Arts Reviews Archives

Wednesday

19 Apr 2023

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

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

Angus Colwell

What the V&A Dundee exhibition doesn’t tell you about tartan

Criss-crosses, everywhere: 300 objects covered in them. The exhausting range and depth of the world’s most famous pattern is on full display at the V&A Dundee’s vast new exhibition. Tartan is a more genuine emblem of Scottish nationhood than the famous deep-fried Mars bar, which no one really eats. But it’s not uniquely Scottish. Plaid has been worn across western Europe for hundreds of years, then was claimed by Scotland as the symbol of the nation, now recognised the world over. It’s even a political weapon. In the recent SNP leadership election, the outsider Ash Regan wore practically nothing but the fabric. Ian Blackford has in the past unnerved many

Wednesday

12 Apr 2023

James Delingpole

One of the best things you’ll see on TV this year: Netflix’s War Sailor reviewed

War Sailor (Krigsseileren), a three-part drama on Netflix about the Norwegian merchant navy in the second world war, is one of the best things you’ll see on TV this year. But I doubt many other critics are going to rave about it or even notice it, for some of the very same reasons that I think make it so cherishable: it’s meandering, episodic, understated and made in Norway, with subtitles. Originally released last year as a feature film for the international category of the Oscars (where it was overshadowed by the more in-your-face All Quiet On the Western Front), War Sailor is the most expensive Norwegian movie ever made. But

Rupert Christiansen

Time for Akram Khan to move on from climate-change choreography

It must be 20 years since I first saw Akram Khan dance, and I will never forget the impression he made in a brief impassioned solo; here was a master of the Indian kathak school who had seen how its traditional vocabulary could be related to the less constricted realms of modernism. Since then he has gone on to fulfil his promise and broaden his aesthetic, notably through his extraordinarily powerful Giselle for English National Ballet. At 48, he has virtually retired from performing, but he continues to choreograph and direct his own company, enjoying a considerable international reputation. Most recently he’s homed in on an environmental agenda and I’m

Deborah Ross

Reframes Patricia Highsmith as a gay icon – and ignores her anti-Semitism: Loving Highsmith reviewed

I first discovered writer Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, Carol, the five Ripley novels) as a young teenager working my way through Golders Green Library. I guess she came shortly after Georgette Heyer, and I was hooked. I only later became aware of her virulent anti-Semitism, and on this count she was not half-hearted – she called the Holocaust ‘the semicaust’ as it failed to fully deliver – yet I still could not look away. I’m the same with the spiders at the zoo: horrified, but also mesmerised. We must, I suppose, separate the art from the artist as not everyone can be Paul McCartney, but any Highsmith documentary

Daisy Dunn

Crossing Continents is the best of the BBC

Ask a member of Generation Z where in the world they would most like to live, and chances are they will say South Korea. K-pop and kimchi have made it indisputably fashionable, and if the Instagram account of one of my Korean friends is anything to go by, life there is really quite idyllic, provided you can forget who your neighbours are. It would take the average worker more than a century to save enough money to purchase an apartment A recent episode of Crossing Continents on Radio 4 presented a very different side of the story. John Murphy, a superbly enquiring producer and presenter, went to visit some of

Lara Prendergast

Is milk racist?

I was tired when I went to see Milk at the Wellcome Collection, having been up for much of the night feeding my baby. In European and Christian imagery, one sign said, ‘a lactating woman often represents fertility, charity and abundance’, but I was not feeling full of the milk of human kindness. Nor was I in the mood to be lectured about the evils of feeding children milk. As it turned out, this wasn’t really a show about milky motherhood. Cows and women produce milk but it’s unfashionable to dwell too much on that detail. The exhibition has a few sculptures of women; mostly they are headless. A massive

Graeme Thomson

Why can’t I let go of my records?

I’m not a natural lender. I’m a reasonably soft touch when it comes to money, but regarding the important things in life – books, music, pens – I loan with a gently thrumming underscore of anxiety. While I’ve weaned myself off my mother’s habit of writing her name in every book she buys, I still tend to keep an internal inventory of where each one has gone, and when I’d like it back. Add in the fact that I’ve never possessed the zealot’s desire to convert others to my enthusiasms, and I’m forced to concede that I make a poor practitioner of the art of lending. Leonard Cohen was the

Lloyd Evans

An epic bore: A Little Life, at the Harold Pinter Theatre, reviewed

A Little Life, based on Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, is set in a New York apartment shared by four mega-successful yuppies: an architect, a fine artist, a film star and a Wall Street attorney, Jude, played by James Norton. A friendly doctor tags along occasionally and an older lawyer, in his sixties, joins the gang after legally adopting Jude. None of the men has a partner or a family, and they never discuss things like sport, cars, investments, movies or girls. Instead they hug a lot and cook pastries for each other in a kitchenette on stage. The play feels like a joke-free episode of Friends with an all-male cast. And

Richard Bratby

An old production that’s aged better than most: Royal Opera’s Turandot reviewed

Since its première in 1984, Andrei Serban’s production of Puccini’s Turandot has been revived 15 times at Covent Garden, not counting excursions to Wembley Arena. The current revival has been running (by all accounts, to capacity houses) since 10 March. The compelling reason for reviewing such a well-worn revival mid-run is that this performance featured the Royal Opera debut of the Nottingham-born Wagnerian soprano Catherine Foster – which by any reckoning was well overdue. Foster is hugely esteemed in the German-speaking world. In itself, that doesn’t prove anything – I mean, they rate Franz Welser-Möst too. ‘Big in Germany’ is often brandished as a rebuke to an imagined Little British

Adrian Tinniswood

Why Christopher Wren died thinking his life had been a failure

When Sir Christopher Wren’s servant went to rouse his master from an afternoon nap on 25 February 1723, and found that the old man would never wake again, the reputation of the nation’s greatest architect was already on the wane. He had walked away from St Paul’s in a fit of pique, with the cathedral still unfinished. He had been sacked from the royal post he held for nearly half a century, the surveyor-generalship of the king’s works. And the tide of taste was turning against his brand of restrained baroque in favour of a more rigid Palladianism. In old age he used to grumble that he wished he had

Tuesday

4 Apr 2023

James Walton

Felt like the product of a night in the pub: BBC1’s Great Expectations reviewed

By now a genuinely radical way to turn a Victorian novel into a TV drama would be to take that novel and turn it into a TV drama. But while we wait for someone to do it, Great Expectations stays true to the current ideals of junking large parts of the source material and infecting what remains with the neuroses of our own age – thereby demonstrating once again the strange modern neediness to believe in our superiority to all those benighted bigots who came before us. (Please tell us we’re the best people who ever lived! Please!) Or rather, it takes those ideals to new heights that are either

Rod Liddle

She has finally learnt to write a song: Lana Del Rey’s new album reviewed

Grade: A– No, Lana, I didn’t, thank you – all cleared up. The most extravagantly talented of that lachrymose, self-harming genre, miserycore, returns with an album described by critics as ‘heavy’, as if we might have expected Mungo Jerry or the Venga Boys. The difference between Del Rey and the rest of those dispossessed chicks warbling bleakly in their bedrooms about all manner of woe is that Lana has a degree of self-awareness and, Christ be praised, even humour. Otherwise, why would she start a song with the words: ‘I haven’t done a cartwheel since I was nine.’ Really – you haven’t? Also, she has learned, over the years, how

Lloyd Evans

Deeply unsatisfying: Berlusconi – A New Musical, at Southwark Playhouse Elephant, reviewed

Berlusconi: A New Musical, an excellent title, has opened at a new venue in south London, Southwark Playhouse Elephant. The show begins with the former Italian prime minister preening triumphantly on a white marble set that resembles the Capitol in Rome where Caesar was murdered by rivals who’d grown sick of his power lust. Berlusconi introduces us to his nemesis, a state prosecutor called Ilda Boccassini, who pursues him for years through the courts. With typical coarseness he dismisses her as a ‘haggard old sow’. And yet the pair perform a strange romantic dance that culminates in a bizarre Berlusconi chat-up line: ‘If you weren’t so frigid we’d end up