Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Tuesday

Mary Wakefield

Sir Peter Hall (1930–2017) on Harold Pinter, actors and making love

Sir Peter Hall has died at the age of 86. He spoke to The Spectator in 2009: Even at 78 and from a distance, Sir Peter Hall has the look of an alpha male. There he is about 100 or so feet away, advancing towards me across the polished boards of his rehearsal room; head forward, bear-like, with the lonely charisma of a boxing champ. As he passes, the younger members of the Peter Hall Company fall back smiling, deferring. He’s king here, a Lear (act one). He pauses to pat a gamine young beauty on the arm, stroke his beard, pull his plump lips into a roguish grin — then

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

The Last Night of the Proms is still an exceptional British party

Wouldn’t you just know it: there’s another row about Last Night of the Proms. Apparently the Scots in their open air Last Night weren’t given the opportunity to sing Jerusalem and Rule Britannia, whereas the Welsh and Northern Irish were. Which just adds to the popular perennial row about EU flags versus Union Jacks at the event. It’s all a bit baffling if you were actually there. I was, and all my little prejudices about it were well and truly seen off. It was the most joyful affair. There were indeed people giving out free EU flags to the Prommers which may have accounted for the fact that the EU flags

Thursday

Jasper Rees

Made in Port Talbot

Port Talbot, on the coast of South Wales, is literally overlooked. Most experience the town while flying over it on the M4, held aloft by concrete stilts planted in terraced streets. From that four-lane gantry, the only landmarks are the dockyard cranes and belching steelworks. Over Easter in 2011, National Theatre Wales staged a piece of street theatre that was crafted as a civic resurrection. The Passion of Port Talbot featured Michael Sheen as a Messiah-like teacher who harkens to oral memories. ‘I remember!’ he hollered on the third day, while attached to a crucifix on a traffic island by Aberavon beach, before reeling off a litany of local names:

Martin Gayford

Silent films

On 15 September 1888 Vincent van Gogh was intrigued to read an account of an up-to-date artist’s house in the literary supplement of Le Figaro. This described a purple house in the middle of a garden, the paths of which were made of yellow sand. The walls were glass bricks ‘in the shape of purple eggs’. Such aesthetic dwellings were all the rage; Van Gogh dreamed of having one himself in Arles. But as one learns from an exhibition at Leighton House, it was another 19th-century Dutch artist, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who actually inhabited two such establishments — one off Regent’s Park, the other in St John’s Wood. On paper, Van

Richard Bratby

Viennese whirl

‘First performance: Vienna, October 3, 1880’ declares the programme for Opera della Luna’s new production of Johann Strauss’s The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief. ‘First British Performance: Wilton’s Music Hall, London, August 29, 2017’. They’re not joking: this really is the first full UK staging of the Waltz King’s single most successful (in his lifetime, anyway) operetta. It’s a major event, and the director Jeff Clarke duly follows up with one of those quasi-academic articles that you get in programme books at big opera houses explaining how La bohème predicted Mussolini, or whatever. Still kept awake at night by the liberal reform agenda of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary? Well, hold tight,

Deborah Ross

Male order | 7 September 2017

The starting point for Taylor Sheridan’s crime-thriller Wind River is explicitly stated at the end when the following words come up on screen: ‘While missing person statistics are compiled for every other demographic [in the US], none exist for Native American women.’ A shocking fact that has to be worthy of a film, although whether this film is worthy of that fact, and isn’t just another genre melodrama featuring an American White Man coming to the rescue, has to be up for question. Also, it contains a brutal rape scene, just so you know. (I didn’t know. But wish I had, as I’d have likely steered clear.) Directing from his

Lloyd Evans

Keeping it in the family

A new orthodoxy governs the casting process in Hollywood. An actor’s ethnicity must match the character’s. If you extend this decree to Shakespeare, you need Macbeth to be played by a Highlander, Shylock by a Venetian Jew, Richard III by an English hunchback and Cleopatra by an Egyptian who has slept with her brother. As for Hamlet, the play can only be entrusted to a family of incestuous Scandinavians. Gyles Brandreth (whose name means ‘firebrand’ or ‘sword’ in old Norse) has anticipated the trend by staging a production alongside his son and his daughter-in-law. Benet Brandreth plays the Dane while his wife, Kosha, plays Ophelia, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, Laertes and Horatio.

James Walton

Second thoughts | 7 September 2017

I had planned to review David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s new Channel 4 sitcom Back without constantly referring to their last one Peep Show. Not only did it seem too obvious a way to go; it also felt a bit unfair to compare a deservedly revered programme that ran for 12 years with a single episode that went out on Wednesday. But then I saw that single episode. It’s possible, I suppose, that one day Mitchell and Webb may head in a completely different sitcom direction. Mitchell may not play an uptight, well-meaning loser, or Webb a preening, conscience-free charmer. For now, though, it’s pretty much as you were. Webb’s

Kate Chisholm

The listening project

As Classic FM celebrated its quarter-century on Wednesday with not a recording but a live broadcast of a concert from Dumfries House in Scotland — Bach, Mendelssohn, Chopin and Liszt, and the première of a specially commissioned work by the Welsh composer Paul Mealor — Radio 3 has upped the ante by announcing an autumn schedule that promises to be ‘an antidote to today’s often frenzied world’. Its new programming ranges from a special opera season and a series of organ and choral music to ‘an immersive audio impression’ of what it feels like to hang vertically on the side of a mountain, wind whistling through the ears, feet teetering

Thursday

Robert Gorelangton

Moor and more

In 1824 an ambitious teenage actor fled to England from his native New York where he had been beaten up once too often. He built a career here, being billed as ‘a Most Extraordinary Novelty, a Man of Colour’. What audiences encountered, however, was not the expected comedy of a simpleton mangling the Bard. They got instead an actor of thrilling charisma and deep natural ability. Ira Aldridge soon became the first black actor to play Othello, taking over the part from the brandy-sodden genius Edmund Kean, who died mid-run due to what one obituary called his ‘vortex of dissipation’. Thanks to a slew of highly prejudiced reviews in London,

Martin Gayford

Snap, crackle and op

Stand in front of ‘Fall’, a painting by Bridget Riley from 1963, and the world begins to quiver and dissolve. Something you normally expect to be static and stable — a panel covered with painted lines — undulates and pulses. In addition to just black and white, the pigments actually present, other hues appear and disappear: faintly luminous pinks and greens. To her irritation, the artist was once told, ‘as though it were some sort of compliment’, that ‘it was the greatest kick’ to smoke dope while looking at this painting. The remark, much though it affronted Riley, is wonderfully characteristic of its epoch, the mid-1960s. We usually think of

Lloyd Evans

Animal or vegetable?

Against by Christopher Shinn sets out to unlock the secrets of America’s spiritual malaise. Two main settings represent the wealthy and the dispossessed. At a university campus, an inquisitive Jesus-freak named Luke interrogates people about their experiences of violence. At an online retailer, oppressed wage slaves toil for hours and mate fleetingly during their tea breaks. Shinn’s characters also fall into two categories. The rich are eloquent, idealistic and disingenuous. The poor are earthy, impulsive and honest. The play is built around a series of formalised conversations, recorded interviews, writing tutorials, a Q&A session at a town hall, a stilted reunion between two old school-friends, and so on. In ritualised

James Delingpole

Straight to hell

No, The State (Channel 4) wasn’t a recruiting manual for the Islamic State, though I did feel uneasy about it throughout the four episodes. The fundamental problem is this: if you’re going to make a watchable drama about bad people doing terrible things, you inevitably have to humanise them. And from there it’s just a short step to making them sympathetic. Peter Kosminsky’s drama followed four British Muslims to Syria to join IS. Shakira, a black convert with a nearly-ten-year-old son, wanted to apply her skills as a doctor; Ushna was a teenager seeking to be a ‘lioness for lions’; Ziyaad was an amiable lunk looking for adventure; and his

Deborah Ross

Moral maze

Una is a psychological drama about a woman who was abused by a man when she was 12, and who confronts him 15 years later, and it’s a hoot. I’m toying with you. Of course it isn’t. It’s disquieting. It’s disturbing. It’s difficult. It’s 90 minutes of uncomfortably shifting in your chair and wishing you were at the latest heist caper that doesn’t make sense. But it is also compelling, up to a point, and your responses will be so complicated that you won’t know where to start unpicking them. Or how. The film is based on the play Blackbird by the Scottish playwright David Harrower, which has won multiple

Petroc Trelawny

‘Smile, segue and shut up’

Three weeks before Classic FM launched, I was on the radio in Hong Kong, introducing hits by Rick Astley and Wet Wet Wet. I’d just turned 21, and was working as a presenter for British Forces Radio. A phone call came from London. ‘My name is Michael Bukht. I’m setting up a new radio station and have heard good things about you. We’d like you to present our afternoon show. By the way, do you know anything about classical music?’ Michael Bukht would not have fared well in today’s consensual media world, where respect is the watchword. He was a bit of a bully, capable of exploding at anyone promoting

Monday

Nick Hilton

Game of Thrones bungles the execution of its last great villain

Another season of Game of Thrones is over, and nobody knows when it will return. After a run of seven short weeks, last night’s extended ‘The Dragon and the Wolf’ brought the curtain down on Westeros for the time being, except the curtain here was the colossal wall of ice that is the last barrier between the living and the dead. ‘The Dragon and the Wolf’ is a strange beast – extending its running time to 80 minutes allows the filmmakers to avoid most of the pitfalls of this season (notably the characters’ mysterious ability to teleport around the vast continent) but they are missing the confidence to know exactly

Thursday

Martin Gayford

What lies beneath | 24 August 2017

Last year, Gary Hume made a painting of himself paddling. At a casual glance, or even a longer look, it might not appear to be what it is. What you see is a wrinkled, pinkish surface with a sort of dome of curving green and blueish shapes at the bottom. This, to Hume, is a sort of self-portrait as a child at the seaside. ‘I’m on the beach, I’ve got the ripples going around my ankles making little coloured shapes, and all the sand.’ Hume’s paintings are like that. They may look abstract, but it turns out that they are startlingly real. One from some years ago consists of six

Deborah Ross

Losing the plot | 24 August 2017

Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky is a heist caper that, to be fair, does what it says on the can. There is a heist. It is a caper. It also features an all-star cast and is said to be ‘the perfect summer entertainment’, which may or may not wash, depending on whether you believe the enjoyment of films is seasonally variable, or an average film is an average film, whatever the weather. It’s USP is that it’s ‘a red-necked Oceans’ or ‘a hillbilly Oceans’ so, in other words, it’s a riff on Oceans. Soderbergh directed the Ocean’s franchise, so it is hardly a stretch for him. Or us, for that matter.