Arts Reviews Archives

Wednesday

30 Nov 2022

Why I love Rod Stewart

Reader, I let you down. But I did so for the right reason: for love. On a night when all of London’s music critics were at the Royal Festival Hall for Christine and the Queens, I deserted my duty. But, honestly, I don’t regret it. The reports back from the RFH suggested some baffling melange of performance art, am dram, experimental pop and gender identity, wrapped up in a concept piece about red cars. Not me. I’ll stick with Rod, a man so comfortable with his gender identity that he’s a byword for male libido. Rod is a man so comfortable with his gender identity that he’s a byword for

Melanie McDonagh

Mesmerising and eye-opening: Courtauld Gallery’s Fuseli and the Modern Woman reviewed

It’s not until you see this exhibition of drawings by Henry Fuseli that you realise that most artists have really not done anything like justice to women’s hair. Fuseli was obsessed with it, particularly that of his wife Sophia, a former artists’ model 20-plus years his junior. Hers was wildly extravagant even by the standards of the time – late 18th, early 19th century. For most art buffs, Fuseli, one of the most idiosyncratic artists of his age, is best known for ‘The Nightmare’, his lurid Gothic painting of a curvaceous sleeping woman with a demon squatting on her belly, shown in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1782; the drawings

James Walton

A dismaying exercise in nostalgia: Simon Schama’s History of Now reviewed

For those who consider themselves traditional liberals (full disclosure: such as me) Sunday’s first episode of Simon Schama’s History of Now may have felt like a somewhat dismaying exercise in nostalgia. As Schama ran through a familiar anthology of 20th-century liberalism’s greatest hits, we were taken back to a happier, more recognisable world of clearly demarcated goodies and baddies where democracy would inevitably mean the triumph of our own beliefs and there was little that couldn’t be fixed by art ‘speaking truth to power’. The programme’s starting point, as you might imagine, was the Spanish Civil War, described by Schama as a ‘great battle between democracy and autocracy’ – rather

Lloyd Evans

An unexpected heartbreaker: Elf the Musical, at the Dominion Theatre, reviewed

Elf opens with an unbelievable premise. Buddy was abandoned as a baby and adopted by Santa’s elves and he spent a happy childhood making Christmas gifts in their factory at the North Pole. The action begins when Buddy decides to track down his real father in New York, but when he arrives he finds a community sunk in greed and cynicism. He’s horrified to learn that everyone exploits Christmas for financial gain. His dad, Walter Hobbs, turns out to be a bullied publishing executive who has no time to spend with his wife and his lonely younger son. Buddy’s mission is to restore love to this broken family and to

Richard Bratby

The sonic equivalent of a Starbucks Eggnog Latte: ENO’s It’s a Wonderful Life reviewed

Whoosh! A digital starburst, a sweep of orchestral sound and the stage of the Coliseum is alive with dancing, whirling snowflakes. Floating in the heavens is the soprano Danielle de Niese; below her in the darkness, the truss bridge that we all know – because we’ve all seen It’s a Wonderful Life – is where the turning point of the story will occur, a couple of hours from now. That being the case, the only question is how composer Jake Heggie, librettist Gene Scheer and director Aletta Collins are going to close the circle and get us there. It’s evident from the off that they’re not going to stint either

Sam Kriss

Why ASMR is evil

In 1954, the psychologist James Olds made a few ordinary rats the happiest rodents that had ever lived. He had directly wired an electrode into the rats’ brains, plugging into the septal area, which he believed might have something to do with the experience of pleasure. When he passed a small electric current through the electrode, the rats seemed to enjoy the experience. If he buzzed the rats only when they were in a particular place, they’d keep returning there, as if they were asking politely for him to do it again. So he tried handing over control of the experiment to the rats themselves. Olds gave them a lever:

Wednesday

23 Nov 2022

James Delingpole

Repellent: Paramount+’s Tulsa King reviewed

TV currently abounds with ‘I thought they were dead’ revival projects: series in which your favourite 1980s movie stars are given a new lease of life and you are reminded – with luck – how much you loved them. Kevin Costner is doing very well in Yellowstone; Ralph Macchio is milking the Karate Kid legacy for all it’s worth in Cobra Kai; Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow had a decent run in The Old Man. Now it’s the turn of Sylvester Stallone in Tulsa King. But I shan’t be hanging around for the second episode. My main problem with it is the flawed premise. Stallone’s character –Dwight ‘The General’ Manfredi

Lloyd Evans

Wordy, overwritten flop – perfect for the BBC: Noor, at Southwark Playhouse, reviewed

A heroic Asian woman parachutes into occupied France to work for the resistance and help overthrow the Nazis. This sounds like a fictional yarn but the story of Noor Inayat Khan is true. Her family were well-educated Sufi Muslims, who counted Gandhi among their friends, and they raised Noor as a pacifist intellectual who spoke several languages. And that’s the first oddity of the show. We aren’t told what drives Noor to side with Britain in a war that violates her family principles. And because we don’t know why she’s fighting, we’re bound to lose interest in her progress. This wordy and overwritten flop is perfectly configured to become a

Damian Thompson

Carries the whiff of a hotel-lounge pianist: Vikingur Olafsson’s From Afar reviewed

Grade: B+ The 38-year-old Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson has an almost unique ability to make counterpoint sing, as his astonishing 2018 Bach recital for DG revealed. But his Proms debut last year in Mozart’s Piano Concerto K491 seemed over-thought, verging on the fussy. Now he’s been allowed the luxury of a concept double album, From Afar, in which he plays an eccentrically curated mixture of small pieces twice, once on a Steinway grand and once on an upright. It’s a revelation, though not perhaps the one Olafsson intended. He says the two instruments call for different approaches to his menu of Bach transcriptions, Schumann, Brahms and snippets of Bartok, Kurtag

Deborah Ross

I soaked my jumper with tears: The Last Flight Home reviewed

If you’re planning on seeing The Last Flight Home at the cinema, don’t make any plans for afterwards as you’ll be completely done in. I soaked the top half of my jumper with the crying, and then needed to race home to wring it out. It’s an unflinching documentary from film-maker Ondi Timoner following her father in the last days of his life right up to the moment he dies. Old age is no place for sissies, Bette Davis once famously remarked, and neither is this film. But it is also about how to live, how to be a mensch, and so full of love and respect. Plus, the older

Rupert Christiansen

The highlight was a dazzling duet from Pam Tanowitz: The Royal Ballet – A Diamond Celebration reviewed

The Koh-i-Noor in this Diamond Celebration of 60 years of the Friends of the Royal Opera House garnered the least applause: Dispatch, a dazzlingly lucid duet newly choreographed by Pam Tanowitz, to a thrilling thrash of a score by Ted Hearne. Dressed in 1960s sports kit with white floppy short shorts, William Bracewell and Anna Rose O’Sullivan engage in a steely contest that brings them together and forces them apart, their arms flattened and their faces expressionless as they push and pull, box and fence. Echoes of Merce Cunningham and Balanchine’s Agon abound – who is in control here? – but Tanowitz has an entirely distinctive style of her own

Graeme Thomson

Like A-ha after an extensive rewilding process: Sigur Ros, at Usher Hall, reviewed

Plus: it’s quite clear that MUNA are going to be huge What is it with Icelanders and mushrooms? Just weeks after Bjork releases a fungal-themed album, Fossora, Sigur Ros appear on stage with dozens of sporey lights illuminating the gloom. It’s boom time for mycophiles, but with Sigur Ros the link makes a certain kind of sense. Their aesthetic is not so much post-rock as glacial. For almost three decades the Icelandic quartet have been making large-screen, epically elemental music: celestial choral pieces, art-house concert films, ambient soundscapes and the occasional relatively conventional rock and pop song. Whether aware of it or not, you will have heard ‘Hoppipolla’ on numerous

Laura Gascoigne

Does gender matter? Making Modernism, at the Royal Academy, reviewed

The catalogue to Making Modernism opens with an acknowledgment from the Royal Academy’s first female president, Rebecca Salter, that in the past it has overlooked women artists. To compensate, it has bundled seven – four headliners and three of their lesser-known contemporaries – into this one show. Excluded from official art schools and reliant on private tuition and ‘ladies’ academies’, these seven women escaped the feminine curse of the three ‘Ks’ – Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen and church) – to forge independent careers in Germany before the first world war. They didn’t constitute an art movement, though Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin – both comfortably off – facilitated one.

Tanjil Rashid

A once-great engine of culture, slowly running out of steam: the BBC at 100

I had my birthday recently – one I share with a venerable old aunt who shaped my formative years. Well-travelled and fluent in more than 40 languages, Auntie broadened my horizons well beyond the dreary suburb where I lived. She informed me about events in faraway lands, but also steeped me in ‘our island story’. On intimate terms with everybody in the arts, Auntie was unbelievably cultivated. Back then, she also spoke with an unmistakable clarity that was a model for non-native speakers – such as myself. Millions worldwide acquired English in this way, gaining with it a whole civilisation. And so last month, on my birthday, I was genuinely

Wednesday

16 Nov 2022

Lloyd Evans

Rebecca Humphries is dynamite – pity about the play: Blackout Songs, at Hampstead Theatre, reviewed

Viewers watching a good romcom need to fall in love with three things. The boy, the girl and the affair itself. The new Hampstead melodrama, Blackout Songs, scores just one out of three. Rebecca Humphries is adorably chic and sexy as the Soho seductress who drifts from bar to bar, picking up men. Her toyboy is a disappointment, a teenage deadbeat who has none of her louche gusto. And his character is a puzzle when it ought to be crystal clear. At the start of the action he wears a neck-brace and speaks with a stammer. In the next scene, his neck has healed and his stammer has vanished as

James Walton

Riveting: C4’s Who Stole the World Cup reviewed

Have you ever seen film of the England 1966 football team holding the World Cup at the Royal Garden Hotel, Kensington, on the evening of their victory? The answer, I can guarantee, is no. Unbeknownst to everybody except a few policemen and FA officials, what they were holding was only a replica, made a few months previously after the real Jules Rimet trophy was stolenin London. But this was just one of the many eye-popping disclosures in Monday’s 1966: Who Stole the World Cup? Of course, it’s not uncommon for a documentary to claim the tale it’s telling is scarcely believable. Much rarer is for that claim, as here, to

Richard Bratby

Hugely entertaining: Royal Opera’s Alcina reviewed

A hotel bellboy, the story goes, discovered George Best in a luxury suite surrounded by scantily clad lovelies and empty champagne bottles. ‘George, George’, he sighed. ‘Where did it all go wrong?’. It’s the same deal, essentially, with Ruggiero, hero of Handel’s Alcina. As the curtain rises he’s in the boudoir of Alcina, a smokin’ hot love-witch who lives on a paradise island with her minxy little sister, Morgana, and whose only serious failing – and who are we, really, to judge? – is a fondness for transforming her enemies into animals. This being an epic tale of chivalry, and this being 1735, it’s universally understood that having this much

Rupert Christiansen

Exhilarating: English National Ballet triple bill, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

Headed for San Francisco, Tamara Rojo bows out of her directorship of English National Ballet with an exhilarating triple bill demonstrating her success in expanding the repertory and raising technical standards. If only the company could tour this class of work outside London. The climax of the evening was a new version of The Rite of Spring by Mats Ek – his second stab at dramatising music so graphically vivid and violently aggressive that choreographers since Nijinsky have struggled to find imagery and movement to match its primal energy. Even Kenneth MacMillan and Pina Bausch didn’t quite hack it for me. Ek has avoided the clichés: nobody stomps about plastered

Rod Liddle

What’s the point of these soul covers? Bruce Springsteen’s Only the Strong Survive reviewed

Grade: B What’s the worst-ever cover version (after Madonna’s hilarious stab at ‘American Pie’)? I reckon Creedence Clearwater Revival’s interminable mangling of ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’, or maybe the J. Geils Band stamping over ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ in hobnail boots – two bands I otherwise adore. Jeff Beck boring his way through ‘Superstition’? The Stranglers wrecking ‘Walk on By’? All Saints ripping the guts out of ‘Lady Marmalade’? I think you catch my drift, because the lesson is pretty clear: no, really, do not play that funky music, white boy. Brucie gets away with this album of familiar, but in the main not over-familiar, soul covers

Michael Hann

Odd, rich and adventurous: Erykah Badu, at the Royal Festival Hall, reviewed

You couldn’t call Erykah Badu one of the world’s most productive artists: it’s 12 years since her last album, and she’s released just five of them in 25 years, plus a couple of mixtapes. You’re more likely to see her name in the papers for something stupid she’s said – that she can see the good in everybody, even Hitler, because he was ‘a wonderful painter’, for example – than because she’s done something musical. Which is a shame because like her equally unproductive neo-soul contemporaries (Maxwell – five albums in 26 years; D’Angelo – three in 27 years), the music still sounds extraordinary. A key influence on neo-soul was