Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Why was the 19th century so full of bigots and weirdos? 

Da Vinci’s Laundry is based on an art world rumour. In 2017, Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ sold at Christie’s for $450 million but some experts claimed that the attribution was inaccurate. Could the world’s costliest artwork be a fake? Writer, Keelan Kember, considers the provenance of a fictional Leonardo owned by a thuggish oligarch, Boris, who claims to have bought the masterpiece at a flea market. He invites two posh British experts, Christopher and Milly, to authenticate the painting and when Christopher questions its origins he earns Boris’s instant displeasure. Boris threatens to toss Christopher from the roof of his luxury mansion. Enter a brash American, named Tony, who wants to

Matthew Bell

The staggering beauty of Fra Angelico

In 1982, Pope John Paul II surprised a few people by beatifying Fra Angelico, the 15th-century Dominican friar from near Fiesole. It’s not clear why he put Beato Angelico on the road to sainthood, given that the artist didn’t perform any miracles. And yet, after spending a few hours immersed in his works, which are both profoundly sacred but also staggeringly beautiful, you begin to understand the decision. He was certainly a hit with popes. Pius XII was such a fan that, in 1955, when the first major Fra Angelico exhibition was held at the Vatican, to mark 500 years since his death, he gave a handwritten speech praising the

Richard Bratby

A Magic Flute that will make you weep

English Touring Opera has begun its autumn season and the miracle isn’t so much that they’re touring at all these days, but that they do it so well. Two generations back, this was the natural condition of opera in the UK: not Netrebko at Covent Garden, but agile, medium-scale companies playing at the Wolverhampton Grand or the Sheffield Lyceum alongside the panto and the 1950s equivalent of Friends: The Musical and An Evening with Sandi Toksvig. Don’t believe it? It’s all in Alexandra Wilson’s new book Someone Else’s Music, which is out now, and which all British opera buffs should read because it’ll make their jaws drop. Case in point:

Deborah Ross

The new Springsteen biopic is cringe

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is a biopic of ‘the boss’ starring Jeremy Allen White. It is not cradle to grave and do not expect the usual crowd-pleasing beats. There isn’t a single montage. Instead, it focuses on 1981, the making of his sixth album, Nebraska, and his mental troubles at that time. This will doubtless satisfy the completists. But non-completists – I could have named only two of his songs, tops – may wonder if it’s that interesting. Also, as White’s performance isn’t a million miles from tortured chef Carmy in Disney+’s The Bear I kept expecting him to put down his guitar and go tweeze micro-herbs on some

Graeme Thomson

Fionn Regan has gone method Worzel Gummidge

Watching the Mercury Music Prize on television last week, I remembered that Fionn Regan’s debut album, The End Of History, was nominated for the award back in 2007. Proof were it needed that the prize is rarely a shortcut to superstardom for most of those it spotlights. The Irish singer-songwriter has never quite replicated the mainstream acclaim he gained for his debut – when, for a solid five minutes, he was the latest in a long line of ‘new Bob Dylans’. He has, however, carved out an interesting and worthwhile career across five further albums, expanding his core skill set of folk guitar and knottily poetic wordplay with experimental touches

James Delingpole James Delingpole

A great comedy about a terrible sport

I’m trying to think of things I’m less interested in than American football. The plant-based food section? Taking up my GP’s offer of a free Covid booster? Ed Miliband’s nostril depilation regime? No, apart from maybe baseball, I can’t think of anything so soul-crushingly tedious as a rigged game where men in shoulder pads and portcullised helmets shout numbers, bash into one another, then wait half an hour while the referee decides whether or not they’re allowed to throw a spinny ball and maybe one day end up being Taylor Swift’s latest boyfriend. So you’ll never guess what the subject is of my favourite new American comedy series, Chad Powers…

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Why I love blowing up worms

Grade: B+ War, as we all know, is hell. But if it involves small squeaky annelids blowing each-other up with bazookas, it is also hella fun. And so to the newest installment in the long-running turn-based strategy series Worms. Can it be a coincidence that Worms Across Worlds arrives on Apple Arcade just in time for the release of Philip Pullman’s final His Dark Materials book? Yes, it absolutely can. Nevertheless the latest Worms, like Pullman’s work, is set in a multiverse in which intrepid heroes travel through portals between worlds. The world of Worms, like the world of His Dark Materials, mingles science and experimental theology: you can see

Thursday

Michael Hann

In defence of Mick Hucknall

Before Simply Red came on stage at the Greenwich peninsula’s enormodome, the screens showed a clip of a very young Mick Hucknall being interviewed. What he wanted, he said, was to be a great singer. Usually, that’s the cue for a gag about fate having other plans. Not this time. He’s 65 now, and he truly is a great singer as he showed for the best part of two hours. He knows it, too. A couple of songs in, he benignly told his audience at the first of two nights at the O2 that he liked it when they sang along with the choruses, but maybe leave the verses to

Gus Carter Gus Carter

Very pretty and pretty gruesome: Ballad of a Small Player reviewed

Ballad of a Small Player opens with Lord Doyle, played by Colin Farrell, hiding from security in his trashed casino suite in Macau. After they’re gone, he slips into the corridor and sees a trolley holding a bouquet of flowers and a knife. I kept my eyes on the knife, expecting the jittery, paranoid gambling addict to grab the weapon. Instead he places a white rose in his green velvet lapel. Director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front, Conclave) enjoys playing these games of misdirection. It feels appropriate. Casinos – with their chandeliers, gaudy frescoes and croupiers in black tie – are contradictory places. Opulence in these temples

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Tracy Letts’s magic touch

Tracy Letts’s Mary Page Marlowe is a biographical portrait of an emotionally damaged mother struggling with romantic and family problems. Susan Sarandon shares the lead with four other actresses which makes the show a little hard to follow. And the timeline is jumbled up so that the audience has to find its bearings at the start of each new episode. Why? Perhaps to give the material a complexity it doesn’t deserve. We first meet our heroine, aged 40 (played by Andrea Riseborough), as she tells her kids that they’re moving to Kentucky without their dad. This unpromising scene is hilarious because the word ‘Kentucky’ is repeated so often that it

James Walton

Is there anything menopausal women can’t do?

Is there anything menopausal women can’t do (on television)? Last Sunday, as a couple of them were still working on the daring theft of a Salvador Dali painting in ITV1’s Frauds, BBC1 launched Riot Women in which five others form a punk band. Meanwhile, two regular features of British TV remain actresses lamenting the lack of older women starring in drama series – and older women starring in drama series. Virtually all these shows also recall the headline from the American satirical magazine The Onion: ‘Women empowered by whatever a woman does.’ And that’s certainly true of Riot Women, written by Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley, Gentleman Jack etc.) and therefore

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

Handel was derided in his own time – particularly by us, for which belated apologies

Here’s a patriotic thought for you: baroque opera, as we now know it, was made in Britain. Sure, there are your Vivaldis and Cavallis; there’s always someone (usually French) trying to make Rameau stick and a few years back Opera North – bless them – even tried to exhume an opera by Reinhard Keiser. But realistically, if you’re going to see a pre-Mozart opera from a major company anywhere in the world, and it’s not by Monteverdi, it’s overwhelmingly likely to be by Purcell or Handel. And Handel wrote practically all of his surviving operas in London, for British audiences and British taste. So it’s only right that UK opera

Andrew Rosenheim

A remarkable insight into Le Carré’s working methods

When Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian Library wrote to John le Carré asking if the writer would leave it his papers, he got more than he could ever have bargained for. Le Carré not only responded with enthusiasm, explaining that ‘Oxford was Smiley’s spiritual home, as it is mine’, but also sent along 85 boxes of neatly arranged papers and memorabilia. After le Carré’s death in 2020 came a second larger tranche; the total archive consisted of more than 1,200 boxes. This was a writer who threw nothing out. Selected fruits of this vast haul can be seen in a new and impressive exhibition in the Bodleian’s Weston Library (formerly

Daisy Dunn

Condoms in 18th-century painting

Waldemar Januszczak and Bendor Grosvenor’s art podcast has returned after nearly five years. It is, says Januszczak, ‘the podcast they could not stop – but they did have a jolly good try’. What happened? It isn’t clear; there are teases that it revealed too much, which is anyway a good ploy for attracting listeners. ‘Subversive’ is not the first word that springs to mind when tuning in to the two unlikely chums. Their regular feature, ‘Shocking News from the Artworld’, is more Apollo than Nigel Dempster. For example: Christie’s has closed the digital art department that dealt in NFTs, the crypto tokens going the way of the dodo. And Gabriele

Margaret Mitchell

The dying art of costume design

At the receptionist’s desk in Cosprop’s studio and costume warehouse, a former Kwik Fit garage, the sloping bleakness of Holloway Road is held at bay by a small chandelier, brassy lighting and a bound guest book. It’s a bit stagey, like a filmset for a cheap foreign hotel or an expensive shrink’s office, quite out of place in the real north London high street. But as the entrance to a costume house that builds worlds and people out of bits of fabric, feathers and jewels, it’s appropriate. Suspend all disbelief, ye who enter here. Cosprop was founded by the costume designer John Bright in 1965. What began as a small

Thursday

Richard Morris

Save art history!

A few weeks ago I went along to a lecture on the Welsh artist, poet and soldier David Jones. Kenneth Clark considered him ‘the most gifted of all the young British painters’. The talk, by a recent art-history graduate with a first-class degree from a reputable university, began at a cracking pace. It was only when he started to show slides to illustrate his talk that I began to feel very hot and sweaty. The paintings were not by Jones but his near-contemporary Stanley Spencer. Jones did share with Spencer the experience of serving with the British Army during the first world war. And both were stimulated by this immersion

Richard Bratby

This museum is a lesson for all curators

The National Railway Museum is 50 years old, and it’s come over all literary. A quote from Howards End stands at the entrance to the newly refurbished Station Hall: railway termini, proclaims Forster, ‘are our gates to the glorious and the unknown’. T.S. Eliot salutes you on the way out: ‘You are not the same people who left that station.’ Big claims, but as it turns out, largely to the point. The changes to the Station Hall are subtle but numerous, making the argument that as well as being the foundational technology of modern civilisation, railways are a culture in their own right. The aim, say the curators, is to

Rupert Christiansen

I could watch Balanchine’s Theme and Variations on repeat

R:Evolution is a pun, presumably intended to suggest that tradition is not static and the obvious truth that change always grows out of what has come before. A useful idea, of course, even if it’s one that the four short works selected under this title by English National Ballet doesn’t smoothly illustrate. The management is, however, due a pat on the back for trying; budget cuts and the power of the grey men in marketing means that such programming is becoming increasingly rare, victim of the regressive fashion for full-length narratives and fairy tales. ENB starts by juxtaposing two works conceived in 1947. Balanchine’s Theme and Variations is one of

M.G. Scott

What does it feel like to perform the same show 355 times in one year? 

I have my routine down to a science. At 6.59, I’m sitting in the stairwell, typing on my laptop or scribbling in a book. At 7.01, I’m speeding down the hall to Dressing Room 18, where the rest of the girls are semi-apparelled, laughing, blasting out Tyla; or some days, silent, headphones in, munching pre-show snacks and staring blankly into space. From 7.01 to 7.05, I’m putting on my costume as the ambient noise of my cast mates getting dismantled by the demogorgon plays over the intercom. At 7.07, I’m sprinting down the dozens of stairs between Dressing Room 18 and the ground floor. And at 7.09, I’m stepping out

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Stephen Fry is the perfect Lady Bracknell

Hamlet at the National opens like a John Lewis Christmas advert. Elegant celebrations are in progress. The stage is full of dining tables draped in white linen and adorned with flowers and beautiful glassware sparkling in the candlelight. Elsinore is reimagined as the home of a multicultural royal family. Claudius, resplendent in a dark dinner jacket, toasts his Asian bride, Gertrude, who wears a banana-yellow sari. Enter Hamlet, hunched and mutinous, in a snaky black suit like a moody star at a film première. He cheers up when he reaches his first soliloquy which he delivers to the crowd like a larky routine at a comedy club. Hiran Abeysekera (Hamlet)