Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Sophie Hannah

The Dwelling

Charlie Zailer wasn’t sure if she’d won or lost. On the victory side of the equation, she’d managed to avoid spending Christmas Day with her sister, and she’d successfully blamed it on work. Her ‘Sorry, but I have to go in for at least a few hours’, delivered in a tone that suggested it was the fault of someone intransigent in a position of authority, had been accepted without question. On the defeat side, here she was: at work, by choice, with a cold steak-and-potato pasty in her bag as a Christmas dinner substitute, struggling to communicate with a stranger who’d judged her to be not worth speaking to. Was

John Carter Cash

All about my father

My father had many faces. There was much that made up the man. If you think you ‘know’ John R. Cash, think again. There are many layers, so much beneath the surface. First, I knew him to be fun. Within the first six years of my life, if asked what Dad was to me I would have emphatically responded: ‘Dad is fun!’ This was my simple foundation for my enduring relationship with my father. This is the man he was. He never lost this. To those who knew him well — family, friends, co-workers alike — the one essential thing that was blazingly evident was the light and laughter within

Anthony Horowitz

The Netflix revolution

There have been two revolutions in television during my lifetime. The first happened in 1975 when Sony launched its Betamax video system — which allowed viewers to record shows and see them when they wanted. Of course, Betamax was found to be clunky and unreliable and it was soon replaced by VHS but, without realising it, the networks had lost control of their audience. No longer would we watch the films they wanted us to watch when they wanted us to watch them. Never again, as the technology spread, would the whole nation come together as one to find out what the newscasters had been up to on Morecambe and

Lloyd Evans

Angst and cant

What if? is the engine of every great story. What if the toys came to life when their owner left the room? What if the prince’s uncle killed the king, seduced the queen, and stole the crown? Lucy Kirkwood asks: what if an elderly atomic physicist volunteered to take charge of the team decommissioning a stricken nuclear power plant in order to spare the lives of younger workers? Quite a complicated set-up. The play takes an hour to reach its starting point. First it feels like an oldies love triangle with a post-apocalyptic twist. We’re in a farmhouse near the site of a nuclear disaster. Rose, a wrinkly beauty, arrives

Michael Tanner

Gardeners’ world

For the past few weeks I have been working my way through Decca’s gigantic set of every note Mozart wrote and quite a few that he probably didn’t — 220 CDs in a monumental hernia-inducing box. Chronological listening is not recommended. Mozart was technically a phenomenon, of course, but he didn’t reach maturity of expression, with one or two extraordinary exceptions, until he was in his early twenties. La finta giardiniera (or Die Gärtnerin aus Liebe, in the composer’s singspiel version — both are included in the Decca set) was written when he was 18, by which time he was exceptionally fluent in composition. Uncut it lasts three and a

James Delingpole

Cosy catastrophe

When I was a child in the 1970s, the two big excitements of the run-up to Christmas were first the chocolate Advent calendar which, somehow, I managed to smuggle past the prison-guard inspection at my Colditz-like prep school; and second, browsing the Radio Times to see what televisual delights the Christmas hols had in store. Now I hardly bother with chocolate —unless it’s Artisan du Chocolat, in which case, yes please. And I find Christmas TV, all Christmas TV, even if it’s a Nick Park animation that has never been on before, so intrinsically depressing that I just want to string myself up from one of the giant black hooks

Bryan Appleyard

The descent of man

Why do humans want to build robots? It seems, on the face of it, to be a suicidal endeavour, destroying jobs and, ultimately, rendering our species redundant as more intelligent and effective beings take over. Lacking, as we now do, an agreed metaphysical justification for human specialness — for example, the soul — it must only be a matter of time before we submit to the machine ascendancy. So far, it has been a subtle, incremental process that conceals any wider significance. Take satellite navigation. This was first introduced in the 1980s and is now more or less universal. Maps have become quaint. As a result, we walk or drive

Kate Chisholm

Northern exposure | 8 December 2016

In this season of watching and waiting as we approach Christmas and year’s end, radio has a precious role. At the switch of a button you can be taken straightaway into another kind of life, a different world, where present realities are not relevant or can at least be made to feel less imperative. While the screen can transport you to places you’ve never been, its visual escapism never quite overwhelms the imagination in the way that words, sound effects, music will do if subtly shaped into audio magic. Who needs images when in an instant you can be taken in your imagination to the wilds of northern Finland, crunching

Stephen Bayley

Making America crass again

Elsie de Wolfe was the pioneer interior designer whose motto was ‘plenty of optimism and white paint’. She banished brown Victoriana from America. And her work on Henry Clay Frick’s private apartments introduced new American money to old French furniture. If only she were with us today. For his first television interview as president-elect, Donald Trump appeared, imperiously, sitting on a golden throne in the style of Louis Quinze. My vision may well have been blurred by circumstances beyond, but I think there were period-incorrect wall and ceiling paintings on classical-allegorical themes in the background. All of this on cantilevered decks behind mirrored glass about 200 metres above Fifth Avenue.

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Trivial pursuits | 1 December 2016

Robert Rauschenberg, like Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, was a ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’. Unlike Shakespeare’s character, however, he made them into art. Rauschenberg’s most celebrated piece, ‘Monogram’, on view in the grand retrospective of his work at Tate Modern, comprises, among other bits and pieces, a rubber shoe heel, a tennis ball, and a car tyre-plus-oil paint on stuffed angora goat. Next to it is another amalgam from the mid-Fifties, incorporating ‘paint, paper, fabric, printed paper reproductions, sock and army-issue flare parachute on canvas’. Modern-art sceptics — a dwindling group but not yet extinct — might conclude that this stuff deserves that time-honoured epithet ‘a load of old rubbish’.

Florian Kaps

Instant gratification

Instant photography already existed long before Edwin Land, the ingenious inventor and founder of Polaroid, went for a walk with his daughter in Santa Fe in 1943. ‘Why can’t I see the pictures now?’ she asked her father on the way home. But the photographic systems available at that time were really just ‘experimental portable darkrooms’ rather than truly ‘instant cameras’. Only a few hours after his daughter’s question, Land got hold of a patent lawyer and by Christmas the first test versions of ‘Polaroids’ had been developed in the lab. Land was an incredible visionary. He was not just researching an innovative film system. He was on the hunt

Peter Hoskin

All I want for Christmas

Comfort and joy. That’s what the song talks about, and that’s what the classic Christmas movies deliver. Whether it’s Die Hard (1988) or It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Home Alone (1990) or White Christmas (1954), we enjoy these films, in part, because they are so comfortable. Time and tradition have made them as familiar as carols, mince pies, woolly jumpers, and avoiding the lancinating gaze of your least favourite aunt over the sprouts. But, at the end of 2016, perhaps we can upset the usual way of things. The Christmas holiday should also be a time for Christmas Holiday, Robert Siodmak’s chilly noir from 1944. It starts as it continues:

Michael Tanner

From first to last

As the dreaded season of goodwill approaches, the Royal Opera has mounted two revivals of pieces that are interestingly contrasted: Puccini, in the first characteristic and successful opera of his career, though with a lot still to learn, and Offenbach, with the incomplete last work of his career, but a radical departure from all the successes he had had before, and a work that is ultimately a noble flop. Les Contes d’Hoffmann is one of the Royal Opera’s most venerable productions, dating from 1980 and having its eighth revival, with William Dudley’s elaborate sets. One might even call them cluttered, and their major disadvantage is that they necessitate not only

James Walton

Closing credits

BBC1’s The Missing has been one of the undoubted TV highlights of 2016. Yet, even thrillers as overwhelmingly thrilling as this one have been known to blow it in the concluding episode, when the biggest revelation of the lot turns out to be that the writers couldn’t really answer all the questions that previous episodes had so intriguingly raised. And of course, The Missing had raised more than most, with its fiendish plotting ranging across three timeframes — until last week, that is, when it added a fourth. So could Wednesday’s finale possibly avoid giving us that sense of outraged disappointment that comes from realising we’ve spent weeks looking forward

Kate Chisholm

On the road | 1 December 2016

‘We’re going to get lots of negative attention from environmentalists,’ he cackled, great puffs of blue-grey smoke emerging from the exhaust of his two-stroke car. Will Self was crossing Tower Bridge in a Trabant, that most potent symbol of the East German socialist state, bending almost double to fit himself round the steering wheel (he’s six foot five inches in his socks) and cursing the lack of wing mirrors. Things could only get worse as he and his old friend Michael Shamash set off on their 700-mile trek across the Channel to Zwickau, in the former GDR, home of the Trabant car. Imagine trying to merge on to a German

Lloyd Evans

Of ice and men

An ice floe. Two anglers. Months to kill. That’s the premise of Nice Fish by Mark Rylance and Louis Jenkins. The off-beat script is full of bleak and quirky insights. Rylance, who stars as the bungling Ron, admits that sometimes he gets so bored he bangs nails through frozen bananas. His pal compares dogs with wolves by observing that wolves are pessimists, jaws low to the ground, like homeless scavengers, whereas dogs are chin-up go-getters, natural corporate players, keen to win promotion in a worldwide enterprise called ‘Man’s Best Friend’. There’s a piece of obsessively nerdy rhetoric about 36-hour fishing permits which sounds like Peter Cook at his best. These

Jasper Rees

No peace, no pussy

The bizarro concept of a ‘President-elect Trump’ came to pass despite the wishes, clearly stated on the stump, of the entertainment-industrial complex. They all came out for Hillary — Queen Bey, the Boss, Jay-Z, J-Lo, SJP, Kimye, Madge, Meryl, Gaga, Lena D, old uncle Team Clooney and all. How the alt-right cackled when this star-spangled nobility got in-yer-faced by a basket of deplorables from the West Virginia coalfield. In the circumstances, now is maybe not a propitious moment for Spike Lee (who felt the Bern) to unleash a finger-wagging homily about America and guns. Chi-Raq, you wouldn’t be alone in not knowing, takes its title from the alternate name lately

Thursday

Martin Gayford

The beast in man

Ernest Hemingway loved going to the zoo, but not on Sundays. The reason, he explained, was that, ‘I don’t like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.’ He would probably have enjoyed Animality, an entertaining exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, Lower John St, W1. It contains quite a few jokes, but generally the laugh is on Homo sapiens. The humour tends to comes from an age-old ploy: birds, reptiles and mammals wearing clothes. It was the basis, for example, of many works by the caricaturist J.J. Grandville of cats, bears and other such fauna dressed up as early 19th-century French

Neil Armstrong

Screen grab

St James’s Palace. 1953. A dynamic Duke of Edinburgh is relishing a ding-dong with the antediluvian fossils of the Coronation Committee. He wants to embrace modernity by allowing the BBC to televise the ceremony. The ‘grey old men’ want to continue doing things in exactly the same way that they have been done since 1066. Modernity prevails and the coronation is the biggest television spectacular there has been. This episode, splendidly recreated with a little artistic licence in The Crown, Netflix’s epic about the Queen, was a tipping point in terms of the public’s acceptance of the medium of television. Many viewers acquired their first sets for the sole purpose