Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Tedious and threadbare: Unicorn, at the Garrick Theatre, reviewed

Unicorn, Mike Bartlett’s new play, involves some characters in chairs discussing a sexual threesome. That’s the entire show. Polly (Nicola Walker) is a drunken crosspatch who wants to spice up her loveless marriage to Dr Nick (Stephen Mangan) by bringing a blonde lesbian into the bedroom. Nick, a dithering twerp, doesn’t care if it happens or not and he lets his gobby wife talk him into it. She’s desperate for a bit of girl-on-girl action because she detests straight men (apart from Nick) and she dated women before she got married. It’s not clear why Nick puts up with this charmless windbag who treats him like a naughty spaniel and

Stephen Hough

How to write a piano concerto

My Piano Concerto, The World of Yesterday, began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic: would I like to write a score for a movie about a concert pianist writing a piano concerto. As I looked at my concert diary, blank but for Zoom calls, it seemed like a wonderful way to keep me busy. I’d never wanted to write a piano concerto (how to begin?) but the characters and outline of this film gave me a handle: an ageing Austrian baroness and a young American composer in the early 1930s; she commissions him to write a piece and invites him to compose it at

James Walton

The White Lotus is off to a shaky start

The White Lotus, now back for a third series, could perhaps be best described as Death in Paradise for posh people. Most obviously, this is because its plots revolve around murders in an idyllic location – only with a far bigger budget, a much starrier cast and several episodes per story. But there’s also the fact that it follows the same pattern every time. So it was that season three began this week, rather like its predecessors, with some lovely scenery, a dead body and a caption reading ‘One week earlier’. After that, we duly watched a bunch of rich, good-looking Americans arriving at a luxury White Lotus resort where

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Soothing and glorious: Fashion Neurosis reviewed

Sometimes the mind needs to take a break. And I can’t think of a better stopping-off place than the soothing, gloriously bonkers discussions on the Fashion Neurosis podcast, hosted by the British fashion designer Bella Freud. Its premise is that Freud, daughter of Lucian and great-grand-daughter of Sigmund, encourages guests to recline on her couch and talk over any and every aspect of their relationship to fashion. Her mellifluous, affirming manner is much more soft soap than wire wool, but this is not territory that requires a Robin Day, and the concept proves a surprisingly fruitful route into family history, personal stories and high-grade gossip. The pool of guests is

Richard Bratby

Regents Opera’s Ring is a formidable achievement

I saw the world end in a Bethnal Green leisure centre. Regents Opera’s Ring cycle, which began in 2022 in Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden, has found its culmination and completion at York Hall, a rundown public bath better known for championship boxing. Tower Hamlets security staff scan you for concealed weapons on the way in, which is not exactly typical at the opera. Still, the Ring is not a typical opera – and isn’t art supposed to feel dangerous? But once you’re inside – and as long as you’re not seated within earshot of the bar staff, who clatter and chatter throughout – Caroline Staunton’s scaled down production transfers

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The new Civ is gorgeous and richly rewarding

Grade: A- It has been nearly ten years since addicts of the empire-building simulator Civilization – or Civ, as players call it – have had a fresh fix. Was it the original Civ that cost you a first in your finals? It’s back, and this time round it aims to cost you a promotion at work. You’ve both grown up. Prepare to lose very many hours to its attractive blend of diplomacy, resource management, city-building and strategic ultraviolence.  Your path through history comes in three linked chunks: you’ll play through the ancient world, then carry forward some of your progress into the age of exploration, and then do the same

Michael Hann

Lauren Mayberry is terrific – but it’s not music for middle-aged men

There are nights when one realises quite how much effort the business end of showbusiness must be. On a bitterly cold Monday night in Philadelphia, Lauren Mayberry – over from Glasgow, and halfway through a month of criss-crossing the USA – took to the stage to survey a crowd of maybe 500 people, in a venue that holds 1,200. A good proportion of those 500 people were just like me: middle-aged men. We have every right to be there, of course, and one suspects Mayberry was glad they bought tickets. But I bet she was disappointed some of the remaining 700 or so tickets had not been bought by young

Rupert Christiansen

I’ve had it with Pina Bausch

My patience with the cult of Pina Bausch is wearing paper thin. She was taken from us 16 years ago, and I had hoped that the aura of divinity around her memory might now be fading. But no, it only burgeons and having joined with Terrain Boris Charmatz to honour her creations, the official keepers of her flame Tanztheater Wuppertal are back in town to present one of her later works, Vollmond (‘Full Moon’), to ecstatic standing room-only congregations in her temple at Sadler’s Wells. What a bad, bad influence the Blessed Pina has had on dance, providing inspiration for hundreds of her imitators to pull the wool over our

Friday

James Heale James Heale

James Heale, Andrew Kenny, Lara Prendergast, Ysenda Maxtone Graham and Nina Power

41 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: James Heale wonders what Margaret Thatcher would make of today’s Conservatives (1:28); Andrew Kenny analyses South Africa’s expropriation act (6:13); Lara Prendergast explores the mystery behind The Spectator’s man in the Middle East, John R Bradley (13:55); Ysenda Maxtone Graham looks at how radio invaded the home (30:13); and, Nina Power reviews two exhibitions looking at different kinds of rage (35:13).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Sam Kriss

Tarot isn’t very old or esoteric – but it does work

Among my many fake and useless skills, I’m a reasonably decent tarot reader. I can do one for you now if you like. A very simple three-card spread: your cards are the Seven of Wands, the Hierophant and the Six of Pentacles. There are lots of vaguely drippy ways of interpreting a three-card spread: past-present-future, or mind-body-spirit; I usually prefer to think of the cards as representing first, the mess you’re in; second, how you got there; and third, how you might plausibly manage to get your way out. And you, reader, are in a bit of a mess.  If you look up the Seven of Wands online or in

Rupert Christiansen

Does Sadler’s Wells really need a lavish new building?

Arts Council England may be successfully clobbering the poor old genre of opera into the ground, but its sister art dance continues to be nurtured ever more generously, and the London scene is as ebulliently youthful and healthily various as it’s ever been. At the top end there’s the Royal Ballet, currently a match for any company in the world, and English National Ballet, performing to an impressive standard too. Sadler’s Wells thrives, with a rich programme embracing Matthew Bourne’s pantos and all sorts from Rambert and Akram Khan to hip hop and flamenco, alongside a succession of foreign visitors who fill the stage with mud or stand on their

Graeme Thomson

The art of the anti-love song

Tracey Thorn released an album in 2010 titled Love and Its Opposite. When it comes to songwriting, it’s the ‘opposite’ that tends to throw up the more compelling discourse. The anti-love song has been a staple in popular music since Elvis’s baby left him and he wandered off to ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Presley is a useful weathervane: if asked to pick between the two, no sentient listener would choose the soppy slobbering of ‘(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear’ over the snarl and bite of ‘Hound Dog’. Pop is sunshine on the surface, but at heart it’s closer to Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate. As Tina Turner once pondered, quite loudly: ‘What’s

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Are these performances of the Bach cantatas the best on record?

Three projects shedding light on the sacred music of J.S. Bach are nearing completion. The first consists of an epic 25-year project to record all the composer’s vocal works – passions, masses, motets and more than 200-odd cantatas – in electrifying performances supplemented by lectures and workshops. At the helm is a Swiss choral conductor renowned for his improvisatory skills – and surely the only baroque specialist to have played Sidney Bechet on a chamber organ. The second project is a guide to Bach’s church cantatas tailored at ‘cultural Christians’; that is, music lovers intrigued but intimidated by their Lutheran theology, unsure how to approach this treasure trove of, at

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Is work really more fun than fun?

Wouldn’t it be marvellous if instead of going to work every day we could contract out the tedium to avatars of whose daytime activities we could remain blissfully unaware? This, in essence, is the premise of the dystopian drama Severance, but I’m not sure it’s a fantasy many of us actually nurture. Noël Coward once said: ‘Work is more fun than fun.’ And though I wouldn’t push it quite that far – it would be true only if you were a huntsman or a Master of Fox Hounds – I think most of us would be pretty bereft without the adrenaline buzz of deadlines, the thrill of office flirtations, the

Deborah Ross

Strangely moving: Bridget Jones – Mad About the Boy reviewed

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is the fourth outing for our heroine as played by Renée Zellweger and I was not especially hopeful. Who can still be bothered? Particularly after that silly Thai jail business (second film) and then all that flailing about in the mud at a music festival (third). But this takes you right back to when you did care. The franchise (this time directed by Michael Morris) seems to have finally grown up a bit, and explores loss and grief with surprising depth. That said, it still knows exactly what it is, and what to deliver, and is in touch with its former self via nostalgic

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

If you have two hours to spare, spend it anywhere but here: The Years reviewed

The Years is a monologue spoken by a handful of actresses, some young, some old enough to carry bus passes. They stand in black costumes on a white stage explaining to us the significance of memory, history and feelings. Then the story begins. The narrator is a precocious chatterbox born in France during the war who has no aim in life other than sensual gratification. She’s not a human being, just a cluster of nerves, like a taste bud, that registers nice or nasty, sweet or bitter. And that’s it. She has no morality. She doesn’t develop personally because her nature isn’t capable of emotional growth. Yet the audience is

Richard Bratby

Want to understand a conductor? Listen to their Haydn

Grade: B When a music-lover is tired of Haydn’s London symphonies, they’re tired of life. It’s not just the sheer creative verve of these 12 symphonies by a composer in his sixties. It’s the generosity of spirit. Beethoven demands a battle of wills; Mozart a near-impossible grace. But a conductor can run straight at a London symphony and Haydn will show us, with a smile, exactly who they are. Beecham is urbane, Bernstein camps it up; Abbado is trim and impeccably turned out. Eugen Jochum (a belated discovery) is just very, very German. Haydn’s still bigger than all of them. Paavo Jarvi has reached the second volume of his London

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,