Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Jeremy Clarkson rants about BBC at charity event: ‘I didn’t foresee my sacking’

Next week Lord Hall will read the BBC’s report into Jeremy Clarkson’s suspension from Top Gear and make a decision about Clarkson’s future. In light of this, Clarkson may well live to regret his night out at the Roundhouse gala. Mr S was a guest at last night’s charity fundraiser and witnessed Clarkson launching a foul-mouthed attack on the BBC over his alleged ‘fracas’ with a producer. The presenter got on stage at the glitzy bash and told the audience that the BBC were ‘f—ing b—–ds’, adding that by suspending him they had ‘f—ed themselves’. The comments came as Clarkson raised £100,000 for the arts charity, which helps young people in the creative industries, by offering attendees the chance to join

Thursday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Will you miss Mad Men? James Delingpole won’t

There’s a scene in the finale of season six that embodies everything that’s so right and so wrong with Mad Men. Don Draper, that fathomless enigma of a Madison Avenue copywriting anti-hero, is pitching for the Hershey’s chocolate account. Hershey’s represents that dream combination — an American brand legend that has never really advertised before. So winning this deal really matters. Draper — as always — is pitch-perfect. Selling products is about telling stories. And the story here is about how good the young Don Draper felt when his Daddy took him into a store and offered to buy him anything he wanted. Naturally he chose a Hershey’s bar. The

Martin Gayford

Richard Diebenkorn at the Royal Academy reviewed: among the best visual evocations of LA there are

It is true that, like wine, certain artists don’t travel. Richard Diebenkorn, subject of the spring exhibition in the Royal Academy’s Sackler Wing, is a case in point: an American painter who is revered in his native land, but of whom few will have heard over here. Will the RA show change that, and — more crucially — does it deserve to? Up to a point. Diebenkorn (1922–93) was no Mark Rothko or Willem de Kooning. He was a second-generation abstract expressionist, almost two decades younger than those two, and a lower-voltage talent to boot. But he created some memorably beautiful pictures, most of the best of them situated in

Taki

No man ever wanted a dumb broad for a wife

As I was flipping through some television garbage trying to induce sleep, I came upon an old western starring Kirk Douglas, Dorothy Malone and Rock Hudson. Once upon a time the above names would have been common points of reference — a collective vocabulary signifying the Fifties: chrome tailfins, standard-issue grey flannel suits, hats and stifled alternative views. No longer. Common points of reference today are unrecognisable, at least for yours truly, still stuck on black-and-white movies, good manners and correct dress. At one point in the film, a young, beautiful girl tells a middle-aged Kirk Douglas that she loves him. He dismisses it, telling her she’s just a girl

Ed Cumming

Game of Thrones premiere at the Tower of London, review: the pride before the fall

Television is in a golden age. Or at least so we are told. If you weren’t able to tell from the quality of the programming, the decadence of the parties would give the game away. With the vast budgets of HBO, Netflix and the like – the box-set barons that have usurped the grand Hollywood studios – big series now mean serious hospitality. This kind of pride usually comes before a fall, or at least some lukewarm reviews. Things are getting out of hand. The House of Cards premiere last month involved a whole hotel and a room full of pudding. Never to be outdone in matters of size, the

John Whitworth

Stolen Kisses

This elfin child was taken into care, And maintenance devolved upon the State. His whimpering mother was inadequate, His father vanished into empty air. Life came unfurnished – nobody was there To dress his wounds and make the pain abate. It was too much to ask and far too late To find another mother anywhere. His scars healed up, his head was cleared of lice, His shorts stayed clean, his nose stopped dripping snot, But life to him was what he had not got, And certain of his habits were not nice. He was a ticking clock about to strike. Nobody liked him. What was there to like?

Adam Sweeting

Raised by Wolves review: council-estate life but not as you know it

Journalist, novelist, broadcaster and figurehead of British feminism Caitlin Moran, who writes most of the Times and even had her Twitter feed included on a list of A-Level set texts, is now bidding to break into the sitcom business. Can one woman shoulder this ever-increasing multimedia load, along with the fawning tide of adulation that follows her everywhere? Wisely, she enlisted the help of her sister Caroline to create Raised By Wolves (Channel 4, Monday), a wily reimagining of their home-schooled childhood (alongside six siblings) on a Wolverhampton council estate. After a 2013 pilot, it’s back for a six-part series, with the hyperactive, motormouthed Germaine (the fictionalised Caitlin) played by

Michael Tanner

Royal Opera’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny review: far too well behaved

Brecht/Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was premièred in 1930, Auden/Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in 1951. Twenty-one years separate them, but it seems, as one looks back, enormously more than that. Think of 1994 and now, no time at all, and not only for an ageing opera reviewer. Both works tend to be routinely referred to as masterpieces, but seeing them both in the space of three days — Mahagonny at the Royal Opera, The Rake’s Progress at the Royal Academy of Music — I felt fairly strongly that they are both patchy pieces, neither representative of their composer at or even near his best. What is

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,