Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

James Walton

Should we be playing the surveillance state for laughs? Celebrity Hunted reviewed

One of the many great things about The Capture was that we could never be sure whether the British authorities’ capacity for virtually blanket surveillance was a nightmare vision of the future or a nightmare portrait of the present. Celebrity Hunted, though, suggests a third possibility: that virtually blanket surveillance is simply proof of how marvellous the authorities are, and so untroubling that it can be played for laughs. This third series is, once again, part of Channel 4’s annual Stand Up to Cancer season, and features four teams of two, whose job is to go on the run for a fortnight and avoid capture by intelligence experts equipped with

Laura Freeman

Manon can be magnificent, this one was merely meh

Manon: minx or martyr? There are two ways to play Kenneth MacMillan’s courtesan. Is Manon an ingénue, a guileless country girl, pimped by her own brother and corrupted by Monsieur G.M.? Or is she a pleasure hunter, a man-manipulator, a schemer out for all she can get? In the Royal Ballet’s revival of Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon, Sarah Lamb is somewhere in the unsatisfactory middle. Primrose innocence in the first act, half-hearted harlot in the second, shorn urchin in the third. Ryoichi Hirano, as Manon’s brother Lescaut, knows what he’s about. Hirano has a nice line in matadors and caped scoundrels. Every duplicitous turn, every dismissive flick of the wrist, speaks

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Pilferer, paedophile and true great: Gauguin Portraits at the National Gallery reviewed

On 25 November 1895, Camille Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien. He described how he had bumped into his erstwhile protégé, Paul Gauguin, who had explained to him how artists in the future would ‘find salvation by replenishing themselves’ from the works of remote peoples and places. Pissarro was not convinced. Gauguin, he grumbled, was always ‘poaching’ from someone. Once it had been Pissarro and his fellow impressionists, now it was the native peoples of Oceania. Plus ça change… Over the succeeding century and a quarter, Gauguin (1848–1903) has frequently been condemned. The magnificent new exhibition at the National Gallery, Gauguin Portraits, is a treat for the eye, full of

Laura Freeman

You'll be blubbing over a wooden boulder at David Nash's show at Towner Art Gallery

Call me soppy, but when the credits rolled on ‘Wooden Boulder’, a film made by earth artist David Nash over 25 years, I was blinking back tears. Funny what the mind will make human. Within a few minutes I started to think of Nash’s boulder, hewn from a storm-struck oak in the Ffestiniog valley in Wales, as ‘the hero of our story’. A hefty hero, weighing half a tonne, but buoyant. In October 1978, Nash launched the boulder into the Bronturnor stream near his studio at Capel Rhiw in the slate-mining village of Blaenau Ffestiniog in Snowdonia. For 25 years, switching from crackling film to high-def digital, Nash filmed the

Taki

Why Roy Cohn is not one of the world’s most evil men

New York   The Roy Cohn documentary Bully. Coward. Victim: the Story of Roy Cohn was successfully screened at the Lincoln Center last week to a full house. Cohn was once Donald Trump’s lawyer, and after the screening the event turned into an anti-Trump show. Had I known this would happen, I would have stayed away, but what is a poor little Greek boy trying to make it in the movies to do? As a young man, Cohn was an aide to Senator McCarthy. He made his name by ensuring that Joel and Ethel Rosenberg, who spied for the Soviet Union, were sent to the electric chair. And here’s the

Rod Liddle

How the BBC can achieve real diversity

Exciting news from the BBC, where every employee has just received a flyer from the Director-General, Lord Hall, informing them about the creation of a new post — Director of Creative Diversity. Should they all apply? Certainly, when I found out about it, I thought I might throw my hat in the ring. I’d immediately employ some heterosexual weathermen and maybe a white presenter or reporter on the London regional news programmes — and then make Dominic Cummings the head of current affairs, if he has any spare time. That would introduce a little diversity into New Broadcasting House, I think. I might also impel Radio 4 to ration the number of

James Delingpole

Pure, undiluted genius: Succession reviewed

I have never ever watched a TV series I have enjoyed more than Succession (Now TV). There’s stuff I’d put in the same league, maybe — Fauda, Babylon Berlin, Band of Brothers, Utopia, Gomorrah, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and so on — but absolutely nothing beats it. It is, quite simply, a work of pure, undiluted genius. Which wasn’t what I expected when my friend Toby recommended it to me a few weeks ago. ‘It’s about this media dynasty, a bit like the Murdochs. And the kids spend their whole time scheming and competing as to which one is eventually going to take over the company from the bullying patriarch

Deborah Ross

Only fitfully funny: Chris Morris’s The Day Shall Come reviewed

The Day Shall Come is a second feature from British satirist Chris Morris and like the first, Four Lions, it is a ‘comedy of terrors’, you could say. But this time, rather than a group of hapless home-grown Muslim suicide bombers we’ve decamped to America and it’s the FBI that will do anything to get their man even if that man is harmless and insists that God speaks to him through a duck. It is funny, fitfully, but it asks us to laugh at someone I wasn’t sure we should be laughing at, plus it is repetitive and acts like we didn’t get the joke the first time, when we

Geoff Dyer

I was born to be on this Bob Dylan podcast, says Geoff Dyer

Podcasts will soon be like porn. Every interest, desire or idle flicker of curiosity will have been anticipated and catered for. Whatever you’re into there’ll be a podcast devoted to it, waiting to make itself heard. That’s easy for me to say because I’ve already found my perfect match: Is It Rolling, Bob? in which ‘Actors Kerry Shale and Lucas Hare talk to interesting people about Dylan’. Since nothing is more interesting than Dylan it follows that there is nothing more interesting than this podcast. I was alerted to it by my friend the writer Rob Doyle who had heard about it from his dad. (My friends, increasingly, are the

Richard Bratby

More misogynistic than the original: ENO's Orpheus in the Underworld reviewed

It’s Act Three of Emma Rice’s new production of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, and Eurydice (Mary Bevan) is trapped in the backroom of a Soho peep show. But that doesn’t really matter because Jupiter (Willard White), a cigar-toking love walrus in a silk bathrobe, has transformed himself into a fly and is about to ravish her, once he’s worked out the practicalities of doing so while three millimetres long. Eurydice’s more than game. ‘Zzzz, zzz,’ she sings, draping herself lasciviously over the mattress. ‘Zzzz, zzz,’ buzzes Jupiter, wings popping erect. Rice’s puppeteer darts about with a toy fly on a string, dressed in a black catsuit and (the killer

Lloyd Evans

Circus routine rather than theatre: Noises Off reviewed

Michael Frayn’s backstage comedy, Noises Off, is the theatre’s answer to Trooping the Colour. Everyone agrees that it’s an amazing display of synchronised choreography but does anyone actually want to see it? Yes, to judge by the press-night crowd at the Garrick. The joint was packed. The show opens at the dress rehearsal of a bedroom farce where an incompetent actress, Dotty Otley, is listening to advice from an exhausted but infinitely patient director. She worries that she hasn’t got her lines right. A lot of them ‘had a very familiar ring’, the director assures her. The gentle wit of these passages is soon overtaken by physical antics as the

Thursday

Claudia Massie

Sebastiao Salgado – master of monochrome, chronicler of the depths of human barbarity

Occasionally, we encounter an image that seems so ludicrously out of kilter with the modern world that we can only flounder in antiquity for appropriate descriptions. We see a black and white photograph that shows a swarm of tiny figures, ant-like in their relentless pursuit of some mysterious purpose around the edges of a dark, cavernous maw, and we say it’s biblical, epic, ancient. We invoke the building of the pyramids, the Tower of Babel or Dante’s Inferno. Our artistic sensibilities might point us towards the darker paintings of Jan Brueghel the Elder or the apocalyptic waxwork tableaux of Gaetano Zumbo. What we seldom imagine is a 1980s Brazilian gold

Stuart Jeffries

A cast of Antony Gormley? Or a pair of giant conkers? Gormley’s RA show reviewed

While Sir Joshua Reynolds, on his plinth, was looking the other way, a little girl last Saturday morning was trying to prise a littler sculpture from the pavement of the Royal Academy’s courtyard. For all its tininess — from a distance the sculpture’s curvy lumps, 12 x 28 x 17cm, resemble horse droppings a security guard might dig into their rose bed — she couldn’t shift it. ‘Iron Baby’ (1999) is a solid iron cast made by Sir Antony Gormley of his six-day- old daughter abased before the Enlightenment temple of art, buttocks facing Piccadilly in eloquent critique. But for the Instagramming hordes, you might step over her heedlessly on

Lloyd Evans

Flimsy and pretentious sketches: Caryl Churchill’s Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp. reviewed

Caryl Churchill is back at the Royal Court with a weird collection of sketches. The first is set on a mantelpiece where a clock, a vase, a statuette and a plastic dog discuss their lives. These ornaments morph into human teenagers. One is a lad who wants to die after being raped by his father. His girlfriend tries to comfort him but she’s harassed by two nasty bullies. These four youngsters have perhaps created alter egos as household ornaments in order to block out their nightmarish lives. Somewhat opaque. In sketch two, a young chap seated on a cloud summarises the storyline of Aeschylus’s Oresteia in a glib and knowing

Norman Lebrecht

Do Jews think differently?

Sixteen years into a stop-go production saga, I got a call from the director of The Song of Names with a suggested script change. What, said François Girard, if one of the two protagonists was perhaps, er, not Jewish? My reply cannot be repeated. I was, for a minute or so, completely speechless. My novel, winner of a 2002 Whitbread Award, is the story of two boys bonding in wartime London. One is a refugee violinist from Poland, the other a middle-class kid of average abilities. ‘I am genius,’ says Dovidl to Martin. ‘You are — a bit everything.’ Beyond bomb sites, their friendship is rooted in a common heritage.

Deborah Ross

If you ever want to sleep again, step away from Joker

Judy is in cinemas this week and so is Joker and if you have to choose between the two, then it’s Judy every time. I would even add: step away from Joker. Step away, and step away now, if you know what’s good for you. It may be a masterpiece or it may be irresponsible trash — there is some controversy here — but either way it is so bleak and so dark and so upsetting the words ‘bleak’ and ‘dark’ and ‘upsetting’ don’t really cover it, and you may never be able to sleep again. Strange as it may be, the film about the wounded Hollywood chanteuse driven to

James Walton

A solid costume drama but Dame Helen has been miscast: Catherine the Great reviewed

It’s possibly not a great sign of a Britain at ease with itself that the historical character most likely to show up in a TV drama now seems to be Oswald Mosley. But the week after his starring role in Peaky Blinders ended, there he was again, right at the beginning of BBC1’s next Sunday-night drama. World on Fire opened with Mosley addressing a 1939 Manchester rally, where he duly whipped up his supporters and reminded the rest of us of the dangers of extremism. Luckily, there were two people in the hall brave enough to protest: salt-of-the-earth northern lass Lois Bennett and her much posher and therefore much stiffer

Daisy Dunn

Did Radio 2 really need to give us four days of the Beatles to celebrate Abbey Road?

This Changeling Self, Radio 4’s lead drama this week, clearly ought to have gone out in August. It’s set — and was recorded — at the Edinburgh Festival and would have been a gift to marketing. ‘I love the festival!’ coos She. ‘All these millions of conversations, listen, listen, oh and stories, lots of stories, the different ways of telling…!’ No one in the real world speaks like this. But it’s just about OK, because she isn’t quite real either. She is a Fairy Queen, come to Edinburgh to spirit away a young pianist named Tam, as in Tamlin, who is a bit wet but really rather nice. The story