Arts Reviews Archives

Thursday

8 May 2025

Delightful nostalgia for political wonks: The Gang of Three, at the King’s Head Theatre, reviewed

The Gang of Three gets into the nitty-gritty of Labour politics in the 1970s. It opens with the resignation of Roy Jenkins as deputy leader in 1972 in a desperate attempt to quell the party’s growing hostility to the Common Market. He holds a council of war with Anthony Crosland, his old Oxford chum, and they discuss their next moves while awaiting the arrival of Denis Healey whom they both heartily detest. The writers, Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky, capture the characters beautifully. Crosland considers himself more gifted and mature than Jenkins but he hasn’t yet made his mark by holding one of the great offices of state. He boasts

Alexander Cohen

How tech ruined theatre

Poor John Dennis. In 1709, the playwright devised a novel technology to simulate thunder to accompany his drama Appius and Virginia. The play flopped and was promptly booted out of the theatre. To add salt to the wound, Dennis’s thunder-generating technique was stolen and inserted into a staging of Macbeth. He accused the producers of ‘stealing his thunder’, birthing the phrase that has long outlived his work. Stage technology has come a long way since. Directors have a toy box of high-tech smoke and mirrors at their disposal. Perhaps it’s more of a Pandora’s box. Live on-stage cameras are particularly in vogue. Watch them crawling all over Jamie Lloyd’s monotone

Monday

5 May 2025

Julian Spalding

Why were the Scots so much better at painting than the English?

This exhibition is awash with luscious brushstrokes, but then that’s to be expected: it’s full of Scottish painting. Before the barren era of conceptual art, which most hope is over, people often observed that the Scots could paint while the English could draw. Why is a bit of mystery, but it was true right through the 18th and 19th centuries and well into the 20th. The Dovecot Studios exhibition opens with John Duncan Fergusson’s portrait of his lover and first muse, Jean Maconochie, painted about 1902. It’s a fabulous eyeful of brush marks. Her pale pink, oval face nestles under her black billowing locks, flanked by two glowing pearls dropping

Thursday

1 May 2025

Oliver Basciano

Why is the National Portrait Gallery’s collection so poor?

The recent announcement that the National Portrait Gallery has purchased two works by Sonia Boyce and Hew Locke for its collection came as something of a shock. The surprise? The art was actually good. Boyce’s quarterised collage ‘From Someone Else’s Fear Fantasy (A Case Of Mistaken Identity? Well This Is No Bed Of Roses) To Metamorphosis’ (1987), reminiscent of an enlarged and doodled upon set of passport photographs is a complex work of art made better the more attention you give it; Locke’s maximalist approach with the bust ‘Souvenir 17 (Albert Edward, Prince of Wales)’ (2024) may not be to everyone’s taste, but his sculpture is full of humour and

Melanie McDonagh

The two young women who blazed a trail for modernism in Ireland

In 1921, the sternly abstract cubist Albert Gleizes opened the door of his Parisian apartment to two young women in their twenties, the Irish artists Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett. They explained that they wanted him to teach them his method of ‘extreme cubism’. He wasn’t sure that he had a method, nor whether it was teachable. They were inexorable. Their gentle voices and their tenacity, he wrote later, terrified him, and he capitulated. They had accepted his pronouncements on ‘painting without subject’; now they wanted to know how. They were to be trailblazers for modernism in the newly independent Ireland, Jellett as a painter and Evie as both painter

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Prepare to feel nauseous at this School Dinners exhibition

If your stomach turns when you walk past a Japanese restaurant with moulded plastic replicas of sushi on display, prepare to feel even more nauseous in the School Dinners exhibition at the Food Museum in Stowmarket, Suffolk. Here, moulded in that same plastic, in (if anything) even more garish colours, you’ll see a sample two-course school dinner from each decade from the 1940s to the 2020s. If orange PVC cod’s roe looks a bit disgusting, a heap of pale, lumpy, plastic 1970s mashed potato with over-boiled carrots is even worse. The sample plate from the 1940s contains chunks of dark brown liver polluting the inside of a jacket potato. (I’m

Richard Bratby

Imagine Dua Lipa releasing an album of Victorian parlour ballads

Grade: B+ This is unexpected. A bright young cellist – one of the brightest, in fact – makes his recorded debut with a collection of opera fantasies. In the 19th century, touring virtuosos routinely ransacked hit operas for melodies, then decked them out with every conceivable bit of flummery, dazzlement and top-end-tinsel, the better to excite their fans. They were wildly popular. The young Wagner spent a miserable few months in Paris compiling opera fantasies for cash in hand. The process basically radicalised him. Nowadays, there’s no less fashionable genre, and for the excellent 26-year-old American cellist Zlatomir Fung to record a whole disc of the silly things – well,

James Walton

How come the only Palestinians Louis Theroux met were non-violent sweeties?

Louis Theroux: The Settlers was never likely to be a programme with much of a narrative arc – and so it proved. In the first 30 seconds, Louis put it to a Jewish householder on the West Bank that his house was ‘quite deep in what are called the Palestinian Territories’. ‘You call it the Palestinian Territories,’ the man replied. ‘I call it the heart of Judea.’ And that, on the whole, was that. Louis travelled from one Jewish settlement to another, doing his best to challenge the inhabitants with his faux-naif questions and impressive range of quizzical expressions. And yet, of course, none of them budged an inch. The

Deborah Ross

Confusing but highly watchable: Slade in Flame reviewed

Slade in Flame was glam-rock band Slade’s first foray into film – and also their last. It was a flop on its release in 1975 and that would have been that, end of story, gone and forgotten, except it has been rediscovered in recent years, with critic Mark Kermode even hailing it as ‘the Citizen Kane of British pop movies’. That, I think, may be something of an overstatement but it’s still a highly watchable 90 minutes, does offer some banging tunes, and Noddy Holder, who plays the lead, does not embarrass himself on the acting front. (The other band members play lesser roles, perhaps mercifully.) Newly remastered by the

Lloyd Evans

Pure gold: My Master Builder, at Wyndham’s Theatre, reviewed

My Master Builder is a new version of Ibsen’s classic with a tweaked title and a transformed storyline. Henry and Elena Solness are a British power couple living in the Hamptons whose relationship is in meltdown after the accidental death of their son. Elena has scrambled to reach the top of the publishing world but she feels bitter that Henry’s career as an architect came to him so easily. When their marriage went awry, she played the field, seducing both men and women, and now she lusts after Henry’s protegé, Ragnar, a camp young stud who may be bisexual. Ragnar is almost too complicated to understand. He’s a philandering black

Craig Raine

Kingsley goes to the toilet

In 1978, I gave a poetry reading at Hull University. Philip Larkin was glumly, politely, in attendance. I was duly appreciative, knowing what it must have cost him. He was deaf as well as disaffected. Perhaps the deafness helped. The next day, we had a lunchtime drink at the University bar. We talked about Kingsley’s recently published Jake’s Thing, a fictionalised account of Kingsley’s sexual relations with Jane Howard. Larkin was puzzled: ‘It’s determinedly foul-mouthed, which I like, but there is a central implausibility. Jake can do it, but he doesn’t want to.’ An innuendo? A suggestion that Jake, and by implication Kingsley, couldn’t? He sipped something improbable like a

Daisy Dunn

A fabulously entertaining new podcast about ancient Greece

How did a myth about the consequences of poor judgment become a parable for aspiration? The question is posed by the Greek writer-actor Alex Andreou in his fabulously entertaining new podcast. His topic is the ancient myth of Midas, king of Phrygia, who was granted his wish to have everything he touched turn to gold. Midas’s new world was brilliant for all of five minutes. What is a man to do with piles of metal when every person he comes into contact with is reduced to the same? The Midas myth has been mangled many times; Andreou recalls that Donald Trump co-authored a book in 2011 entitled Midas Touch in

Michael Hann

A triumphant show: Self Esteem, at Duke of York’s Theatre, reviewed

The most compelling character in the newish documentary One to One: John & Yoko isn’t either John or Yoko. It’s one A.J. Weberman, inventor of ‘Dylanology’ and ‘garbology’. He’s shown practising both in the film, rummaging through Bob Dylan’s bins for clues to the thought process of genius. Fifty years on, two things struck me. The first is how odd it is that Lennon and Dylan would let someone as obviously potty as Weberman anywhere near them. The second is that everyone is now Weberman. Think of the Swifties who decode every missive from Taylor; the fanatics who obsess over the sexual antics of boy bands based on convoluted readings

Friday

25 Apr 2025

Owen Matthews

Owen Matthews, Matthew Parris, Marcus Nevitt, Angus Colwell and Sean Thomas

31 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Owen Matthews reads his letter from Rome (1:21); Matthew Parris travels the Channel Islands (7:53); Reviewing Minoo Dinshaw, Marcus Nevitt looks at Bulstrode Whitelocke and Edward Hyde, once close colleagues who fell out during the English civil war (15:19); Angus Colwell discusses his Marco Pierre White obsession, aided by the chef himself (21:26); and, Sean Thomas provides his notes on boredom (26:28). Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

24 Apr 2025

Damian Thompson

‘I’ve seen controllers come and go’: Radio 3’s Michael Berkeley interviewed

A few years ago I had a panic-stricken phone call from a female friend. ‘Help!’ she wailed. ‘Remind me what classical music I like. I think I’m going to be a guest on Private Passions.’ I could understand her anxiety. The programme, which celebrated its 30th birthday this month, is BBC Radio 3’s lofty version of Desert Island Discs. Eminent writers, scientists, artists and businessmen, plus the occasional book-plugging celeb, explain how music – mostly but not exclusively classical – is, well, one of their private passions. Even if, as in the case of my friend, it isn’t. It’s an honour to be asked on the show, which is presented

Deborah Ross

Worth watching for the dog: The Friend reviewed

The Friend is an adaptation of the novel by Sigrid Nunez starring a harlequin Great Dane. If I remember rightly, Naomi Watts and Bill Murray are also in the mix somewhere but I can’t be sure. Who could notice anything but Apollo in all his noble, giant, majesty? Watts and Murray are fine – if they are even in it? – but Bing, who plays Apollo, is astonishing. It’s his first role, yet he must be a shoo-in for the Palm Dog prize at Cannes this year. Even if you’re not into the ‘non-action’ genre it’s worth it for the dog To be clear, though, this isn’t your usual cute-doggo

James Delingpole

It should be illegal for TV baddies to profit from their psychopathic acts

I’m about to give away the opening scene of the latest gangsters-are-cool drama MobLand. Don’t worry. It won’t spoil anything. By the end of this review you won’t want to watch even a moment of this dog’s breakfast of an atrocity of charmless, witless, misbegotten, amoral tripe anyway. So we’re in a basement with Tom Hardy, playing his usual amiably ruthless hard-man character. This time he’s called Harry Da Souza and he’s the chief fixer for a London-based Irish crime family called the Harrigans. On this occasion, Da Souza is mediating between two lower-tier rival gangs, whom he has orders to make apologise to one another. After much tense negotiation,

Graeme Thomson

The disturbing ambient music of William Tyler

One could argue that all musical forms are essentially incomplete until the listener joins the party, but ambient music seems more needily co-dependent than most. Given that a typical sound bed is a blank canvas of amniotic electronica, much depends on the interpretation of whatever is laid over it: the drip and the drift; the scrape and the scratch; the arbitrary beauty of found sounds and field recordings. The meaning can be as banal or as profound as desired. Is that distant clanging the bells of mortal dread tolling for us all; or simply next door’s bin lid clattering on to the pavement? Since releasing his excellent debut album, Behind

Digby Warde-Aldam

The polarising poet, sculptor and ‘avant-gardener’ who maintained a private militia

Not many artists engage in the maintenance of a private militia, and it seems fair to assume that those who do may be bound to polarise. The Scottish poet, sculptor, ‘avant-gardener’ and would-be revolutionary Ian Hamilton Finlay was just such a figure: and boy, did he polarise. To his fans, he is a cult figure in the true sense, a limitlessly inventive visionary whose Lanarkshire home and garden remain a site of pilgrimage. To his detractors – notably, a number of vocal Finlay-bashers in the English press – he was a crank, a provincial megalomaniac possessed of artistic, literary and dictatorial pretensions quite out of proportion to his ability. These

Lloyd Evans

The case for replacing nurses with robots

Tending is a work of activism on behalf of the NHS. The script brings together the testimony of 70 nurses in a show spoken by three performers. It’s full of surprises and shocks. All NHS nurses are obliged to annotate their actions as they work. ‘If you haven’t documented it, you haven’t done it,’ they’re told. A nurse estimates that she spends 20 per cent of her time caring for patients and the rest of it chronicling her doings on bits of paper. There appears to be no feedback mechanism that enables the nurses to help managers find ways to improve the service. A nurse tells the story of a