Arts Reviews Archives

Wednesday

3 Jan 2024

Sam Leith

Video games aren’t a total waste of time

My wife argues with the children about video games. I argue with the children about video games. The children argue with each other about video games. Consequently, I argue with my wife about video games. It is a total nightmare – and it’s one that in various versions will be replicated in houses with young children up and down the country. The problem, in part, is a cultural divide. It frustrates me, too, when the children refuse to come off Rocket League or Fifa when they’re told to (‘I’m in the middle of a game!’). I’m also wary of the addictive nature of these things. But at the same time

Thursday

14 Dec 2023

Rupert Christiansen

The best British Nutcracker

The Nutcracker is one of those Christmas traditions that turns out to be not very traditional at all. First performed in St Petersburg in 1892, it didn’t catch on outside Russia until the late 1950s, when Balanchine’s version for New York City Ballet was repeatedly screened on network television in the USA and Festival Ballet’s production became a hardy perennial at the Royal Festival Hall. The Royal Ballet embraced it only in 1968; since then, it has become globally ubiquitous and an infallible money-spinner. The enormous affection that The Nutcracker inspires is underpinned by a magnificent score that shows Tchaikovsky at his most freshly inventive (it’s bizarre that he composed

James Walton

The road to the final snow-gazing scene is tortuous: Sky Max’s The Heist Before Christmas reviewed

When it comes to one-off family dramas for Christmas, two things are pretty much guaranteed. They’ll begin with credits announcing a starry cast, and they’ll end with a redeemed character gazing at some falling snow as the music swells. The only tricky bit, then, is what should happen in-between. Should the redemption take place against a backdrop of vaguely gritty realism? Should plausibility be a consideration, or can the writers just rely on the magic of Christmas to get them out of any plot-related trouble? If Santa’s involved – as he so often is – should the show believe in Father Christmas? In the case of The Heist Before Christmas

Guy Hayward

The art of walking

My pilgrim companion William Parsons and I did not call our first journey a pilgrimage. Rather, it was a song walk: a walk with a purpose of taking a song, ‘The Hartlake Bridge Tragedy’, back to where it came from. It was also an attempt to reclaim my place in the world, after too much time spent in front of my computer. Stepping out and walking with intention. It did the trick. When we arrived at the monument that commemorates those who had drowned, we were met by chance by a couple who had three ancestors who had died in the Medway tragedy but did not know the song. Thus

Dan Hitchens

A short history of stained glass

On 13 December 1643, a Puritan minister called Richard Culmer borrowed the Canterbury town ladder and carefully leaned it against the Cathedral’s Royal Window. He then ascended the ladder’s 60-odd rungs, holding a pike; according to his account, modestly written in the third person, ‘Some people wished he might break his neck.’ Culmer had in his sights the ‘wholly superstitious’ depictions of the Holy Trinity, of ‘popish saints’ such as St George, and in particular of St Thomas Becket. There Culmer perched, he recalled cheerfully, ‘rattling down proud Becket’s glassy bones’. ‘Our lives are like broken bits of glass, sadly or brightly coloured, jostled about and shaken’ Culmer thus earned

Richard Bratby

In Mumbai, orchestras are playing western classics without apology

Choosing a concert opener is an art in its own right. Fashions shift: the traditional overture has fallen from favour in recent years, and you might go seasons now without hearing such one-time favourites as The Thieving Magpie or Euryanthe. The opening slot is more likely to contain something short and contemporary, or worthy and obscure (cynics call it ‘box-ticking repertoire’). Or it might be empty, tipping you straight into a symphony or concerto the way a Michelin-starred chef presents his signature creation – unadorned, on a bare white plate. The Symphony Orchestra of India began its latest UK tour with John Williams’s ‘Imperial March’ from The Empire Strikes Back

Rod Liddle

Pleasant, underwhelming: Kurt Vile’s Back to Moon Beach reviewed

Grade: C+ Maximum points for self-awareness, you have to say. The title track of this pleasant, if largely underwhelming, album include the lines: ‘These recycled riffs aren’t going anywhere, any time.’ Never a truer word spoken. Here, this fitfully engaging singer-songwriter shuffles through predictable chord changes pinioned by forgettable piano riffs and intones – deploying an often exaggerated southern drawl somewhat at odds with his Pennsylvanian provenance – basic and repetitive melodies which stay in the memory for about the half-life of Oganesson and then vanish. There is a pleasing twang to the guitar, bursts of scuzzy bottleneck and the occasional lap steel, but the songs go nowhere, as Kurt

Lloyd Evans

You’ll want all the characters to die: Infinite Life, at the Dorfman Theatre, reviewed

Infinite Life is about five American women, all dumpling-shaped, who sit in a hotel garden observing a hunger strike. Some of them haven’t touched food for days, some for weeks. ‘Don’t be afraid to puke,’ counsels one of the dumplings. ‘Puking is good.’ They pass their afternoons wittering inanely about nothing at all. One dumpling is an air hostess, another works in banking, a third has a job as a fast-food executive. Or so they claim. Each of the dumplings might be lying to the others but it would make no difference because nothing connects them, and they have no stake in the situation other than the desire to burn

Deborah Ross

Fine for the kiddies, given they’re clueless: Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget reviewed

The original Chicken Run (2000), which is generally considered the best riff on The Great Escape ever made starring stop-motion poultry, did not require a sequel – but here it is anyway. Now you’ll probably expect me to say that Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget isn’t a patch on the original so I will: it isn’t. It’s not bad-bad. It’s definitely something you can stick the kids in front of, given they don’t know any better. But it’s not nearly as inventive or funny or affecting and, while Aardman films have always looked and sounded like no other, this has a generic rather than a quirky, handmade feel. Chances

David Starkey

David Starkey on the inventor of the portrait

On 12 November 1549, the 12-year-old Edward VI, newly liberated from the tutelage of his overweening uncle, Lord Protector Somerset, was at last able to enter his father Henry VIII’s private apartments in the Palace of Whitehall. From the extraordinary mixture of treasures and bric-à-brac he found there, he chose one thing: ‘a book of patterns of physiognomies’ by his father’s court painter, Hans Holbein, who had died in 1543. Edward was already familiar with his fellow European rulers from their portraits in the long gallery at St James’s, which seem to have been labelled and arranged as a teaching tool for the boy. Now, on the threshold of power,

Laura Gascoigne

A Nativity that sends shivers down the spine

Hieronymus Bosch was not a natural painter of religious images. His terrifying visions of Hell may have helped to keep congregations on the path of righteousness, but they did not inspire feelings of devotion – which could explain why none of the large altarpieces he painted remained over their altars after his death. In the eyes of the church, his Last Judgments were titillating: one painting showing ‘monstrous creatures from the underworld’ was removed from a church in his native ‘s-Hertogenbosch during his lifetime by officials offended by its orgy of nudity. Even his ‘Adoration of the Magi’ (c.1494) did not stay long above the Antwerp altar for which it

Tuesday

12 Dec 2023

Michael Hann

Why I love the Hold Steady

Live music is thriving right now. According to the US trade magazine Billboard, Taylor Swift’s Eras tour has so far grossed an estimated $838m, and that’s just from 66 shows in the Americas. It’s already the second highest-grossing tour in pop history, and she hasn’t had to cross an ocean yet. At the top end, live music is indeed awash in cash. But at the grassroots end, it really isn’t: December began with one of the UK’s best loved small venues, Moles, in Bath, announcing its bankruptcy – one more historic room set to shut down. Bands complain about venues taking a third of their merchandise revenues, a recent practice

Wednesday

6 Dec 2023

Damian Thompson

A marvel – how did Bradley Cooper pull it off? Maestro reviewed

As the overture to Candide blazed away during the ovation for Maestro at the Venice Film Festival, three members of the audience flung their arms around in an imitation of Leonard Bernstein’s conducting style. They were his children, Jamie, Alexander and Nina, and their reaction said it all. Bradley Cooper, the film’s star and director, had pulled off a piece of cinematic chutzpah worthy of Lenny himself. His secret? The last quality you associate with the most embarrassingly flamboyant genius in American musical history: understatement. It’s easy to imagine the ghastly three-hour biopic Cooper didn’t make. West Side Story goes from near-catastrophe to wild triumph. Children all over America are

James Delingpole

Still the best thing on TV: Apple TV+’s Slow Horses reviewed

Slow Horses is the best thing on television. And it’s now so successful and popular it can afford to launch series three with a sequence worthy of James Bond: Istanbul location budget; spectacular chase sequences involving cars and speedboats with some thrillingly dangerous manoeuvres round a huge container vessel; a beautiful, immaculately dressed female agent meeting (spoiler alert, though to be fair you can see this one coming a mile off) a tragically sticky end. Except it’s better than Bond – not that difficult these days, it must be said – because it is missing all that grim portentousness, over-earnestness and pomposity. The cars are beaten up and gadget-free; the

Graeme Thomson

Small moments vs Big Ideas: Peter Gabriel’s i/o reviewed

Peter Gabriel is terribly fond of a Big Idea. With Genesis he would sing in character as a lawnmower, a fox and as ‘Slipperman’. His final work with the band, in 1974, was The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, a double album driven by what we might kindly describe as a ‘kaleidoscopic’ narrative involving a Puerto-Rican protagonist on a voyage of self-discovery in New York City. Since going solo there has always been plenty of stuff whirling around each new Gabriel project. His Real World HQ in the West Country is part recording studio, part hi-tech hippie lab, encompassing conceptual technological probing, multimedia collaborations, NGOs and various foundations. i/o is

Richard Bratby

Simply not as good as Mozart’s: RCM’s Don Giovanni Tenorio reviewed

In Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, Don Giovanni finds himself in hell, chatting to the sentient Statue that dragged him to his doom. ‘It sounds rather flat without my trombones,’ admits the Statue, conceding that once you remove the genius of Mozart from the mix, you’re left with a trite (if titillating) morality tale. You could draw the same conclusion from the opera Don Giovanni Tenorio, by Giuseppe Gazzaniga (1743-1818), and if you haven’t heard of him you might wonder why not. Institutional racism? Patriarchal hegemony? Not this time. Gazzaniga was a Neapolitan composer of perfectly adequate operas that simply aren’t as good as Mozart’s. Anyway, Don Giovanni Tenorio made

Laura Gascoigne

Masterclass of an exhibition: Impressionists on Paper, at the RA, reviewed

Viewers have different relationships with small pictures, or perhaps it’s the other way round: small pictures have different relationships with them. A big picture clamours for attention; a small picture you have to lean in to hear. No picture is more intimate than a drawing, and none brings you closer to the artist’s hand. A drawing can’t lie; it wears its facture on its sleeve. If you look closely, you can work out how it was made and even track the artist’s changes of direction. You can see, for instance, how Van Gogh launched into ‘The Fortifications of Paris with Houses’ (1887) in watercolour, then fortified the fortifications with gouache

Jenny McCartney

Fascinating: Radio 4’s Empire of Tea reviewed

I can scarcely remember a time before tea: I started drinking it at around four, at home in Belfast, as a reward after school. Before long I was as fiercely protective of my right to a brew as the workers of British Leyland’s Birmingham car plant, who were famously spurred to strike action in 1981 when the management proposed cutting tea breaks by 11 minutes. Decades on, my passion is undiminished. There is no problem to which tea is not at least a partial solution: it restores flagging spirits, calms the over-excited, warms in winter and refreshes in summer. Sathnam Sanghera’s recollections in his Radio 4 five-parter Empire of Tea

Lloyd Evans

What a muddle: The House of Bernarda Alba, at the Lyttelton Theatre, reviewed

Green, green, green. Everything on stage is the same shade of eau de Nil in the NT’s version of Federico García Lorca’s classic, The House of Bernarda Alba. All the furniture and props are green. The mirrors, the walls, the crucifixes, the clocks and even the bucket and the knife-rack bear the same queasy pigment. The idea, perhaps, is to suggest a lunatic asylum or an NHS waiting room. Lorca’s steamy tale is set in a remote Spanish village in the 1930s where life is dominated by the repressive and superstitious Catholic church. The story opens with a nasty matriarch, Bernarda Alba, celebrating her husband’s death by ordering her five

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

The Spectator film critic who transformed cinema

‘Going to the pictures is nothing to be ashamed of,’ insisted the film writer Iris Barry in 1926. But it certainly wasn’t something to be proud of, either. To the cultural cognoscenti of the 1920s, Barry admitted, the cinema was barely an art at all – about as aesthetically significant as ‘passport photography’. And for much of polite society, seeing a film was done in secret, if at all. So it was a considerable boost for the fledgling medium when, 100 years ago, the word ‘cinema’ began to appear for the first time in this country above its own regular column, with its own dedicated critic, in the arts pages