. Some experts are seriously concerned, for example, about the development of ‘fully autonomous weapons’ —