Arts Reviews

Russia is not the only country erasing Ukraine’s cultural heritage. Ukraine itself has been demolishing its own public statues and murals for years. Before the war, in 2015, our parliament passed legislation that criminalised communist propaganda. ‘Decommunisation’ was a deceptively simple idea: it started with the removal of our 1,300 Lenins and a few other revolutionary figures. Since the invasion, even monuments with complex histories have been removed. In Odessa, a statue of the city’s founder Catherine the Great was toppled. In Dnipro, seven monuments were torn down, including those to writer Maxim Gorky, 18th-century scientist Mikhail Lomonosov and poet Pushkin. Two months ago, a Soviet monument to the soldier

Careful what you wish for. There can be no definitive way to stage an opera, and it’s the critic’s duty to keep an open mind. Still, we’ve all occasionally gazed at a white cube that represents an Alpine meadow, or watched a chivalric hero slouch across the stage in tracksuit bottoms, and felt our hearts slump. Then you pitch up at the Royal Opera House’s new production of Dvorak’s Rusalka and it’s as if some mischievous sprite has magicked you straight back to 1960. The directors are also credited as ‘creators’ (back in your box, composer and librettist!) At first, you don’t suspect much. It’s actually rather enchanting: deep forest

With a title like Cocaine Bear you’ll probably be happily anticipating one of those B-movie cultural moments. It’s a bear! On cocaine! Sign me up! You go to a film like this in the spirit of trash-loving glee. It’ll be fun. It’ll be 90 minutes of low camp entertainment rather than a four-hour Oscar-contending head-scratcher – and that can be a relief. But, in fact, and despite the publicity blitzkrieg – it’s a bear! On cocaine! – this is a standard animal-on-the-rampage affair. The cocaine doesn’t even bring much to the party. (Kids: take note.) Quite what I was expecting, I don’t know. Maybe the bear would become euphoric and

Standing at the Sky’s Edge is an ode to a monstrous carbuncle. The atrocity in question is a concrete gulag, Park Hill, built by Sheffield council in the 1960s as a punishment for hard-up locals who couldn’t afford to buy a house. The show is a propaganda effort on behalf of bossy, big-state, high-tax Labour authorities so the smiling residents of the brutalist eyesore keep telling us how much they love their multistorey dungeon. ‘You can see the whole city from up here,’ say the characters, as if no Sheffield resident had ever mounted any of the bluffs or heights that surround the area. The script is honest enough to

I was almost tempted not to watch Kleo because it sounded like so many things I’d seen before: beautiful ex-Stasi assassin, mysteriously imprisoned for nameless crimes, suddenly out of a job after the fall of the Berlin Wall, takes brutal revenge on all who betrayed her. It’s reminiscent not just of everything from La Femme Nikita, Kick-Ass and Kill Bill to the ghastly, grisly Killing Eve, but of any number of hitmen-out-of-retirement dramas (most recently The Old Man), plus every revenge yarn from the Count of Monte Cristo onwards, all seasoned with a delicate hint of Deutschland 83. But the thing about TV, you realise, is that originality is overrated,