Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

James Walton

When piracy meets protest

Sometimes there are advantages to being ill-informed. Knowing embarrassingly little about why 30 Greenpeace activists were jailed in Russia in 2013, or the wilder assertions made by the broadcaster Alex Jones (emphatically not the woman from The One Show) meant that two documentaries this week unfolded for me like the twistiest – if not necessarily the most plausible – of thrillers. Twenty-four per cent of Americans still doubt that the Sandy Hook massacre even happened Then again, in my slight defence, such ignorance seemed to be what both programmes were assuming – because, unlike many documentaries, they didn’t summarise or give away the story they were about to tell. Instead,

Sam Leith Sam Leith

I’ve finally shaken my Candy Crush addiction

Most of us, once we pass the age when we wash our own underpants, don’t play games on a PC or a console. We think ‘Twitch’ is what you get when your spouse stacks the dishwasher and ‘Discord’ is what comes next. But you bet we play Candy Crush on the commute. Mobile gaming is still gaming, and it’s a big deal. Problem is, most of it’s crap. This is true even when the games are OK. Take the new Strange Horticulture, which ports a well received PC/console original to mobile. It’s a cartoon-gothic puzzle game (you identify plants apothecary-style; there’s a murder plot; vibes abound) which is dragged from

Michael Hann

‘Psychedelic folk that twists and leaps’: Beth Gibbons, at the Barbican, reviewed

A decade ago, a group of people who owned small music venues came to the conclusion that the kinds of places they ran were teetering on the brink of a catastrophic extinction event. And so they formed the Music Venue Trust, which has spent ten years kicking cans and shouting the odds about the need to preserve these places, about how they are the production lines from which the festival headliners of tomorrow come. A brilliant guitarist, a fascinating songwriter, St Vincent cycles sleekly through styles with utter assurance Quite right. Good, small venues are the best place to enjoy both live, loud, raucous music and intimate performances where the

Deborah Ross

Limp and lifeless: Freud’s Last Session reviewed

Freud’s Last Session stars Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode and is a work of speculative fiction asking what would have happened if Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis had met to debate the existence of God. What if two of the greatest minds of the 20th century had the chance to thrash it out? Thrash it out they do but, alas, they cannot thrash any life into this film. If you are planning to see it at the cinema, a few espressos beforehand may not go amiss. It is directed by Matthew Brown, who co-wrote the script with Mark St Germain, on whose play it is based. It takes place on

Laura Gascoigne

How Miss La La captured Degas’s imagination

‘Can you come Saturday morning to my studio, 19 bis rue Fontaine?’ Degas wrote to Edmond de Goncourt in 1879. ‘From 10.30 to half-past noon, I will have my négresse and her partner who will come expressly to be at your disposal.’ Not content with dangling from a rope by her teeth, she suspended a 300-kilo cannon barrel from her jaw It’s not what it sounds like. The ‘négresse’ in question was Anna Albertine Olga Brown, stage name Miss La La, an aerialist at the Cirque Fernando who had been sitting – or more accurately hanging – in Degas’s studio for a painting for that year’s fourth Impressionist exhibition. As

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Thank goodness Busoni’s Piano Concerto is returning to the Proms

On 5 August, Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto will be performed at the Proms for only the second time. It should have been the third time, but a Musician’s Union strike in 1980 forced the cancellation of the concert at which Martin Jones had been booked to give the première. Jones is a fearless virtuoso, still recording in his eighties, but one can’t help wondering whether his disappointment back then was tinged with relief. In one place, the soloist’s fingers must wrap themselves around 128 notes in a single bar Garrick Ohlsson, a long-time champion of the work, describes its difficulties as ‘absolutely immense, and 25 per cent of this piece

Rupert Christiansen

A fitting – and lovable – tribute to Frederick Ashton

I encountered Frederick Ashton at a dinner party shortly before he died in 1988. Frail and anxious, he clutched my arm and demanded to know which of his creations I thought would survive him. I duly reeled off some titles, but felt that any opinion I expressed would have disappointed him. In public, he professed to care not a fig for posterity, but he evidently did, and his will set out thoughtful arrangements parcelling ownership of his works out to various trusted colleagues, with the bulk passing to his nephew, the Royal Ballet’s administrative director Anthony Russell-Roberts. How exhilarating to be reminded of Ashton’s remarkable range, and of choreography so

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.