Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Lurking beneath the gore are moments of wit and sensitivity: Squid Game reviewed

Should we be worried that Squid Game is the most popular show in Netflix’s history? If it’s a case of art imitating life, then the prognosis for our civilisation is not good: most of us will die, horribly, sooner rather than later, but for the very few who survive there will be untold riches to enjoy in the company of the cruel and capricious controlling super-elite. Squid Game is a Korean update of the Japanese cult classic Battle Royale (2000) which spawned — or revived; let’s not forget Rollerball (1975) — the genre known as ‘death games’. These films take place in a dystopian future where ordinary, desperate folk compete

Jessa Crispin

The best podcasts where girls sit around talking about ghosts

‘I’ve actually seen ghosts.’ This statement comes less than ten minutes into the first episode of Dark House, a limited-series podcast about ghosts, houses and interior decoration from House Beautiful magazine. And this is the moment, I assume, a certain number of people roll their eyes and switch over to the next podcast in their queue. Humans are fascinated by ghosts. We tell the stories, we take the city tours of hauntings when we travel, we see all the films in the Conjuring and Insidious series. But that’s a bit different from seeing real ghosts, which is just someone taking things too far. It was a shadow, or a dream,

Deborah Ross

Hang in there for the gripping final half an hour: The Last Duel reviewed

Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel is set in the 14th century and is a tale of rivalry and rape told from three points of view, when two would probably have been sufficient. The best is saved to last, perhaps unforgivably. It’s the woman’s story, starring Jodie Comer who is sensational, so do hang on in there for that. However, I can’t guarantee that you won’t have severe battle-scene fatigue by then. The last duel itself is so extended it puts you in mind of Monty Python and the Holy Grail Based on true events and, loosely, on the book by Eric Jager, it stars Adam Driver (trying hard not to

Mark McGinness

Granada’s Brideshead Revisited remains the sine qua non of mini-series

It is 40 years ago today since Granada’s masterly adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited first beamed into British homes. This 11-part serialisation of a book originally entitled A Household of the Faith soon gathered millions of faithful householders. The autumn of 1981 was an especially cold and wet one and it was still too soon in the Thatcher premiership for her patron saint, Francis of Assisi, to have worked his magic. So while ITV was not able to deliver harmony, truth, faith or hope, it certainly provided 659 minutes of romantic escapism. It began very soberly with the credits — a simple black screen announcing the first episode’s actors in stark white script — propelled only by Geoffrey Burgon’s majestic score. The opening scene —

Richard Bratby

We’ll be talking about Royal Opera’s Jenufa two decades from now

Leos Janacek cared about words. He’d hang about central Brno, notebook in hand, eavesdropping on conversations and trying to capture their exact rhythm and intonation in scribbled semitones and quavers. So there’s a tidy irony in the fact that the opera that made his name isn’t really called Jenufa at all. Janacek called it Jeji Pastorkyna, and if it’s easy enough for non-Czech speakers to understand why that was never likely to travel, it’s not without consequence. Another woman drives this story, and in the original title she’s present but unnamed: Jenufa’s stepmother, described simply as Kostelnicka, or churchwarden. Jeji Pastorkyna translates roughly as ‘Her Stepdaughter’. No matter. When you

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A triumph: Young Vic’s Hamlet reviewed

Here goes. The Young Vic’s Hamlet, directed by Greg Hersov, is a triumph. This is a pared-back, plain-speaking version done with captivating simplicity and perfect trust in the text. The star is Shakespeare and the production merely opens up an aperture to his dazzling account of human greatness and frailty. The action takes place on a small, level stage that could be covered by two bedspreads. Designer Anna Fleischle adds an oblong arch of distressed stone along with three tall blocks that rotate to create internal hiding places, corridors and cubby-holes. That’s all she needs to suggest a house of horrors, a court of nightmares, a royal palace beset by

Michael Hann

A terrible joke gone wonderfully right: Rick Astley and Blossoms Perform the Smiths reviewed

Many of us who grew up loving the Smiths have rather shelved that affection in recent years. Many of us, being lily-livered liberals, have rather taken against Morrissey’s politics and his public support for the far-right For Britain party. Even those inclined to agree with him might have tired of his unrelenting self-pity and his inability to say anything nice about anyone, ever. Yes, we’ve still got lovely Johnny Marr playing the songs in his solo shows, but with the greatest goodwill in the world — and Marr gets granted the greatest goodwill in the world by being such an obviously decent fella — he’s no one’s idea of a

Laura Gascoigne

The frisky side of a classical master: National Gallery’s Poussin and the Dance reviewed

In the winter of 1861, visitors to the Louvre might have seen a young artist painstakingly copying one of the museum’s 39 paintings by Poussin. The subject was ‘The Abduction of the Sabine Women’ and the artist was the 27-year-old Edgar Degas, then at work on his own classical battle of the sexes, ‘Young Spartans’. Although lumped with the impressionists, Degas was a classicist at heart. ‘The masters must be copied over and over again,’ he believed, ‘and it is only after proving yourself a good copyist that you should reasonably be permitted to draw a radish from nature.’ A dedicated copyist himself, Poussin would have approved. The paintings in

Thursday

Ian Pace

How the culture wars are killing Western classical music

Musicology may appear an esoteric profession. But several events in the past few years have pushed musicological debates into the columns of national newspapers, from the American academic who claimed that music theory was a ‘racial ideology’ and should be dismantled, to the Oxford professor who allegedly suggested that studying ‘white European music’ caused ‘students of colour great distress’, to the high-profile resignation of a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, reportedly in response to academic ‘cancel culture’. These disputes have not emerged from nowhere. They are the result of longer processes that have forced serious questions about the very place of music, and above all the Western classical

James Walton

Blair & Brown: The New Labour Revolution should be called ‘The Tragedy of Gordon Brown’

Murder Island features eight real-life ‘ordinary people’ seeking to solve a fictional killing on a fictional Scottish island. What follows is so confused and confusing that you can only imagine it was pitched to Channel 4 as ‘Broadchurch meets The Apprentice’ and nodded through as a result, without anybody asking such pesky questions as ‘So how might that work, then?’ Or if they did, that they were silenced by the news that Ian Rankin was signed on as the writer — whatever that might mean, seeing as most of the programme is necessarily unscripted and the investigation itself impossible to plot in advance. Tuesday’s opening episode began with the ordinary

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A well-meaning but dull Official History: Olivier’s Normal Heart reviewed

The Normal Heart is not about Aids. Larry Kramer’s play is set in New York in 1981 at a time when clinicians were struggling to find a link between a handful of rare diseases that struck only gay men and heroin addicts. The term ‘Aids’ wasn’t adopted until late in 1982. And this dampens the wheels of Dominic Cooke’s production. A playgoer is likely to stifle a yawn as the characters on stage try to discover medical facts that have been common knowledge for decades. There are other problems with Kramer’s ageing script. The story follows an indignant activist, Ned, who has to persuade the city authorities to take the

John Phipps

The Sunday Feature is one of the most consistently interesting things on Radio 3

The story is likely apocryphal — and so disgraceful I almost hesitate to tell it — but it goes like this. On the night of 14 November 1940, as more than 500 Luftwaffe rained bombs on the people of Coventry, the newly appointed city architect Donald Gibson was watching the fires. Gibson had been appointed to the newly created position of ‘city architect’ three years earlier by the radical Labour council that had come to power in a local election. His job was to modernise what was then Britain’s best-preserved medieval city, and build the ideals of social justice and equality into the city’s brick and mortar. That night, as

Deborah Ross

If it were any better, it would actually be a terrible pity: Diana – The Musical reviewed

This week, an excellent film (Moving On) and a film that isn’t at all, but is entirely worth it as it’s one of the super bad ones that don’t come along too often. It’s the kind that, if it were any better, it would actually be a terrible pity. (See also: Cats.) It’s Diana: The Musical and it’s two hours of ‘whaaaaaat?’ and pinching yourself that this is really happening. (After two hours I was black and blue, with the pinching.) I don’t know what the best lyric is but ‘Harry, my ginger-haired son, you’ll always be second to none’ has to be up there. (Also: ‘It’s the Thrilla in

Laura Gascoigne

The genius of Frans Hals

Since art auctions were invented, they have served to hype artists’ prices. It can happen during an artist’s lifetime — Jeff Koons’s ‘Balloon Dog’ — or half a millennium after their death — Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’. And it can sometimes restore a lost reputation, as happened with Frans Hals. When the picture now famous as ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ came up for auction in Paris in 1865, Hals was all but forgotten. A successful portraitist in his lifetime, he never made much money — with a wife and at least ten children, he remained a renter throughout his career — and after his death his reputation, overshadowed by Rembrandt’s, was tarnished

Thursday

James Walton

A compelling mess: No Time to Die reviewed

These days, James Bond can no longer just be the main character in the Bond films. He’s also had to become a defiant metaphor for them. Since Daniel Craig took over the role, Bond has regularly been told that he’s badly outdated. Yet, by the closing credits, he’s once again proved how much the world still needs him. That this has been reflected at the box office is, I’d suggest, largely down to one neat trick: Craig’s Bond films have thrown in just enough gruff emoting to get people to go along with the pretence that his Bond is a radical reinterpretation, while still essentially sticking to their trusty old-school

Rosie Millard

In defence of Marvel

The teaser for Spider-Man: No Way Home, out this Christmas, which had a record number of 355 million views in the first 24 hours of online availability, delivers three minutes of thrills. Tom Holland is back, in the titular role, with his girlfriend from the previous Spidey movie, his best friend Ned, references to Mysterion, jokes from Benedict Cumberbatch as master wizard Dr Strange, plus engagement with that most playful of Marvel concepts, the multiverse. Bring in the multiverse, and anything, everything, is possible. Are you old enough to recall that moment in Dallas when the shooting of JR was revealed to be a dream? Well, the multiverse does all

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Gripping slice of old-fashioned entertainment: Old Vic’s Camp Siegfried reviewed

Boy meets girl. Girl gets pregnant. Then the entire world collapses. That’s the story of Camp Siegfried, which is set in the late 1930s at a holiday park in Long Island where German-Americans come to enjoy the outdoor life and to celebrate their ancestral culture. The boy is a strapping 17-year-old who chats up an awkward geeky girl with little sexual experience. Or so it seems. The boy is keen on Germany’s dynamic new chancellor but the girl finds Hitler too ‘excitable’. But when she’s invited to give a speech to the entire camp, she becomes an overnight convert and extolls the Nazi virtues of unity and patriotism. And she’s

Daisy Dunn

Made me buzz like an electron: Science – Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda reviewed

Given my affection for M*A*S*H, I can’t think why I haven’t listened to Alan Alda’s podcasts before now, besides the fact that they look quite uninviting. There is Clear+Vivid, on the power of communication, and Science: Clear+Vivid, on the power of scientific research. As someone who used to fall asleep listening to cassettes for A-Level physics, I am not easily excited by protons, and was prepared to give the latter particularly short shrift. Five hours on, however, Alda is still in my ears, and I am buzzing like an electron. Unlike many presenters, Alda, 85, doesn’t pretend not to know something just so that his interviewee will explain it to

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Absurd and amusing, solemn and scholarly: Charles Jencks’s Cosmic House reviewed

An editor once told me: always look at the loos. It was remarkable, she said, how many grand cultural projets, having spent a fortune on the atrium, the concert hall, the galleries, spent pennies on the bogs. The smallest rooms at Charles Jencks’s Cosmic House are among the loveliest loos in London with windows on to the garden and a ‘Jencksiana’ mirror over the sink. This was the Baltimore-born writer, critic and landscape designer’s take on the ‘Serliana’ window devised by the mannerist architect Sebastiano Serlio and it recurs throughout this mad and marvellous post-modern house. Jencks died in 2019 leaving his house on Lansdowne Walk in Holland Park as

Wednesday

James Walton

No Time to Die is a compelling mess

Times being what they are, James Bond can no longer just be the main character in the Bond films. He’s also had to become a defiant metaphor for them. Since Daniel Craig took over the role, Bond has regularly been told that he’s badly outdated. Yet, by the closing credits, he’s once again proved how much the world still needs him. That this has been reflected at the box office is, I’d suggest, largely down to one neat trick: Craig’s Bond films have thrown in just enough gruff emoting to get people to go along with the pretence that his Bond is a radical reinterpretation, while still essentially sticking to