Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

Upstart Crow without the jokes: RSC’s Hamnet, at the Swan Theatre, reviewed

The Swan Theatre has reopened after an overhaul and praise god: they’ve replaced the seats. The Swan is a likeable theatre; the only space in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s portfolio that still conveys a real sense of history, though until 2020 that came at the price of acute posterior discomfort. No more: and we can get on with enjoying the inaugural production, an adaptation by Lolita Chakrabarti of Maggie O’Farrell’s Shakespeare novel Hamnet. It’s a nice fit, and after the RSC’s success with Wolf Hall you can see the logic. It’s Shakespearean without too much of that difficult Shakespeare, plus you get the built-in audience that comes with an award-winning

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

So good it would have made Ibsen envious: Dixon and Daughters, at the Dorfman Theatre, reviewed

Deborah Bruce’s new play Dixon and Daughters is a family drama that opens on a note of sour mistrust. We’re in a working-class home in Yorkshire where a vituperative old crosspatch, Mary, has just returned from prison. Rather than accepting her daughters’ friendly welcome she treats them all with open hostility. Had Ibsen been in attendance, he would have blushed with envy  Her first malevolent act is to try to evict Julie, even though her boyfriend has subjected her to horrific and repeated violence. And Mary is highly suspicious of the absent Briana who has changed her name and is threatening to return home, by force if necessary. What was

Dan Hitchens

From Bayeux to Cartier-Bresson: how artists have brought the coronation crowds to life

In 1937, the Parisian communist newspaper Ce soir sent a 28-year-old would-be filmmaker on an unpromising first assignment. Henri Cartier-Bresson was to take photographs of the British coronation, an event of limited appeal either to Ce soir’s readers or to Cartier-Bresson himself. But on the streets of London, he discovered what would become his signature approach. Two Brylcreemed lads in their best suits, hoisting their girlfriends on to their shoulders for a better view He would turn away from the King, the procession, the organised magnificence, and focus solely on the crowds, looking for some fleeting moment in which the meaning of the day was concentrated. As he wrote long

Wednesday

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

How productive is it to listen to productivity gurus?

I was making my way slowly through one of my dismally prosaic little to-do lists – ‘pay the water bill’ ‘wash hair’, etc. – when the voice of the journalist Helen Lewis came on Radio 4 talking about productivity. It’s the Holy Grail of modern life, apparently, and we are now constantly looking for ‘charismatic individuals’ to help us maximise it. Her writer friend Julian Simpson is obsessed with the topic, she said, even though he disarmingly admitted what some of us may quickly have suspected, that ‘my interest in productivity manifests itself when I need to be doing something else’.  It’s like buying shiny folders from Ryman and writing

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Purest fantasy but you’ll love it: Tetris reviewed

Tetris is a righteously entertaining movie about the stampede to secure the rights from within the Soviet Union to what would become the world’s bestselling video game. The question you’re going to be asking yourself time and again – especially during the Lada-ZiL chase scene through the streets of Moscow in which our heroes try to elude the hatchet-faced KGB agents – is: ‘How much of this is true?’ And the honest answer is: ‘Not very much, actually.’ The star of the show has to be Roger Allam in a possibly career-best performance as Robert Maxwell Yes, there is a game called Tetris (which has sold 520 million copies and

Graeme Thomson

Americana Coldplay: The National’s First Two Pages of Frankenstein reviewed

Once upon a time, rock bands wished for nothing more than to look as though they posed a clear and present danger to your children. Though a few true believers still hold to this honourable creed, nowadays most groups are comprised of the kind of people one might expect to be grading your offspring’s dissertation at a respected Russell Group institution. If the National were an author, they might be Anne Tyler The National exemplify rock’s professorial bent: bespectacled academic types, bearded, literate, wry and congenitally suspicious of happiness. Relatability sells, apparently. Almost by stealth, the American quintet have become one of the most successful groups of the age, winning

Laura Gascoigne

Hitching them together does neither any favours: Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian, at Tate Modern, reviewed

In July 1928, an unknown Swedish woman artist mounted a solo show of her revolutionary abstract paintings at the World Conference on Spiritual Science in London. It was a moment the 65-year-old Hilma af Klint had waited a long time for, but her confident prediction 20 years earlier that ‘the experiments I have undertaken will astound humanity’ was not fulfilled. So deafening, in fact, was the critical silence that greeted her work that she left instructions for it to remain under wraps until 20 years after her death. The world wasn’t ready for her ‘future pictures’. Entering the room devoted to Mondrian’s signature grids, you could be in a different

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Famine zones are more fun than this play: Dancing at Lughnasa, at the Olivier Theatre, reviewed

Snowflakes, an excellent title, rehashes The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter. A guest in a hotel room is visited by two intruders posing as staff. The intruders are hired assassins who accuse the guest of committing a half-explained hate crime on social media. His punishment, execution, will be livestreamed as a warning to other hate criminals. Brian Friel’s shrieking bumpkins are exactly what the Arts Council wants us to see It’s a thrilling start but the show lacks tension and the accused’s back story isn’t explained fully. And once the sentence has been carried out, the story becomes predictable. The core idea – freelance killers dispensing justice on behalf of

Richard Bratby

Powerful and beguiling: Innocence, at the Royal Opera House, reviewed

The big London companies gave two UK premières in the space of a week, both dealing with the subject of teenagers being shot dead. Kaija Saariaho and Sofi Oksanen’s new opera Innocence was premièred at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2021 and comes to the Royal Opera in exactly the same production by Simon Stone, the Australian director responsible for that lockdown favourite The Dig as well as a shattering staging (in Munich, in 2019) of Korngold’s Die tote Stadt. Innocence is a series of elastoplasts being pulledoff very slowly So Innocence was never likely to pull its punches. Chloe Lamford’s set – a brightly lit modernist structure that revolves as

Rupert Christiansen

A triumph: Nederlands Dans Theater 1, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

Yes, yes, I know. You’ve had your fill of David Attenborough’s jeremiads, you’ve heard enough already about climate change catastrophe. You’ve got the message, ordered the electric car and solar panels: now can we talk for a moment about something less unthinkably apocalyptic? The point is as much to celebrate the grace and beauty of these phenomena as to mourn their passing But the quiet triumph of Figures in Extinction [1.0] is to make the crisis seem freshly urgent and emotionally engaging. The first of three scheduled collaborations between the Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and Complicité’s theatrical magician Simon McBurney, presented by Nederlands Dans Theater 1, it focuses on endangered

Deborah Ross

I cried twice: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry reviewed

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is an excellent adaptation of Rachel Joyce’s bestselling novel (2012) about a retired old fella who traverses England on foot in the belief he can save a friend dying of cancer. It could have been twee or sentimental (that was the fear) but instead it is spare and restrained and while there are occasional jarring moments it is still wonderfully tender and full of feeling. I cried, possibly twice, but I don‘t think it was three times, whatever anyone might say. Broadbent is a wonder, so real and sincere it doesn’t feel like acting, and Wilton equals him The film is directed by Hettie

Robert Gore-Langton

John Gielgud and Richard Burton’s fraught, botched, triumphant Hamlet

In 1963 two Hamlets went into production: one directed by Laurence Olivier, the other by John Gielgud. The situation had been engineered by Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. The story goes that while shooting the film Becket, Burton and O’Toole had decided they should each play the Prince under either Olivier or Gielgud and they tossed a coin over who would get which director. O’Toole got Olivier; Burton got Gielgud. Both productions – booze-drenched affairs – went ahead, but the Hamlet that became a showbiz legend was Burton’s doomed Dane. The production made a fortune; it was probably the most profitable Shakespeare ever staged Burton looked up to Gielgud. He

Wednesday

Rupert Christiansen

Not an experience you’d want to repeat: Shen Yun, at the Eventim Apollo, reviewed

If you live in London, you may well have spotted Shen Yun’s enormous candy-coloured posters on the Underground, endorsed by puffs from authorities proclaiming the show to be ‘very, very on top’ and ‘an exemplary display of excellence’. This primitive advertising strategy seems to have worked: on the night I went, the Hammersmith Apollo (capacity around 3,500) was filled to the gills, the crowd made up of the same social mix that you might find at the Cirque du Soleil. What did any of us think we’d be getting? I was more impressed by the speed of the costume changes than I was by anything that happened on stage ‘Shen

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Why do theatres hate their audiences?

War has broken out in theatreland. Managements are increasingly at odds with the audiences who fund their livelihoods. A recent stand-off involved James Norton’s new show, A Little Life, which contains a couple of scenes in which the actor removes his clothes. A punter at a preview in Richmond secretly photographed the moments of nudity and posted the images online. This sparked a furore in the newspapers and the majority of commentators took the producers’ side against the theatre-goers. Dr Kirsty Sedgman, a media studies lecturer, spoke piously to the Independent about ‘an absolute violation of the unwritten contract between audiences and performers’. The Mirror reported that ‘drastic measures’ might

James Walton

Boring is as good as this erotic drama gets: Netflix’s Obsession reviewed

It is, of course, traditional for film and TV reviewers to demonstrate their steely high-mindedness by claiming that anything describing itself as ‘erotic’ is in fact deeply boring. Unfortunately, faced with Netflix’s four-part Obsession, the b-word is hard to avoid – the twist in this case being that boring was as good as the series got. The rest of the time it alternated between the inept, the infuriating and the utterly mystifying – and not just because you could never fathom what on earth the characters thought they were up do. How, for instance, did so much money and talent get wasted on a show that the people involved with

Laura Gascoigne

Rossetti’s muse was a better painter than he was: The Rossettis, at Tate Britain, reviewed

‘A queer fellow’ is how John Everett Millais described Dante Gabriel Rossetti after his death, ‘so dogmatic and so irritable when opposed.’ What’s queer in England is quite normal in Italy, where heated arguments are described as ‘discussioni’, but history has tended to forget that Rossetti was Italian. His fellow Pre-Raphaelites, however, were very conscious of his foreignness, though Holman Hunt found the ‘maccaroni’ served at the Rossetti family table – where you were as likely to meet Giuseppe Mazzini as Niccolo Paganini – ‘delicious’. Rather than professional models the Pre-Raphaelites wanted girls with a mass of hair, preferably red Gabriel (he adopted the Dante in his teens) was the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A puzzling spectacle: The Secret Life of Bees, at the Almeida Theatre, reviewed

The Secret Life of Bees is a fairy-tale set in the Deep South in 1964. Lily, a bullied white girl, befriends a plucky black maid, Rosaleen, and they escape together from Lily’s tyrannical dad. After various adventures they take sanctuary at a honey farm run by a commune of astonishingly successful African-American businesswomen. This story clearly wants to expose the cruelty of whites and the oppression of blacks but the details suggest the opposite. This is a tale of black self-confidence and white failure. Spineless Lily could never have fled her abusive dad without the intelligent and combative Rosaleen to spur her on. And the all-female honey corporation is a

Richard Bratby

The last unashamedly happy masterpiece: Haydn’s The Creation, at Ulster Hall, reviewed

Haydn’s The Creation is Paradise Lost without the Lost. True, the words aren’t exactly up there: translated into German by Haydn’s pal Baron van Swieten and subsequently retro-translated into some of the clumsiest, most endearingly rococo English ever set to music. But you get the idea. Near the start some demons get consigned (very efficiently) to the outer darkness, and at the end the angel Uriel gives Adam and Eve the briefest of warnings – despatched in a brisk recitative before the chorus of angels floods the heavens, once more, with sunlight and praise. Basically, though, it’s optimism. It’s freshness. It’s a universe founded on faith, and with it, joy.

Michael Hann

Glorious: Elton John’s farewell tour, at the O2 Arena, reviewed

Elton John has now been retiring for nearly five years. The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour began in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in September 2018. Why there? Because it’s a hop and a skip from the small town of Lititz in Amish country, where scores of the big arena shows are built – it’s the real rock’n’roll capital of the world. Since then, with breaks for Covid and other health worries, he has played roughly 300 shows, grossing north of $800 million as of January this year – this is the most commercially successful tour ever. Retirement, or the threat of retirement, has always been a canny career move: Frank Sinatra played

Deborah Ross

So tastelessly disturbing it forgets to say anything: Sick of Myself reviewed

Sick of Myself is a satire from Norway that skewers the ‘look at me, look at me’ generation addicted to social media and asks: how far will someone go? Too far, is the short answer. Much, much, much too far, is the longer one. Indeed, although this starts out as a dark comedy, it does eventually escalate into full-on body horror, and while it is compelling and original, if you are as squeamish as I am, you will eventually be watching from behind your hands. Still, I did catch around 67 per cent, so consider this a review of 67 per cent of the film. The other 33 per cent