Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Florence | 31 March 2016

Once, it seems, Sandro Botticelli played a trick on a neighbour. Next door was a weaver who possessed eight looms. He and his assistants kept these in constant use, creating such a judder-ing racket that the poor painter was unable to concentrate on his pictures. Botticelli implored this fellow to reduce the noise, but to no avail. So eventually the artist carried an enormous rock on to his roof, poised so the slightest vibration would bring it crashing through the noisy weaver’s premises. The man then saw reason. You can easily imagine the problem today as you walk down Botticelli’s street, Via del Porcellana. It’s a long, narrow thoroughfare running

Kate Chisholm

Crossing continents | 31 March 2016

Could radio, and in particular a weekly soap, have a role to play in the Syrian crisis? You might think, no chance, given the levels of violence and terror that have overtaken the country. How can a mere broadcast signal have an impact compared with all that destruction? But, says the director of Radio Alwan, a station operated by Syrians living in exile in a western suburb of Istanbul, ‘radio is effective’. It’s a ‘weapon’ because it ‘allows you to enter the houses of people and talk to them’. It’s also so easy. ‘You don’t need power, you don’t need electricity — just two small batteries.’ He was talking to

Ismene Brown

Black magic

Ballet’s romantic mantra could be summed up by John Keats’s ballad ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, in which a young man remembers his terrible encounter with a supernatural ‘fairy’s child’. Beguiled to sleep with this ravishing fantasy creature, he dreams of a ghostly corps of other chaps similarly beguiled, who warn him that she was a witch who would leave him forever haunted, sick and bereft. You can remodel this fantasy this way and that, switch the genders, reconfigure death, sleep and hallucination, and come up with Giselle, La Sylphide, Swan Lake, La Bayadère in the 19th century, and then find Fokine, Balanchine and Ashton developing it into the 20th

Francesca Steele

Good clean fun

I once forced some pals on a skiing holiday to spend an afternoon off the slopes watching Chalet Girl. Suffice it to say, I have a high tolerance for lowbrow ski films. So if saccharine tales about plucky Alpine underdogs really aren’t your thing you might want to give my views a miss — as you might Eddie the Eagle, a biopic so drenched in cheerful clichés about the British class system, the power of perseverance and cheap slapstick laughs, it is a kind of Downton Abbey on skis. That said, it’s hard to remember an afternoon at the cinema I’ve enjoyed more in recent times (and it’s definitely better

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Funny boys

Sir Ken’s excellent West End residency continues with a sugar-rich confection. Sean Foley has adapted and updated an elderly French farce about an assassin who befriends a needy depressive. Hitman Ralph rents a hotel suite overlooking a courtroom where his target is due to make an appearance. The neighbouring room is occupied by a mopey Welshman, Brian, who wants to hang himself from the light socket. Ralph discovers Brian’s plan and realises that Brian’s death will fill the hotel with cops and ruin his assassination attempt. So Ralph must save Brian from suicide. It’s a pretty clunky scenario and the logistics are frankly incredible because the design postulates two adjacent single

Richard Bratby

The kids are all right

In a remote fishing village a lone figure confronts an unexplained death, standing tormented but unbroken against fate, the community and the elements of sea and wind that surge through every note of the score. No, not Peter Grimes: this is Vaughan Williams’s 1932 operatic setting of Synge’s Riders to the Sea. But Vaughan Williams’s operas are undramatic, runs the received wisdom. There were no great British operas between Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and the premiere of Grimes in 1945, we’re repeatedly told. This student production of Riders to the Sea didn’t just refute those assumptions: it threw them into a riptide and watched them being dragged under and swept

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Love at first sight | 31 March 2016

Now the kids are back for the school holidays, I have a licence to watch complete trash again. No more brooding Scandi dramas (though Follow the Money is shaping up very nicely — plus, as an added bonus, its anti-windfarm theme is really winding up Guardian readers) — just pure televisual soma, such as the masses use to anaesthetise themselves after another thankless day in their veal-fattening pens. First Dates (C4, Fridays), for example. You wouldn’t want to pig out on more than one episode at a time but it’s about as perfectly formed a TV experience as you’ll get: you laugh, you cry, you gawp, you cringe; you feel

Wednesday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Sins of the fathers | 23 March 2016

A feature film about priests who abuse children is being released on 25 March. Which happens to be Good Friday. Geddit? The sacrifice of the innocents. A conspiracy of religious hierarchs. Hand-washing by the secular authorities. I’m sure I can think of some more analogies if you give me time, but that’s enough to be going on with. Enough, certainly, for the distributors to boast that the movie is ‘controversially slated to be released on Easter [sic] Good Friday’. As publicity stunts go, this isn’t subtle. But the film is. The Club, directed by the Chilean Pablo Larraín, sets out to perplex us from the first frame until the last.

Martin Gayford

The counterfeiters

One day, in the autumn of 1960, a young Frenchman launched himself off a garden wall in a suburban street to the south of Paris. He jumped in an unusual away; not as if he expected to land, feet first on the pavement below, nor even as if he were diving into water, but arms outstretched, back arched, apparently taking off into the air above. The result was Yves Klein’s ‘Le Saut dans le vide’ (Leap into the Void), which opens the exhibition Performing for the Camera at Tate Modern. Beside the finished product — a photomontage — are two other images that together explain how it was done. One

Kate Chisholm

Born again

Six years ago, on Good Friday, the journalist Melanie Reid was thrown off her horse while on a cross-country ride in Stirlingshire where she lives. The accident broke her neck and back and left her tetraplegic, paralysed from the armpits downwards. On Easter Sunday on Radio 3 she’s Michael Berkeley’s guest on Private Passions, a timely guest, as he says, because she has recently written in her Sunday Times column about being ‘surprised by a small epiphany of happiness’, of experiencing a ‘rebirth’, if ‘rather cruel’. ‘You find joy in little things …I see all the things that I never saw in my busy life,’ she says, which coming from

James Walton

Good cop, bad cop | 23 March 2016

Which is better, British TV drama or American? A couple of years ago, merely asking the question would have had the hipsters chortling into their obscure US box sets — and even now a strange cultural cringe seems to persist. Nonetheless, I’d suggest, British television drama these days really is in the midst of an era that will have commentators in 20 years’ time routinely (if a bit unimaginatively) reaching for the adjective ‘golden’. Already in 2016 we’ve had War and Peace, Murder, The Night Manager and Happy Valley — and that’s before the hugely welcome return of Line of Duty (BBC2), Jed Mercurio’s riveting thriller about a police anti-corruption

Deborah Ross

Slow burn

The big hitter this week is, of course, Batman v Superman, but if you want to learn something new, and meet characters that’ll stay with you long after, well, get yourself to Court. This is an Indian courtroom drama in which the wheels of justice grind so slowly you’ll want to scream, and now I can see I haven’t sold this well. ‘What do you fancy seeing at the cinema, dear? A courtroom drama in which the wheels of justice grind so slowly you’ll want to scream? Shall I book, or will you?’ But Court’s lassitude is kind of its point. It is one of those film in which not

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Nuclear waste

Miss Atomic Bomb celebrates the sub-culture that grew up around nuclear tests in 1950s America. The citizens of Nevada would throw parties and stage barbecues to coincide with the latest nuclear detonation in the desert. This musical has a lot going for it. The melodies are strong, and well sung. The high-kicking chorus lines are easy on the eye and the show has a zippy, innocent spirit. But the storyline gets sidetracked in a mass of contradictory directions. The main theme follows a homesick farm girl who becomes involved with a runaway soldier whose brother runs a Vegas nightclub where a beauty contest is being held that the farm girl

Monday

Douglas Murray

Finally: proof that the ‘Clarkson’ persona was all just an act

To the extent I have ever thought about him, I have always viewed Jeremy Clarkson as a slight irritant. This is largely because he personifies what a type of lazy leftist believes right-wingers to be like (uninterested in culture, cultivatedly thick, casually racist). But this weekend we learnt what some of us had long-suspected: that rather than being a scourge of our dishonest, molly-coddled, excuse-ridden culture, Clarkson may be one of its happiest and most comfortable creatures. Saturday’s Times carried a long interview with him. It is worth reading not because of Clarkson, but because of what it says about our culture. Because if you fell for the idea of Clarkson

Thursday

Harry Mount

Rebel angels

This is the first exhibition I’ve been to where the Prime Minister joined the hacks at the press view. A week after the Irish general election, the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, came to the biggest show in Ireland devoted to the centenary of the Easter Rising. Kenny’s presence at the press launch just goes to show how the Irish rebellion against British rule at Easter 1916 is still the defining story of modern Ireland. In fact, the Easter Rising was a pretty good failure, although I didn’t suggest that to the Prime Minister at the press view. The rebellion lasted only six days before it was put down by the British

Martin Gayford

Repeat prescription

Walter Sickert was once shown a room full of paintings by a proud collector, who had purchased them on the understanding that they were authentic Sickerts. The painter took one look around, then announced genially, none of these are mine, ‘But none the worse for that!’ Were Giorgione to return to life, and take a stroll around the Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy, he might echo those words. Few of the works on show, in all probability, were actually executed by Giorgione, but they are none the less magnificent for that. This is — wisely — not an exhibition that attempts to reassemble the artistic personality of that enigmatic

Kate Chisholm

Home and away | 17 March 2016

Four programmes, four very different kinds of radio, from a classically made drama to weird sonic ramblings, via the best kind of all: first-person narrative, straight to mike. On Syrian Voices this week on Radio 4 (produced by David Prest), Lyse Doucet has been talking to Syrians whose lives have been utterly changed by the war, now passing its five-year mark. On Monday we heard from Sam, a 22-year-old student who lives in the government-controlled area of Daraa and studies English literature at the university. It was here that the uprising began after some students scrawled graffiti on a wall, ‘It’s your turn next, doctor’, calling for their country to

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Greedy greenies

‘We have a problem. Yes. At the wind farm.’ Any conspiracy thriller with lines like that has definitely got my vote. Possibly most of you are unaware of this, because it’s not something I talk about often, but I happen to be not too fond of the things I call bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes — nor of the charlatans, crooks, liars and parasites who make their living out of them. Indeed, whenever I try to think of an industry that’s worse than wind farms I keep coming unstuck. At least landmines serve a useful purpose for force protection; at least Albanian prostitutes make a few men very happy. Wind, on the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Time out of mind | 17 March 2016

The Maids is a fascinating document. Written in 1947, Jean Genet’s drama portrays a pair of serving girls who enact sexually loaded fantasies while dressed in the clothes of their employer, Madame, whose murder they are secretly plotting. This macabre sketch still resonates because it analyses and presages the key social transition of the 20th century, namely the overthrow of privilege by the underclass. And it boasts extra layers of erotic chic because the sexually inquisitive maids are sisters and because Genet suggested that the girls might be played by men in drag. This delicate, subtle work is as firmly rooted in its historical era as another classic political allegory,

Michael Tanner

Original sin | 17 March 2016

The Royal Opera has bitten the bullet so far as Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov goes, and opted to stage the original 1869 version, with no modifications or additions from his revised 1874 edition, which used to be called ‘definitive’ but which seems to be under a cloud nowadays. Rimsky-Korsakov’s version has been pushed right to the back of the doghouse, so that it might soon be revived for its historical interest. Before I launch into my praise of the new production, which is an unqualified triumph, I would like to register some reservations about the work itself, in any of its versions. It’s routinely said that the hero of the opera