Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Deborah Ross

The Place Beyond the Pines – don’t read this review!

The Place Beyond the Pines stars both Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper — you spoil us, ambassador! — and is a generational feud film about fathers and sons and legacy. Can anyone be born clean? How do past events reverberate? How might one act of violence play out, years later? It is written and directed by Derek Cianfrance who made Blue Valentine, a remarkably raw and claustrophobic film about a marriage going down the tubes, also starring Ryan Gosling, but with Michelle Williams, and although this is a more familiar genre, it is still blissfully gripping. Certainly, I was gripped, blissfully, which was nice, as I haven’t been held in

Will Gore

Lara Pulver interview: ‘People in LA were desperate to meet Irene Adler’

Not many actors have made a name for themselves with quite the same force as Lara Pulver. In January last year more than eight million people tuned in to BBC1 and watched her star as Irene Adler in ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’, the opening episode in the second series of Sherlock. I’m not saying that Pulver’s appearance in one of the early scenes wearing nothing more than a pair of high heels (albeit with some clever camera angles preserving her modesty) was the only reason for the vast amount of attention the episode received. It’s surely no coincidence, however, that her name was almost immediately trending on Twitter and that

John Mole

Scan

I shall be radioactive For eight hours afterwards And must be careful To avoid intimate contact. The prospect of this Alarms me, but what now Suddenly comes to mind Is just how alone I felt Standing in Hereford Cathedral October 1962 Beside the Mappa Mundi With Krushchev banging on As nuclear war seemed Unavoidable, that the world Could soon be dust, this sacred Storehouse of humanity And faith be flattened In an instant. Eight hours Or not much more Was all I’d have to hurry home Before our precious intimacy Would vanish in the void And love, left echoing, Become an empty word.

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Newt Gingrich’s Downton downtime

Newt Gingrich has a new love. ‘It’s a great study of plot,’ the failed Presidential runner and former Speaker of the House told Slate magazine. He was not referring to a ’90s sleaze inquiry, or the reasons why he lost to Mitt Romney. The object of his obsession is our very own Downton Abbey. In what could be mistaken for an interview about his once colorful private life, Gingrich went on: ‘It has about 15 subplots plus four or five that come and go. At any given moment you could list these different developments going on with these different personalities. See, you’re never bored.’ Apparently, ITV’s most successful export is

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre: Ten years and a million cheap tickets

‘The house that Ho Chi Minh built.’ That’s how Nicholas Hytner refers to his ample north London home. In 1989, at the age of 34, he was hired by Cameron Mackintosh to direct the musical Miss Saigon. ‘It just felt like a huge lark,’ he said at the time. The show ran for ten years in the West End and on Broadway and the royalties enabled him ‘to do what I wanted to do thereafter. It was a massive stroke of good fortune.’ Artistic freedom has been the hallmark of his ten-year stewardship of the National Theatre. Hytner grew up in a prosperous south Manchester family and his fascination with

Andrew Lambirth

George Bellows; Sydney Lee RA

The American artist George Bellows (1882–1925) is best known for his boxing paintings, but as this surprising exhibition reveals, that was only the half of it. We don’t really know his work in this country, apart from the odd picture in a mixed show, but here is indisputable evidence that we have been missing out. Bellows died from appendicitis aged only 42, so this exhibition inevitably offers us work which varies wildly in style and competence, as he tried his hand at different approaches and different subjects. Nevertheless there are at least half-a-dozen paintings of real worth and presence, in addition to the boxing pictures, which I personally find of

Radhika Kapila

Weeknd’s world

There was something vaguely disappointing about seeing Abel Tesfaye appear on stage at London’s Electric Ballroom. A wide-eyed, puffa-jacket-clad figure isn’t what you expect from his enigmatic alter-ego ‘The Weeknd’ — it seemed incongruous that we should watch this self-styled introvert performing to an audience. At 23 years old, Tesfaye (aka The Weeknd) has released three mixtapes, achieved eight million downloads and, this year, completely sold out his British shows. His reputation is growing as people are drawn in by his distinctive, falsetto tones. The Weeknd’s first online mixtape ‘House of Balloons’ and subsequent albums took the internet by storm. Now, with increasing popularity, his enigmatic internet presence is also

Kate Chisholm

Noise – A Human History

You could say that Neil MacGregor revolutionised radio with his mega-series A History of the World in 100 Objects. In each of those 100 programmes he took us on an extraordinary journey of the mind, to show us what we’ve been up to since the first ‘primitive’ reindeer carvings of the Ice Age. He did this not by the usual route for such grandiose series of going on a whirlwind trip through history, but by looking at the small, often tiny details and drawing from them as much meaning as possible. He also transformed the 15-minute radio slot into a brilliant teaching tool, focusing on the minuscule while at the

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The Village

Everyone’s loving BBC1’s new, Sunday-night period mega-drama The Village (32 episodes long if writer Peter Moffat has his way). It’s taut, spare, grown-up, accomplished, dark, strange and poetic, according to the critics, which I think are all euphemisms for ‘not like Downton Abbey’. And it definitely isn’t like Downton Abbey. There’s a lot more brooding, the dialogue’s more Pinteresque (which is to say it’s more often there to evoke mood or the banality of existence than to carry the plot, amuse you or illuminate character), its view of the past (a Derbyshire village on the eve of the first world war) is much less rosy. But is this necessarily a

Clarissa Tan

Composition and catharsis: Review of ‘A Late Quartet’.

Why the sudden spate of movies about classical music quartets and impending death? Early this year, we had Quartet, about four senior singers in a retirement home. Now we have A Late Quartet, about a string ensemble facing the loss of one of its members. The film industry couldn’t possibly be subliminally associating classical music with ageing and fuddy-duddyness, could they? Shame on them. Perhaps before the year is out we’ll have The Latest Quartet, then we’ll know that classical music has carked it altogether. Anyway, of the two movies (so far), Late is by far the more masterly. It is for all intents and purposes a chamber film —

Michael Tanner

Kafka Fragments at the Linbury Studio; Nabucco at the Royal Opera House

Yes, well…aphorisms are never easy to deal with, they are a naturally intimidating form of utterance. If you admit that you don’t understand them, you may well be thought thick. If you reject a request for an explanation of one, on the grounds that what it says can’t be put any other way, you may well get away with it. Many aphorisms are intended to shut down a line of thought, La Rochefoucauld’s for instance, while the best of Nietzsche’s say, in his words, ‘what other people would take a book to say, and would still leave unsaid’. Setting them to music sounds a bright idea for certain composers, but

Patrick Carnegy

Jonathan Slinger’s Hamlet

In his ‘Love Song’, T.S. Eliot’s ageing bank-clerk J. Alfred Prufrock protests he isn’t ‘Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be…’. David Farr’s new production sets out to put this to rights. The result is indeed a very strange affair. It is built around Jonathan Slinger, who last season starred memorably as Prospero in The Tempest and as Lenny in Pinter’s The Homecoming. A little further back he’s been Macbeth in a curiously Popish staging by Michael Boyd and Richards II and III in Boyd’s great Histories sequence. A less Eliotian conceit is the director’s notion that Hamlet is about sword fighting or, in this modern-dress interpretation, specifically fencing. The

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Peter and Alice

Inspired writer, John Logan. His 2009 play, Red, delved brilliantly into the gloom-ridden, suicidal mind of the misanthropic modernist painter Mark Rothko. The play’s unflinching and sordid honesty earned the author, and his director Michael Grandage, a bagful of gongs on either side of the Atlantic. The pair have reunited for Logan’s new play, Peter and Alice, which opens with a meeting between Alice Liddell (of Wonderland fame) and Peter Llewellyn Davies, who inspired J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Alice and Peter, now grown up, compare notes about the books they featured in, about the writers who used them as models, about childhood, about adulthood, about this, about that. The writers

Anthony Howell

Grumarí

The leaves  hardly breathe   and snakes  loop round the branches,  soaking up heat   from cars parked  nose to tail outside  the seafood   kiosk by  this savage southern   beach where  the leaves hardly breathe  and snakes   loop round  the branches, soaking up heat  from cars parked   nose to tail  outside the seafood  kiosk by   this savage  southern beach.

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Michael Dobbs tight lipped on House of Cards plot

It was a gamble that seems to have paid off. American online entertainment giant Netflix commissioned their first ever original series with a Washington adaptation of Lord Dobbs’s classic, House of Cards. According to its star, Kevin Spacey, the show is today the most watched ever on the service. Season one ended on a cliff hanger that promises to deliver still more viewers. The new House of Cards is sufficiently different from the old to attract a new audience; yet there were enough nods to the original BBC series to keep Westminster loyalists happy. Dobbs, the brains behind Francis Urquhart (who has been renamed Underwood and upgraded from a Tory shireman

Tuesday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Introducing Spectator Play: Audio and video for what we’ve reviewed this week

Did you catch Dr Who over the weekend? Clarissa Tan, who wrote our latest TV column, was surprised that the Dr had to contend with ‘something in the wi-fi’. How’s wi-fi for a thoroughly modern enemy? Here’s the prequel to this week’s episode, The Bells of Saint John: Clarissa also watched Rachel Johnson learning to be a Lady. It might sound like a bit of a drag, but ‘what could have turned out to be a rather prissy affair turns out to be a fun watch’. Johnson tries to master riding side-saddle, and ponders why etiquette lessons are becoming more and more popular. Here’s Johnson describing what makes a 21st

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

Cross examination

As Easter comes upon us in this bitter spring, many of us are drawn to contemplate the mystery of Christ’s passion: his Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension into Heaven. You don’t have to go to church to do this, for reverie or prayer can take place in a quiet landscape or by a cosy fireside, but there are various aids to meditation, and none better than the appropriate visual art. Although we live in an increasingly irreligious age, there have been religious painters of real power in recent years, and perhaps none more so than Craigie Aitchison (1926–2009). Aitchison is an unlikely choice because he himself professed no particular belief, although

David Platzer

The Angel of the Odd: an exhibition that ends with a satisfying shiver

To some extent, all Romanticism has its origins in darkness, coming in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that introduced fear into the age of reason. ‘Reason’s Sleep Produces Monsters’ proclaims the opening drawing in Goya’s series ‘Los Caprichos’ (1797–99), which features in this entertaining exhibition. After all the cruelties that man had inflicted on man at the 18th century’s twilight, it was only natural to turn to ghosts and witches for light relief. The exhibition’s title comes from an Edgar Allan Poe story but Goya’s phrase would be equally appropriate. The exhibition starts not with Goya but with F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), one of those German expressionist films

Peter Hoskin

Caitlin Rose’s The Stand-In: a fantastic album from a fantastic girl

Caitlin Rose, Caitlin Rose, Caitlin Rose. I’d feel awkward admitting that I’m rather obsessed with this Nashville chanteuse, were it not for a mitigating truth: you should be, too. Her debut album Own Side Now, released in 2010, was proof enough of her sweltering talent. And now we have a follow-up, The Stand-In, that’s superior in many regards. Her voice, already aspiring to the heights of Cline and Lynn, has become rounder, more chocolate-y. Her songs, already a stunning catalogue of broken love, sound even more heartfelt. Her… … Oh, I don’t want to embarrass myself, so let’s get down to cold, musical facts. Perhaps the main difference between this

Kate Chisholm

Come together | 28 March 2013

‘That’s the power of ritual,’ said the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, on Thought for the Day last week. He was thinking particularly of the Jewish festival of Passover with its ritual gathering of the family to eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs as a re-enactment of the experience of exile and slavery. ‘It’s an expression of collective memory and shared ideals…an annual reminder of what it felt like to be oppressed.’ His words were striking precisely because ritual is so often regarded with suspicion these days, signifying rigid, backward, inclusive thinking. Yet these simple acts of representation done in unison (whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim) allow us to become acquainted with