Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

The true inventor of the superhero comic? William Blake

Among the documents in the West Sussex Record Office is an indictment for sedition of a certain William Blake. During an altercation in a Felpham garden in August 1803, he is accused by one John Scofield, a soldier in the British army then at war with France, of having shouted: ‘Damn the King. The soldiers are all slaves.’ Fortunately for the accused, when the case came to trial in Chichester the following January the ‘invented character’ of Scofield’s evidence was judged to be ‘so obvious that an acquittal resulted’. It looks as if Blake got off lightly. Had the judge been better versed in the work of our great artist-poet,

Richard Bratby

It’s disturbing how proud some music-lovers are about detesting Bruckner

There was a pleasing simplicity about the Glasshouse’s Big Bruckner Weekend. Five concerts, five major works, just one composer. You went big or you went home, and in truth that’s usually the deal with old Anton; in the words of the The Bluffer’s Guide to Music: ‘Bruckner just didn’t write pleasant little recommendable pieces.’ But it was striking how much more manageable he felt in this context. With a single work per concert, even the most obstinate Brucknerphobe was confronted with no more than 80 minutes of music at a sitting. No distractions, then – with the added sweetener of hearing a state-of-the-nation showcase of four leading British orchestras before

Rupert Christiansen

What would Balanchine say? New York City Ballet, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

It’s been 16 years since New York City Ballet appeared in London, and its too-brief visit to Sadler’s Wells offered a welcome chance to encounter a previously unseen range of repertory and personnel. Perhaps the company can never be what it was when I first saw it as a youngster – its founder George Balanchine still in charge, the likes of Suzanne Farrell and Edward Villella in their prime – but one cannot live off misty memories and what has emerged now certainly has living, evolving force. Yet the evening’s highlight for me had to be its ‘heritage’ element – the exquisite performance by Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley of

Saturday

Thursday

Timothy Jacobson

The fading art of elegant gallery dining

We live in times generally unfriendly to ritual, religious or civic. For 50 years at least, churches have stripped away once-glorious liturgical rituals in order, they say, to render themselves more accessible, even as pews have emptied. On the civic side, great art museums – some would say the cathedrals of our secular age – once invited visitors to a ritual that gave a rest to the feet and the eyes while enhancing the experience of being there in the first place. It was called having lunch. The space is still there but is a shell. ‘Redesigned’ is not the adjective; vandalised would be better Visual attentiveness requires energy even

Richard Bratby

Homework, not theatre: WNO’s Cosi fan tutte reviewed

Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte hasn’t always been taken seriously. In fact for much of the 19th century it wasn’t even reckoned to be very good (Donald Tovey described its characters as ‘humanly speaking, rubbish’). For the modern director, there are several potential approaches. One – the hardest – is to try and evoke in the audience an approximation of a late-18th-century mindset. Another, scarcely easier, is to go all-in on psychological subtlety – the path taken by Tim Albery in the current Opera North production. A third is simply to play the whole thing as a saucy romp with a beautiful score, and that’s the choice that Max Hoehn has

Pierre d’Alancaisez

Another exhibition that sees everything through the prism of race

A wave of totalising race-first exhibitions has swept through UK art institutions of late. The National Portrait Gallery’s remit of ‘reflecting’ British society could reasonably make one wary of its turn at the same project. Indeed, a false, stilted language accompanies curator Ekow Eshun’s The Time is Always Now. To have some 20 artists ‘reframing the black figure’ somehow sounds both ambiguous and politically predetermined. What unites these works is more often a trendy hashtag than ‘lived reality’ Eshun has long been invested in the artistic black diaspora. His 2022 Hayward Gallery show In the Black Fantastic played on fantasy and Afrofuturism and had artists make new worlds that would

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

This play about Hitchcock isn’t worth leaving the house for

Double Feature is a new play by John Logan, whose credits include Skyfall. The subject is movie-making, and the action is set in 1964 in a Hollywood cottage where Alfred Hitchcock is preparing Tippi Hedren for a nude scene in Marnie. The great director, who made a star of the unknown Hedren by casting her in The Birds, has all the power here. He positively quivers to get her into bed and yet he hesitates because he’s three times her age and nine times her girth. Nobody, not even a director of Kent’s powers, can make a gourmet feast out of two half-eaten pizzas Their interactions have a gruesome master-slave

Hannah Tomes Hannah Tomes

Devastating: Almeida Theatre’s King Lear reviewed

Yaël Farber’s production of King Lear at the Almeida Theatre is imbued with an undercurrent of tension that feels as if it’s constantly on the edge of exploding into violence. It’s not her first crack at Shakespeare – in 2001 she adapted Julius Caesar, and she directed Hamlet at the Gate in Dublin in 2018 and Macbeth at the Almeida in 2021 – but I’d be willing to bet it’s her most virulent. Danny Sapani’s Lear flies into a terrifying rage, scattering microphones across the stage The opening scene – a swanky press conference that could have been lifted straight from an episode of Succession – neatly sets the tone

Deborah Ross

John Galliano shows the cancelled can be uncancelled

Kevin Macdonald’s documentary High & Low: John Galliano charts the highs and (spectacular) low of the British fashion designer who was fired as creative director of Dior after a number of anti-Semitic tirades came to light. I went into the cinema wanting to hear what Galliano had to say about it all. Why Jews, John? Why not Buddhists? What was going on? But the film never properly gets to the bottom of it. (‘I have no memory of that’ is his favourite reply.) As to whether the ‘cancelled’ can be ‘uncancelled’, there is a clear answer: yes. He is now riding high and appears to have been forgiven by the

Michael Hann

The joy of meat-and-potatoes rock

‘Meat-and-potatoes rock’ is the pejorative term critics use when describing groups of white men with guitars who play loud, uncomplicated music. Why would anyone enjoy such stuff, when there are the ceviches of hyperpop, the flavoured foams of experimental hip-hop, the chargrilled seasonal vegetables of jazz? Don’t they know the world has moved on? Unfortunately, the world has a habit of not listening to the critical consensus. The highest new entry in last week’s album chart came from the Snuts, a meat-and-potatoes guitar band. This week’s No. 1 album is all but guaranteed to be by Liam Gallagher and John Squire, the Toby Carvery of meat-and-potatoes rock. As the prevalence

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The Last Dinner Party are sadly rather good

Grade: A- There is something decidedly fishy about this convocation of terribly well-bred young ladies who became a kind of sensation two years ago, before they had even recorded a single song – and now have their first album at number one, a sell-out tour in the US and a Brit award. All a bit too good to be true. Do they write their own stuff? Are they music industry nepo-kids, like everybody claimed Clairo was? For the first time, a glimmer of trouble afflicted them last week when a member of the five-piece band seemingly announced that people didn’t want to hear about the cost-of-living crisis. Cue outrage from

James Walton

Workmanlike romp: Sky Atlantic’s Mary & George reviewed

If there’s such a thing as a workmanlike romp, then Mary & George might be one. This drama about political and sexual shenanigans during the reign of James I certainly has all the scheming, racy dialogue and nudity that any romp-lover could wish for. At the same time, there’s the slightly awkward sense that it’s harbouring a guilty secret: it wants to be taken seriously as history and thinks it has some important things to say about class, gender and sexuality in 17th-century England and beyond. As a result, the naughty stuff – while definitely naughty – occasionally feels rather dutiful, and the playfulness somehow rather solemn. (‘It’s really interesting

Friday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

In Bermondsey I heard the future – at the Barbican I smelt death: new-music round-up

To Dalston to witness the worst gig of my life. The premise of the Random Gear Festival was simple and rather inspired: gather some arbitrary objects; get people to play them. In previous iterations, the offerings had included an ice skate, a wet baguette and an exercise bike. This time we had a trampoline, a microwave, a dead fish. I kept an open mind. I was reminded that years ago at Cafe Oto I had seen the then chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Ilan Volkov rub two blocks of polystyrene together with the subtle virtuosity of Martha Argerich at a Steinway. I was reminded too of what

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Serious composers write ad music too

Next month in London, they’re celebrating a composer you’ve probably never heard of, but whose work you’re sure to have heard. If you’ve watched much British TV or cinema in the past half century, you’ll already know his music, and better than you think. A quick test of age: do you remember ‘The Right One’ – the song that used to advertise Martini (‘any time, any place, anywhere’) in a haze of wah-wah pedal and 1970s hair? How about Dennis Potter’s sci-fi swansong Cold Lazarus, or more recently, the Bafta-winning Édith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose? Still no? Then picture David Suchet as ITV’s Poirot: and come on, surely

James Delingpole James Delingpole

A turkey: Netflix’s Avatar – The Last Airbender reviewed

Blimey, Avatar: The Last Airbender is a load of tripe. And I really didn’t want it to be. There’s nothing I like more than trawling the networks for exciting new cultural phenomena from the burgeoning, weird oriental TV market – such as Squid Game and One Piece – and bringing it to your attention. Perhaps it fails because, while based on a hugely popular echt Japanese anime series, this is made by Americans. Whatever the case this much-heralded fantasy offering (no relation of the James Cameron Dances With Smurfs movies) is a turkey. The premise is enticing. It’s set in a world divided into competing tribes – Earth, Air, Fire

Laura Gascoigne

Dazzling but it’s all show: Tate Britain’s Sargent and Fashion reviewed

Madame Ramon Subercaseaux, the beautiful wife of a Chilean diplomat, was not a Parisienne. So when the 25-year-old John Singer Sargent’s portrait of her in a black and white ensemble straight out of the Renoir playbook won a second-class medal at the 1881 Paris Salon, French pride was wounded. Édouard Pailleron, father of the purebred French children in Sargent’s other Salon submission, kicked up a fuss and had to be placated with another medal. But that was nothing to the scandal that erupted three years later over the American artist’s provocative portrait of femme du monde Virginie Gautreau, salaciously anonymised as ‘Madame X’. Two years later, he left Paris for

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

118 minutes too long: The Picture of Dorian Gray, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, reviewed

Sarah Snook, who appeared in Succession, takes centre stage in Kip Williams’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s only novel. The best thing about The Picture of Dorian Gray is the narrative premise: a young aristocrat commissions a portrait of himself and the image grows old while he retains his youthful good looks. It’s a ghost story, really, and Dorian ‘dies’ when the portrait is completed and then haunts his own life as an ageless and untouchable spirit. Wilde used the book as a literary showcase for his aphorisms. On ageing: ‘The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.’ Imagine Orson Welles declaiming the

Deborah Ross

All I kept thinking was how the sand must get everywhere: Dune – Part Two reviewed

Dune: Part Two is not a sequel but a continuation of Dune, so picks up exactly at the point you’d started to wonder if it would ever end. All I can remember from the first film is sand, sand, so much sand, and it must get everywhere, and into your sandwiches. But it is set in a massive desert so it goes without saying there would be a lot of sand. I don’t blame the sand especially. There are all sorts of allegories at play; I’m not paid enough to think about them Directed by Denis Villeneuve and based on the series of books by Frank Herbert, this second outing

Daisy Dunn

Why are there so few decent poetry podcasts?

The late John Berryman described A.E. Housman as ‘a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but an absolutely marvellous minor poet… and a great scholar’. The Times obituarist went further, declaring Housman to have been, on occasion, ‘so unapproachable as to diffuse a frost’. That such a man could be so moved by a cherry tree in spring and by the dales of Shropshire in autumn says something about the separability of art and life. The greatest contradiction for Frank Skinner, whose poetry podcast has returned for a ninth series, lies between Housman’s work as a Cambridge classicist and his verse. As Skinner observes, there