Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

The musical émigrés from Nazi-Europe who shaped postwar Britain

Halfway up the stairs to the Royal College of Music’s exhibition Music, Migration & Mobility is a map of NW3, covered in red dots. It’s centred on the Finchley Road north of Swiss Cottage, and every dot (there are nearly 50) represents a business or an institution associated, in the middle years of the last century, with a refugee from the Nazis. Herr Zwillenberg offers upholstery repairs; a grocer stocks sauerkraut ‘and all Continental Delicacies’. There are adverts for fundraising concerts and political lectures; a Blue Danube Club and a Café Vienna. It’s urban Mitteleuropa in miniature, uprooted, transplanted, and clinging together for comfort and mutual support. They called it

Laura Gascoigne

How Vermeer learnt to embrace the everyday – and transfigured it

Has any artist ever painted fewer pictures than Johannes Vermeer? At the last authenticated count there were 37 still in existence, and five more are known from references in early sources. With allowance for wastage and disappearance historians estimate that he produced no more than 50, a rate of two a year over a career spanning two decades. So when 28 are assembled in one exhibition, as currently at the Rijksmuseum, it counts as a blockbuster. Astonishingly, this is the museum’s first Vermeer exhibition. Holland’s national gallery has not always valued its most popular master: when it opened in 1885, the only Vermeer on show, ‘Woman in Blue Reading a

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

Close to perfection: Opera North’s The Cunning Little Vixen reviewed

Opera North has begun 2023 with a couple of big revivals, and it’s always rewarding to call in on these things and see how they’re holding up. The long-lived, endlessly revived classic production is one of the quirks of operatic culture. It actually feels disconcerting, as a regular operagoer, to go to the conventional theatre (you know, the vanilla kind where they don’t sing) and discover that they’ve started again from scratch. A completely new Tempest? What was wrong with the 2016 staging? Possibly it’s to do with the financial realities of an art form that needs to keep a full orchestra and chorus on the payroll. A Year Zero

Rupert Christiansen

Pam Tanowitz is the real deal: Secret Things/Everyone Keeps Me, at the Linbury Theatre, reviewed

Civilisation has never nurtured more than a handful of front-rank choreographers within any one generation, with the undesirable result that the chosen few end up excessively in demand, careering around the globe and overworking, delegating or repeating themselves. Please can someone up there ensure that Pam Tanowitz doesn’t suffer such a fate. This fifty-something American has recently matured as one of the best in field, producing dance of rigorous clarity, austere yet richly nuanced, that makes the work of certain other big names look fuzzily derivative or gimmicky. Just don’t ask too much of her, because she works through fine detail, not a broad brush. Tanowitz is the real, rare

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Listen to the world’s first radio play

Radio works its strongest magic, I always think, when you listen to it in the dark. The most reliable example is the Shipping Forecast, that bracing incantation of place names and gale warnings, which – with the lights out – can transform even the most inland bedroom into a wind-battered coastal cottage. But darkness can heighten disturbance, too, as I was reminded when listening to Danger by Richard Hughes, billed as the BBC’s first-ever radio drama. It was first broadcast in 1924, with the audience at home under instructions to maximise its effect by turning off all their lights. The play’s first audience, in 1924, was under instructions to maximise

Michael Hann

Widescreen pop-rock that deserves to be better known: Metric, at the Roundhouse, reviewed

Why aren’t Metric stars? In their native Canada, several of their albums have gone platinum, but the rest of the world? Not so much. Twenty-five years after Emily Haines and James Shaw formed the band, here they still are, playing to a not-quite-full Roundhouse to promote their eighth album, Formentera. It was a pretty good turnout – about 3,000 people on a Wednesday night in January – but I doubt anyone ever formed a band thinking: ‘In a quarter of a century, we might be able to not quite fill one of London’s mid-sized venues!’ Writing very good songs isn’t enough to take a band to the top, but Metric

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Forgettable romcom with an irritating title: Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons, at the Harold Pinter Theatre, reviewed

A romcom with an irritating title, Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons, has opened at the HP Theatre starring Jenna Coleman and Aidan Turner. Telly addicts will recognise their names. They play two London yuppies, Oliver and Bernadette, who are struggling to communicate properly. Out of nowhere, the state imposes a gruesome new ‘Hush Law’ that forbids citizens from uttering more than 140 words a day. It lasts just 85 minutes and you’ll have forgotten you saw it by the time you get home All kinds of questions arise. Why was the Big Hush introduced? Whose interest does it serve? How is it policed? By overstepping your quota of natter, are

Deborah Ross

Much more gripping than it sounds: Women Talking reviewed

Women Talking, which has received Oscar nominations for best picture and adapted screenplay, is one of those films that, on paper, is a hard sell. It is women talking, and talking and talking, after enduring the most horrifying experience at the hands of men. All of which sounds barely cinematic and even less entertaining. But as written and directed by Sarah Polley, it is compelling, gripping, powerful, as tense as a thriller. Think of it this way: it’s like Twelve Angry Men, but in this instance it’s Eight Angry Women (in a hayloft) who must reach a unanimous decision. The premise is: women living in a Mennonite community – Mennonites

James Walton

Sky’s Funny Woman is no laughing matter

Nick Hornby’s 2014 novel Funny Girl was both a heartfelt defence and a convincing example of what popular entertainment can achieve. Telling the story of Barbara Parker, a fictional 1960s TV star, it took a stern line on highbrows who prize the punishing over the pleasurable, while delivering a lot of pleasure itself. My only reservation was that Hornby was a little too obviously smitten with his heroine: a ‘quick-witted, unpretentious, high-spirited, funny, curvy, clever, beautiful blonde’, whose attitudes occasionally seemed to owe a suspicious amount to contemporary feminism. The trouble with Sky’s television version – renamed Funny Woman – is that the ‘occasionally’ of that last sentence has become

Martin Gayford

Unmissable: Donatello – Sculpting the Renaissance, at the V&A, reviewed

‘Donatello is the real hero of Florentine sculpture’, so Antony Gormley has proclaimed (hugely though he admires Michelangelo). It’s hard to disagree. But the full range of his work is hard to see, spread out as it is on altars and tombs through Florence and elsewhere in Italy. This makes Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance at the V&A an unmissable treat. Donatello was versatile, prolific, inventive, influential and long-lived Throughout much of the Quattrocento, Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi (c.1386-1466) – or ‘Donatello’ – turned out new notions about what art could look like and how it might be made. In origin he was, as the V&A show emphasises, a

Matthew Wilson

Why are roses romantic?

You may think that roses have always symbolised courteous romance, but art history describes their smuttier private life. Consider the pouting red blooms in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Venus Verticordia’, which the art critic John Ruskin considered so obscene that he refused to continue his friendship with the painter. Ruskin admired the execution when he first saw ‘Venus Verticordia’ in Rossetti’s studio in 1865, but later reviled the crude suggestiveness. ‘I purposely used the word “wonderfully” painted about those flowers,’ he later wrote to Rossetti with deep concern. ‘They were wonderful to me, in their realism; awful – I can use no other word – in their coarseness.’ Ruskin’s anxiety reflected

Wednesday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Classy but constrained by its video game origins: Sky’s The Last of Us reviewed

The Last of Us is widely being hailed as the best video game adaptation ever. Maybe. But it’s still a video game adaptation. On one of the early levels, for example, you have to escape from a zombie apocalypse that has broken out in Houston, with your truck and your guns, being careful also to avoid the military authorities who will shoot you on sight. Later, your mission is to climb through some sewers, up a ladder and into the hidden entrance of an apartment complex to retrieve the car battery you need to effect your escape from the dystopian hellhole that is post-apocalypse Boston. Instead of a virus, the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

These drag queens haven’t a clue how banal their problems are: Sound of the Underground, at the Royal Court, reviewed

Sound of the Underground is a drag show involving a handful of cross-dressers who spend the opening 15 minutes telling us who they are. Then, rather ominously, they announce: ‘We’ve written a play.’ But they haven’t really. The scene shifts to a kitchen where the drag queens meet to discuss their pay and conditions, and the show turns into an advertisement for their woes. Drag is facing a crisis, we hear, caused by its sudden popularity. Drag queens are in demand from TV bosses and corporate executives but the artistes feel dismayed and traduced by this surfeit of opportunity. They loathe RuPaul, a cross-dresser favoured by the BBC, and they

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Nursery-level music: Sam Smith’s Gloria reviewed

Grade: D Yes, it’s porky Sam from Essex, with his body issues and his complex gender pronouns and his endless narcissistic banalities, his depthless self-importance. This is Smith’s fourth studio album in a career that seems to be nosing a little downhill, mercifully – although it will still sell by the million worldwide. He has recently decided he is genderqueer, rather than just gay. He says he feels like a woman. Me too, mate – but what’s a boy to do? The good things? Just one. He has a pleasant and flexible tenor voice which, when unadulterated, is capable of carrying a tune – if there were, y’know, tunes. And

Richard Bratby

Still ugly but worth catching for the chorus and orchestra: Royal Opera’s Tannhäuser reviewed

A classical concert programme is like a set menu, and for this palate the most tempting orchestral offering in the UK this January came from the Slaithwaite Philharmonic under its conductor Benjamin Ellin. They opened with a suite from Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo, and the inclusion of Hollywood film music in a ‘straight’ classical programme was interesting in itself. Film music has been around for more than a century now. Many scores are fully as effective in concert as (say) Schubert’s Rosamunde or Beethoven’s Egmont, and yet this almost never happens. Film scores (unless by a big beast of the classical world) are generally hived off into ‘pops’ nights. Snobbery is

Deborah Ross

Both compelling and repulsive: The Whale reviewed

I can’t work out if Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, which stars Brendan Fraser as a man weighing 600lb – that’s 42 stone in real money – is ‘abhorrently cruel’, as some have said, or a film of ‘rare compassion’, as others have said. Either way, it is compelling, although whether that’s for the right reasons or wrong reasons, I also can’t work out. You certainly can’t take your eyes off Fraser, much as you’d sometimes wish to. Is this really sweet, klutzy ‘George, George, George of the Jungle (watch out for the tree!)’? After years in the wilderness, Fraser has now been nominated for an Oscar. So what we can

Graeme Thomson

Two of Scotland’s most inventive solo musicians: Fergus McCreadie, Maeve Gilchrist + Mr McFall’s Quartet reviewed

Folk is the Schiphol of Scottish music. Eventually, every curious traveller passes through. From arena rockers to rappers, traditional music remains an undeniable source. Which is why the second word in ‘Celtic Connections’ is at least as significant as the first. Now in its 30th year, lighting up the otherwise unpromising prospect of a Glasgow January, this year’s instalment of the roots festival features artists from all corners of the globe. Many of them would regard folk only as their second or third musical language, rather than the mother tongue. One of the early highlights makes the point rather beautifully. It’s a homegrown affair, showcasing pianist Fergus McCreadie and harpist

Laura Gascoigne

The county that inspired a whole way of painting: Sussex Landscape, at Pallant House, reviewed

In a national vote on which county’s landscape best embodies Englishness, every county would presumably vote for itself. But when the War Office commissioned Frank Newbould in 1942 to design a poster with the patriotic slogan ‘Your BRITAIN – fight for it now’, it featured Sussex, with a shepherd herding sheep in the foreground and Belle Tout lighthouse on the distant horizon. In the ‘green and pleasant’ stakes, Sussex holds the advantage that the seeds of our alternative national anthem ‘Jerusalem’ were sown during William Blake’s stay from 1800 to 1803 in the coastal village of Felpham near Bognor Regis. But while it has prompted the occasional poem, Sussex has

Revd Steve Morris

My hunt for the Holy Grail: Damned drummer Rat Scabies interviewed

Most former punks end up touring the nostalgia circuit or cropping up at conventions. Not Christopher John Millar, aka Rat Scabies. When Scabies hit middle age, the legendary drummer with the Damned began to hunt for the Holy Grail. ‘We all started off criticising government and I’ve ended up looking for pixies,’ explains Scabies. In 2005, the music journalist Christopher Dawes wrote a rollicking account of a trip he took with Scabies to the epicentre of it all, Rennes-le-Château, a tiny village atop a rock overlooking the River Aude in the Languedoc. Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail has taken its place as a minor gonzo classic. Dawes lived across

Tuesday

Zoe Strimpel

Still fabulous: Savage Love podcast reviewed

Two podcast MOTs this week. I am a long-term listener of sex and relationships podcast Savage Love, hosted by Seattle-based Dan Savage. And tuning in to his most recent instalment, I can confirm it is still fabulous. A quick primer for those not familiar: Savage is famous for giving the world such gems as ‘monogamish’ (mostly monogamous; Savage and underwear model husband Terry were monogamish before becoming poly),  ‘fuck first’ (do the deed before, not after, your huge romantic meal), and ‘DTMI’ (dump the motherfucker). Savage’s intelligence, mellifluous voice, encyclopaedic knowledge of kinks and sexuality, intriguing politics (a true man of the left, he has lost patience with cancel culture and