Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Eccentric triviality aimed at 1970s feminists: Orlando, at the Garrick Theatre, reviewed

Orlando opens with a pack of Virginia Woolfs on stage. All wear the same costume of horn-rimmed spectacles, long tweed skirts and woolly cardigans, and they comply with current diversity targets. There’s a white Woolf, a black Woolf, a mixed-race Woolf, an East Asian Woolf, and a male Woolf with a deep voice who seems to have wandered in from Little Red Riding Hood. The pack of Woolfs chat away about how to tell the story of an English aristocrat, Orlando, who was a teenager in the 1590s. He enters the stage dressed like a girl. (Confusion over sexual identity is the show’s big idea.) After an opaque interview with

Graeme Thomson

Not everything Bowie did was genius – he was more interesting than that

I’m generally not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, but one occurred to me recently as the younger members of my family were blasting out a patchy David Bowie playlist: Stand Up Against Revisionism. It’s harder than ever these days not to succumb to printing the myth – reality can be so so-so – but critics have a duty to keep a clear head while others are losing theirs. Even around the dinner table on New Year’s Day. Bowie would have been 76 this week; he was born on 8 January 1947, and died two days after his 69th birthday in 2016. He’s not getting any less popular in posthumous

James Delingpole James Delingpole

A Turkish dystopia that eludes western censors: Netflix’s Hot Skull reviewed

A strange new virus has infected half the world but the cure is worse than the disease: authoritarian tyranny, in which the populace lose most of their freedoms, are subject to endless testing and are corralled into gated communities. I’m talking, of course, about the wildly implausible plot of a dystopian sci-fi thriller called Hot Skull. On the downside, it’s a bit depressing, with relentlessly grey cityscapes so bleak it makes Blade Runner look like Pleasantville. On the upside, it’s Turkish which means that – as with the brilliant Russian post-apocalyptic drama To the Lake – you get a completely different, original and perhaps more honest satirical slant on the

Laura Gascoigne

Did this Lithuanian invent abstraction? M.K. Ciurlionis, at Dulwich Picture Gallery, reviewed

Trivia question: name a famous Lithuanian. Google came up with four I’d never heard of and one I had: Hannibal Lecter. It seems that Lithuanians are famous only in Lithuania unless they’re the monstrous inventions of non-Lithuanians – an injustice Dulwich Picture Gallery is helping to correct with its M.K. Ciurlionis exhibition. Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis is not just Lithuania’s most famous artist; he is also the country’s most famous composer. On his death in 1911 he left more than 400 musical compositions and more than 300 artistic ones, the latter squeezed into six short years before pneumonia carried him off aged 35. The son of a church organist, he was

Richard Bratby

Do conductors have to be cruel to be good?

Playing under the baton of Arturo Toscanini must have felt a bit like fighting in the trenches. There are recordings of him rehearsing in the 1930s or ’40s. The orchestra is bowling along; there’s a low muttering, and then suddenly, out of nothing, the explosion. A scream of rage: a huge, operatic, animalistic roar. There’s a barrage of Italian profanities and what sounds like a fist smashing repeatedly on wood. Bernard Shore, who played under Toscanini in the BBC Symphony Orchestra, witnessed him hurling his baton at a cowering viola section. With the NBC Symphony, Toscanini threw his gold pocket watch to the floor and stamped on it. The players

Wednesday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Detectorists Christmas Special is a triumph

They’re tricky things to get right, Christmas specials. Ideally, they should capture in one perfectly judged episode the very essence of everything you found wonderful about your favourite classic sitcom, be it The Royle Family, Father Ted or Peep Show, all dusted with the lightest sprinkle of tinsel, icing sugar and nostalgia. But if they get the mix wrong – usually by overdoing the saccharine and mawkishness – it takes you straight down to Christmas hell and tarnishes your memories forever. For example, I will never, ever be able to watch Only Fools And Horses again, not even the actually funny episode where the chandelier falls down, because of an

Tuesday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The Recruit might be the worst show on Netflix

The Top Gun series received generous support from the US Navy because it was such an effective recruitment tool. I wonder if something similar went on between the CIA and Netflix’s new series The Recruit, this time as an exercise in reputation management. ‘There’s nothing sinister or threatening about the Company,’ this bizarre, horribly ill-judged and tasteless comedy/thriller series squeals at every turn. ‘We’re just a bunch of lovable, kooky misfits doing our bit to defend your freedoms.’ If you think I’m exaggerating, consider that one of the biggest baddies in the series – right up there with the evil Russians – is the Senate oversight committee responsible for holding

Friday

James Walton

Irresistible: Sky Max’s Christmas Carole reviewed

What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions disproportionate to anything a particular story has earned; or b) nothing at all. And if you want to see how both of these are possible, two of this year’s big Christmas TV offerings provide handy illustrations. Firmly in category a) is The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, an animated film by Charlie Mackesy, based on his own mega-selling book and with some impressively big-name actors doing the voices. Its methods are established immediately when a boy lost in a snowy wood happens across a cute talking mole

Deborah Ross

Mesmerisingly sad: Corsage reviewed

Corsage is a biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria who was prized for her beauty and fashion sense and may have been, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say, the Princess Diana of her day. But then disaster strikes: she turns 40. I know, but in 1877 that is old. That is past it, for a woman. What purpose does she serve now? This isn’t yet another film about a woman being done over by bad royals. It isn’t Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette or Pablo Larrain’s Spencer. It’s more a take on celebrity culture and no longer being what is wanted. It’s mesmerisingly sad, and Vicky

Rupert Christiansen

A short history of applause – and booing

A dank Tuesday evening in a West End theatre. The auditorium is barely two thirds full. The play is nothing special – certainly not spectacular. Your neighbour is struggling to stay awake. The reception, however, is tumultuous. The audience is on its feet, squealing, whistling and whooping as though someone has just found the cure for cancer. The house lights come up and the rumpus stops as suddenly as it started. Everyone makes for the nearest exit. This irritatingly mechanical ritual is a phenomenon – imported, I guess, from Broadway – that has recently become ubiquitous in London, never mind the quality of what’s on stage. It represents a significant

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A cute present for aficionados: The Beach Boys’ Sail on Sailor – 1972 reviewed

Grade: B+ By the time the 1970s had come along – post Altamont and post hope – the Beach Boys were tired of being beach boys and thus became, for a while, just another rather mediocre rawk band. The two albums they released in the first three years of the decade, Carl and the Passions – ‘So Tough’ and Holland, dispensed (largely) with those sumptuous harmonies and the simplicity of teenage anthems to God and gave us unconvincing blue-eyed soul and tinny R&B. Of those two albums, only the lovely ‘Marcella’ (where those harmonies come back) and the commendably ludicrous ‘All This is That’are worth shelling out your hard-earned pennies.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The puppetry renaissance

Advance ticket sales for My Neighbour Totoro, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production running till mid-January, beat all Barbican box-office records. I went on a rainy weekday evening last month, and the place was heaving with Hayao Miyazaki fans of all ages, lots of them clutching furry Totoros they’d bought in the theatre shop.  It’s an impressive, dreamlike production, set in rural Japan after the second world war, and another triumph for the art of puppetry. Totoro himself is huge and cuddly, with an enormous round tummy and inane grin when he bares his teeth. There’s a whole puppeteer inside his pink tongue, as well as three or four more

Rupert Christiansen

Like bingeing on cheap chocolate: Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

A Christmas revival of New Adventures’ ten-year-old production of Sleeping Beauty stirs up all my nagging ambivalence about Matthew Bourne’s work. I’ve mulled over this in print elsewhere several times, and I feel conscious that if Bourne reads reviews – perhaps he doesn’t – he might be groaning into his Corn Flakes. But his reputation is so securely high (a knighthood, Tonys and Oliviers galore), his popularity so ubiquitous, that an honest doubter can’t do him any harm. Here are the pros. He has invented a recipe of his own, hard to imitate, though many have tried – a mix of Kenneth MacMillan’s sexed-up ballet idiom, Cameron Mackintosh-Andrew Lloyd Webber

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Cruel but shamefully enjoyable: Vardy v Rooney – the Wagatha Christie Trial reviewed

The Wagatha Christie affair began in 2019 when Coleen Rooney accused Rebekah Vardy of selling stories from her private Instagram account to the Sun. Rebekah denied the charge and sued Coleen. The case reached the High Court last summer and has now arrived in the West End in a verbatim script by Liv Hennessy. The staging is brilliantly funny with the court presented as a football pitch where a set of TV pundits explain the legal niceties to us. Rebekah, the plaintiff (and husband of former England striker Jamie Vardy), is cross-examined by David Sherborne of 5RB chambers who acts for Coleen. Sherborne begins by attacking Rebekah’s claim that she

Graeme Thomson

Christmas songs that will reduce your gas bills

It’s unlikely that Irving Berlin was pondering the energy price cap when he composed the seasonal standard ‘I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm’ in 1937. ‘I can’t remember a worse December, just watch those icicles form,’ he wrote, a sentiment many of us can surely relate to right now – but wait! ‘What do I care if icicles form,’ he continues. ‘I’ve got my love to keep me warm.’ Good for you, sir. Meanwhile, the rest of us are watching the digits ticking incessantly upward on our smart meter with the murderous fascination of a gun dog fixated on a fox hole. For the first time in my

Richard Bratby

What makes a Christmas song Christmassy?

Temperature records for Los Angeles in the summer of 1945 are patchy, but 90 in the shade seems to have been the norm. It was during one such scorcher, presumably, that the songwriters Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn pulled up at a red light on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Cahn suggested going to the beach. Styne had a better idea: ‘Let’s go write a winter song.’ Driving over to the offices of their publisher Edwin H. Morris, Cahn commandeered a typewriter, glanced out the window and typed the exact opposite of what he saw: ‘The weather outside is frightful.’ The Great American Songbook had acquired another Christmas classic.

Robert Gore-Langton

The art of the panto dame

There is nothing more panto than a dame. The grandmother of today’s dames is Dan Leno (1860–1904), a champion clog dancer and music-hall performer, not much taller than Ronnie Corbett. He was preceded by others, notably James Rogers, who in 1861, in Aladdin,played a character called Widow Twankey, named after a cheap and revolting tea. But Leno was the first modern prototype dame – a befuddled genius in a frock with a fantastic line in patter. He created the role of Mother Goose in a play written for him by J. Hickory Wood and starred in a legendary run of 16 pantos at Drury Lane that finished him. He died

Laura Gascoigne

An Uffizi Adoration that upstages even the Botticellis

Tourists who queue for hours outside the Uffizi to see Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ and ‘Birth of Venus’ are sometimes surprised to find his world-famous paintings upstaged by the work of a non-Italian they’ve never heard of. At three metres tall and five metres wide, Hugo van der Goes’s ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’ – known as the ‘Portinari Altarpiece’ – is certainly imposing, but it’s not the size that impresses so much as the colour: beside the glow of its Flemish oil paint, Botticelli’s tempera looks pasty. Despite its modern medium, though, and the realism of its technique, this monumental altarpiece by Botticelli’s Netherlandish contemporary appears more gothic than renaissance in feeling.

Thursday

Ian Pace

The political polyvalency of modernism

The late Sir Roger Scruton often pronounced in a harsh manner on modern architecture and modern music, perceiving in various work an assault on bourgeois culture and a break with tradition. Back in the 1950s, music critic and CIA agent Henry Pleasants (a station chief in Bonn) delivered if anything a more scathing view of the ‘agony’ of modern music, arguing that it had severed its connection with the idioms bequeathed by the human voice. It might seem natural that opposition to the iconoclasm of artistic modernism would go hand-in-hand with a relatively conservative politics. Furthermore, knowledge of Nazi attacks on Entartete Kunst suggests a clear disjunction between far right

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

A very good place to start if you want to understand China: Mark Kitto’s Chinese Boxing reviewed

In so far as it acknowledged them at all, the Chinese Communist Party has blamed ‘infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces’ for the recent anti-lockdown protests. It’s an accusation laden with historical baggage. Modern China’s history with foreign states, especially the Europeans, hasn’t generally been a happy one. For many Chinese, the collective memory is still raw. The most mutually traumatic episode in this history is probably the Boxer Rebellion, when thousands of foreign delegates were besieged in Beijing by Chinese rebels for 55 days. The siege eventually ended with an allied rescued mission which sacked the city, the soldiers raping and killing the Beijingers who were left. This