Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Why does everyone hate Max Reger?

The German composer Max Reger, born 150 years ago next week, is mostly remembered today for countless elephantine fugues and one piece of lavatory humour. When he was savaged by the Munich critic Rudolf Louis, he wrote back to him: ‘Sir, I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.’ The quip was probably borrowed from Voltaire, but since no one can find it in his writings the credit has gone to Reger. Max Reger was probably the most technically accomplished writer of large-scale fugues since Bach But let’s not dwell on the image of

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A ripping production with plenty of laughs: Guys and Dolls, at the Bridge Theatre, reviewed

Further than the Furthest Thing is an allegorical play set on a remote island populated by English-speakers from all over the world. Dialect experts will have a ball unscrambling the set-up. First we meet Auntie Mill, a white Scotswoman whose husband, Uncle Bill, is a black fisherman with a West Country accent. Their nephew, Francis, is a mixed-race teenager whose verbal mannerisms seem to originate from North Yorkshire. And he has a pregnant girlfriend, Rebecca, who looks east Asian but talks like a Dubliner. This crazy muddle may be a deliberate assault on the entire cult of colour-blind casting. Or it could be a thoughtless embrace of chaos. Either way,

Graeme Thomson

The most exciting live band in Britain right now: Young Fathers, at the O2 Academy, reviewed

There are several reasons why Young Fathers currently feel like the most exciting live band in Britain, but for now let’s concentrate on effect rather than cause. The Edinburgh trio have somehow managed to dispense with all the froth and blather of concert-making – gratuitous chat; choreographed audience interaction; the fat and gristle – to deliver a show that is all attack. Every minute is a prime lean cut, direct and thrilling. They don’t mess about during the first of two sold-out Glasgow shows, but then brevity appears to be a kind of manifesto. The new album, Heavy Heavy, their fourth and not quite their best, lasts barely 30 minutes.

Daisy Dunn

A short introduction to the philosophy of Moomin

One of the lesser-known schools of modern philosophy is the Philosophy of Moomin. Like Cynicism or Epicureanism, it is difficult to pin down precisely, but subscribers speak of the importance of the individual, of liberalism and acceptance, and of the life-affirming joy of feeling. In the words of Moominpappa: ‘Just think, never to be glad or disappointed. Never to like anyone and get cross at him and forgive him. Never to sleep or feel cold, never to make a mistake and have a stomach-ache and be cured from it, never to have a birthday party, drink beer, and have a bad conscience… How terrible.’ Within this philosophical school, Moominpappa’s wife,

Rupert Christiansen

Generous, boundless, turbo-charged: Turn It Out with Tiler Peck and Friends, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

The death last week at the age of 83 of the sublime Lynn Seymour – muse to Ashton and MacMillan, the creator of roles in Romeo and Juliet and A Month in the Country among many others – set me thinking gloomily about the current dearth of ballerinas with her questioning intelligence and free spirit. So much technical proficiency around, so many elegant gymnasts, Dutch dolls and Sugar Plum Fairies, but so little distinctive personality or temperament. Where is the mystique, the grandeur, the ability to ambush our emotions? Her clarity of articulation is bobby-dazzling, her energy apparently inexhaustible Tiler Peck is among the best of the new breed. Star

Deborah Ross

Made me laugh for all the wrong reasons: Allelujah reviewed

Allelujah, based on the stage play by Alan Bennett, is set in a geriatric ward in a Yorkshire hospital and has a stellar cast: Jennifer Saunders, Derek Jacobi, David Bradley, Julia McKenzie, Lorraine Ashbourne, Dame Judi Dench – but not Dame Maggie Smith, inexplicably. Maybe she missed the call. It’s directed by Richard Eyre and produced by Nicholas Hytner, among others, so it has all the credentials you could wish for and yet, and yet, and yet. It’s weirdly lifeless and perfunctory and introduces a tonal shift at the end that belongs to a different film. That part did make me laugh but for all the wrong reasons, alas. The

James Delingpole James Delingpole

What a gloriously easy living Chris Rock makes from his comedy

Chris Rock was paid $20 million for his 70-minute Netflix special, so by my reckoning his riff on whether or not the royal family are racist must have made him more than a million quid. Was it worth the money? Well, I enjoyed it but I’m not sure how well it will translate here, in precis, with all the swearing removed. At that altitude, bodies get frozen to three times their normal weight Rock begins by pointing up the absurdity of Meghan Markle (winner of the ‘lightskin lottery’, he says) complaining to Oprah: ‘I didn’t know how racist they were.’ ‘It’s the royal family!’ expostulates Rock. ‘They’re the OGs [Original

David Sexton

The exquisite pottery of Lucie Rie

Lucie Rie had no time for high-flown talk about the art of ceramics. ‘I like to make pots – but I do not like to talk about them,’ she’d say. ‘I am not a thinker, I am not an art historian, I just do.’ It was her profession, she would maintain. Rie’s work is astonishingly self-sufficient. She belonged to no school and left none Her distaste for people preening about her craft went a bit further too. ‘I don’t like pots, I just like a few pots,’ she stated. When I interviewed her for the Sunday Telegraph back in 1988, she even said: ‘It’s extraordinary but I hardly like any

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The cult of Morse

I am on the Inspector Morse walking tour in Oxford, which is led by a donnish man called Alastair. We look like the funeral cortege of a man whose death is under investigation. Oxford is a major character in Morse. I think of it as the antagonist. There is something very cold about the city, and unexpressed. Oxford’s novels are few – elves, talking lions, a bit of class. Its subconscious is rarely exposed: crime fiction must do it.  Three series grew out of Colin Dexter’s 13 novels: Inspector Morse (1987-2000); Lewis (2006-2015), in which Morse is a spectral presence, which suits him (he would be a good ghost); and

Thursday

William Moore William Moore

Don vs Ron: the fight for the American right

29 min listen

In the cover piece of this week’s magazine, deputy editor Freddy Gray writes about the fight for the American right: it’s Don (Trump) vs Ron (DeSantis). Who will win? On the podcast, Freddy is joined by Amber Athey, Washington editor of The Spectator‘s world edition. (00:37) Political editor Katy Balls writes in this week’s magazine that small boats are a big election issue. Rishi Sunak has promised to stop the illegal crossings, but what will it cost him? Katy is on the podcast with Spectator contributor Patrick O’Flynn. (10:49) And finally, would you let a man with an axe into your house for the sake of art? Cosmo Landesman’s father did, and he

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

Electrifying: London Handel Festival’s In the Realms of Sorrow, at Stone Nest, reviewed

Hector Berlioz dismissed Handel as ‘that tub of pork and beer’ but it wasn’t always like that. Picture a younger, sexier Handel, rocking into Rome aged 22 and challenging Scarlatti to a keyboard duel. The Italian elite couldn’t get enough of Il caro Sassone, ‘the darling Saxon’, and he repaid them with 80-odd short Italian cantatas: little controlled explosions of character, colour and flamboyant melody in which his whole future career as a musical dramatist can be heard in concentrated form. This was an encounter with a genuinely evil work of art For the London Handel Festival, the director Adele Thomas staged four of these pocket-operas. The setting was Stone

James Walton

Watch some liars claim that youth and beauty don’t go together

Back in 1990, Grandpa from The Simpsons wrote a letter of protest to TV-makers. ‘I am disgusted with the way old people are depicted on television,’ he told them. ‘We are not all vibrant, fun-loving sex maniacs. Many of us are bitter, resentful individuals who remember the good old days.’ Thirty-three years on, it’s a protest that continues to fall on deaf ears, as we saw once again in the first part of Kathy Burke: Growing Up (Wednesday). The starting point was Kathy’s own 58th birthday, which had clearly come as rather a shock to her – and, given her take-no-nonsense (polite version) spikiness, you might have thought that the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Cumbersome muddle: Women, Beware the Devil, at the Almeida Theatre, reviewed

Rupert Goold’s new show, Women, Beware the Devil, has great costumes, sumptuous sets and an intriguing chessboard stage like a Vermeer painting. Impressive to look at but that’s where the good news ends. Dramatist Lulu Raczka should have thought twice before writing a script about witchcraft, which was bound to invite comparisons with The Crucible, one of the greatest plays in the theatrical canon. Raczka is no Arthur Miller. She seems to take a dim view of human beings and her writing feels like a vehicle for her vengeful sense of revulsion. Her female characters are mostly skittish, cackling ninnies and her males are lusty, arrogant, predatory monsters. No figure

Cosmo Landesman

The day I sold my destroyed piano to the Tate

One day in October 1966 I came home from school and found a large man stripped to the waist, attacking the family piano with a woodman’s axe. Seeing the anxious look on my face, my father assured me there was nothing to be afraid of. The axe-wielding man was, he explained, an ‘artist’ who was ‘creating a work of art’. My 11-year-old brain was puzzled: how could this axe-wielding lunatic be an artist? Can you destroy a piano and call it art? These same basic questions came to my mind last week when I went to Tate Britain and found that very piano hanging on a wall after 11 years

Deborah Ross

So formulaic I could have written it: Champions reviewed

Champions is an underdog sports movie starring Woody Harrelson as a baseball coach forced to take on a team with intellectual disabilities. But the main thing you need to know is it is so formulaic I could have written it, you could have written it, it could have written itself. Heck, it’s so predictable it could have also directed itself –  though, hopefully, it would never have been able to trash itself or I’d be out of a job. This is so formulaic I could have written it, you could have written it, it could have written itself Billed as a ‘hilarious and heart-warming comedy’, this is a remake of

Yevheniia Moliar

Ukraine must stop destroying its cultural heritage

Russia is not the only country erasing Ukraine’s cultural heritage. Ukraine itself has been demolishing its own public statues and murals for years. Before the war, in 2015, our parliament passed legislation that criminalised communist propaganda. ‘Decommunisation’ was a deceptively simple idea: it started with the removal of our 1,300 Lenins and a few other revolutionary figures. Since the invasion, even monuments with complex histories have been removed. In Odessa, a statue of the city’s founder Catherine the Great was toppled. In Dnipro, seven monuments were torn down, including those to writer Maxim Gorky, 18th-century scientist Mikhail Lomonosov and poet Pushkin. Two months ago, a Soviet monument to the soldier

Laura Gascoigne

How two Dutchmen introduced marine art to Britain

In March 1675 the Keeper of His Majesty’s Lodgings at Greenwich received an order for ‘Three pairs of shutters for the three windows in a lower room, at the Queen’s building next to the park (where the Dutch painters work’). Willem van de Velde and his son, also called Willem, would have preferred a studio with north light, but they weren’t complaining. They had been put on a retainer of £100 a year by Charles II – with an additional £50 from James, Duke of York – for the father to draw ‘Draughts of Sea Battles’ and the son to turn ‘said Draughts into Colours’. Turner claimed that an image

Michael Hann

Full of love: Butler, Blake and Grant, at the Union Chapel, reviewed

Years ago, I asked Robert Plant what he felt about the world’s love of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. He said he no longer really knew what the song was about, and it didn’t mean an awful lot to him. But, he added, that didn’t really matter because the people who loved the song had given it their own meaning. Songs don’t have to be as ubiquitous as ‘Stairway to Heaven’, however, to work their way into your soul. It’s perhaps even easier to develop a personal connection with a song that one doesn’t have to share with the entire world. Lots of people just wanted to feel 21 all over again

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