Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

Dated and wasteful: Rusalka, at the Royal Opera House, reviewed

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

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Approaches perfection: Medea, @sohoplace, reviewed

Winner’s Curse is a hybrid drama by Dan Patterson and Daniel Taub which opens as a lecture by a fictional diplomat, Hugo Leitski (a dinner-jacketed Clive Anderson). Leitski offers to teach us the subtle art of negotiation. An expert diplomat, he explains, must convince each side that they’re the winners in the negotiation and that their opponents have lost. In his youth he helped to broker peace between two Slavic nations, Karvistan and Moldonia, and the action switches from Leitksi’s lecture room to a seedy hotel, the Black Lagoon Lodge, where the peace deal was agreed. Clive Anderson’s skilfully improvised performance is the beating heart of this enjoyable comedy-lecture The

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

What’s the difference between Shamima Begum and Unity Mitford?

The debate sparked by Josh Baker’s BBC podcast on Shamima Begum, and her teenage flight to join Isis, has divided opinion sharply into two camps. According to one, she was a naive 15-year-old cynically groomed by hardened operatives in the most feared terror organisation in the world. No, says the other, she was a capable girl who – knowing of Isis atrocities – made a highly determined decision to join them. But can’t both things be true at once, as they are for so many young recruits to extremism?  From another era, class and race, we might remember Unity Mitford, who flaunted her admiration of Hitler Listening, one is immersed

Graeme Thomson

His nasal American-Yorkshire voice struggles to convince: Yungblud, at OVO Hydro, reviewed

Even before albums became bloated, thanks to the largesse offered by CDs and streaming, most contained filler: those so-so songs merely passing needle time, weak aural bridges between the big hits and superior deep cuts. Bubblegum-punk and Auto-Tuned pop, sung in a distinctly nasal American-Yorkshire hybrid Increasingly, live concerts have filler, too. With the collapse of record sales, young pop performers feel compelled to jump into huge arenas more quickly than might be wise. It’s not always as easy as it looks. A massive social media profile doesn’t always translate into having sufficient willing bodies to fill these vast spaces, and while you can ship in pyrotechnic back-up, fancy sets

Deborah Ross

Devastating: Close reviewed

The Belgian film Close, written and directed by Lukas Dhont, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes and is up for an Oscar, is a coming-of-age-story that’s exquisite and heart-breaking. Take tissues, and probably not just the one box. I was deeply touched by their little white vests, purchased no doubt from the Belgian equivalent of M&S Dhont’s starting point was psychologist Niobe Way’s book Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, which is based on hundreds of interviews and showed that boys have deeply intimate, confiding friendships until adolescence when they are socialised to withdraw from one another. (Just to be on the safe side I asked

James Delingpole James Delingpole

In defence of the fabrications of reality TV

My new favourite tennis player, just ahead of Novak Djokovic, is Nick Kyrgios. Up until recently I’d barely heard of him and what little I knew – his massive, sweary, on-court tantrums – did not inspire much enthusiasm. But then I watched Break Point and realised that here was exactly the kind of man I’d like to be myself: someone so talented at what he does that he puts in no preparation and little practice; who prefers chilling with his mates and his family to the grinding tedium of work; who loathes rules and formality and won’t be told what to do; and who, despite all these self-generated handicaps, is

Laura Gascoigne

Thoroughly unsettling, never simplistic: Mike Nelson – Extinction Beckons, at the Hayward Gallery, reviewed

You enter through the gift shop. Mike Nelson has turned the Hayward Gallery upside down and back to front for his survey exhibition, Extinction Beckons. ‘It’s been a very intensive four weeks,’ says an assistant putting the finishing touches to the multi-room installation ‘The Deliverance and The Patience’ (2001) when I visit two days before the opening. Lit by one of Nelson’s signature red lights, even the green sign reading ‘FIRE EXIT’ makes me nervous Having the place to myself feels like having sole occupancy of the haunted house at the fair. This is less of a house, though, more a warren of passages and poky rooms bearing unsettling signs

Daisy Dunn

Blue monkeys, bull-leaping and child sacrifice: why were the Minoans so weird?

Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford does not take the idea of a labyrinth too literally. It does not lead you through galleries to dead ends, nor are you left searching, like Theseus, for a ball of thread to find your way out again. The real enigma of the exhibition revolves around the Bronze Age civilisation at its heart. The Minoans, who occupied Crete between about 3,000 and 1,100 BC, remain some of the most mystifying people ever to have been stumbled upon in modern times. It is uncertain where they came from, what they believed, how they were governed and why they chose to

Thursday

Deborah Ross

The bear overacts the least: Cocaine Bear reviewed

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

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

How has it escaped being cancelled? The Lehman Trilogy, at the Gillian Lynne Theatre, reviewed

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

James Walton

Riveting and titillating: BBC2’s Parole reviewed

There’s a distinct and rather cunning whiff of cakeism about the new documentary series Parole. On the one hand, it can convincingly pass itself off as a sombre BBC2 exploration of the British justice system. On the other, it offers us an undeniably enjoyable, reality TV-style opportunity to compare our opinions with those of the experts. Who doesn’t welcome the chance to indulge in some serious – or even titillating – armchair psychology? Monday’s opening episode began with some solid statistical captions stating that 16,000 UK prisoners are considered for parole every year, that 4,000 are granted it and that each decision is made by a small panel drawn from

Michael Hann

The crowd was the star of the show: Carly Rae Jepsen, at Alexandra Palace, reviewed

The other week I saw a T-shirt bearing the caption ‘For the girls, the gays and the theys’. And if you want a very quick and easy demonstration of why someone might wish to wear a T-shirt specifically excluding straight men, I suggest you go to pretty much any big standing show, certainly any featuring a youngish guitar band. On the way out, my friend said it was the loveliest crowd he’d been in for a long time, and I pointed out why There you will see the straight man in his natural environment, moving from the bar in small herds of six or seven in a straight line through

Richard Bratby

Crapcore: ENO’s The Rhinegold reviewed

Tubas and timpani thunder in The Rhinegold as the giants Fasolt and Fafner, having built Valhalla, arrive to claim their fee: Freia, goddess of beauty and youth. It doesn’t go well. Suddenly Fasolt drops his defences and declares his yearning (the translation is John Deathridge’s) for ‘a woman who’d lovingly and softly live with us lowly mortals’. At those words the music melts, and a solo oboe sings a melody so poignant that Ernest Newman thought it worthy of Mozart. This is the first instance in the whole cosmic drama where Wagner gives us a glimpse, however unformed, of something that an adult human might recognise as love. It’s the

Laura Gascoigne

Humanity, clarity and warmth: Alice Neel, at the Barbican Art Gallery, reviewed

If you want to be taken seriously as a contemporary painter, paint big. ‘Blotter’, the picture that won the 34-year-old Peter Doig the John Moores Painting Prize in 1993, was over 8ft x 7ft. The pictures in his current show at the Courtauld are so big that only 12 of them fit in the gallery space. Lovers of paint owe Doig a debt of gratitude for rescuing the medium from the conceptual doldrums ‘Blotter’ was a dreamlike image based on a photo of the artist’s brother standing on a frozen lake in Canada, where Doig spent most of his childhood. Its title referred partly to his technique of letting the

Christopher Howse

The mysterious world of British folk costume

In a remarkable photograph by Benjamin Stone, from around 1899, six men in breeches of a criss-cross floral pattern hold up great reindeer antlers. (Carbon dating of these objects produced the year 1066, plus or minus 80.) A man in a bowler hat holds a squeeze box and on the right a serious-faced boy stands with a hobby-horse head emerging from the cloth that swathes him. The photograph features in the exhibition Making Mischief: Folk Costume in Britain. It shows the Abbots Bromley horn dance, performed annually on the Monday after Old St Bartholomew’s Day (4 September). Never mind that the breeches were made in the 1880s by Mrs J.

Wednesday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

What I love about Netflix’s Kleo is that it’s so damned German

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,

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The unknown German composer championed by Mahler

I was sceptical when the lady on the bus to Reading town centre told me that her father knew Liszt. Who wouldn’t be? This was a long time ago, mind: probably 1980, and I was on my way into school. I think our conversation started because I was reading a book about music. She was old and tiny, wearing a luxuriant wig. She introduced herself as Mrs Ball but her accent was unmistakably German. Even so, Liszt had been dead for nearly a century. Could it be true? ‘Oh, my father knew everyone,’ she said. ‘Richard Strauss was a great friend. And dear Bruno Walter. He lived in our house,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A sex farce reminiscent of Alan Clark’s diaries: Phaedra, at the Lyttelton Theatre, reviewed

Simon Stone claims that his new comedy, Phaedra, draws on the work of Euripides, Seneca and Racine. In fact, the porn-mag narrative resembles a passage in Alan Clark’s diaries where the priapic scribbler seduces a mother and daughter in rapid succession. That’s what happens to Sofiane, a homeless Moroccan lecher, aged 41, who has the looks of George Best and the sexy drawl of a Riviera gigolo. He befriends Helen, a senior Labour MP, who shares her picture-perfect London home with her two brattish children and her high-flying husband Hugo, who speaks 15 languages. Helen appears to be starved of sex and male attention, which seems rather improbable for a

Daisy Dunn

What a voice Plath had – stern yet somehow musical, long-vowelled, bear-like: Radio 4’s My Sylvia Plath reviewed

Can you ever truly know a poet? The question arises every time one publishes a collection that looks vaguely confessional. Is it real, we ask, or is it all persona? My Sylvia Plath, an Archive on 4 programme to mark the 60th anniversary of Plath’s death this month, presupposes that poets are to some degree unreachable. The ‘My’ belongs to Emily Berry, a contemporary poet, who knows that her Plath is different from another’s, is different from Plath’s own Plath, and so on.  Unexpectedly, given the emphasis on many Plaths and the gap between a writer and their verse, the framework of the programme is intensely personal. It comes as

James Walton

Bravely shows that depressed people can be quite annoying: The Son reviewed

For my money – and lots of other people’s – Florian Zeller’s 2020 film The Father was pretty much a masterpiece. Oscar-winningly adapted from his own play by Zeller and Christopher Hampton, it plunged us into the fractured world of Anthony, an old man with dementia (as Oscar-winningly played by Anthony Hopkins). With different actors playing the same characters and perfectly coherent scenes that kept contradicting each other, we shared Anthony’s struggle to work out who was who and what was what. The result provided a rare combination of tricksy intelligence and emotional punch. Now, with The Son, adapted with Hampton from another of his plays, Zeller brings us another