Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Tuesday

Rupert Christiansen

Distressingly vulgar: Royal Ballet’s Cinderella reviewed

Despite its widespread rating as one of his masterpieces, Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella is chock full of knots, gaps and stumbling blocks – all of which the Royal Ballet’s new production throws into relief. Ashton isn’t altogether to blame: Prokofiev’s graphic score dictates an excessive amount of time given over to knockabout for the Ugly Sisters (mostly a matter of them bumping into each other) and a tiresome court jester. There’s nothing to be done with an inert third act, which in Ashton’s treatment merely recapitulates previous choreography and ends with a static tableau. The Prince has no personality whatsoever: he’s little more than a handsome porter. Yet genius shines through.

Laura Gascoigne

Artists’ dogs win the rosettes: Portraits of Dogs – From Gainsborough to Hockney, at the Wallace Collection, reviewed

Walking on Hampstead Heath the December before Covid, I got caught up in a festive party of bichon frises dressed, like their owners, in Christmas jumpers. It seemed bizarre at the time but wouldn’t surprise me now. During lockdown the local dog population exploded and the smaller breeds now wear jumpers all winter. There are no dogs in jumpers in the Wallace Collection’s new show – though, given the level of anthropomorphism, there might as well be. The ‘Allegorical Dog’ section, devoted to Edwin Landseer, includes ‘Trial by Jury’ (c.1840) with a poodle sitting as judge, and a canine interpretation of the parable of Dives and Lazarus featuring a well-fed

Stuart Jeffries

A look inside Britain’s only art gallery in jail

The centrepiece of the exhibition at Britain’s only contemporary art gallery in a prison is an installation, consisting of two broken, stained armchairs. They’ve been placed face-to-face, as if for a therapy session. Elsewhere there are silkscreen prints and paintings. This outbuilding-cum-art studio and gallery is where prisoners are also taught dry-point etching – surprising given the needles involved, but I am assured that all potential weapons are accounted for at the end of each session. ‘For two hours a week I come here and learn new skills,’ explains the silkscreen artist and inmate of HMP Grendon. ‘I get completely absorbed in printmaking. I feel freer here than any other

Wednesday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Succession works because the writers don’t care about the boring business storylines

I have a theory that many great artists’ strength is a product of their weakness. The flaw of the relentlessly frivolous creator of Succession Jesse Armstrong, for example, is that he is very easily bored by grown-up subjects such as big business, finance, corporate structure, legal affairs or anything involving depth and seriousness. Which ought, you might think, to pose a major problem for someone constructing an epic drama – loosely based on the Murdoch family – about the struggle for succession in a global media empire. But Armstrong’s saving grace is this: most viewers are not interested in such tedium either. The reason, for example, that Elisabeth Murdoch has

Graeme Thomson

Why supergroups nearly always suck

Recently in these pages, ruminating on the ghastly Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I wrote that music does not conform to any equation. I should have added: except, of course, for the occasions when it does. One tried-and-true formulation is that ‘super-groups’, those bespoke vehicles bringing together artists best known either for working alone or within other bands, tend to add up to considerably less than the sum of their parts. Supergroups are in thrall to the idea of their own existence; the music trails sluggishly behind We could blame Eric Clapton. Indeed, it seems remiss not to. Blind Faith – a fatally untidy union of Clapton (ex-Cream), Steve

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

In praise of From Our Own Correspondent 

Most of us are familiar with the notion of writer’s block, that paralysis of invention induced by the appalling sight of a blank page. Composer’s block is less widely discussed, although musicians seem equally afflicted by creative drought. Perhaps the best known case is that of the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov, the subject of Radio 3’s Sunday Feature, which describes how the great man finally fought his way out of a numbing three-year ‘apathy’ with the help of a hypnotist.  Rachmaninov fought his way out of a numbing three-year ‘apathy’ with the help of a hypnotist The composer had been catapulted into his long despair by the hostile reception to

Deborah Ross

Emily Watson’s performance is extraordinary: God’s Creatures reviewed

There are some films that you know will be quality simply by the actors who have agreed to be in them. They’re like a kitemark. Emily Watson is such an actor, as is Paul Mescal, who hasn’t put a foot wrong since Normal People and must have an excellent agent or just a feel for these sorts of things, even if he’s bound to turn up in the Marvel franchise one of these days. Both Watson and Mescal star in God’s Creatures, so it’s double kitemarked, you could say. It’s a tough watch, and a tense watch, but it’s powerfully affecting and plainly quality through and through. It asks: mothers

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Flawless: Accidental Death of an Anarchist, at the Lyric Hammersmith, reviewed

Accidental Death of an Anarchist has been performed all over the world with varying degrees of success. Written by Dario Fo and his wife Franca Rame, the script was inspired by an actual case of police brutality in 1969 when a train driver with anarchist leanings was found dead beneath the open window of a fourth-floor interrogation room. Official reports described the fatality as ‘accidental’. The plot structure is borrowed from Gogol’s The Government Inspector. A senior civil servant arrives in an isolated town and exposes the corrupt and self-serving ways of the townsfolk. After he departs, the civil servant is exposed as an imposter. Here, the authority figure is

Richard Bratby

The opera’s a masterpiece but the production doesn’t quite come off: ENO’s The Dead City reviewed

English National Opera has arrived at the Dead City, and who, before Christmas, would have given odds that this new production of Korngold’s Die tote Stadt would ever make it this far? This is late-Romantic music-drama on an exuberant scale; it simply doesn’t lend itself to pubs and car parks (even the reduced version staged – superbly – at Longborough last summer used an orchestra of some 60 players). Korngold deals with strong emotions (grief, delusion and obsessive love) with a melodic generosity that has historically provoked the prissiest instincts of the British operatic establishment. The Royal Opera held its nose and staged a brief run in 2009, before sweeping

Laura Gascoigne

After Impressionism – Inventing Modern Art, at the National Gallery, reviewed

Getting the words ‘impressionism’ and ‘modern art’ into one exhibition title is a stroke of marketing genius on the part of the National Gallery, but is it too much for a single blockbuster? Symbolism, cloisonnisme, pointillism, expressionism, cubism, abstraction: if impressionism was a watershed in modern art, the streams that flowed from it were many and various. By setting a time frame of 1886 to 1914 – from the last impressionist exhibition to the first world war – After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art narrows its options only to widen them by expanding its focus beyond Paris to Brussels, Barcelona, Vienna and Berlin. In the closing decades of the 19th century,

Christine L. Corton

How fog gripped the Victorian imagination 

Conjure up before your mind a vision of ‘Dickensian’ London, and as likely as not you will see in your imagination a street filled with yellow fog, dimly illuminated by a gas-lit street lamp. The classic ‘pea-souper’ was caused by a natural winter fog in the Thames basin, turned yellow by the coal fires and industrial chimneys of the Victorian city and held in place for days by the phenomenon of ‘temperature inversion’, when a layer of warmer air traps the cold, damp and increasingly impenetrable atmospheric mix in the streets below. Charles Dickens was probably more responsible than anyone else for the association: most famously, of course, in the

Tuesday

Lukas Degutis

The genius of Lana Del Rey

Over the past few years, Lana Del Rey has been engulfed in acclaim: Variety’s Artist Of The Decade, the first recipient of Billboard’s Visionary Award and Rolling Stone UK’s endorsement as ‘the greatest American songwriter of the 21st century’. Bruce Springsteen has named her ‘one of the best’ and Courtney Love called her a ‘true musical genius’. And now, with her long-awaited ninth studio album Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd released last weekend, the critics have not held back. From the Guardian to the Financial Times, Del Rey’s new album has collected a string of 4- and 5-star ratings. But to call Del Rey’s journey a bumpy one would be an understatement. Just over a decade ago, the release of

Sunday

Robert Jackman

New British B-movie that strikes gold: Hitmen reviewed

Like a lot of modern day B-movie directors, the Enfield-based filmmaker Savvas D. Michael takes an almost tradesman-like pride in his output: the aim is to do as much as possible (artistically speaking at least) without splashing the cash. And if you’re partial to the output of Guy Ritchie – the former Mr Madonna whose style has shaped an entire generation of testosterone-laden British filmmaking – you’ll be hooked to his latest, Hitmen. For all Michael’s claims about the ancient classics (his previous film – about the underworld characters who frequent a North London social club – was sold as a modern day take on The Iliad), it’s clear he knows

Wednesday

Oscar Edmondson

Do we need the BBC World Service?

In 1957 the BBC removed the head of the Russian Service. Anatol Goldberg was by all accounts a remarkable broadcaster, tasked with coordinating, producing and narrating the BBC’s radio output to the USSR at one of the most volatile periods of the Cold War. Internal reports praised his navigation of the ‘complications’ of Russian programming. So why was he demoted? The answer lies in the long history of British government interference in the World Service.  Today harmony reigns between state and Service: the government announced a one-off £20 million payment to the World Service in last week’s updated Integrated Review. Yet last year foreign-language broadcasting was facing a £28 million

Laura Gascoigne

Don’t miss the exquisite Native-American carvings at the Sainsbury Centre

It’s payback time: women, artists from ethnic minorities and non-western traditions are taking over the exhibition schedules. On the heels of the seven women expressionists in Making Modernism at the Royal Academy comes Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South. ‘We are aware that art history has excluded a lot of artists and it is incumbent on us to broaden our perspective,’ said Academy secretary Axel Rüger at the press view – and for anyone who failed to grasp the magnitude of the moment one of the artists, Lonnie Holley, added: ‘This is the Royal Academy of Arts. This is not just some come-by-lately museum,

Michael Hann

Pretty, charming and largely unremarkable: Devonte Hynes & the LSO reviewed

Think of pop music as being like the parable of the sower. These days the seed falling on stony ground comes from the young rock bands, while the stuff that’s finding fertile earth is on the edges of R&B where it shades into other styles, especially psychedelia. It works from both ends: the Australian group Tame Impala went from being a workaday psychedelic rock band to being festival headliners by bringing dance music into their sound. Meanwhile within black music, Janelle Monae – perhaps better known as an actor – and Solange Knowles are regarded by critics as something not far short of deities for their Afrofuturist, trippy takes on

Deborah Ross

I never knew a game of dominoes could be so menacing: The Beasts reviewed

The Beasts is a rural psychological thriller from Spain that has won many awards across Europe and even though we don’t set any store by awards – the multi-Oscar winning Everything Everywhere All At Once is known as Extremely Baffling As Well As Dull in this house – it is a riveting, merciless study of human nature, so cleverly tense throughout that even a game of dominoes becomes menacing. You didn’t know a game of dominoes could be menacing? Trust me, it can. You might never be able to look at a pack of dominoes again without feeling menaced. Directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen and co-written with Isabel Pena, the film

James Walton

Makes a change to see such reassuringly competent policemen: ITV1’s Grace reviewed

Sunday-night dramas on the two main terrestrial channels definitely aren’t what they used to be. Not so long ago, you could bid farewell to the weekend with a reliable cocktail of lovely scenery, eccentric but good-natured rustics and plots carefully designed to warm the cockles. Now we have The Gold on BBC1 providing a meticulous analysis of recent economic history – while on ITV1 the new series of Grace began with an episode that hinged on one simple question asked early on: ‘What kind of sick mind dresses up in a full latex bodysuit and assaults his victims with a dildo?’ The programme is based on the bestselling novels by

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Drab by comparison to the film: Bonnie & Clyde, at the Garrick Theatre, reviewed

The murderous odyssey of Bonnie and Clyde is a tricky subject for a musical because the characters are such loathsome wasters and their grisly ambition is to fleece poor people at gunpoint during the Great Depression. They’re famous for stealing from banks but they changed tack once they realised that grocery stores and funeral parlours were easier to rob. The little guy was their real target. In this revived musical, written in 2009, the principal figures have no redeeming qualities at all. Bonnie is a beautiful brain-dead popsicle who dreams of becoming a poet or a movie star. Nowadays she’d be ranting on TikTok from the front seat of an

Richard Bratby

If you’re anywhere near Edinburgh, get a ticket: Scottish Opera’s Il trittico reviewed

It does no harm, once in a while, to assume that the creators of an opera actually know what they’re doing. Puccini was clear that he wanted the three one-act operas of Il trittico to be performed together and in a particular order. Promoters and directors have had other ideas, and between the wars it was apparently common to perform the triptych’s comic final opera, Gianni Schicchi, in a double bill with Strauss’s Salome, which must have been an interesting night out. Come for the necrophilia, stay for the lulz. But Scottish Opera’s new production presents Il trittico in the form the composer intended, and what d’you know? It works.