Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

The craft renaissance

As long ago as the 1960s, the poet Edward James was worried that traditional crafts were dying out. Having frittered much of the family fortune he had inherited, aged five, on supporting struggling surrealists (he commissioned the Mae West lips sofa and lobster telephone from a scuffling Dali) and on backing shows starring his actress girlfriends (‘very wealth-consuming,’ he admitted, ‘because invariably they flopped’) then creating an 80-acre sculpture garden in the Sierra Gorda mountains of Mexico, the man described as ‘the last of the great eccentrics’ decided in his late fifties to invest his remaining money in something more sensible. So in 1964 he founded the Edward James Foundation

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

An exhilarating debut: Peltokoski’s Mozart Symphonies reviewed

Grade: A- Here’s an oddly structured album of Mozart’s symphonies 35, 40 and 36 from the world’s most fashionable young Finnish conductor – and, no, it isn’t Klaus Makela, the 28-year-old maestro of the Oslo Philharmonic and Orchestre de Paris who’s taking over in Amsterdam and Chicago. It’s Tarmo Peltokoski, 24, who hasn’t yet had to cope with iffy reviews hinting that he’s been overpromoted. Peltokoski is cute, clever and scarily self-assured. He’s already music director of the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra and is about to hold the same position in Toulouse. He’s principal guest conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic and also the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, the Mercedes-Benz of chamber

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Eddie Izzard’s one-man Hamlet deserves top marks

Every Hamlet is a failure. It always feels that way because playgoers tend to compare what they’re seeing with a superior version that exists only in their heads. And since disappointment is inevitable, it’s worth celebrating the successful novelties in Eddie Izzard’s solo version. He makes some valuable breakthroughs, especially in the comedic sections. Izzard makes some valuable breakthroughs. His Gravedigger is funny. Actually funny. That’s rare His Gravedigger is funny. Actually funny. That’s pretty rare. He plays Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as sock-puppets whose robotic yapping he imitates with his hands. Brilliant stuff. Well worth copying. His Osric is a greasy, cocktail-party flatterer with a faint Mexican accent. Osric, the

James Delingpole James Delingpole

How a TikTok dance craze turned into a brainwashing cult

Because you don’t – I hope – use TikTok you will never have heard of the Wilking sisters. But back in the day (2020) they were huge, their homemade videos of dance routines performed at their suburban Michigan home attracting 127 million views. A year later, it all turned sour. Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult opens with one half of the sibling duo, Melanie, talking tearfully about her terrible loss. You think at first that Miranda has died. But no, it’s almost worse, for Miranda has become a living ghost – still present on social media, but dead to her family and friends, and unrecognisable from the

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Under the Taliban, Afghan light entertainment accrued unusual weight

For a television talent show, Afghan Star had unusually high stakes. When it first hit Afghanistan’s screens in 2005, four years after the fall of the Taliban, it represented the triumph of music over those who had attempted to smother it. Even from the show’s somewhat chaotic inception, it galvanised a nation, sending supporters out on to the streets to canvas for their favourite performers. When the Taliban first swept into town, people were overjoyed: they were seen as ‘angels of peace’ The first winner, Shakib Hamdard, certainly deserved some luck: he had lost his father to a suicide bomb and his brother to a rocket attack, and was driving

Lucy Davies

Breathtaking: Mary Cassatt at Work, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, reviewed

Work – in the sense of toil – is about the last thing a 19th-century painter wished to be associated with. Inspiration and success were gifts bestowed on the lucky few – about as easy to grasp as smoke. For Mary Cassatt, however, art was nothing more than work. ‘Effort upon effort,’ is how she described the process of painting to her friend, the collector Louisine Havemeyer. Pissarro admired her technical skill, Gauguin her charm and strength, but Degas was her true mentor Still, she produced almost 1,000 works in her lifetime, and Mary Cassatt at Work – a new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – tells us

Richard Bratby

Shiny, raunchy, heartless spectacular: Platée, at Garsington, reviewed

Fast times on Mount Olympus. Jupiter has been shagging around again and now his wife Juno has bailed on their hit reality show Jupiter & Juno, storming off set in a thundercloud of gold lamé and wheeled luggage. The producers are freaking out. Production runners scamper in all directions until Bacchus sends out to Starbucks and they all sit down to brainstorm a route out of ratings Hades. Meanwhile the luxury villa lies silent, its jacuzzi empty and the fake grass scattered with cardboard coffee trays. Cupid, it turns out, might have a plan – she knows a wannabe called Platée and, hilariously, she’s a total minger. Garsington’s new Platée

Deborah Ross

Minor Linklater but fun: Hit Man reviewed

Richard Linklater’s Hit Man is a minor Linklater but a minor Linklater is still an event. Also, after all those contemplative, existential films (Boyhood, the Before trilogy), who can blame him for letting his hair down with a sexy rom-com thriller that’s not concerned with deep questions. Though the film doesn’t add up to much, it is ‘based on a somewhat true story’ and it is a fun ride – somewhat. The ‘somewhat true story’ is extraordinary, even if it’s only the starting point. The person it’s based on is Gary Johnson, who died in 2022, just before filming began. He was a Houston college professor (psychology) who also worked

Thursday

Robert Jackman

An exclusive look at Graham Linehan’s Father Ted musical

The tree-lined streets of Rotherhithe are an odd place to unveil a West End musical. But this is a suitably odd situation. Graham Linehan – lauded comedy writer turned culture warrior – is about to unveil what he calls ‘a musical that may never be seen’. For much of the past 30 years, the idea of turning Father Ted, cult sitcom of the 1990s, into a West End musical would have seemed a hot prospect – certainly to the legions of nerdy, largely male fans who still stream episodes decades later. Once upon a time, it looked destined for Shaftesbury Avenue, backed by one of the biggest names in theatre.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Let the Lemon Twigs pour warm syrup into your ears

Grade: A If you enjoy the sensation of having warm, jangly syrup poured directly into your ear, then this is probably the summer album for you. You might think that syrup cannot, by definition, be jangly. But imagine treacle with popping candy in it – poured into your ear in a kindly manner by a smiling young man. This Long Island sibling duo have been honing their pastiche for eight years or so and here reference almost every power-pop band that ever existed, from the Byrds via the dB’s to Teenage Fanclub, but also taking in the winsome pop which dominated our charts before the Beatles came along (but post

James Walton

I worry Romesh Ranganathan might not have enough work

Let’s say, for the purposes of this joke, that I was recently staying in a hotel and kept hearing through the wall a voice shouting, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ At first I assumed it was someone having sex – but I later found out that the next-door room was occupied by Romesh Ranganathan’s agent. This year’s Comic Relief featured a W1A sketch where one of the gags was about how Ranganathan now presents everything on television. But the truth is, apart from that sketch, his only TV gigs so far this year have been presenting The Weakest Link, presenting the Baftas, co-presenting Rob & Romesh Vs…, co-writing and starring in the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Amazingly sloppy: Romeo & Juliet, at Duke of York’s Theatre, reviewed

Romeo & Juliet is Shakespeare with power cuts. The lighting in Jamie Lloyd’s cheerless production keeps shutting down, perhaps deliberately. The show stars Tom Holland (also known as Spider-Man) whose home in Verona resembles a sound studio that’s just been burgled. There’s nothing in it apart from a few microphones on metal stands. He and his mates, all dressed in hoodies and black jeans, deliver their lines without feeling or energy as if recording the text for an audiobook. Some of them appear to misunderstand the verse. Shakespeare’s most thrilling romance has been turned into a sexless bore When not muttering their lines they stare accusingly into the middle distance,

Richard Bratby

When Fauré played The Spectator

Gabriel Fauré composed his song cycle La bonne chanson in 1894 for piano and voice. But he added string parts later and he premièred that version in April 1898 at the London home of his friend Frank Schuster: 22 Old Queen Street, the building currently occupied by this very magazine. I’m not sure how much Fauré gets played at Spectator HQ these days; his music certainly hasn’t been a feature of recent summer parties. Perhaps Fauré himself caressed the ivories where James Delingpole and Toby Young now prop up the bar. Imagine Verlaine’s poetry drifting out into the garden to mingle with Rod Liddle’s cigarette smoke on the moonlit air.

Laura Gascoigne

Is there still life in British still life?

‘The tyrannical rule of nature morte is, at last, over,’ announced Paul Nash in the Listener in 1931. ‘Apples have had their day.’ Since Cézanne fulfilled his famous boast that he would astonish Paris with an apple, artists had been trying the same trick in London, with limited success. Astonishment, unfortunately, only works once. Nash had had it up to here with them apples: tired of post-impressionism, tired of still life. An electric toothbrush occupied the same place in Hamilton’s heart as Mont Sainte-Victoire in Cézanne’s Continental ghosts haunt the tabletops of Pallant House Gallery’s informative new survey of modern and contemporary British still life. First it was the Dutch,

Rupert Christiansen

Arresting and memorable: Compagnie Maguy Marin’s May B reviewed

Samuel Beckett was notoriously reluctant to let people muck about with his work, so it’s somewhat surprising to learn that he licensed and approved Maguy Marin’s May B. This 90-minute ‘dance theatre’ fantasia may play on vaguely Beckettian themes but in no way is it faithful to his texts or instructions – in some respects it even subverts them. Yet it has enjoyed huge success all over Europe since its première in 1982, and finally reached Britain last week. A long wait, for something that turns out to be very odd indeed. Ten dancers of all shapes and sizes in grotesque make-up and dressed in chalky, tatty underclothes stand immobile

Michael Hann

Nickelback may not be cool but they are very good at what they do

In May 2013, Rolling Stone polled its readers in an attempt to discover which band might be crowned the worst of the 1990s. The winners – or losers, depending on how you look at it – were Creed, trailed in second place by Nickelback. Eleven years on and Creed appear to have turned that status around, in America at least – Vanity Fair, Vice and Slate have noticed that they have, whisper it, become cool. And Nickelback? Well, no one’s claiming coolness for them: last year they released a documentary called Hate to Love: Nickelback, a recognition of the fact that, outside their fanbase, they are usually mentioned only as

Deborah Ross

Craving some alien spider insanity? Sting’s the film for you

This week, a horror film – and with it, a whole load of alien spider insanity. If you’ve been hankering after a whole load of alien spider insanity, then Sting will hit the spot. As a rule, I avoid this genre, as I still suffer from nightmares after bunking off school to see The Exorcist (aged 12), but this is playful, B-movie horror rather than horror horror. It’s 90 minutes of silly, daft fun. I think I’ll leave a shorter gap between these films in future. Maybe every 35 years rather than every 40? I think I’ll leave a shorter gap between horror films in future. Maybe every 35 years?

Saturday

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Quentin Letts, Owen Matthews, Michael Hann, Laura Gascoigne, and Michael Simmons

31 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Quentin Letts takes us through his diary for the week (1:12); Owen Matthews details the shadow fleet helping Russia to evade sanctions (7:15); Michael Hann reports on the country music revival (15:05); Laura Gascoigne reviews exhibitions at the Tate Britain and at Studio Voltaire (21:20); and, Michael Simmons provides his notes on the post-pub stable, the doner kebab (26:20). Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Oscar Edmondson.  

Thursday

Michael Hann

The unstoppable rise of country music

When a major artist releases a new album, the first thing to follow is the onslaught of think pieces. And when Beyoncé released Cowboy Carter earlier this year, the tone of these think pieces – especially on this side of the Atlantic – was one of slightly baffled congratulation. Here, at last, was a pioneer who might drag this hidebound genre – of sequins and satin, of lachrymose, middle-aged songs about drink and divorce – into the modern age. ‘Modern country is like punk for the Hannah Montana generation’ The only problem is that Beyoncé was not leading; she was following. Beyoncé pivoted to country not to make it cool,

Laura Gascoigne

Suppress your groans: this women-only show is fascinating

In a Victorian art dealer’s shop a woman waits with her young son while the supercilious owner examines her work; behind her two top-hatted gents interrupt their inspection of a drawing of a dancer in a tutu to give her the once-over. The woman’s shabby umbrella, propped against the counter, awaits reopening in the rain outside. She knows what the dealer will say, and so do we. Every picture tells a story, and Emily Mary Osborn’s ‘Nameless and Friendless’ (1857) summarises the plot of Tate Britain’s latest exhibition, Now You See Us. Unlike her picture’s protagonist, Osborn was herself a successful artist in a field dominated by men – not