Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

James Heale, Lara Prendergast, Patrick Marnham, Laura Gascoigne and Michael Simmons

32 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: James Heale interviews Woody Johnson, the former American Ambassador to the UK, about a possible second Trump term (1:19); Lara Prendergast reflects on the issue of smartphones for children and what lessons we could learn from Keir Starmer’s approach to privacy (6:35); reviewing Patrick Bishop’s book ‘Paris ’44: The Shame and the Glory’, Patrick Marnham argues the liberation of Paris was hard won (12:37); Laura Gascoigne examines Ukraine’s avant garde movement in light of the Russian invasion (20:34); and, Michael Simmons provides his notes on venn diagrams (28:33).  Presented by Patrick Gibbons.  

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

The tragic fate of Ukraine’s avant-garde

In a recent interview Oleksandr Syrskyi, the new commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, said that he spends his time off reading books on the country’s ‘difficult history’. If even he finds it difficult, where do us non-Ukrainians start? In the introduction to its new exhibition, the Royal Academy makes a brave attempt at explaining the political background to Ukrainian modernism, developed in a brief window of creative opportunity before it was slammed shut by Soviet repression. To western eyes, though, it’s not immediately clear what distinguishes the 70 works on show – the majority on loan from Ukraine’s National Art Museum and Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema – from

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Netflix has massacred The Decameron

Unless you did English A-level and shoehorned a mention of it into your Chaucer paper to try to get extra marks, you probably haven’t even heard of Boccaccio’s The Decameron, let alone read it. Which no doubt partly explains Netflix’s decision to give it the Bridgerton treatment: no one, anywhere, is liable to complain about their most cherished classic being massacred. I had to look up who was responsible for this atrocity of a show, so I could check who to hate But massacred it has been. Just as Bridgerton drives a coach and horses – or bulldozer with flashing rave lights and klaxons, more like – through anything that

Deborah Ross

Funny, authentic and takes you right back to being 13: Didi reviewed

Didi is a coming-of-age drama by the Taiwanese-American writer-director Sean Wang. It’s set in the summer of 2008 and based on his own adolescence – and here’s the bottom line: it’s an absolute joy. It’s funny, moving, authentic and takes you right back to being 13. (Agh!) The main character here is Chris (Izaac Wang), who is called ‘Didi’ by his family as that’s the Chinese for ‘little brother’. He is 13, lives in Fremont, California, and is about to start high school. There’s no father in the picture as he’s working back in Taiwan. His flustered, put-upon mother, Chungsing (the magnificent Joan Chen), can’t comprehend her children’s American ways

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Reinforces the caricatures it sets out to diminish: Slave Play, at the Noël Coward Theatre, reviewed

Slave Play is a series of hoaxes. The producers announced that ‘Black Out’ performances would be reserved for ‘black-identifying’ playgoers but the ticketing system is colour-blind and these so-called ‘segregated’ shows were attended by audiences of all ethnicities. The PR gambit generated lots of free publicity, but these stunts don’t always translate into ticket sales. The second hour involves screeds of impenetrable psychobabble as the couples bicker and moan The show appears to be a drama set in the Deep South before the American civil war. It opens with a white farmer humiliating his black cleaner, who easily outsmarts him. When he forces her to eat fruit from the dirty

Richard Bratby

Forget the Proms and Edinburgh – the Three Choirs Festival is where it’s at

The Proms have started but there is a world elsewhere, and in Worcester Cathedral the 296th Three Choirs Festival set sail with a concert that couldn’t have happened anywhere else. A few years back I caused grave offence when I described the Three Choirs as a ‘home of lost causes’; as if, coming from The Spectator, that could ever be anything but a compliment. In truth, there’s still no classical music festival that provides such a sense of being plugged into a vital and ancient tradition – of being so close, as Elgar put it to ‘the living centre of music in Great Britain’. So here we were with the

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

We’ve been doing a monstrous disservice to goldfish

As everyone knows, Londoners don’t talk to strangers. And heaven forbid that anyone should make eye contact on the Tube. But despite having lived in the city for decades now, I’ve never really found this to be true. My average day out and about is punctuated by pleasant little conversations with strangers. Now and then, without too much effort, I’ve hit chat jackpot and got an entire life story out of a fellow bus passenger in seven stops. It seems that for many years we have been doing a monstrous disservice to goldfish Still, old myths die hard, and Radio 4 is promoting the new series of Alexei Sayle’s Strangers

Graeme Thomson

Jack White’s new album will be of close interest to Led Zeppelin’s legal team

The ploy of releasing an album without any advance warning comes into play when an artist feels they are being paid either too much or too little attention. The stealth arrival of Jack White’s new solo album falls firmly into the second category. Putting out music in this way ensures additional media coverage and a certain level of intrigue I didn’t love White’s old band, the White Stripes, back when they were a garage-rock/blues revival phenomenon in the early 2000s. Since their demise in 2011, the world seems to be coming around to this way of thinking. Their most successful albums, Elephant and White Blood Cells, hold little cultural currency

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The most exhilarating ‘authentic’ Mozart I’ve ever heard

Grade: A+ Yet another double bill of Mozart’s Piano Concertos 20 and 23! There’s an online database of 185 recordings of the first of these, the brooding K466 in D minor, and the classically perfect K488 in A major isn’t far behind. Can there really be anything new to say about either of them? The answer is yes, and in virtually every bar. Olga Pashchenko, a Russian-born pianist based in the Netherlands, here directs the top-flight period ensemble Il Gardellino in her second album of Mozart concertos. She’s playing a fortepiano, but don’t let that put you off: it’s a sweet-toned instrument whose soft action helps Pashchenko deliver cheeky ornaments

Thursday

Robert Gore-Langton

Why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies

Sherlock Holmes fans will be delighted to know that there is a new play featuring the great man. In it Holmes, 72, bored silly by retirement and bee-keeping in the Sussex Downs, is back living at his old haunt of 221B Baker Street and  reunited with the widowed Watson. The case that lands in Holmes’s lap concerns a reported outbreak of fairies in the Bradford area. Thus we are plunged into the Cottingley saga, a mystery that fascinated the public in the 1920s. The play is by Fiona Maher, a fairy-lore expert, organiser of the Legendary Llangollen Faery Festival (she’s known as Tink) and author of a very well-researched book

Michael Hann

Charismatic, powerful and raw: Patti Smith, at Somerset House, reviewed

There are certain long-established rules for describing Patti Smith. Google her name and the words ‘shaman’ and ‘priestess’ and you’ll see what I mean. For the best part of 50 years she’s been treated as though she’s a mystical object, a human convergence of ley lines, as much as a rock singer. In the courtyard at Somerset House, she didn’t exactly discourage the clichés. There was a long lecture on the power of the full ‘buck’ moon, which was hidden by clouds but still prompted the people in front of me to pull out their phones to check astronomy apps. There was a lengthy hymn to William Blake that concluded:

Laura Gascoigne

How a market town in Hampshire shaped Peggy Guggenheim

On 24 April 1937 Marguerite Guggenheim – known as Peggy – of Yew Tree Cottage, Hurst was booked by a certain PC Dore for driving an unlicensed vehicle through nearby Petersfield. What was the founder of the famous Venice museum doing in a market town in Hampshire? It’s a long story, vividly told in an exhibition marking the 25th anniversary of the opening of Petersfield Museum on the site of the former police station and courthouse where she paid her £1 fine. ‘Peggy,’ said a friend, ‘is absolutely revolting about sex. Delicacy is unknown to her’ In the 1930s the Jewish-American heiress, who had lost her father Benjamin on the

James Walton

Clear, thorough and gripping: BBC2’s Horizon – The Battle to Beat Malaria

If you transcribed the narrator’s script in almost any episode of Horizon, you’d notice something striking: an awful lot of the phrases would end with a colon, and for one obvious reason: to play a neat trick on the viewers: that of making them keen to hear what comes next. (You get the idea.) Monday’s programme therefore began by explaining that the mosquito is ‘the target of one of medical science’s greatest quests: the battle to save millions of lives and end a scourge that has shaped human history: malaria’. Unusually for an uncompromising science documentary, the finale was a genuine tear-jerker Now in its 51st year, Horizon has spent

Deborah Ross

Oblique and long but never boring: About Dry Grasses reviewed

About Dry Grasses is the latest film from Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan and it had better – I thought to myself as the lights dimmed – have a great deal to say about dry grasses that is fascinating and insightful, given it has a formidable running time of 200 minutes. (That’s nearly three and a half hours in old money.) It is, needless to say – with a title like that, few will mistake it for a Marvel flick – one of those films where the story unfolds obliquely and meditatively and may say everything or nothing, it’s hard to know. All I can tell you for sure is

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Shapeless and facile: The Hot Wing King, at the Dorfman Theatre, reviewed

Our subsidised theatres often import shows from the US without asking whether our theatrical tastes align with America’s. The latest arrival, The Hot Wing King, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning play about unhealthy eating. The production opens in a luxury house in Memphis, occupied, rather strangely, by four gay men who dress gracelessly in cheap, flashy designer gear. They behave like overgrown babies and spend their time leaping about the place, bickering and bantering, singing songs, performing dance moves and exchanging cuddles. This cameo repeats the caricature of the foolish African crook. Why is the Globe perpetuating racial bigotry? One of the four man-babies wears a business suit and calls himself

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Boring, corporate, imitative, inane and gutless: Kasabian’s Happenings reviewed

Grade: D+ Happenings were interesting, or irritating, events staged from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s by performers who eschewed the corporate and bourgeois restraints placed on artists and veered into surrealism, parody, violence and, of course, situationism. Think Allan Kaprow and John Cage. In rock music, meanwhile, think the Fugs and the Pink Fairies. Happenings by our country’s most profitable faux-rawk outfit, Leicester’s Kasabian, is by contrast a celebration of everything happenings were most opposed to. It is boring, corporate, imitative, inane and gutless. I would almost rather listen to an album by Dua Lipa. It is 20 years since Kasabian’s first album and they have got

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

Are kids’ games under threat?

We hear a lot about the rights of the child, but the first I heard of the child’s right to play was at the Barbican’s latest exhibition. Among the games-related facts in Francis Alÿs’s new show is a quote from Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children, confirming a child’s right ‘to engage in play and recreational activities’. Barbie has stood seven times for the US presidency. (As a young looking 65, she could do well) Are children’s games under threat? Alÿs thinks so. Children in Europe today, he laments, have a tenth of the freedom to roam that he enjoyed growing up in the

Graeme Thomson

Hard to love – but Shirley Manson is terrific: Garbage, at Usher Hall, reviewed

There’s nothing quite like the drama of a prodigal’s return. ‘I’ve been singing in this venue since I was ten years old,’ announces Shirley Manson, staring down nearly half a century of personal history at Edinburgh’s ornate Usher Hall. The fact that Garbage’s lead singer made the United States her primary residence many years ago lends this homecoming concert added potency. There are shout-outs to her dad, a ‘Happy Birthday’ serenade for her sister and what looks like a tear or two at the start of the encore. A ‘badass’ attitude is so sleekly applied it seems like a Che Guevara T-shirt in the racks at M&S For all the

Deborah Ross

Impossible to doze through, sadly: Twisters reviewed

Twisters is an action-disaster film that follows ‘storm-chasers’ and is so relentless in its own pursuit of tornadoes that plot, character and dialogue are also thrown to the wind. It has a classy cast (Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell) and a classy director (Lee Isaac Chung) but if you believe, as I do, that once you’ve seen one big storm you’ve seen them all don’t expect any mercy. This never lets you off the hook and is so furiously and incessantly loud that a doze is impossible. God knows I tried. This film never lets you off the hook and is so furiously loud that a doze is impossible. God knows

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Vapid and pretentious: Visit From An Unknown Woman, at Hampstead Theatre, reviewed

Visit From An Unknown Woman, adapted by Christopher Hampton from a short story by Stefan Zweig, opens like an episode of Seinfeld. A playboy writer enjoys a fling with a black-clad beauty – but when he kisses her goodbye, he can’t remember her name. It feels like a set-up for a gag, but the script is very short of jokes. A year passes and the mysterious beauty, named Marianne, returns to the playboy’s pad and delivers a series of astonishing revelations. At this point, the show turns into a memory play as Marianne starts to yammer about her childhood, her family struggles and a mass of other details which sound