Arts Reviews Archives

Thursday

25 Sep 2025

Michael Keegan-Dolan’s How to be a Dancer is worthy of Flann O’Brien

Michael Keegan-Dolan’s show doesn’t even pretend to live up to the arresting proposition in its title – anyone hoping to glean a few useful tips on becoming a dancer would come away bitterly disappointed. What the Irish choreographer offers instead is a witty and touching exercise in autobiography in which he is ably abetted and illustrated by his resourceful wife, Rachel Poirier. Born into a large and unlettered working-class family in north Dublin, Keegan-Dolan grew up jiving to Talking Heads and emulating Gene Kelly. Pigeon toes hobbled his four gruelling years in ballet training and as a performer he didn’t make it beyond the chorus line in West End musicals.

Deborah Ross

Emma Thompson is surprisingly convincing as the star of this action thriller

Dead of Winter is an action thriller starring Emma Thompson and you have to hand it to her. Has such a thoroughly ordinary, sixty-something-year-old woman (no superpowers) ever carried an action thriller before? Not that I can think of. That’s not to say it’s devoid of clichés. I think we all know that it’s best to steer clear of cabins miles from anywhere. But it’s well made, tense, fun, and if you’ve longed to see an ordinary, sixty-something-year-old woman brandish a gun or put a claw hammer through someone’s foot you will not be disappointed. Directed by Brian Kirk, from a script by Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb, it’s set

Graeme Thomson

Uplift from an odd couple: James Yorkston & Nina Persson reviewed

Let’s hear it for the odd couples of popular music: Bowie and Bing. Shaggy and Sting. Metallica and Lou Reed. Nick Cave and Kylie. U2 and Pavarotti. The ongoing collaboration between James Yorkston and Nina Persson isn’t quite so wildly unlikely as any of these but still seems intrinsically counter-intuitive; until, that is, the realisation dawns that each has a stakehold in the other’s natural territory. Yorkston is a fifty-something Scottish folkie with the honed melodic instincts of a pop aficionada. Persson is a former rock star from Sweden whose voice has the controlled command found in the best traditional singers. Which perhaps explains why a pairing that makes little

Thursday

18 Sep 2025

Madeline Grant

Is Grey Gardens the greatest documentary ever made?

A middle-aged woman wearing what looks like Princess Diana’s infamous ‘revenge dress’ and a balaclava from an IRA funeral approaches the hole in the floor. The raccoon that lives there, clearly used to her presence, looks up expectantly. Sure enough, the woman empties a bag of dry food into the hole. The scene is framed by the intricate fluted wainscotting of the room’s door frame. I am not exaggerating when I say I believe it to be one of the great scenes of modern cinema. The vignette comes from Grey Gardens, the Maysles brothers’ cult documentary, which turns 50 this autumn. Like many great documentaries – from Tiger King to

Hermione Eyre

Sondheim understood Seurat better than the National Gallery

In Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim catches something of what makes Georges Seurat so brilliant – not just his technical flair, but his engagement with ordinary life. Sondheim has Seurat sing, or rather woof, a little duet between two dogs meeting on the island of La Grande Jatte; later, Sondheim gives Seurat a pointillist melody as he works, crotchet-dabs of blue, blue, blue, red, red… Seurat’s muse, meanwhile, is called Dot. Seeing the National Gallery’s somewhat overloaded presentation made me long for the light touch of Sondheim. There are wonders here, and it is a great coup for the National Gallery to have drawn these 50-odd works

James Walton

The makers of Doc don’t seem to trust the show

The drama series Doc began with the most literal of bangs. While the screen remained black, the sound-effects team knocked themselves out by creating a spectacular crashing noise. When the lights came on, we saw a smashed-up car containing ‘a female, unresponsive’. By the time she did respond – one major brain operation and seven seconds of the show later – it was apparent to the doctors that there was something high-concept wrong with her. As her colleagues at Minneapolis’s Westside hospital, they knew she was right to say her name was Amy Larsen, but her answers about her children’s ages, her current job status and the name of the

Daisy Dunn

R.S. Thomas – terrific poet, terrible husband

Love’s Moment is one of those quiet radio programmes you’re unlikely to have read about. It aired without fanfare at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, an understated yet engrossing one-off, half-hour documentary. It can now be found in the recesses of BBC iPlayer. It opened with a compelling question: ‘What happens when two artists fall in love and marry, and as one’s reputation soars, the other’s is slowly forgotten?’ Narrator Gwyneth Lewis, former National Poet of Wales, might have been alluding to any artistic couple in history, but her subjects were R.S. Thomas and Mildred Eldridge. Thomas was one of the most popular poets in Wales in the last century. He was an

Lloyd Evans

When Freud met Hitler

A new play by Lawrence Marks and Maurice Gran, the writers of Birds of a Feather, feels like a major event. This is a period drama that examines an imaginary association between Hitler and Freud and develops into an enquiry about the nature of evil. As Hitler grows into adulthood he gravitates towards the Freud family, muscling in on their summer holidays The play opens with a scene from Hitler’s childhood, as his father, Alois, thrashes the young boy while his mother watches and weeps helplessly. This tableau is oddly hilarious because it explains in simple domestic terms the unimaginable horrors of the 20th century. As a teenager, Hitler meets

Michael Hann

Suede turn their fine new record to mush at the Southbank

I think a lot about Wishbone Ash. A disproportionate amount. Partly because I have had to listen to them for around ten hours while researching a book. Partly because when I was a kid, I always found it curious that Wishbone Ash were advertised in the weekly music press but never reviewed. Back then, broadsheets barely covered rock, so there was no room for their gigs and albums there. But they were never on Top of the Pops or The Tube or even Whistle Test either. Perhaps Tommy Vance occasionally gave them a spin on the Friday Rock Show, but other than that they were not on Radio 1. They

Richard Bratby

Anna Netrebko’s still got it

In the opera world, you’re never far from a Tosca and last week we had two of them, both brand new. That’s healthy: any opera company with a functioning survival instinct is wise to maintain a stock of solid, revivable Puccini favourites. Critics yawn, academics snipe, but Puccini prevails because the simple fact is that Tosca is a straight-up banger. I took a Tosca virgin to the first night in Cardiff. She hadn’t read a synopsis or done any of those homeworky things that novice opera-goers are told they should do, but which they really, really shouldn’t need to. ‘This is bloody marvellous, isn’t it?’ was her reaction after Act

Deborah Ross

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is anything but

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is, I have to tell you, anything but. I should have trusted the trailer. When I caught this, my first thought was ‘heck, that looks bad’. Stupidly, I was not put off. The film is written by Seth Reiss (co-writer of The Menu) and directed by Kogonada (if you haven’t seen After Yang, more fool you). And it stars Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell. It can’t be that bad, surely? Reader, I swear to you, it is. The direction is prosaic and sentimental while Robbie and Farrell have zero chemistry, not a squeak It’s a romantic fantasy about two people who have resolved to stay

Rod Liddle

No, Big Thief’s Double Infinity is not the greatest folk album ever

Grade: B- ‘I feel within myself a constant dialogue between my masculinity, my femininity and the part of me that is neither of those things. I’m just trying to talk about it because I feel like I’m something that is very ambiguous,’ explains lead singer and songwriter Adrianne Lenker. This may explain why the first song on the new album from this New York indie-ish folk-rock band is called ‘Incomprehensible’, a title which could easily be appended to a good 60 per cent of the lyrics on an album which, given its heralding as the greatest folk album ever, is something of a let-down. It ain’t quite John Prine, let

Thursday

11 Sep 2025

James Walton

Lower your expectations for Spinal Tap II

This Is Spinal Tap is now such a deserved comedy behemoth that it’s easy to forget how gradual its ascent to generally agreed greatness was. Only over the years did so many lines and scenes from a low-key 1984 mockumentary about a heavy-rock band (amps that ‘go to 11’, a tiny Stonehenge, a classically inspired piece called ‘Lick My Love Pump’) become part of our lives. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, by contrast, comes amid a loud fanfare – which may be part of the problem, because the result certainly doesn’t live up to expectations that are inevitably sky-high. Then again, the sad truth is that it mightn’t have

Wednesday

10 Sep 2025

Richard Bratby

Why are there so few decent French symphonies?

Grade: B Here’s a blind-listening game for you: spot the difference between proficiency and genius. Kazuki Yamada and his Monte-Carlo orchestra have recorded three first symphonies by three 19th-century French composers. With a few barnstorming exceptions (I’m looking at you, Berlioz), the French never really got the hang of the romantic symphony. Berlioz recounts with horror how Parisian editors picked through the scores of Beethoven’s symphonies, meticulously correcting Big Ludwig’s supposed errors. The kindest thing to say about the first symphonies of Gounod and Saint-Saëns is that they sound like Beethoven with the inspiration snipped out. Bright, polite and completely harmless, they’re both blown out of the water by the

James Delingpole

Netflix’s Hostage is an act of cultural aggression

Apart from hunting, one of the very few consolations of the end of summer is that telly stops being quite so dire. But that moment hasn’t quite arrived yet – as you can tell from the fact that I’m reviewing Hostage. There’s so much that is annoying about Hostage that I don’t know quite where to begin. But let’s start with its cloth-eared use of the word ‘abducted’. Suppose you were the prime minister (Suranne Jones) and your implausible Médicins Sans Frontières husband Alex (Ashley Thomas) had been kidnapped by a masked terror group in French Guiana and you had to brief your teenage daughter on what had happened, which

Lloyd Evans

Shallow and silly: Born With Teeth, at Wyndham’s Theatre, reviewed

Born With Teeth is a camp two-hander starring a pair of TV luminaries, Ncuti Gatwa and Edward Bluemel, as Marlowe and Shakespeare. The year is 1591 and the great dramatists are holed up in a tavern working on an early draft of Henry VI (Part 3). Not much writing gets done. It’s all rhetoric and bombast. Marlowe is a bullying egomaniac who boasts of his ‘throbbing quill’ and parades a peacock’s feather which he strokes lasciviously. Both playwrights are gay, of course, and they live in a world that views heterosexual couplings as a mystifying aberration. Marlowe prances about on the table and re-enacts his conquests of grateful gay aristocrats.

Rupert Christiansen

Both thin and overblown: Royal Ballet’s A Single Man reviewed

A common flaw in narrative ballet today is the attempt to tell stories that are too complex and ramified for the vocabulary of dance to convey. With Jonathan Watkins’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s slim novella A Single Man, the flaw is the opposite. George, a middle-aged prof, is traumatised and in mourning for his recently killed lover Jim. The consolations of ordinary life fail, but he feels the twinge of desire returning for one of his students. After they spend an erotically charged night together, he can move on. There’s just not enough in this fable to sustain 100 minutes of dance drama. To fill this scenario out, Watkins introduces

Graeme Thomson

The problem with Chappell Roan

There is a downside to being fast-tracked into the position of this season’s newest pop sensation, and it became more and more obvious the longer Chappell Roan’s self-proclaimed ‘biggest ever show’ went on. A freshly risen pop star promoting their debut album should, by law, be performing a 40-minute hit-and-run set in a sweaty club, showcasing the absolute cream of their catalogue. Bang, bang, bang. Over and out. But the fast-track these days moves at positively breakneck speed. Barely a year after her first hit, Roan found herself playing to an audience of some 100,000 fans, convening over two nights on an ugly plot of land adjacent to an airport

Michael Hann

Britain’s loveliest, most thoughtful festival

The last weekend of August is my favourite of the year. That’s when I pootle down to Cranborne Chase to the loveliest, most thoughtful festival in the UK. End of the Road is a festival for those who look at TV coverage of Glastonbury and see only the size and the heaving crowds and come out in a cold sweat. It’s lovely because it’s small – around 15,000 people. You can walk from the furthest campsite to the furthest part of the festival area in 25 minutes or so. If you’re not enjoying what you’re watching, you’ll be able to find something else within five minutes’ walk, via an array

Sam Leith

What a joy to welcome back the Metal Gear series

Grade: A As gamers of my generation who grew up on the Metal Gear series will know, its creator Hideo Kojima is a got-dang genius. The attention to detail and love and inventiveness he gave to 1998’s Metal Gear Solid and its sequels was second to none. There were quirks (smoking was good for you); there was devilment (to beat the Mantis fight you had to use the other controller); and there were silly names (Revolver Ocelot, anyone?). So it’s with great joy that – amid a rash of rereleases and remasters and reboots aimed squarely at nostalgic middle-aged gamers – we see this, a new-generation redo of the third