Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

John Phipps

A beautiful radio adaptation: Radio 4’s The Housing Lark reviewed

Nineteen fifty-six: the Suez crisis, the first Tesco, Jim Laker takes 19 wickets in a match. But also: Trinidadian pianist Winifred Atwell becomes the first black woman to have a UK number one with ‘The Poor People of Paris’; Kenneth Tynan announces a playwriting competition in the Observer, which is won by the Trinidadian dramatist Errol John, and a third Trinidadian, Sam Selvon, publishes his most enduring novel, The Lonely Londoners. He was photographed the same year by Ida Kerr, looking up out of shot past a crooked nose, a frown half creasing his forehead as a smile plays around the corners of his mouth. Selvon’s novels are fatalistic comedies,

Louise Levene

The Royal Ballet’s return was joyous – but the presenter was gushing and witless

Mothballed since March when it danced a farewell Swan Lake, the Royal Ballet made a triumphant and joyous return to Covent Garden last Friday, performing a string of ancient and modern works before an invited audience of 400. Meanwhile, around the country (and the world) ballet-starved viewers paid £16 to watch a Vimeo livestream. Jonathan Lo and the 83-strong orchestra, enjoying added elbow room in the stalls, set the tone for an emotional evening with the Sleeping Beauty overture — the ballet that famously reopened the Opera House after the second world war. It was a natural and poignant choice, but director Kevin O’Hare hadn’t succumbed to ancestor worship. Balanchine,

Deborah Ross

Like a weird episode of Downton – with less sexual chemistry: Rebecca reviewed

Rebecca is a new adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s gothic, twisted, never-out-of-print tale of sexual jealousy. It’s directed by Ben Wheatley, with a script by Jane Goldman, and stars Lily James, Armie Hammer and Kristin Scott Thomas. High hopes? Me too. But though it’s perfectly watchable, it’s not at all daring. Would the second Mrs de Winter be more fully formed and less of a pallid, round-shouldered meek little thing? Would sinister Mrs Danvers have more substance? Would it be a modern interpretation for modern times? No, is the short answer. And also it just isn’t sexy enough. Meanwhile, I forgot to start this with: ‘Last night I dreamt I

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Why the Royal Academy is wrong to consider selling their precious Michelangelo

How much does a Michelangelo cost? It is, as they say, a good question, meaning: nobody really knows. The reason for this odd state of affairs is that almost none of them have ever been bought and sold on the open market, which is how the prices of most things are established. It’s hard to think of many examples of his sculptures being traded in that way over the past 500 years. Strangely, the main exception is the ‘Taddei Tondo’, otherwise known as ‘Virgin and Child with the Infant St John’, which, reportedly, some members of the Royal Academy are suggesting the RA should sell. If that were to happen,

Jonathan Maitland

Why great speeches are made for stage and screen

Curious thing, writer’s block. If you believe it exists. Terry Pratchett didn’t. ‘There’s no such thing,’ he said. ‘It was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.’ He had a point. Writers write, period. But there is a syndrome in my house known as Not Starting Anything New Through Fear Of It Being Not Very Good. Less catchy than ‘writer’s block’, but arguably a more accurate description of the condition. My Covid-induced version of the above involved endlessly ‘honing’ an already completed play about my mother to devastatingly little effect and musing on the oldest creative question of all: is there a formula for writing success, and if so

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A night of angry pipsqueaks: Young Vic’s 50th birthday gala reviewed

When Kwame Kwei-Armah took over the Young Vic a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign was strapped to the front of the building. One of BLM’s aims is the overthrow of capitalism and it’s widely assumed in theatreland that Kwame, who is great fun to meet, has embraced this goal by adjusting the Young Vic’s pay structures so that he earns no more than the bar staff and the cleaners. Happily the pay cut seems not to have affected his mood, and last weekend he was fizzing with anticipation as he hosted the Young Vic’s 50th birthday gala. ‘We’re in the house. Make some noise,’ he cried. ‘Shake off the cobwebs!’ He introduced a

Deborah Ross

Gripping high gothic psychological horror: Saint Maud reviewed

Saint Maud is a first feature from writer-director Rose Glass and it’s being billed as a horror film. But it’s not your common-or-garden horror film. There are no chases through woods. No one watches a doorknob being twisted from inside the room. Also, there are no maypoles. (Always bad news, maypoles.) Instead, it’s more of a character study, as well as a study of religious fervour, told in the high gothic style, grippingly, with wonderful originality and no dilly-dallying. Eighty minutes, and that’s it. (Sorkin, Nolan, Scorsese, Tarantino… please take note.) The film stars the terrific Morfydd Clark who, I think, you cast when you can’t get Molly Windsor who,

Daisy Dunn

Alan Partridge should replace Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour

In the week Jenni Murray left Woman’s Hour, I was listening to Alan Partridge on his new podcast, From the Oasthouse, and imagining what he might have been like as her successor. As I chuckled through half a dozen episodes of awkward Norfolk frippery, it occurred to me that, short of taking him on, the BBC could do wonders for its reputation in the wake of Murray’s departure by taking a leaf out of the Partridge playbook. Partridge, played by Steve Coogan since 1991, has moved with the times. Although he hasn’t changed, his horizons have, and he is doing his best to retain his cringe-inducing record. Ousted from his

James Walton

Funny, tender and properly horrible: Channel 4’s Adult Material reviewed

A woman is eating a pie in her car as it gets an automatic wash. Careful to keep the pie out of shot, she then films herself on her phone pretending to have an orgasm, posts the clip online and drives to work. Once there, she’s constantly distracted by thoughts of domestic chores (‘Whites tonight, colours in the morning, hang them out before the school run’) — which mightn’t be so unusual, except that her work consists of having sex. But if the early scenes in Channel 4’s new porn-industry drama Adult Material suggested a cheeky, essentially light-hearted twist on female life-juggling, this soon proved deceptive. What followed was an

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Spectacular and mind-expanding: Tantra at the British Museum reviewed

A great temple of the goddess Tara can be found at Tarapith in West Bengal. But her true abode, in the view of many devotees, is not this sacred structure itself but the adjacent, eerily smoking cremation ground. There she can be glimpsed in the shadows at midnight, it is believed, drinking the blood of the goats sacrificed to her during the day. Many holy men and women live in that grisly spot too, adorned with dreadlocks, smeared with ash, and dwelling in huts decorated with lines of skulls painted crimson. As a domestic setting this wouldn’t suit everybody. But the varieties of religious experience (to borrow the title of

Colin Grant

The most important book on black Britishness has one flaw: its author was white

How many black friends do you have? Do you have any? It’s likely that black people have more white friends than the reverse. In part that’s surely down to demographics and the size of the population. No matter your colour, you’re ten times more likely to bump into a white person than a black person, more or less, depending on where you find yourself, of course. The situation is not so pronounced as in the United States where residential segregation has reinforced social apartheid. In the UK black and white people may live cheek-by-jowl, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate knowledge or even empathy. Out of just over 100 households on

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Enjoyable but hardly classic Alan Bennett: The Outside Dog & The Hand of God reviewed

The season of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads continues at the Bridge. In The Hand of God we meet Celia, a posh antiques dealer, who befriends old maids in the hope of acquiring their valuables cheaply. Like everyone in her trade she uses play-acting and mind games to give her the advantage while haggling. If her enemy falters, she pounces. A man visits her shop and becomes visibly excited by a framed drawing which Celia hoped to flog for £30. Spotting his eagerness, she trebles the price. He pays up and hurries out. Later she learns that the drawing was by an old master whose style she failed to recognise. Millions

Deborah Ross

One zinger after another – but it’ll leave you cold: Trial of the Chicago 7 reviewed

Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 — don’t worry, you haven’t missed six earlier films — is a courtroom drama based on true events featuring a stellar cast: Mark Rylance, Frank Langella, Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Jeremy Strong. You may be wondering: hang on, no Michael Keaton? But he tips up too! What, no Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Don’t worry. He’s here. But while the performances are ace and the script is one of those Sorkin scripts where the dialogue is one zinger after another — zinger ping pong, I call it — it will leave you cold emotionally. This is a film to admire, in some respects, but

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Sick, puerile, inappropriate and delicious: Amazon Prime’s The Boys reviewed

There’s a delicious scene in the new season of Amazon’s superheroes-gone-bad series The Boys. The chief superhero Homelander (Antony Starr) is introduced by a minion to a potential new member of his elite superhero group, the Seven. Homelander watches this bright new talent performing wonders in a gym-style training zone: the young man is agile, eager, skilled with weaponry; but perhaps his most valuable features, the minion suggests, are that he is disabled and belongs to an ethnic minority. This could play really well with the youth demographic, who are into that kind of woke stuff, the aide suggests. The potential recruit approaches Homelander, sweet, modest and starstruck. Even though

Sophie Haigney

The rise of blocked-off design

Plexiglass bubbles hover over diners’ heads in restaurants. Plastic pods, spaced six feet apart, separate weightlifters in gyms. Partitions of all kinds are creeping up in workplaces. As offices, restaurants, bars and businesses reopened after months of lockdowns and closures, a new phenomenon emerged, one that I’ve come to think of as ‘blocked-off design’. It’s design and layout that aims to construct and enforce distancing in a somewhat makeshift way. It’s characterised by partitions, sheer walls, six-foot markers. As a visual language, it’s defined by barriers and blockage — physical reminders that spaces where we once went to mingle with others are now fraught, and that even in public, isolation

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

The mediums who pioneered abstract art

In the 1850s Britain was hit by an epidemic likened by The Illustrated London News to a ‘grippe or the cholera morbus’. It came from America rather than China and afflicted the mind rather than the body. The craze for table-turning was sparked in Hydesville, New York, in 1848 after two young sisters, Maggie and Kate Fox, claimed to hear mysterious rappings in the floor of the family home and attributed them to a spirit called Mr Splitfoot. Epidemics are by nature democratic, respecting neither education nor class. Eminent naturalists, scientists, novelists and social reformers were gripped by the grippe. When unseen forces such as electromagnetic waves were being discovered,

Liam Cagney

As immersive art goes, nothing can compete with Berghain

In Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, the protagonist, at the Venice Biennale, muses on installations. ‘Ideally, the perfect art installation would be a nightclub, full of people, pumping music, lights, smoke machine and maybe drugs thrown in. You could call it Nightclub, and if you kept it going 24 hours a day it would be the big hit of the Biennale.’ How right he was. For what else is Berghain — the world’s most famous techno club — if not a wild work of immersive art? Berghain is housed in the ruin of a Soviet thermal power station in Berlin. Conceived on a grand scale, it’s a fathomless black box

James Walton

How on earth did Harold Pinter and Danny Dyer become such good friends?

Collectors of TV titles that sound as if they were thought of by Alan Partridge will presumably have spotted Danny Dyer on Harold Pinter. As Dyer himself understatedly put it: ‘This might seem an unlikely pairing: the likely lad and the Nobel Prize winner.’ Yet, what made the programme such an intriguing if undeniably peculiar watch is that the pairing in question wasn’t dreamed up by a desperate (or drunk) commissioning editor. In 2000, aged 22, Dyer auditioned for Pinter’s Celebration at the Almeida Theatre in Islington. ‘I knew the money would be rubbish,’ he told us, ‘so I didn’t care much.’ Nor, unlike his rivals, did he really know who

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Would be much better without Bill or Ted: Bill & Ted Face the Music reviewed

I think I am supposed to say that Bill & Ted Face the Music, the third in a franchise about two Californian morons who time travel to save the world, is a harmless satire on American teenage good-naturedness and stupidity. I’m not sure about that: I think it is more likely evidence of what American cinema has done to the American mind since Jaws turned the B-list film into the A-list film, and vice-versa. Its heinous. The premise is: creatures of the future decided long ago (in 1989) that Bill and Ted would one day write a song that would heal reality. So Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure saw them

Robert Gore-Langton

Does Rada seriously believe George Bernard Shaw was an Irish Mengele?

What has happened to Rada? The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art is the latest arts establishment to have gone mad. In the summer, it issued a self-flagellating public statement that it was institutionally racist and would ‘decolonise the curriculum and end racism’. The ‘actor-vists’ are clearly unhappy with the place. They should all be busy learning how to be heard at the back of the stalls. But these days, the enunciation course has a ‘d’ in front of it. The student body — or a noisy part of it — is now calling for a purge of the school’s illustrious benefactor, George Bernard Shaw, after whom one of the school’s