Culture

Culture

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

Why shamanism shouldn’t be dismissed as superstitious savagery

Lead book review

In 2014, in the course of his inquiry into shamanism, the anthropologist Manvir Singh spent time with the Mentawai people on the Indonesian island of Siberut. He estimated that among the 265 residents he managed to interview, 24 were male shamans, or sikerei. These ‘specialists’, as he puts it, were uniquely empowered to commune with

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.

What did Leni Riefenstahl know?

Cinema

Leni Riefenstahl: what are we to make of her? What did she know? Often described as ‘Hitler’s favourite filmmaker’, she always claimed that she knew nothing of any atrocities. She was a naive artist, not a collaborator in a murderous regime. This documentary wants to get to the truth. But even if you’ve already made

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

Inspired: Scottish Opera’s Merry Widow reviewed

Opera

The Merry Widow was born in Vienna but she made her fortune in the West End and on Broadway. The original 1905 Viennese production was a shoestring affair. It was the English-language revivals in London and New York that made the Widow a global smash, and that happened only after extensive rewriting, done with Lehar’s

How tech ruined theatre

Theatre

Poor John Dennis. In 1709, the playwright devised a novel technology to simulate thunder to accompany his drama Appius and Virginia. The play flopped and was promptly booted out of the theatre. To add salt to the wound, Dennis’s thunder-generating technique was stolen and inserted into a staging of Macbeth. He accused the producers of

It’s trust in English kindness that keeps the migrants coming

More from Books

Halfway through The Shawshank Redemption, Andy and Red, sitting in their filthy prison yard, discuss hope. Red thinks it’s a dangerous thing, which can lead to despair if not fulfilled. But Andy insists on hoping for freedom, and his hope is finally rewarded. The astonishing thing about the migrants and refugees Horatio Clare meets in

The grooming of teenaged Linn Ullmann

More from Books

Girl, 1983, a fusion of novel and memoir, tantalises with what we already know of its author. Linn Ullmann is the daughter of the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann and the much older Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. Their relationship was probed in her previous work, Unquiet. Here the parents are more distant figures, as the

It’s a wonder that the Parthenon remains standing at all

More from Books

We all have our own vision of the Parthenon. Lord Elgin, for one, seems to have treated it like Harrods. Hoping to decorate his Scottish stately home with the Marbles, he wrote long instructions to his agent: ‘The first on the list are the metopes, the bas-reliefs and the remains of the statues… Would it

News from a small island: Theft, by Abdulrazak Gurnah, reviewed

More from Books

In 2021, the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature made Abdulrazak Gurnah the world’s second-best-known Zanzibari – after a certain Farrokh Bulsara, aka Freddie Mercury. Forgive the flippant comparison, but the pop world’s perplexity over Queen’s vocalist’s origins feels germane to the quest for a coherent self and story undertaken by the Nobel laureate’s

Who’s the muse? In a Deep Blue Hour, by Peter Stamm, reviewed

More from Books

The Swiss writer Peter Stamm’s fiction is often enigmatic – unreliable narrators, contradictory behaviour and characters who can’t admit to their emotions. In his latest novel, fortysomething Andrea is in Paris with her cameraman boyfriend Tom, attempting to make a documentary about a celebrated author 20 years older than herself. The subject, Richard Wechsler, appears

When ordinary men did extraordinary things – D-Day revisited

More from Books

The ferry from Portsmouth to Caen is the most atmospheric way to visit the D-Day battlefields, if not always the most comfortable. As the Normandy coast emerges from the haze, the sand and shingle of Sword beach stretch away to starboard. This was the easternmost of five landing areas assaulted on 6 June 1944 with

Cooking up a storm of memories – Bee Wilson’s kitchenalia

More from Books

When Bee Wilson’s husband abruptly called time on their 23-year marriage, she was left with a house full of memories embedded in the everyday objects around her. Two months after his departure, the heart-shaped tin of the title – in which she’d baked their wedding cake – clattered to the floor for no apparent reason.

Rafael Nadal: king of the orange brick court

More from Books

Even the greatest have setbacks. It is how they respond that makes them great. Take your chances, forget the lapses. The triumvirate who ruled men’s tennis this century – Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer – each won just 54 per cent of the points they played. It was about turning it on when

Why is the National Portrait Gallery’s collection so poor?

Arts feature

The recent announcement that the National Portrait Gallery has purchased two works by Sonia Boyce and Hew Locke for its collection came as something of a shock. The surprise? The art was actually good. Boyce’s quarterised collage ‘From Someone Else’s Fear Fantasy (A Case Of Mistaken Identity? Well This Is No Bed Of Roses) To

Prepare to feel nauseous at this School Dinners exhibition

Exhibitions

If your stomach turns when you walk past a Japanese restaurant with moulded plastic replicas of sushi on display, prepare to feel even more nauseous in the School Dinners exhibition at the Food Museum in Stowmarket, Suffolk. Here, moulded in that same plastic, in (if anything) even more garish colours, you’ll see a sample two-course

Imagine Dua Lipa releasing an album of Victorian parlour ballads

More from Arts

Grade: B+ This is unexpected. A bright young cellist – one of the brightest, in fact – makes his recorded debut with a collection of opera fantasies. In the 19th century, touring virtuosos routinely ransacked hit operas for melodies, then decked them out with every conceivable bit of flummery, dazzlement and top-end-tinsel, the better to