Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Graeme Thomson

When musical collaborations go right – and when they go horribly wrong

Big Red Machine release their second album later this month. It’s a fine name for ten tonnes of agricultural apparatus but perhaps not quite so persuasive for a pop group, particularly one with a considerably lower profile than most of its members. A collective formed by the National’s Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Big Red Machine has corralled the likes of Robin Pecknold (Fleet Foxes), Sharon Van Etten and Taylor Swift into making a collaborative record called How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?. It sounds intriguing on paper, but the quality of musical collaborations is notoriously hard to gauge from the cast list. Unlike film, in

Zoe Strimpel

Mesmerising and monstrous: @zola reviewed

The distinction between on and offline life blurred long ago. The greatest spats, sexual self-fashionings and mad soliloquies now unfurl on social media. The splenetic rhythms and fundamental shallowness of this medium make it a questionable source for art, but Janicza Bravo’s @zola — the first film ever released based entirely on a series of viral tweets — makes a tight, original fist of such material. @zola is A’Ziah ‘Zola’ Wells King, who in 2015 as a 19-year-old exotic dancer and stripper living in Detroit unleashed a 148-tweet thread, billed as #thestory, which detailed a chain of nasty but fascinating events during a surreal trip to Tampa. Full of sex,

Robert Gore-Langton

The history of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane is the theatrical history of England

Andrew Lloyd Webber has not been in the best of moods lately, largely thanks to all the Covid delays to his new musical Cinderella, now finally about to open — for the umpteenth announced time — at the Gillian Lynne Theatre. The bigger news, however, is that his theatre at the other end of Drury Lane, the grand old Theatre Royal, is finally finished after massive renovations. Lloyd Webber has spent an awesome £60 million on the rebirth of his Grade I-listed theatre, known to show folk as ‘the Lane’, with his wife Madeleine heavily involved and in cahoots with the heritage expert Simon Thurley and the great theatre architect

Thursday

James Walton

When did Sunday night TV become so grim? Baptiste reviewed

There was, you may remember, a time when Sunday night television was rather a jolly affair: gently plotted and full of rosy-cheeked yokels, twinkly coppers and warm-hearted patriarchs. Well, not any more — as BBC1’s Baptiste and ITV’s Professor T confirm. Both feature main characters, and quite a few supporting ones, with backstories so abidingly grim that you can only hope they don’t send out annual Christmas circulars. So it is that Julien Baptiste — French detective turned freelance missing-persons hunter — now has a dead daughter to go with his imprisoned son. Meanwhile, Cambridge academic Jasper Tempest’s OCD is clearly linked to the fact that, at the age of

Richard Bratby

Springtime for Putin: Grange Park’s The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko reviewed

Alexander Litvinenko lies in a London hospital, dying of polonium poisoning. That photograph from 2006 haunts the memory: the medical robe, the electronic monitors, Litvinenko’s accusing gaze and bald, ravaged head. But in case we needed reminding, Grange Park Opera handed out copies of Death of a Dissident, the account of the crime by Litvinenko’s widow Marina, and the principal source for Anthony Bolton and Kit Hesketh-Harvey’s new opera The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko. Minutes later, a hospital bed rolled on stage replicating that exact image. And then Litvinenko — the tenor Adrian Dwyer — opened his mouth and started to sing. Opera plays a high-stakes game with

Stuart Jeffries

What really went on at Britain’s Bikini Atoll?

Nearly a century ago, some Chinese water deer swam the River Ore to Orford Ness. They had escaped from the ornamental deer park at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire and, perhaps through ancestral homing instinct, headed as far east as possible without falling into the North Sea. They climbed unsteadily on to this strange shingle spit at the end of England and made it home, along with the gulls, thistles, wild poppies and the brown hares who, reportedly, are too burly to be airlifted by the Ness’s marsh harriers and barn owls. The pioneering deers’ descendants have borne witness since to many faces of human folly. From the first world war

Deborah Ross

I laughed quite a lot when I shouldn’t have: Old reviewed

The biggest challenge in reviewing M. Night Shyamalan’s Old lies in describing its central idea without making the film sound considerably cleverer and more interesting than it is, but I’ll give it my best shot. Just remember: if I fail, and Old does sound clever or interesting at any point, it totally isn’t. This is directed and written by Shyamalan who is one of the most consistently inconsistent of film makers (Sixth Sense, good; The Village, so-so; Last Airbender, let’s never talk of it again). The central idea has it that a group of holidaymakers are trapped on a tropical, secluded beach where ageing is accelerated and, as they discover,

Sara Veale

Swaggerific display of pumping chests and crotch-grabbing struts: NYDC’s Speak Volumes reviewed

Last week I attended a dance performance in person for the first time since March last year. If you’d asked me to choose the ideal show for the occasion, I’d have probably picked something with marquee names and lavish costumes — a classical ballet gala, or maybe one of Matthew Bourne’s glittering productions. As it happens, I watched teenagers in bomber jackets snarl at each other in between dance-offs — and actually, it was just the ticket. Mental health issues among teens have rocketed during the pandemic, and this crew, from National Youth Dance Company, drive the point home with a hard-nosed production that doesn’t ask so much as command

Daisy Dunn

Floods you with fascinating facts: Trees A Crowd reviewed

Listening to Trees A Crowd, a podcast exploring the ‘56(ish) native trees of the British Isles’, solved one of childhood’s great mysteries for me. Why, when you plant a pip from one type of apple, does it grow into a completely different type of apple tree? The answer — one kind of apple tree will typically cross-pollinate with another variety to pass on a different set of genes — is less interesting than the next bit. Which is that if you do plant, say, a Braeburn seed, and it takes, you’re likely to end up with crab apples. The reason, as explained on the podcast, is that the wild crab

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Rich and strange: Eileen Agar at Whitechapel Gallery reviewed

Heads turn, strangers gawp, matrons tut or look in envy. A man doffs his bowler hat knowing when he is outdone. The model walking imperturbably along a London street is Eileen Agar, her headwear the ‘Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse’, encrusted with crustaceans, spangled with starfish. If the Little Mermaid,in her leggy period, had been invited to Ascot, she might have worn something like this. A British Pathé newsreel of Agar wearing the same hat plays on a loop in the Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. (You can also see it on YouTube.) About 50 seconds in you catch her trying not to smile. ‘Life’s

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

One for hardcore Tennessee Williams fans only: The Two Character Play reviewed

It can be difficult to remember that Tennessee Williams, the great songster of the Deep South during the 1950s, was still churning out plays when he died in 1983. In the 1960s he was past his peak and he began to experiment with form, perhaps hoping to compete with fashionable youngsters like Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter. Hampstead Theatre staged the world première of his absurdist melodrama The Two Character Play in 1967. And now, a mere 54 years later (an interlude that hints at its merits as a crowd-pleaser), the show has returned to its cradle. Sam Yates directs. This is an obscure and sometimes baffling script that features

Thursday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The techniques of totalitarianism are still fully in play today

How to Become a Tyrant (Netflix) is ideal history TV for Generation No Attention Span. Presented in six bite-sized chunks by Peter Dinklage, aka the ‘Imp’ Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones, it tells you most of the things you need to know about Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Gaddafi, Kim Il-Sung, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein, without obliging you to think or grapple with any tedious detail. Instead of examining the dictators individually, it explores their careers thematically, looking for the ingredients they have in common. It’s split into half-hour episodes — ‘Seize Power’, ‘Crush Your Rivals’, ‘Reign Through Terror’, ‘Control the Truth’, ‘Create a New Society’, ‘Rule Forever’ — which

Deborah Ross

Quietly devastating: Nowhere Special reviewed

Off the Rails is one of those gentle ensemble comedies that we do so well (Calendar Girls, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, etc.), except when we don’t, and it all falls rather flat, and feels like the B-side of a Richard Curtis film. This comes in, alas, at the flatter, B-side end of the spectrum, even if its heart is in the right place and all the other things you say when a film doesn’t deserve a kicking. But you can’t really say it’s any good. Plot-wise the deal is: to comply with the dying wish of their best friend, Liz (Sally Phillips), Kate (Jenny Seagrove) and Cassie (Kelly Preston) must

Nicola Christie

The best theatre podcasts

All the world’s on stage again so where to go to for insight into what to see and why? Podcasts, of course. Lowe’s ‘luck’ is that he happens to be friends, neighbours, or have starred, with everyone he interviews Let’s start with Literally! With Rob Lowe. An hour-long conversation between the most swoonable actor in the world who we’ve all forgotten, and everyone he knows and likes, from Alec Baldwin and Oprah Winfrey to St Elmo’s Fire co-star Demi Moore. It’s a wonderful and eye-opening listen. Lowe combines the enthusiasm and curiosity of the best interviewers with a knowledge and experience that makes conversation flow until the cup spilleth over.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

What a comic treat: The Game of Love and Chance at the Arcola reviewed

Lady Sylvia is a gorgeous aristocrat whose hand is sought by the charming Dorante whom she has never met. To avoid the stiff formalities of courtship, Lady Sylvia swaps places with her maid and observes Dorante from the safety of pretended servitude. But instead of falling for Dorante, she becomes enamoured of his manservant. However, there’s another wrinkle coming in Marivaux’s classic comedy. Deronte’s manservant, unbeknown to Lady Sylvia, is actually Dorante himself, who has pulled an identical switcheroo with his valet. The story is so hopelessly contrived that its sheer artificiality becomes part of the joke. This production of The Game of Love and Chance, directed by Jack Gamble,

Martin Gayford

Full of masterpieces: Paula Rego at Tate Britain reviewed

The Victorian dictum ‘every picture tells a story’ is true of Paula Rego’s works, but it’s only part of the truth. Rego has said that she hopes and expects that when people look at her pictures, ‘Things will come out that I’m not even aware of.’ And that’s right too: every marvellous picture tells so many stories, and is so charged with under- and overtones, that no one, including its creator, can be aware of everything that’s going on. That’s certainly true of many works in the Rego retrospective at Tate Britain. All notable painters and sculptors are, of course, sui generis. They don’t follow established rules; instead they make

Richard Bratby

A short history of millionaire composers

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me, though if you’ve spent much time in the world of classical music, and you hadn’t realised just how different, you could do worse than attend an opening night at Grange Park Opera. True, Grange Park’s founder, Wasfi Kani, is famously adept at cultivating donors: you don’t build an opera house on the late Duchess of Roxburghe’s Surrey estate without a certain fundraising flair. It was when Joanna Lumley shimmered on stage in a midnight-blue ball gown and suggested that we might each like to leave the company at least £25,000 in our wills that I

Thursday

Tanjil Rashid

The vivid memory-scapes of Hong Kong master Wong Kar Wai

The films of Wong Kar Wai are a kind of map of Hong Kong. In them the city becomes a magnificent metropolis of missed connections, a tempestuous port where ill-fated lovers cross paths like ships in the night. And Wong has filmed the city from so many angles, with such spatial precision, that if the People’s Republic were ever to grow impatient with the territory’s seditious tendencies and raze it to the ground, Hong Kong could be reconstructed, flawlessly, from Wong’s films alone. A major retrospective on the Chinese film director is under way at the BFI and ICA. It couldn’t be more felicitous, since Wong Kar Wai is that

James Walton

Looks lovely if nothing else: Craig and Bruno’s Great British Road Trips reviewed

To its huge credit, ITV has managed to find perhaps the last two television celebrities who’ve never before been filmed travelling around Britain while exchanging light banter and using the word ‘iconic’ a lot. In Craig and Bruno’s Great British Road Trips, the Strictly judges are driving a Union flag-bedecked Mini through such telegenic staples of heart-warming TV dramas as the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and the Scottish Highlands. For the opening episode, the choice fell on the Cornish coast, which certainly helped the programme achieve its primary aim of looking lovely. But this, as it transpired, was just as well — because for a fair amount of the

Jessa Crispin

Wallace Shawn’s Designated Mourner feels like watching the news

Pity the aesthete, the flâneur and the opera-goer. Those who find the contents of their own heads so dull and mundane they must fill them instead with the fantastical inventions of our most extravagant lunatics. They have been locked out of the theatres and cinemas and public spaces that make them feel at their most alive and abandoned to the content programming of Netflix and whatever Tenet was supposed to be. They’ve been deprived, sheltered, cut off from the only thing that gives their lives meaning. I’m describing me. I’m asking you to feel sorry for me. If I don’t, at least twice a week, have a reason to wear