Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

A remarkable story: The Salt Path reviewed

Cinema

The Salt Path is an adaptation of the best-selling book by Raynor Winn. It tells the true story of how she and her husband, Moth, lost their home and lost all their money. At one point they go to a bank to withdraw all their funds: £1.38. And if that wasn’t bad enough he’s then

Rod Liddle

A lovely album: Saint Leonard’s The Golden Hour reviewed

The Listener

Grade: A+ The kids with their synths and hip producers, dragging the 1980s back: I wish they would stop. It was, in the main, an awful decade for music, the bands trite yet portentous, the stupid burbling bass guitars, hubris-stricken vocals and tinny drums. The kids retread all the dross. Yet if you were actually

RIP to new music’s gentle, smiley radical

Danish composer Per Norgard – whose death at the age of 92 was announced this morning – was a towering presence in European new music, and the shine-bright timbres and heady narrative drive of his eight symphonies posed crucial questions about what it meant to be a symphonist during the late 20th century. In 2000

The forgotten story of British opera

Arts feature

British opera was born with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and then vanished for two-and-a-half centuries, apparently. Between the first performance of Dido in 1689 and the première of Britten’s Peter Grimes in 1945, serious British operas effectively didn’t exist – or so we’re told in textbooks and biographies. But what if there was a different

Cinema has reached a nadir in the new Mission: Impossible

Cinema

You have to time your arrival at cinemas carefully if you want to avoid the high-volume, rapid-fire edits of trailers for upcoming mind-rot. That’s conceptually impossible with Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The first half an hour is a debrief in the form of an extended trailer of highlights from previous missions. At one

Wes Anderson’s latest is as hollow as anything AI could come up with

Cinema

AI is coming for everyone’s jobs, but especially mine. There is absolutely no good reason for The Spectator to keep sending me to watch films with my wobbly biological eyes, not when they could just feed the latest releases into a computer, set the parameters to ‘contemptuous’, and watch a perfectly serviceable review assemble itself,

Lloyd Evans

Magnificent: The Deep Blue Sea, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, reviewed

Theatre

Richard Bean appears to be Hampstead Theatre’s in-house dramatist, and his new effort, House of Games, is based on a 1987 movie directed by David Mamet. The script sets up a rather laborious collision between two vastly different cultures. A gang of small-time crooks in Chicago are visited by a beautiful, high-flying, Harvard-educated academic who

We’ve underestimated Francis Rossi

Pop

I have a friend who insists that had Status Quo hailed from Düsseldorf rather than Catford, they would nowadays be as critically revered as Can, Faust, Neu! and those other hallowed Teutonic pioneers of unyielding rhythm from the 1970s. Maybe so. Very probably not. Canned Heat and ZZ Top seem more reachable comparisons. But it’s

Architecture has hit a nadir at the Venice Biennale

Exhibitions

Much of Venice’s Giardini this year was as boarded up as a British high street. The Israeli pavilion was empty, apparently awaiting refurbishment. (At the 2024 art biennale, the curators had closed it in the face of pro-Palestinian protests, prompting the latter to demand it should be opened, presumably so they could protest its closure.)

A spate of re-releases suggests that Wolfgang Sawallisch was no B-lister

The Listener

Grade: A It’s clearance-sale time for the great classical labels of the 20th century. As streaming platforms drain the remaining value out of once-prestigious recorded catalogues, even B-listers are being pulled up from the vaults and remastered for one last re-release. Eleven-disc Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos edition? Walter Weller’s complete Decca recordings? Now’s your chance:

The odd couple: Austen and Turner at 250

Arts feature

History is full of odd couples: famous but unrelated people who happen to have been born in the same year. 1809: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. 1926: Queen Elizabeth II and Marilyn Monroe. Yet few historical pairings are as unlikely as the novelist Jane Austen and the painter J.M.W. Turner, born within a few months

Our half-time scorecard on the Royal Opera’s Ring cycle

Opera

With Die Walküre, the central themes of Barrie Kosky’s Ring cycle for the Royal Opera are starting to emerge, and one of them seems to be wood. Not trees, so much; at least not as a symbol of life. After the rapid assembly of a world from theatrical nothingness (a bare stage), Hunding’s forest hall

I think I’ve found the new Van Morrison

Pop

Young male singers won the right to be sensitive in 1963, when The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released. And in the 63 years since, being young and vulnerable and questing has been one of the great default settings. I’d say you can’t go far wrong singing sadly about your feelings, but of course you can,

Art deco gave veneer and frivolity a bad name

Arts feature

The jazz style was the blowsy filling between the noxious crusts of two world wars. More than 30 years passed between its flourishing and its remonikered second coming as art deco, no longer gaudy ephemera, now a legitimate addition to the inventory of fashions. The coinage was initially ascribed to the antique dealer John Jesse.

The powerfully disorienting world of Mark Eitzel 

Pop

There’s a lot to be said for an artist making an audience feel uncomfortable. Richard Thompson used to say that he considered it sound practice to keep punters ill at ease and on their toes. Mark Eitzel would probably agree, although it’s never been entirely clear whether the nervous exhaustion he induces among his fans

Poise and gentleness: Hiroshige, at the British Museum, reviewed

Exhibitions

Why is Hiroshige’s work so delightful? While his close predecessor Hokusai has more drama in his draughtsmanship, Hiroshige’s pastoral visions conjure a sense of timeless continuity that appealed to his contemporaries as much as to present-day teens who love the merch. His is a world in which everything has happened before, and will happen again.