Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Tuesday

Timmy Fisher

Banksy’s stunt wasn’t even original – and why we should support ads on Sydney Opera House

It was announced last week that the woman who bought Banksy’s ‘Girl With Balloon’ will be going through with the purchase. And who could blame her? The prospect of owning a piece of ‘art history’, as she called it, is an enticing one to any investor, regardless of its condition. The video documenting Banksy’s triumph has clocked over 12 million views since it was uploaded to his Instagram account, and one could certainly argue it highlights the disconnect between the intrinsic value of art and that ascribed to it by ever-changing tastes. But it would be wrong to give artistic credit for what is essentially a publicity stunt. Not least

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Houses of ill repute

Architects and politicians have a lot in common. Each seeks to influence the way we live, and on account of that both, generally, are reviled. But architecture is more important than politics. Unless you are an anchorite or a polar bear, it’s unavoidable. And it lasts longer. The best architecture affects our mood. Exaltation, if you are lucky. And the worst influences our behaviour: a riot with burning Renaults, if you live in a French banlieue. But, as a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection suggests, architecture may also, in one way or another, affect our health. At ground level, this is quite obvious. Damp, foul air, extreme temperatures, bad

Martin Gayford

Lost in the Pacific

At six in the morning of 20 July 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson first set eyes on a Pacific Island. As the sun rose, the land ‘heaved up in peaks and rising vales’. The colours of the scene ‘ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive’, rising into ‘opalescent clouds’. The whole effect was a ‘suffusion of vague hues’ shimmering so that mountain slopes were hard to distinguish from the cloud canopy above. Oceania, the new exhibition at the Royal Academy devoted to the region’s arts and cultures, is almost as beautiful as that dawn landscape, and just about as difficult to make out with any

Richard Bratby

Ring leader

‘On Brünnhilde’s rock I drew the breath that called your name; so swift was my journey here.’ It’s Act Two of Götterdämmerung. Siegfried, entoiled in evil beyond his comprehension, has unwittingly committed the betrayal that will tip the whole vast drama into its final collapse, and at this point Covent Garden’s Ring cycle really does feel like it’s swept by in a breath. True, Keith Warner’s 2007 production is looking creaky. But there’s still no mightier assertion of an opera company’s ambition than to stage all four music-dramas of Der Ring des Nibelungen in the space of a week; and no artistic experience remotely comparable to witnessing it. So, about

Laura Freeman

MacMillan’s #MeToo minefield

Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling is a #MeToo minefield. Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary is a serial seducer, a man of many mistresses, a grabber of princesses. Were he alive and kissing today, he’d check himself into an Arizona rehab clinic. In 1889, it was laudanum and a loaded pistol. Rudolf ought to be tormented, driven by ennui and the oppression of the imperial court to darker and darker thrills. Ryoichi Hirano, who opens the Royal Ballet’s 2018/19 season as the Crown Prince, is not dark enough. It is his debut as Rudolf and his performance is studied and contained. Hirano is handsome, tall, Apollonian. He was electrifying in MacMillan’s Elite Syncopations

James Delingpole

Get woke, go broke

You won’t be aware of this because the BBC has been keeping it very quiet. But the new Doctor Who is — wait for it — a woman! Let me say straight away that Jodie Whittaker is a delight. Opening as the new Doctor is never easy — all that tiresome establishing rigmarole you have to go through along the lines of ‘I’m feeling all funny. Almost like I’m a completely different actor but in the same body. What can it be? Who am I? Has anyone watching at home worked it out yet?’ But already we like her. Yes, at the moment she’s still a bit of a mishmash

Lloyd Evans

Second thoughts | 11 October 2018

Pinter Two, the second leg of the Pinter season, offers us a pair of one-act comedies. The Lover is a surreal pastiche of married life. A suburban housewife has a paramour who visits her daily while her husband is at work. The husband knows of his rival and discusses his wife’s infidelity as if it were a normal aspect of marriage. He toddles off to the office and a little later the lover arrives: it’s the husband. They begin a game of role play. The wife is a whore and the husband is her trick. This neat device dramatises the theory that marriage is prostitution in disguise. Director Jamie Lloyd

Deborah Ross

Hollow man

Damien Chazelle’s First Man is a biographical drama that follows Neil Armstrong in the decade leading up to the Apollo 11 mission to land a man on the moon (1969), but while it’s strong on mission, and technically dazzling, it’s weak on biography. Who was Armstrong the person? What made him hell-bent on such peril? Did he fear never returning? As portrayed here, he’s essentially yet another strong, detached, emotionally unavailable man of few words, so this is a set-piece action film at heart. A Mission Possible, if you like. Unlike Chazelle’s previous two hits (Whiplash, La La Land), the director himself did not write the screenplay. Instead, it’s been

Kate Chisholm

On the double

How very odd of Radio 4 not only to release The Ratline as a podcast before broadcasting it on the schedule in the conventional manner, but also to give its network listeners an edited-down version. It’s as if the podcast of Philippe Sands’s programme, which investigates war crimes by the Nazis, fuelled by his own family history and what he discovered while writing his book East West Street, has been given priority, and anyone who listens in the old-fashioned, switch-of-a-button way is somehow second-best and doesn’t deserve the full monty. The first episode of the ten-part series was six minutes longer online than on-air. What’s in those missing minutes, I

Rod Liddle

Don’t judge a play by its audience

There is a new book out about the sun — the bright thing in the sky, not the newspaper. It sounds very interesting. ‘Science Museum The Sun — One Thousand Years of Scientific Imagery’. You can get it from that place ‘Science Museum’, which I seemed to remember was once called the National Science Museum but which has now ridded itself of that hateful word ‘national’ as well as its unfashionable definite article. In the introduction to the book, the authors Harry Cliff and Katy Barrett write: ‘The images and texts featured here are almost always the product of collaborative work. While the name on the image is so often

Thursday

Laura Freeman

The stirrer and the monk

Sometimes Andrea Mantegna was just showing off. For the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, he painted a false ceiling above the Camera degli Sposi. Around a great trompe l’oeil oculus, apparently open to the sky, assorted gawpers and cherubs lean nosily over the parapet: ‘What’s going on down there, then?’ Only the Duke and Duchess of Gonzaga entertaining their friends from Ferrara. A terracotta pot is half off the edge, supported only by a thin rod. One nudge from a misbehaving putto and — whoops! — just missed the Duchess. Some of the putti stick their heads through the trellis. Another stands on a ledge, flashing us his bare, plump, crinkly

Emma Byrne

Ballet’s Antichrist

William Forsythe has been called a lot of things in his four decades as a dancemaker: wilful provocateur, ‘pretentious as hell’, even ballet’s Antichrist. But nothing, he claims, to warrant US government officials showing up, unannounced, at his door and threatening him with arrest. Had he been reported by an angry dance purist, perhaps? After all, this is the choreographer who has done more than any other to push the limits of what ballet can be, the great forward-thinker hailed for his athletic, sometimes bewildering, deconstructions of an art form that goes back centuries. It’s gained him an army of devoted (read obsessive) fans, but also some vocal detractors. One

Kate Chisholm

A world apart | 4 October 2018

The most inspiring voice on radio this week belongs to Hetty Werkendam, or rather to her 15-year-old self as she talked to the BBC correspondent Patrick Gordon Walker in April 1945. He was with the British soldiers who entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and witnessed the horrors of that scene: dead bodies in piles with no one to bury them, living people lying beneath them too weak to move, or using them as pillows. Hetty was one of several children interviewed by Gordon Walker, her voice so strong and resolute and light in spirit, in spite of all that she had seen and experienced. Talking now, aged 88, to Mike

Deborah Ross

Gaga over Gaga

This version of A Star Is Born, starring Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, is the fourth iteration (Janet Gaynor and Frederic March, 1937; Judy Garland and James Mason, 1954; Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, 1976). So it’s a remake of a remake of a remake and overly familiar, you would think. Oh God, not another fella who can’t take it when her career eclipses his, boo hoo. Would a reboot with the genders flipped but the age gap preserved ever get made? Not a hope, is the short answer. But, but, but… I did cry, and Lady Gaga is truly sensational, fabulous, a revelation. I had no idea. Cooper directs,

Alexandra Coghlan

The naked and the dead

Yes, Oscar Wilde never wrote it. No, Strauss didn’t intend it. In fact, the composer famously demanded the Dance of the Seven Veils be ‘thoroughly decent, as if it were being done on a prayer mat’. But that doesn’t stop this striptease and musical money shot being the look-but-don’t-touchstone of any Salome. A blonde, blank-faced Barbie doll in gym knickers, vest and shiny trainers stands in a spotlight, a baseball bat in her hands. Strauss’s oboe begins its suggestive arabesques but Salome remains quite still, her eyes fixed impassive, unblinking on the audience. Eventually her hips begin to twitch, her back arches and she goes sullenly through the motions of

James Walton

Mother’s ruin

It’s a radical thought I know, but I sometimes wonder what it would be like if a new TV thriller began by carefully introducing the characters and basic situation, before proceeding chronologically from there. In the meantime, though, there’s BBC1’s The Cry, which didn’t just start with the traditional blizzard of time-shifts, but continued like that for the next hour. In one of the more prolonged of Sunday’s many opening scenes — it lasted at least 60 seconds — main character Joanna (Jenna Coleman) explained to an unseen listener that ‘that’s when this began, with two faces’. When the scene was replayed 55 minutes later, we discovered that she was

Lloyd Evans

God and monsters

The drop-curtain resembles a granite slab on which the genius’s name has been carved for all time. The festival of Pinter at the Harold Pinter Theatre feels like the inauguration of a godhead. And it’s not easy to separate the work from the reverence that surrounds it. Pinter One consists of sketches and playlets written in the period after 1980 when the author abandoned his anarchic underclass comedies and set about analysing power and its abuses. But his originality deserted him and he began to write like a student troll with a sadistic streak. In Press Conference a newly appointed minister discusses murdering dissidents’ children by snapping their necks. In

Saturday

Stephen Markeson

The story behind my famous picture of Margaret Thatcher

I was surprised and delighted to find Morten Morland’s wonderful imitation of a photograph of Margaret Thatcher peering through the curtains of Number Ten on The Spectator’s cover. It reminded me of one of my memorable experiences as a photographer with the ‘Iron Lady’. I was a staff photographer at the Times for about 15 years covering some very memorable events worldwide. In November 1990, I was called into Simon Jenkins’ office, the editor at that time, who wanted to see me for a ‘very important’ assignment. The Times had been given the exclusive news that Margaret Thatcher had been ousted as Prime Minister and would be leaving No.10. Simon told me he

Thursday

Michael Hann

Not easily Suede

‘I always think they’re not lusting after me,’ Brett Anderson says of the middle-aged fans who still turn up to see his band Suede and leave the shows a little flushed and excited. ‘They’re lusting after something that doesn’t really exist. They’re remembering their wild youth. It’s faintly comical to me when I think about myself in the 1990s and the sexuality of it. That got a bit out of control, I suppose. And it’s odd, because I’m quite a reserved person in lots of ways, so I don’t really know what was going on there.’ Oh, Brett, you do yourself a disservice. Look at yourself! Not an ounce of