Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Nina Power

The art of war

On his deathbed, the Austrian writer Karl Kraus remarked of the Japanese attack on Manchuria: ‘None of this would have happened if people had only been more strict about the use of the comma.’ The implication being that by channelling rage into the ordering of small things, we might stay away from violence on a colossal scale. Unable to restrict ourselves to matters of punctuation, alas, humanity is often at war: with itself, and others, however hallucinatory. Two current exhibitions come at rage from very different starting points. War and the Mind demonstrates the devastating psychological impact of war on those who fight it and those who have no choice

Friday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Katy Balls, Alexander Raubo, Damian Thompson, Daisy Dunn and Mark Mason

27 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Katy Balls analyses the threat Reform pose to the Conservatives (1:20); Alexander Raubo talks us through the MAGA social scene and the art collective Remilia (6:42); Damian Thompson reviews Vatican Spies: from the Second World War to Pope Francis, by Yvonnick Denoel (12:27); Daisy Dunns reviews the new podcast Intoxicating History from Henry Jeffreys and Tom Parker Bowles, as well as BBC Radio 4’s Moving Pictures (17:50); and, Mark Mason provides his notes on obituaries (22:46).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons. 

Thursday

Richard Bratby

The thankless art of the librettist

Next week, after the première of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera Festen, the cast and conductor will take their bow. All being well, there’ll be applause; and then a brief lull as the creative team takes the stage. There’s often a ripple of curiosity in the audience at this point, because it’s rare that we get to see just how many people it really takes to make an opera. Standing near the composer will be Lee Hall, the writer of Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters, and now part of the most maligned – and indispensable – profession in all of music. He’s the librettist. In short, Hall wrote the words,

Michael Hann

A cheaper, shinier, more processed Chris Stapleton: Brothers Osborne reviewed

If you were a frequent viewer of Top Gear in its Clarkson/Hammond/May era, there is a particular laugh you will be very familiar with: the combined hoot and exclamation that the three of them, and Clarkson especially, would engage in when driving a fast car around a bend. It was a sort of ‘WOOOOwraghhhahahaha’, designed to convey both sheer delight at being alive and a certain manly pride in being able to extract such a feeling from a motor vehicle. It was a performance. At the end of each song that the Cambridgeshire doom-metal band Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats played at the gorgeous Ally Pally theatre – a much

James Walton

Stately, sly and well-mannered: BBC1’s Miss Austen reviewed

It is a truth universally acknowledged that lazy journalists begin every piece about Jane Austen with the words ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’, so I’ll fight the temptation. In any case, the Miss Austen at the centre of BBC1’s new Sunday-night drama isn’t Jane, but her beloved sister Cassandra, best known for destroying most of Jane’s letters. Given that this has rendered our knowledge of the woman’s biography tantalisingly sketchy, Cassandra has attracted her fair share of resentment from Janeites. But rather cunningly, Miss Austen both exonerates her and takes full advantage of the sketchiness: high-mindedly questioning our entitlement to snoop into Jane’s private life, while feeling free to

Deborah Ross

Extraordinary: The Seed of the Sacred Fig reviewed

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is by the Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof and all you need to know is that it is extraordinary. What you don’t need to know, but may like to know, is that Rasoulof, who has already been imprisoned multiple times by the authorities, filmed it clandestinely while directing remotely from an undisclosed location and then had to flee Iran on foot. The journey was extremely complicated and dangerous and took 28 days. You could never accuse Rasoulof of taking filmmaking lightly. But that’s not the bottom line. The bottom line is: it’s enthralling cinema. The film follows a family in Tehran. Iman (Misagh Zare) is

Richard Bratby

Opera North’s Flying Dutchman scores a full house in cliché bingo

The overture to The Flying Dutchman opens at gale force. There’s nothing like it; Mendelssohn and Berlioz both painted orchestral seascapes but no one before Wagner had flung open the sluices and let the ocean roar into the opera house with quite such elemental power. Garry Walker and the orchestra of Opera North dived into it headfirst, while images of waves were projected on the curtain. If you believe that opera audiences can’t handle an overture without visual distraction (and most opera directors do appear to think this) it’s as good a solution as any. A strong start for a new production. Then the curtain rose and we were in

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

FKA Twigs is the most interesting pop musician we have right now

Grade: A Hell, there’s a lot not to like, or even to be a little suspicious of, with this young woman. Her politics are, as you might have guessed, banal and stupid. She has been in a relationship with the ghastly Matty Healy of the 1975. But she has huge talent and is probably a more interesting musician than any other we have right now, if we’re just talking pop music. She exists just beyond the Kuiper Belt of digital, alternative rhythm and blues, where pop meets modern classical. The conventional description is ‘art pop’, but as that brings to mind 10cc I think we’d better move on. Her songs,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Stylish facsimile of Carol Reed’s film: Oliver!, at the Gielgud Theatre, reviewed

Oliver! directed by Matthew Bourne is billed as a ‘fully reconceived’ version of Lionel Bart’s musical. Very little seems to have been reconceived. This stylish and dynamic show develops like an unblemished copy of Carol Reed’s film. Fair enough. Punters want comfort, not novelty when they go to see a 65-year-old musical. Billy Jenkins, as the Artful Dodger, captures every heart in the auditorium. But of course he does. It’s no slur on Jenkins to point out that the ‘Dodger’ is one of the greatest acting gigs in all musical theatre. Has it ever been done badly? The Oliver I saw, Raphael Korniets (one of three sharing the role), is

Daisy Dunn

Booze now has its own Rest is History-style podcast

Intoxicating History is the perfect title for drinks expert Henry Jeffreys and food critic Tom Parker Bowles’s new podcast. Its theme is alcohol, but its contents are predominantly historical, which is good news if, like me, you are quick to apply the word ‘bore’ to any man who talks about wine for more than eight minutes. The first episodes came out before Christmas but they have been gathering momentum since Dry January. Today’s drinking culture, which has spawned this bizarre annual group sacrifice, has an interesting pedigree. Europeans have apparently been on their guard against boozing Englishmen for nearly a millennium. The Portuguese were certainly left in no doubt as

Craig Raine

The problem of back-story in drama

Olga in Three Sisters, the opening speech: ‘Father died just a year ago, on this very day – the fifth of May, your name-day, Irina.’ Jeeves says somewhere in P.G. Wodehouse that people with monogrammed slippers are afraid of forgetting their names. Irina, the absent-minded sister, probably needed reminding it was her birthday. A useful side-effect is that the audience also knows exactly when and where we are. Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County begins with a frank information offload: Beverly Weston, the patriarch, conveniently explains to the new native-American hire, Johnna, the basic set-up: ‘My wife takes pills and I drink.’ This bald set-up is ‘concealed’ by digressions about Berryman,

Thursday

Robin Aitken

‘Innovation is not enough’: meet visionary English painter Roger Wagner

In the side chapel of the church of St Giles’, at the northern apex of the historic Oxford thoroughfare, hangs a remarkable painting. ‘Menorah’ (1993) depicts the (now demolished) Didcot power station with its six massive cooling towers and central chimney stack as the setting for the crucifixion; Christ and the two thieves are set against the minatory bulk of the huge industrial buildings while other figures, lamenting and covering their faces, occupy the foreground. It is haunting and profound, an appalling vision but also a beautifully realised one – the work of a master of his craft. For Wagner, art should never be ‘one person thick’. He believes in

Richard Bratby

Classical music has much to learn from Liverpool

They do things their own way in Liverpool; they always have. In 1997 the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra launched a contemporary music group called Ensemble 10:10 (the name came from the post-concert time-slot of their early performances). For a decade now, they’ve also administered the Rushworth Prize, an annual competition for young composers based in the north-west. And while classical fads and crises have come and gone, the RLPO has held its friends close and tended its garden. The result? The kind of artistic self-assurance that lets you put your chief conductor in charge of a première by a novice composer, and then call in a Barenboim to guarantee a

Rupert Christiansen

What a sad thing Strictly Come Dancing has become

Those of a violently masochistic disposition would have heartily enjoyed the Saturday matinée of the Strictly Come Dancing: Live Tour at the Utilita Arena, Birmingham. Talent loses out to glitter and hype, as shrieking vulgarity envelops all What deliciously perverse pleasure was to be drawn on this bleakly cold afternoon from the vast, snaking queues, the blared injunctions from the Tannoy, the drear concrete ambience, the over-priced merchandise tat and the chaos of the ultra-processed catering outlets – not to mention the £15 charge for leaving an empty backpack in the cloakroom. And then there was the show. How sad that what started off 20 years ago as a timely

Graeme Thomson

The maudlin, magical world of Celtic Connections

Is it possible to find a common thread running through the finest Scottish music? If pushed, one might identify a quality of ecstatic melancholy, a rapturous yet fateful romanticism, in everything from the Incredible String Band to the Cocteau Twins, the Blue Nile to Frightened Rabbit, Simple Minds to Mogwai. The Jesus & Mary Chain have a song called ‘Happy When It Rains’, which seems about right. There were moments during the launch event for Celtic Connections, Glasgow’s annual and much-valued winter celebration of roots music from Scotland and far beyond, when this bittersweet admixture of moods was thrillingly conjured up. At other times, it simply felt a little contained,

Deborah Ross

Miserable but compelling: Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths reviewed 

Pansy is meant to be a sympathetic figure, but I felt sorrier for those who had to put up with her The central character in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths is Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), an angry, bitter, late middle-aged woman who rages against everyone and everything. Against her husband, her son, chuggers, dogs in coats, shop assistants, babywear with pockets: ‘What’s it going to keep in its pocket?’ Everyone, Leigh has said, ‘knows a Pansy’. Or is one, he might have added. Or is in touch with their inner Pansy. Why does babywear have pockets? This is not a cheerful film and, as with Leigh generally, there is no neat redemptive

Hermione Eyre

The rediscovery of the art of Simone de Beauvoir’s sister

An exhibition of the art of Hélène de Beauvoir (1910-2001), sister of the great Simone, opened in a private gallery near Goodge Street last week. It was the first time Hélène’s work had been shown or received any attention in London, and young people in alternative clothing gathered to sip orange wine and listen, rapt, to the 75-year-old biographer and friend of the de Beauvoir sisters, Claudine Monteil, as her recollections helped elucidate Hélène’s abstract paintings. The reclamation of a new ‘lost’ artist was under way. De Beauvoir’s cubist self-portrait is quite good – but ‘Simone in red jacket’ must never be seen It is possible, these days, for gallerists

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

An excellent sixth-form drama project: Santi & Naz, at Soho Theatre, reviewed 

Santi & Naz is a drama set in the Punjab in 1947 that uses an ancient and thrilling storyline about domestic violence. The main characters are a pair of young lesbians who plot to kill Naz’s bridegroom, Nadim, on the eve of the wedding. They discuss stabbing or poisoning him and eventually they decide to drown him in the village lake. This is a strange play. It wants to teach us about Indian society in the 1940s while assuming we’re experts There are many motives for this murder. Santi and Naz hate men. They detest the custom of marriage which forces women to endure painful sexual couplings. And Santi fears

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Not a complete waste of time: Netflix’s La Palma reviewed 

Netflix is the television equivalent of pasta and ready-made pesto: a slightly desperate but acceptable enough stand-by when you’ve got home late, you haven’t time to prepare anything more nutritious and at least it fills the gap without too much pain or fuss. It is an adamantine rule of television that foreign-language dramas are always superior La Palma is classic Netflix. You wouldn’t necessarily rave about it to your friends. But if, as I do, you have one of those wives who gets really pissed off if there’s not a programme ready and waiting to be viewed while supper’s still hot and, in a panic, you click on La Palma,

Thursday

Tanjil Rashid

Was Brazil the real birthplace of modernism?

A paradox of art history: to understand the artists of the past, it helps to study how, and where, they conceived of the future. If today we foresee the future in the East, previous generations looked westward. In the last century, Europeans, having inherited a seemingly aged and decrepit civilisation, determined that the future of art was to be found in the New World. That much is well known. But this did not always mean America. Indeed, the true cognoscenti had a different country in mind: Brazil. Brazil’s modernists proudly integrated all traditions – European, Amerindian, African, Asian For the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, it was Brazil that was the