Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Michael Hann

Without Pitchfork, bands like the Clientele would never have attracted any attention

The whole world might have been different had Alasdair MacLean, singer and guitarist of the delicate, pastoral, slightly psychedelic band the Clientele, had his way. In 2006 he told music website Pitchfork about the time he was working for a publisher and strongly recommended they turn down a children’s fantasy novel that had been submitted. They overruled him and published Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone anyway. We all know what happened to J.K. Rowling. MacLean ended up leaving the world of books, and in due course the Clientele got a music deal that enabled them to turn full time, though I have no idea whether they still survive solely

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Visually world-class, dramatically second-rate: Don’t Destroy Me, at the Arcola, reviewed

Don’t Destroy Me is the rather breathless title of Michael Hastings’s first play which he wrote when he was just 18. The material draws on his adolescent years in a south London boarding house and the action opens with an elderly husband, Leo, and his unfaithful young wife, Shani, preparing for a visit from their handsome teenage son, Sammy. Leo knows that his marriage is being undermined by Shani’s affair with a cocky spiv who lives next door but this tawdry business fades into the background as the play starts to come alive. The characters upstairs take over. The flat above is occupied by Mrs Pond, a pretentious fraud in

Richard Bratby

Fresh as an April shower: Opera North’s Albert Herring reviewed

Opera North has launched its spring season with Giles Havergal’s 2013 production of Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring, performed (as conceived) in the Howard Assembly Room – the company’s studio space next door to the Grand Theatre. The economics of opera are a dark and dismal science, but one of the few constants is that ticket sales are never the whole story. So if ON has revived a show that can only accommodate an audience of around 300, and which can’t tour, we should assume that’s all priced in. The problem here is that Havergal presents the opera in the round, a practice rarely seen on the unsubsidised stage but beloved

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Original and absorbing: A Highland Song reviewed

Grade: A- Why don’t you go outside and get some fresh air instead of playing that stupid game? A) I’ve been outside, and I didn’t like it. And B) there’s a game for that. A Highland Song excellently simulates the experience of going outside for a walk and regretting it. Moira sets off to meet her Uncle Hamish at the lighthouse – but like Virginia Woolf’s lot, takes her sweet time getting there. Once you’re 100 yards from her front door, she has no idea where she is. Despite her och-aye-hoots brogue, she turns out to be no less clueless than the tourists who head up Ben Nevis in flip-flops

James Walton

Highly effective slice of old-school storytelling: ITV’s Born from the Same Stranger reviewed

With its tales of close relatives reuniting after years of separation, ITV’s Long Lost Family has been reliably jerking tears since 2011. Now, from the same production company, comes Born from the Same Stranger: another thumping slice of highly effective old-school human-interest storytelling, this time served with a side order of ethical dilemmas. In the 1990s when, as the programme put it, ‘sperm donation was in its heyday’, donors did their thing in return for 50 quid and a promise of anonymity. On solid practical grounds, this seemed like a good idea at the time – and perhaps still does. But it reckoned without the deep human need to know

Deborah Ross

Mesmerising: All of Us Strangers reviewed

Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is an aching tale of grief, loss and loneliness starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, so I probably don’t need to tell you the acting is off the scale but I will anyway: the acting is off the scale. Scott, in particular, infuses his character with such vulnerability that you’ll want to reach into the screen and comfort him. And while it does feature ghosts, don’t let that put you off. They’re the doable kind rather than the walking-through-walls, ‘wooOOO-wooOOO’ kind. (Huge relief all round.) Haigh makes complex, intimate, single-protagonist films (Weekend, 45 Years, Lean on Pete) and this is no exception. Here Scott

Rupert Christiansen

Giselle is lovingly revived at the London Coliseum

Two archetypal ballet heroines have been facing each other across WC2: at the Coliseum, Giselle the blameless virgin, wronged in the first act, disembodied in the second; at Covent Garden, Manon the seductive, manipulative courtesan who can’t choose between love and money. Both in different ways are victims of a cruel world, and both must die. The men responsible for their downfall – of course – survive. Mary Skeaping’s staging of Giselle for the English National Ballet, first seen in 1971, divides opinion among the cognoscenti. It reverts to what is known about the original 1841 Paris production, retrieving a substantial episode of expository mime – that will baffle modern

Thursday

Christopher Harding

The man who got the West to fall in love with India’s sacred literature

The first European translation of the Bhagavad Gita, a dialogue between Prince Arjuna and Lord Krishna, appeared in English in 1785. Strangely, this classic of Indian spirituality, which is much concerned with liberation, was prefaced with talk of conquest, rightful dominion and chains of subjection. The translation had been produced under the auspices of the English East India Company, then in the process of claiming for itself ever-larger swaths of territory in India. The first edition incorporated a letter written by the governor-general in Calcutta, Warren Hastings, in which he compared the Gita with Homer and Milton. He also noted its usefulness as a source of intelligence on a newly

Graeme Thomson

Americans still think ‘punk rock’ was about the music, bless them

Of their many cultural quirks, Americans retain a slightly ridiculous and yet rather touching belief in the power of ‘punk rock’ (nobody in the UK ever calls it that, of course: it’s just ‘punk’). Despite laying claim to the progenitors of the whole punk thing – the Stooges, the New York Dolls, the Ramones – Americans still don’t quite seem to understand it. They actually think it was about the music, bless them. More bafflingly, they seem to regard ‘punk rock’ as something that has enduring currency, rather than being a brief – though significant – cultural phenomenon of the mid-to-late 1970s that was more or less over before it

Laura Gascoigne

Modern, timeless, effortlessly avant-garde: Pasquarosa, at the Estorick Collection, reviewed

In February 1929, an exhibition by a young unknown female painter opened at the Arlington Gallery on Bond Street. This was not surprising in itself, given that the gallery specialised in lesser-known artists. More surprising was the fact that this artist was a woman – and Italian. As the critic Emilio Cecchi noted in the catalogue: ‘As regards the best Italian art of today the English public knows very little.’ What piqued people’s interest in this particular Italian artist was her fascinating backstory. Born in 1896 in Anticoli Corrado, a small hill town northeast of Rome known as a nursery for artists’ models, Pasquarosa Marcelli had never painted and was

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Duff nonsense: The Enfield Haunting, at Ambassadors Theatre, reviewed

The Enfield Haunting is a good old-fashioned horror show that wants to be a documentary as well. It’s based on a hocus-pocus yarn that made the front page of the Daily Mirror in 1977 and was swiftly forgotten. The play opens in an Enfield terrace that resembles a bomb site, complete with charred plasterwork, missing walls and ripped out floorboards. Peggy, a harassed housewife played by Catherine Tate, is struggling to cope with three teenage brats and a ghost that’s got loose in her home. Two ghosts, in fact. Peggy’s daughter, Janet, has been possessed by a demonic spirit that forces her to rasp out nonsense in a hoarse, throaty

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

The Queen’s Reading Room needs more Queen

In the dog days of winter, when venturing out under darkened, sleety skies is to be avoided if at all possible, an online book club often seems the most appealing kind there is. Here in the UK, on territory in which the daytime TV hosts Richard and Judy once held undisputed reign, a bookish royal has entered the fray: Queen Camilla, whose ‘reading room’ and associated charity was launched on Instagram during the pandemic, and has now branched into podcasts. The first episode of The Queen’s Reading Room was introduced by the charity’s chief executive Vicki Perrin, to the background music of insistently vivacious strings, the kind they let rip

Richard Bratby

Everything hits the spot: Royal Opera’s Elektra reviewed

Aristotle wrote that classical tragedy should evoke pity and awe. With Richard Strauss’s Elektra, the awe can be taken as read: a certain irreducible level of epicness is written into the score, even if – like Sir Antonio Pappano on the first night of this new production at the Royal Opera – a conductor takes the composer’s advice and treats it like Mendelssohn’s ‘fairy music’. But I genuinely hadn’t expected quite so much of the other emotion – pity, or if you prefer, compassion. There it was, though, welling up from the bottom of the orchestra, worrying away at one’s preconceptions, until in the Recognition Scene the eyes started to

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Gladiators was never good TV

I’m sure there’s a Portuguese word which describes ‘enforced nostalgia for a thing you never enjoyed in the first place’. Whatever it is, it applies in spades to BBC1’s reboot of Gladiators, which we’re now told was one of the landmarks of 1990s Saturday TV entertainment but which I don’t recall fondly one bit, despite having a child who would have been just the right age to enjoy it. What I do remember was the desperate contrivance of it all. The Fawn, I recall, was invited to go with our boy the Rat to write up a feature on the very first show and interview the stars. She came back

Deborah Ross

Sincere, heartfelt, true: The Holdovers reviewed

The first thing to say about Alexander Payne’s latest, The Holdovers, is that it’s not so much an inspirational teacher film as an uninspirational teacher film. You should know that before attending the cinema otherwise you might sit throughout in the brace position, fearing it could go all Dead Poets Society at any moment. It doesn’t. No one plunders Tennyson for motivational slogans even once. Instead, it feels sincere, heartfelt, true. You may even come away wishing  you’d had an uninspirational teacher when you were at school. The year is 1970 and it’s filmed as if it had been made in 1970 with static on the soundtrack, desaturated colours and

Thursday

Richard Bratby

The stars are aligned for Royal Opera’s tantalising new production of Elektra 

About 30 minutes before the end of Richard Strauss’s Elektra, the universe splits open. Elektra, daughter of the murdered king Agamemnon, lives for the day when her brother Orest will return to avenge her father by slaughtering her mother. Now Orest is here and his sister no longer recognises him. Until suddenly, shatteringly, she does, and Strauss’s 109-piece orchestra unleashes a dissonant scream unlike anything that had been heard in European music. Indeed, for many listeners in 1909 it was the end of music. Satirists compared it to capital punishment (one cartoon depicted a quaking victim of ‘Elektra-cution’). When it transferred to Covent Garden in 1910, newspapers promised London audiences

Laura Gascoigne

The killer satire of James Gillray

‘I hope the day will never come when I shall neither be the subject of calumny or ridicule, for then I shall be neglected and forgotten’, is how Samuel Johnson greeted the news that James Gillray had caricatured him as Dr Pomposo. In Georgian London, a caricature was a fast-track to celebrity. And, as described by one contemporary observer, the print shop window was ‘the temple of fame in grotesque’. Gillray was chiefly responsible for this. When he emerged on to the print publishing scene in the 1780s, the British art of ‘caricatura’ – an Italian import – was in its infancy. It grew up fast. Gillray, who had misspent

James Walton

Why has the BBC pulled its punches in this doc about the Indian super-rich?

The big finish to Streets of Gold: Mumbai, an excited look at the city’s ‘wealthiest one-percenters’, was an extravagant party hosted by ‘two of India’s most coveted fashion designers’. As the programme made clear, all the guests were rich and/or famous, and all were dressed to prove it. ‘If you’re basic, you’re not invited,’ said one – which, given that the idea of the party was ‘to celebrate diversity in all its forms’ some documentaries might have considered a remark worthy of further investigation. But not Streets of Gold. As the previous hour had demonstrated, its chief characteristic – never a good one for a documentary – was a marked

Michael Hann

The confusing, overwhelming, exhilarating music of Jockstrap

Shall we get the pop predictions for this year out of the way first? Taylor Swift will continue to conquer the world; the charts will continue their descent into meaninglessness; some long-forgotten group or style will become inexplicably popular because kids use it to soundtrack their TikTok videos. There. That’s the coming year taken care of. And how did the old one wrap up? With a week of gigs in the run-up to Christmas that was so overloaded it was impossible to get to them all. That still left plenty of treats, though, beginning with Jockstrap. The band was joined on stage by strings, a percussionist, a soprano, as well

Deborah Ross

Poor Things is weird and wonderful – but not so weird I had to Google it afterwards

I’ve heard a few people say that, based on the trailer, Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film, Poor Things, looks too weird for their tastes. To be honest, the trailer made me think this ‘gender-bending Frankenstein’, as it’s being sold, looked too weird for my tastes. But let’s be brave. It is Lanthimos after all (The Lobster, The Favourite), and it is the wonderful Emma Stone, whom we are always here for, so let’s not be too afraid. It is weird, no doubt. But it is the sort of weird we can do. And not so weird that I had to Google it afterwards. It has a simple narrative – a journey