Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

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

Clarissa Tan

Dr Who: there’s something in the wi-fi; How to be a Lady; The Mystery of Mary Magdalene

It used to be that when an arch-villain wanted to decimate a community, he’d put something in the water. Now, it’s something in the wi-fi. In the new Dr Who, the Time Lord battles a baddie who runs a group called the Spoonheads, whose mission is to upload and download stuff from the wireless internet. A bit like what I do all day, then. But wait — the Spoonheads are uploading people’s minds, to access all of human intelligence. Then they download them again, for their own evil purposes, while their victims languish in a mindless warp. The episode is called ‘The Bells of Saint John’ (BBC1, Saturday) and plays

Deborah Ross

Trance: not Danny Boyle’s finest hour

Obviously, we all love Danny Boyle and want to have his babies — I’d like at least two of his babies — but his latest film, Trance, is a horrid mess. A psychological take on the art-heist film, it is miscast, iffily acted, confusing, implausible (to the extent I never fully understood what was happening) and is interspersed with bouts of horrible, ill-judged violence. In one instance, for example, a man gets shot in the penis. This need not be a dealbreaker necessarily but at some point, possibly before we’ve even had the first child, and to prevent such nonsense going any further, I will have to sit him down

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The Book of Mormon is toothless, jokeless, plotless and pointless

Impossible, surely. The Book of Mormon could never live up to the accolades lavished on it by America’s critics. ‘Blissfully original, outspoken, irreverent and hilarious,’ was a typical review. The three authors are formidably gifted. Trey Parker and Matt Stone gave us South Park, while Robert Lopez is the co-writer of Avenue Q. As a fan of both shows, I was fearful that Mormon would turn out to be as much fun as underwater paintballing. So, up goes the curtain. A posse of geeky Yanks in crisp white shirts are being dispatched to Mormon missions around the world. We focus on two characters, a big handsome jock and a fat

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

‘In the beginning was breath’

Declan Donnellan is riding high. His acclaimed production of the burlesque classic Ubu Roi has confirmed his membership of the elite group of British directors who enjoy renown across Continental Europe and beyond. The critics cheered his French-language production of Alfred Jarry’s anarchic satire when it reached Paris earlier this month. The show, created by Donnellan’s company Cheek by Jowl, is currently bunny-hopping between venues on either side of the Channel. It arrives at the Barbican on 10 April where it forms part of the Dancing around Duchamp season. I meet Donellan in a Hampstead café. ‘My local,’ he says as two cappuccinos are clattered down in front us. He’s

Candy Neubert

search party

the worst night coming the bloody dark covers our traces fanning across the grid worked out in the Ops Room section by section any place my heart is gone any direction beginning in the house and loosed off in mid air in some canal or building site or park the hinterlands behind are coded as we slot together drum and lock and screw over the downy skin of the child still held against the light soft as a miracle daring the stars and torches picking through this one o’clock and two o’clock and three

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

When Picasso was a boy wonder

Exhibitions are only as good as the loans that can be secured for them, as was seen at the Royal Academy’s Manet exhibition recently. The exhibits at Burlington House were thin on the ground because in some cases promised loans were rescinded, and other items were simply not available. Whatever one thinks of that controversial figure Norman Rosenthal, for so many years exhibitions secretary at the RA, his ability to seek out and obtain loans amounted to genius, backed by two important characteristics: audacity and tenacity. When I first saw the Courtauld’s Picasso show, I immediately thought of a painting of the artist’s friend Casagemas on his deathbed, lit by