Arts Reviews Archives

Thursday

23 Jun 2016

Madeleine moments

I’d just heard (on catch-up) Jenny Abramsky (a former director of BBC radio) telling Gillian Reynolds (the esteemed radio critic of the Telegraph) why radio is so special to her: ‘It takes place in my head. It paints pictures in my mind. It talks to me as an individual. It surprises me. It stretches me.’ Then I popped down to the kitchen to make some soup for lunch, reached for the radio button and was hooked instantly as Jeremy Vine talked to a man who had lost his wife in a road accident when their child was just two. (Vine’s Radio 2 lunchtime programme on Monday was focusing on child

James Delingpole

Animal crackers

The other evening I was driving back in heavy rain from my pilates class when I noticed something rather upsetting in the gated road that goes through our estate. I stopped and got out of the car for a closer look. Yes, as I feared, it was a dead duck. Some bastard had squished her flat. What made me more upset still was that I could see her mate — a mallard drake — swimming forlornly in the ditch next to the road. I loved those ducks like Tony Soprano used to love his ducks. Especially the stupid way they waddled blithely across your path, forcing you to slow down

Wednesday

22 Jun 2016

Tom Williams

Show business

Sport has never held much appeal for me, so I rarely venture into stadiums. But I do appreciate their peculiar power: I was present at the 2012 Paralympics when George Osborne ill-advisedly turned up to award a medal while engaged in a campaign against disability benefits, and was roundly booed by the entire stadium. It was a transporting lesson in the joy of crowds and the proudest I have ever felt to be British. The stadium, ostensibly a facilitator of mass spectatorship, is actually a machine for producing such feelings. The Greeks were explicit about the ritualistic, community-forming function of their games, but it was the Romans who secularised the

Martin Gayford

Jumbled up

‘In the end, nothing goes with anything,’ Lucian Freud remarked one afternoon years ago. ‘It’s your taste that puts things together.’ He would perhaps have been a little startled to find those words inscribed on the wall of Painters’ Paintings at the National Gallery, but they are very apt. The exhibition reassembles the works of art owned by a number of great painters, among them Van Dyck, Reynolds, Degas, Matisse and Freud himself. It begins with pictures and sculptures that used to co-exist in Lucian’s sitting-room. Most powerful of these is a magnificent Corot, ‘Italian Woman’ (c.1870), that once hung over his fireplace and is now part of the National

Lloyd Evans

Face value | 22 June 2016

When Richard III’s bones were unearthed in a Leicester car park, Frankie Boyle suggested the headline ‘Bent royal found at dogging hotspot’. Rupert Goold opens his version of the play by restaging the 2012 excavation as if to inform us that the past and the future are held together by something called time. That glib gesture apart, this is a superb production whose modern-dress aesthetic works, just for once, extremely well. And it works because the costumes are dark, sober and unornamented and this visual restraint moves our attention upwards to the more fertile arena of the face. And what a face Ralph Fiennes has, all meat-cleaver and calculation: the

Deborah Ross

Home alone

The Secret Life of Pets is the latest animation from Illumination Entertainment, which also brought us Minions and Despicable Me, but whereas they were smart, funny, charming and original, this is not that smart, not that funny, not that charming and not that original. It’s an average caper that feels familiar and suffers mightily from an excess of chase scenes although, in the interests of full disclosure, I should add I attended the screening with a six-year-old who said afterwards: ‘I loved it.’ Six-year-olds. We are fond of them and all that, but they just don’t ever get the bigger picture, do they? This is set in Manhattan and concerns

Tanya Gold

Absolutely Fabulous

Absolutely Fabulous, which is about to make its cinema debut, is a comedy about women being useless. I watched it obediently in the 1990s — mostly for the clothes — and realise now, with more jaded eyes, that I was invited to laugh only at female failure. Failure is not a bad subject for comedy — it is actually one of the best, as Edmund Blackadder and Alan Partridge and David Brent tell us — but Absolutely Fabulous is too unsophisticated to be funny, and comedy without wit is spite. Absolutely Fabulous is based on a single sketch from Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders who were, then, the only female

Thursday

16 Jun 2016

Simon Grant

Out of this world | 16 June 2016

It is London in the summer of 1871. Queen Victoria has just opened the Royal Albert Hall in memory of her beloved husband; Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice in Wonderland has just been published, and French refugees from the Franco-Prussian war continue to arrive in the capital. Among them is Claude Monet, who is having a miserable time in the fog and mist. Not far from the Thames views that he had been painting, a fellow artist has just opened her first exhibition of 155 ‘Spirit Drawings’ in a gallery on Old Bond Street, in the heart of London’s art quarter. She was Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884), a 57-year-old London-based middle-class

Michael Tanner

Longborough’s Tannhäuser is a major relief after ENO’s abysmal Tristan

Tannhäuser Longborough Festival Opera, until 18 June The Longborough phenomenon continues, indeed if anything gets more remarkable each year. This year they are tackling Wagner’s least popular opera, Tannhäuser, and making it actually thrilling, at least when the title role is taken by Neal Cooper. There really is nothing to be done with parts of Tannhäuser except to get a move on, and that is what the great Wagnerian Anthony Negus does. This is one of the shortest performances I have seen or heard: since Wagner never got the opera into the shape he wanted, there are many possibilities, from his alterations over the years, for adding or subtracting a sizeable chunk. Usually

Martin Gayford

Split decision

In 1992 I wrote a column that was published under the headline ‘It’s Time to Split the Tate’. To my absolute astonishment, shortly afterwards it was announced that this would actually happen (no doubt a coincidence rather than a response to my words). Hitherto, though it is hard now to recall those times, there had been just a single Tate gallery in London — the one on Millbank, containing a cheerful jumble of British painting from the Tudor era onwards mixed with what was then described as modern ‘foreign’ art. Eventually, Tate Modern opened and became one of the most prominent features on the cultural landscape, not only of London

Deborah Ross

Highly illogical

Matteo Garrone’s first English-language film is a baroque fantasy based on Pentamerone (Tale of Tales), the 17th-century collection of fairy tales by the Italian poet and courtier Giambattista Basile. (It is also known as The Story of Stories, ‘Lo cunto de li cunti’, but that, I think we can all agree, travels rather less well in the original language.) Garrone, who is best known for his grittily realistic Neapolitan crime drama Gomorrah, has thrown gritty realism entirely to the winds here. Instead, this is fantastically unhinged, veering madly between wonder and horror, gorgeousness and grotesquery, as hearts are eaten, fleas are cuddled, and an old woman’s youth and beauty are

Michael Tanner

Wardrobe malfunction

It is at the Coliseum that I have seen the most wonderful Tristan and Isoldes of my life, both of them under Reginald Goodall, in 1981 and, even more inspired, in 1985. Neither was particularly well produced, but nothing stood in the way of the musical realisation, as complete as I can ever imagine its being. After last year’s quite glorious Mastersingers, I had the highest hopes of Edward Gardner’s conducting of this new production, but they were dashed — in the case of the music, not drastically; but the idiocy of the costumes and the production is so gross that no performance could survive it. The settings are fashionably

Lloyd Evans

I dream of Genie

Gauche, perhaps, to complain about Aladdin but it slightly deserves it. The terrific Genie opens the show and then disappears for 45 minutes while the plot is explained. My squirmy ten-year-old kept whispering Aladdin-related trivia at me in order to occupy himself as the rags-to-riches storyline was laid out in far too much detail. Visually the show is impressive, despite minor flaws. The rangy architectural sets are intricate confections of teetering filigree but they look a little factory-fresh and unlived-in. Behind them the daylight skies are wrongly composed of a single hue (only the night sky has a single hue). Aladdin is played by Dean John-Wilson, a cocky slab of

Ismene Brown

Swan upping

Was Tamara Rojo, when she danced Swan Lake last Saturday at the Albert Hall, thinking as she shaped each phrase, ‘This will be the last time I dance this …and this …and this’? I wonder. She told me a few years back that she had a five-year diary to cover the rest of her dancing career, a diary ending in 2016. Akram Khan’s modern Giselle this autumn will be a Rojo role, but if at 42 she was privately saying farewell to her classical career on Saturday, she did it with the spectacular and refined artistry the public has come to expect. A woman sitting next to me complained that

James Walton

My big fat Gypsy fortune

In his latest documentary for the This World series, the Romanian film-maker Liviu Tipurita could have been forgiven for treading carefully — and not just because it meant him entering the world of organised crime. After all, his previous film in the series, the uncompromisingly titled Gypsy Child Thieves, was ferociously denounced by Roma groups for showing how some Roma parents send their children into European cities with strict instructions to beg and steal — the charge being not that this was necessarily untrue, but that it might confirm ugly prejudices. So how would Tipurita tackle the equally awkward facts behind The New Gypsy Kings (BBC2, Thursday)? The impressive answer

Kate Chisholm

Women of substance

Three women, three writers, three very different life experiences. On Monday afternoon the artist Fiona Graham-Mackay introduced us to Imtiaz Dharker, whose portrait she has been painting. While she attempts to capture a visual impression, Imtiaz, who is a poet, tells us what it feels like to be the sitter, the one who is being looked at, drawn, observed with such sharp-eyed scrutiny. A Portrait of… on Radio 4 was one of those seductive programmes that draws you in simply by the quality of the voices and the clear-sighted honesty of what they’re saying. What would it feel like to be painted, and then see yourself as someone else has

Thursday

9 Jun 2016

Stephen Bayley

These foolish things | 9 June 2016

No reliable statistics exist — it’s not the sort of thing you can audit — but England is surely the most haunted country on earth. And haunted not just by white ladies, ghosts, headless highwaymen, spooks and phantoms, but by a recurrent dream of Eden and other more recently lost pre-industrial worlds. Thus follies and summer houses, Eden’s buildings, are among the nation’s most distinctive contributions to world architecture. They might be ‘fragile and neglected trivia’, according to Clough Williams-Ellis, but their ghosts remain and every garden centre pays tribute to a collective yearning for open-air theatricality, so that dreams dreamt in Shugborough might be replicated in Solihull. If you

Martin Gayford

Let’s talk about sex

At one time, Damien Hirst was fond of remarking that art should deal with the Gauguin questions. Namely, ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’ Hirst would sum up with a deft shift from post-impressionism to Michael Caine: ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’ The new exhibition of work by the American artist Jeff Koons at Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery might raise the same query in a visitor’s mind. Among other sights, you are confronted by a number of brand-new vacuum cleaners, mounted over neon lighting tubes; soon afterwards by a shiny blue sculpture, six metres high, representing a monkey made out of twisted balloons. Then

Kate Chisholm

Polluted by podcasts

Just to prove my esteemed colleague wrong I’ve been out there in podcast space looking for a wireless moment that will outclass the impact, the fascination, the compelling authority of much (though not all) of Radio 4’s daily output. Of course, there’s a lot of good stuff being made but how do you discover what’s worth spending time with? It’s hard to make a serendipitous discovery by surfing the web. There’s no equivalent to the simple switching of a button and that instant connection, our attention held, communication created, imagination fed. You have to work hard to find a podcast that has edge, knowledge, aural style; all you can do

James Delingpole

Arrested development

Sometimes I wonder whether, of all the literary genres, graphic novels aren’t the most stupidly overrated. I can say this because I’m old enough to remember when they were just this obscure thing you had to seek out in specialist stores like Forbidden Planet, understood only by pale, nerdy teens and twenty-somethings who felt superior to, but unappreciated by, the real world outside. Then Watchmen came along and spoiled the party in much the same way Britpop ruined indie. Suddenly, graphic novels became everyone’s domain. See how the Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta (Alan Moore was the author; David Lloyd the illustrator) has become almost as recognisable a