Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Radio is the best way to mug up on the classics

If ever I found myself at a pretentious literary party obliged to play David Lodge’s ‘Humiliation’ game and to confess to the great books I’ve never read, I’d only escape the ignominy of winning (by being the most ignorant) because of the radio and the almost weekly possibility of hearing yet another classic adapted as a drama or read at bedtime. The nuances of the novel may be lost in translation — the depth of characterisation, the complexities of the plot, its many threads and diversions — but a good adaptation will capture the essence, the true feeling of the original and take us there in our imaginations as effectively

Ismene Brown

50 shades of beige: English National Ballet’s Modern Masters at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

My moment of the week was stumbling into the shocking, fantastical Cabinet of Curiosities in the Alexander McQueen show at the V&A. On the walls were tier upon tier of dresses, shoes and headdresses, feathered, leathered, beaded, painted, razored, or tenderly embroidered with a fairy needle. Rotating at the centre of the room was the Spray Paint Dress that a dazed Shalom Harlow wore while robots ejaculated paint over her in 1998. What could be more sinisterly resonant of classical ballet’s erotic world? McQueen made his one and only ballet working with Sylvie Guillem 18 months before his suicide — remember her as the cross-gender Chevalier d’Eon in Eonnagata? But

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The Heckler: Why I’m allergic to Stephen Sondheim

I came out in a rash when I heard that Emma Thompson was to star in Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd at the Coliseum. Sondheim has that effect on me. And it’s an allergy I bear with pride. I’ve been the victim of a Sondheim evening only once in my life and I emerged feeling as if I’d been shrieked at for three hours by a gorilla with rabies. The show, Sunday in the Park with George, was conceived as an exercise in ‘musical pointillism’ to honour the painter Georges Seurat. Musical pointillism? Come on. Sondheim has supporters that I admire, like Michael Grandage, and I would put the following questions

Deborah Ross

The Voices review: a hateful, repellent, empty film

The Voices is ‘a dark comedy about a serial killer’, which is not an overcrowded genre, and I think we can now plainly see for why. I was up for it, initially. The buzz around the film had been good. ‘Unexpectedly pleasurable’, GQ. ‘Wild and hilarious’, Hollywood Reporter. Which just goes to show: never, ever trust reviews. This is a hateful and repellent and empty film. This is not pleasurable, unexpectedly, expectedly, or otherwise and it is neither wild nor hilarious. I bitterly resent each of the 104 minutes I gave to it, and I say that as someone who never has anything better to do. It may even be

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Radiant Vermin at the Soho Theatre reviewed: a barmy little sketch posing as a revolutionary satire

Philip Ridley is best known as the screenwriter of The Krays, in which Gary and Martin Kemp played Ronnie and Reggie as a pair of tanned and lisping choirboys. Ridley loves to bang his own gong. And he’s got enough gongs to raise quite a racket. The Smarties Prize, the W.H. Smith Mind-Boggling Book Award, the George Sadoul prize, the best director award at the Porto Film Festival. His action-packed CV even features trophies he nearly won but didn’t: the London Fringe Best Play Award (nominated); the Carnegie Medal (shortlisted). And no London writer has shown more literary potential than Ridley. He remains the only earthling ever to receive the

Connie Bensley

Don’t Look Back

No, let’s not look at the old photographs any more: our hair was so full and shiny then, and anyway we can’t tell all those babies apart now. And who was the woman in the lace blouse sitting on our sofa, with that basilisk stare? I don’t remember ever seeing her before. Let’s put the albums back on the shelf and settle down with that serial killer thing on TV. That always cheers us up.

Paul Birtill

Not Mister Jones!

My father was always arguing and falling out with people in the neighbourhood, but when he clashed with Mister Jones, our friendly, cheerful greengrocer, I remember my brother shouting in dismay, ‘Oh not Mister Jones as well!’

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Mark Gatiss: I based Sherlock’s Mycroft on Peter Mandelson

In the BBC’s Sherlock, Mark Gatiss plays Sherlock Holmes’s sly older brother Mycroft. Now the actor has revealed in an interview with the Radio Times that the person who inspired his performance is none other than Peter Mandelson. ‘I based Mycroft on Peter Mandelson. It was explicit even before I was going to play him. Steven Moffat and I talked about how Mandelsonian Mycroft was… Conan Doyle says Mycroft is the British government. He’s the power behind the throne. Both Mandelson and Mycroft are the sort of people who, I think, would sit out a world war. [They would think] there’s a longer game to be played.’ Happily, this meant Gatiss didn’t need to stretch himself too

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Eurovision in sign language

I was at the hall of Swedish Church in Marylebone last night to watch the final of Melody Festival – the bar was selling dill crisps, pear cider and plenty merriment. As I expected, ‘Heroes’ won. But the show itself was a masterpiece of entertainment, an example of how Swedish TV is now vastly superior to the BBC in spite of having a fraction of its entertainment budget. The show was played to a 28,000-strong crowd (a panel of six BBC bureaucrats choose the lamentable UK entries) Melody Festival opened with a version of Final Countdown (a Swedish anthem) sung in swing time by Conchita, last year’s Eurovision winner. As the votes

Thursday

Shura Slater

Alexander McQueen may have been a prat but at least he was an interesting one

Alexander McQueen famously claimed to have stitched ‘I am a c***’ into the entoilage of a jacket for Prince Charles. The insult was invisible behind the lining and his tailor master later investigated and found nothing. So what was this? An invention, an embroidery of the truth? It certainly became a good source of publicity as he spread the story — step one in the creation of his bad-boy image. McQueen wore his counterculturalism loudly on his sleeve. Often tediously. He wanted to be dark, dark, oh so dark. Great. I think it’s pratty, but there are millions of people who don’t, so good for him — good for them.

Martin Gayford

Flying witches, mad old men, cannibals: what was going on in Goya’s head?

It is not impossible to create good art that makes a political point, just highly unusual. Goya’s ‘Third of May’ is the supreme example of how to pull it off. It is a great picture with a universal message — the terrible suffering of the innocent victims of war — and one echoed, with fresh horrors, in the news today. The figure in front of the firing squad, arms flung wide, in Goya’s picture is everyman. One of the reasons for its power, and for that of ‘Disasters of War’, his series of aquatint etchings, is that images of violence and evil sprang spontaneously from his imagination. There are some

The Spectator

How (not) to poison a dog

Deadly to dogs An Irish setter was allegedly poisoned at Crufts, using beef containing slug pellets. Some other substances with which dog-show rivals could poison your pooch: — Chocolate contains theobromine, a stimulant which dogs cannot metabolise, and which causes the heart to race. It takes just 1 oz per pound of body weight of milk chocolate and a third of an ounce per pound of body weight of dark chocolate to kill a dog. — Grapes and raisins can cause kidney failure in two thirds of dogs. The link was discovered by America’s Animal Poison Control Center in 2004 after the fruit was linked to the deaths of 140 animals in one year,

N. S.

Adam and Eve Take an Allotment

The figure in the shadows stared at Eve And shook the beans inside the bag. ‘Believe Me, crops of serpentini beans achieve A growth of two feet, even more, no lie.’ Eve, flattered by him, looked and gave a sigh. He rattled them and said, ‘Give them a try…’ ‘Perhaps I could be tempted…’ Blushing red, Eve muttered, playing with the seeds, her head A blaze of possibilities, the bed So promising where they could start the plot. She turned. ‘Now Adam, should we take the lot? A multi-buy…’She fanned herself.‘It’s hot Out here. There’s no escaping all this heat!’ Then Adam spoke, ‘I’ll put a garden seat In for

Harry Mount

Seeing Paris through Impressionist eyes

The spectre of the Charlie Hebdo killings still hangs over Paris. Outside the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, opposite the Louvre, there’s a big poster of Cabu, one of the murdered cartoonists. The poster is peppered with fake bullet holes; underneath, the caption reads, ‘It doesn’t hurt at all.’ I didn’t realise, until I talked to the curator of the new Impressionist show at the National Gallery in London, that Cabu was a popular figure on French children’s TV in the 1970s. His death particularly haunts the middle-aged, who grew up on his cartoons. The Charlie Hebdo posters across Paris still bring you up short. I hope it isn’t sacrilege

Anna Picard

Alice in Wonderland at the Barbican reviewed: too much miaowing

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson loved little girls. He loved to tell them stories, he loved to feed them jam, he loved to set them puzzles, and he loved to take their photographs. On 25 March, 1863, he composed a list of 107 prepubescent portrait subjects, arranged alphabetically by forename. Below the Agneses came the Alices, including Alice Liddell, the little girl for whom he created Alice in Wonderland. Mostly good-mannered, occasionally lachrymose and stuffed full of half-remembered governess-led learning, the fictional Alice displays behaviour quite out of step with her age. Instead of doing what she is told to do by the creatures she meets, she behaves like an adolescent (though

Kate Chisholm

What it’s really like to live in India today – stressful

After a month cooped up in a Scottish castle, no internet, no TV, and no radio, watching hectic snowflakes billowing through the wooded hillside opposite my window, I realise that what I’ve missed most about this supposed deprivation has not been the news (to which I thought I was addicted) or the chatter, the company of other voices, but the chance to be taken in my head to other places and inside quite different experiences of life. It’s not just the factual education that radio can provide (although I’m pretty sure most of what I know has come from listening on air), it’s the absorbing intimacy of hearing other people

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The Armour at Langham Hotel reviewed: three new playlets that never get going

One of last year’s unexpected treasures was a novelty show by Defibrillator that took three neglected Tennessee Williams plays, all set in hotel rooms, and staged them in suites at a five-star dosshouse in central London. The Langham Hotel, an antique hulk of marble and glass overlooking Broadcasting House, is justly proud of its raffish literary history. Arthur Conan Doyle once met Oscar Wilde there for a chinwag and a cup of tea and by the time the bill arrived they’d conceived a fictional detective named Holmes. The Langham’s management is keen for Defibrillator to repeat last year’s success but how? Search the archive for more plays set in hotels?

James Walton

Poldark review: drama by committee

By my calculations, the remake of Poldark (BBC1, Sunday) is the first time BBC drama has returned to Cornwall since that famously mumbling Jamaica Inn — which may explain why even the lowliest yokel here tends to project from the diaphragm. Leading both the cast and the diaphragm-projection is Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark, initially seen as a British Redcoat in a wood rather unconvincingly captioned ‘Virginia, America, 1781’. The short scene that followed efficiently established that he had a rackety past and some politically radical ideas, before the American rebels attacked, leaving several extras dead. Ross himself suffered injuries bad enough to bring on a severe case of flashback,

Deborah Ross

Suite Francaise review: what is this film playing at, when it comes to Jews in attics?

Suite Française is being billed as a second world war romance about ‘forbidden love’ and, in this regard, it is handsome, solid, well played and probably fine, if you haven’t read Irène Némirovsky’s novel, but if you have? Then you may have been hoping and praying for something deeper, something more special. As you know — because I have been nothing if not repetitive down the years — I desperately try not to compare films with their source material. Let a film live or die by its own merits. But this book nags like nothing else on earth. What? Really? No! And where did that Jew in the attic come