Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

Seldom less than gripping: Banged Up podcast reviewed

Prison-based podcast Banged Up, now in its second series, is far more uplifting — and less soapy — than its name suggests. It begins with the tacit assumption that, if you haven’t personally been incarcerated, you probably have at least a dozen questions you’d want to ask someone who had. Is the food really awful? How likely are you to be beaten up? Is there a lending library? (I’d start with the last.) Banged Up has the answers to plenty more besides. The podcast is hosted by a prison lawyer named Claire Salama and two ex-inmates, a former footballer, Mike Boateng, known as ‘Boats’, and university-educated Rob Morrison, who describes

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Do theatres actually read scripts before agreeing to stage them?

Money is a new internet play about financial corruption starring Mel Giedroyc. She appears on-screen for less time than it takes to eat a Malteser. Giedroyc plays the boss of a palm-oil firm that wipes out orangutan habitats in Asia and wants to launder its reputation by donating cash to a London charity. A million quid is on the table. The charity staff meet via Zoom to discuss the gift. But first they brief each other about their latest activities which, predictably enough, consist of stoking grievances and spreading self-pity. Their charitable aims include ‘tackling local loneliness’, and ‘breaking down barriers based on age, race and gender’. The meeting then

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

The bizarre art of Scottie Wilson deserves to be better known

On eBay I have an alert set for ‘Scottie Wilson’. Nine times out of ten, it’s a diamanté Scottie dog from the jewellers Butler & Wilson. Once in a while, it’s a gem. Scottie Wilson didn’t think much of journalists. Art critics were ‘just jugglers — dodgers’. The sort of people who went to art shows — his or anybody else’s — could be counted on to go about ‘blabbing a lot of stupid muck. A lot of blah blah. They get paid for it too!’ Which makes it tricky to write about Scottie (always Scottie, never Wilson). You just know he’d light a cigarette and scowl. I came late

Saturday

Roddy McDougall

Roddy McDougall, Theo Zenou, Gus Carter and Toby Young

23 min listen

On this week’s episode, Roddy McDougall remembers heroes of the speedway, (01:15) Theo Zanou examines at Stanley Kubrick’s fascination with Napoleon, (07:20) Gus Carter looks at a memorial to everyday heroism, (17:20) and Toby Young explains what’s wrong with Equity’s anti-racism guidelines. (21:35)

Thursday

Theo Zenou

Kubrick’s Napoleon – the greatest movie never made

Two centuries ago — on 5 May 1821 — Napoleon Bonaparte died in a rat-infested house. The fallen Emperor had spent his final years exiled on the British outpost of St Helena. Yet Napoleon’s ignominious last act was only the beginning of his legend. A recent data-driven study, published by Cambridge University Press, crowned him the second most significant figure in history, after Jesus no less. Stanley Kubrick, the virtuoso director of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining, considered Napoleon the most interesting individual who ever lived. Kubrick’s passion project — never produced — was a biopic of the conqueror. He predicted it would be the ‘best movie ever

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

‘I’ve seen the bare bones of London’: street painter Peter Brown interviewed

‘I’ve been seeing the bare bones of London,’ explains the landscape artist Peter Brown, who is known affectionately as ‘Pete the Street’. We meet on the corner of St Martin’s Lane, where he is painting the view facing north, taking in the Coliseum, the Duke of York theatre and an Iranian restaurant called Nutshell. ‘The pandemic has been a good opportunity to paint all these West End theatre awnings.’ What has he noticed about London during the pandemic? ‘UPS vans, everywhere,’ he says. How about Deliveroo bikes? ‘I’ve spotted less of those.’ Has London changed over the past year? ‘I met a bloke on Old Compton Street who described how

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Xenophobic twaddle: Bush Theatre’s 2036 reviewed

The Bush Theatre’s new strand, 2036, opens with a monologue, Pawn, which takes its name from the most downtrodden piece on the chessboard. The speaker, Jordan, is an amiable dimwit of mixed Trinidadian and South African heritage whose mother explains his background to him like a condescending anthropologist: ‘Trinidad and South Africa are countries with cultures too rich for most people to understand.’ Jordan describes his life in London which consists exclusively of battling oppression. He buys fried chicken from Yusef, a Turkish food-seller, and he learns a greeting in Turkish that Yusef recognises. So Yusef starts to slip him extra portions as a perk. A white teenager hears of

James Delingpole James Delingpole

This Is My House has rekindled my love for the BBC

Here’s a thought that will make you feel old. Or worried. Or both. The poke-fun-at-celebrity-houses series Through the Keyhole — originally presented by Loyd Grossman — was first broadcast as a segment on TV-am in February 1983. That means that we are now as far away in time from Through the Keyhole’s first episode as its debut was from the end of the second world war. It has endured almost till the present (I actually preferred the Keith Lemon version to the stilted and slightly turgid original) because it’s such an addictive format. Most of us fancy ourselves as amateur psychologist sleuths, picking up on those telling details missed by

Thursday

Stuart Jeffries

The artists ensnared by the capitalist system they affect to despise

A few years ago, the American artist Barbara Kruger covered the façade of Frankfurt’s Kaufhof department store with a pair of huge eyes. It was as if Big Brother had come out of retirement. Above that unsparing gaze was the slogan, in Kruger’s signature Futura bold italic font: ‘You want it. You buy it. You forget it.’ It was a typical work of art by Kruger. She made her career from what’s called culture jamming, subverting media messages by transforming them into their own anti-messages and by indicting the business of capitalism. In 1987, for instance, she took an advertising image of an all-American boy flexing his juvenile biceps before

James Walton

A very watchable doc cashing in on Line of Duty: BBC2’s Bent Coppers reviewed

If you’re after an exciting, twisty programme about police corruption that doesn’t also feel a bit like sitting an exam in Line of Duty studies, then Bent Coppers: Crossing the Line of Duty could well hit the spot. As both the timing and subtitle not so much suggest as bellow, this three-part documentary series is an obvious attempt to cash in on its fictional counterpart. Happily, though, it’s a successful one. In Wednesday’s second episode the focus was on 1970s Soho, where the most reliable way to make a fortune was by opening what the narrator Philip Glenister called, in suitably 1970s argot, ‘dirty bookshops’. Of course, there were certain

Joanna Rossiter Joanna Rossiter

The art of storing and unveiling

‘Put beauty first and what you get will be used forever,’ said Roger Scruton in his BBC documentary Why Beauty Matters. The philosopher’s neat elision of beauty and utility is perfectly embodied by Étienne Maurice Falconet’s nymph, who is to be the star of a forthcoming lecture by Waddesdon Manor curator Juliet Carey. This small marble figure would be far less remarkable were it not for the elegance of the 19th-century wooden box in which she is housed. Exquisite, flesh-like pillows of chamois fill the space around the nymph’s form: the box and the sculpture seem at one, as though locked in a dance. The nymph has been stored this way

Deborah Ross

It will do your head in: Black Bear review

Black Bear is one of those indie dramas that is meta on so many levels you can either sit with it afterwards or, if you’re weak like me, you’ll immediately turn to the internet for an explanation and may even find yourself buried deep in one of those Reddit threads that will make you wish you’d had the strength to just do the sitting. This is a compelling film in its way, and it’s well performed, with a surprising reset midway through, and you don’t have to fully understand a film to enjoy it. But if I’m honest? I do feel a little bit cheated when an interpretation or ending

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Why do theatres think audiences want Covid-related drama?

Hats off to the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. They’ve discovered a new form of racism. Some people say we have enough ethnic division already but in south-west London they’re gagging for more apparently. A new play, Prodigal, examines the prejudice endured by a Ugandan chap whose mother moved to London when he was a child and whose younger siblings are British. Family tensions depressed him. ‘You all made me feel ugly,’ he moans. The shifty whinger has returned home after his mother’s death in order to cheat his family out of an insurance pay-off. It’s remarkable to see a drama that reinforces a damaging stereotype but the author, Kalungi

Jessa Crispin

This is the golden age of the grifter – and there’s a podcast for every con

Truly we are living in the golden age of the grifter. From Fyre Fest to the WeWork empire to Theranos to the personal development cult NXIVM, we see a charismatic person promising us endless growth, pleasure or wealth and we give them all our money. The con-man economy doesn’t just stop at the men and women leading these frauds and profiting wildly from them. (Some of them go to jail, yes, but WeWork leader/charlatan Adam Neumann was paid many millions of dollars just to go away.) There is also now a podcast, usually sponsored by a security system, for every con. Barbara Kruger’s shopping bag indicting shopping has become a

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Clever, funny and stomach-knotting: Promising Young Woman reviewed

Promising Young Woman is a rape-revenge-thriller that has already proved divisive but is a wonderfully clever, darkly funny, stomach-knotting — my stomach may never unknot — exploration of what #notallmen seem to get: it isn’t OK to have sex with a woman who has had a few too many and isn’t in a position to give consent. Unless, of course, she is also out late at night and wearing a short skirt in which case: asking for it. We all know that. This is written and directed by the extraordinary polymath that is Emerald Fennell, who was head writer for the second series of Killing Eve, has collaborated with Andrew

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Theatre’s final taboo: fun

How will the theatre look after lockdown? A clue emerges in a statement made by Guy Jones, the literary associate of the Orange Tree in Richmond. ‘The victims of this year are many. Homelessness is on the rise, loneliness is deadly, the monster of racism lurks in every-day interactions… and many of the inequalities we live with are written into the systems in which we are asked to participate.’ ‘The victims’. That’s his starting point. It might seem odd that a theatre should prioritise the injured and the aggrieved, as if the stage were a tribunal or a public court where justice is dispensed. But that’s how theatres see themselves.

John Phipps

It’s almost touching that the NFT world sees itself as radical

Some things are explained so many times that they become unexplainable: we can only relate to them as something complicated that needs to be explained. The global financial crisis was like this. Crypto-currencies were like this too. The newest thing that exists to be explained is the world of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. NFTs are collectible digital objects. They are created with a technology called the blockchain, which unalterably and uniquely records their provenance. This means that if I mint an NFT of an image — a cartoon of Donald Trump, say, sitting naked astride the Capitol — I can prove definitive ownership of the image, no matter how many

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

This comedy duo should be on Netflix: General Secretary reviewed

General Secretary is a new drama with a dull title and an off-putting poster. A pair of angry women in sombre clothing glare into the middle distance. But the satirical premise is intriguing. What if two young females with no experience took over the world? Georgie and Cassie are working from home when they receive a mysterious message from the United Nations. A pushy German blonde appears on their screens and makes an announcement: ‘You vill now be presiding over ze vorld.’ That’s it. And so they take control from their kitchen. The first surprise is that the newly empowered sisters don’t set about exposing the faults of male-dominated governments.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Intelligence-insulting schlock: Sky Atlantic’s Your Honor reviewed

I’m really not enjoying Your Honor, the latest vehicle for Bryan Cranston to play a good man driven to the dark side by extraordinary and compelling circumstances designed to make the viewer go: ‘There but for the grace of God go I…’ The problem with the compelling circumstances in this case is that they feel so desperately contrived. Cranston plays a priggishly upright New Orleans judge who radiates implausible goodness and rectitude. We first glimpse this during the case of a trial of a black woman accused by police of concealing drugs in an intimate part of her anatomy. A white cop, sweating integrity, swears on the witness stand that

Sara Veale

An awesome and hilarious display: Rambert’s Rooms reviewed

Social distancing continues to put the kibosh on large-scale productions, but Jo Stromgren has a nifty workaround in Rooms, which sees Rambert’s 17 dancers tackle 100 characters between them, giving the impression of a huge ensemble piece. The new show — part dance, part theatre — remakes the same few rooms over and over to present 36 ‘choreographic miniatures’, each with its own elaborate set-up. Zipping through this funhouse is a trip from the ordinary to the surreal and back again, with glimpses of dinner parties, crime scenes, radio segments, cannabis farms, raves, protests and more. It’s an imaginative feat of staging that’s all the more impressive for being performed