Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Michael Tanner

Royal Opera’s Tristan und Isolde: an absurd production – but still a magnificent night

Any adequate performance of Tristan und Isolde, and the first night of the Royal Opera’s production was at least that, leaves you wondering what to do with the rest of your life, as Wagner both feared and hoped it would. What Tristan does — one of the things — is to present an image of romantic love, in both its torments and its ecstasies, which makes everything else seem trivial; and at the same time to undercut that image by asserting the claims of ordinary life, but in the subtlest way. So, however swept away one is by the agonies of Tristan in Act III, and the raptures of the

Lloyd Evans

National Theatre’s 3 Winters: a hideous Balkans ballyhoo

A masterpiece at the National. A masterpiece of persuasion and bewitchment. Croatian word-athlete Tena Stivicic has miraculously convinced director Howard Davies that she can write epic historical theatre. And Davies has transmitted his gullibility to Nicholas Hytner, who must have OK’d this blizzard of verbiage rather than converting it into biofuel and sparing us a hideous Balkans ballyhoo. Certainly the play is conceived on a grand scale. Location: a Zagreb mansion. Timeline: 1945 to 2011. Characters: several generations of clever proles plus one dangling aristo. It opens on a note of sourness and corruption. A blonde Marxist stunnah seduces a top commissar who buys her off with the freehold to

Deborah Ross

Birdman: plenty to see, little to feel

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, which stars Michael Keaton as a one-time superhero movie star (just like Keaton himself), is audacious technically, and so meta it may well blow your mind, but it is also weird, maddening, wearing and exhausting. It is so frantically fast-paced it feels as if you are on a theme-park ride that just won’t stop, or slow down, if only for a minute, so you can take a breather, collect yourself, come up for air. It is already a critical smash. It has garnered seven Golden Globe nominations. It is widely tipped for the Oscars. It has received five-star reviews everywhere. But the one thing you should

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Lloyd Evans’s top five plays and musicals of 2014

1. The play of the year, by a mile, was Fathers and Sons at the Donmar adapted from Turgenev’s novel. Lindsey Turner directed Brian Friel’s harrowing and exhilarating script with immense visual aplomb. 2. Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be Lionel Bart’s first musical was a sublimely witty look at the Cockney underworld starring Gary Kemp. 3. The Realness A new song-and-dance comedy at Hackney Downs Studio, approached the same material as Fings but with a punchier and more contemporary style. 4. I Can’t Sing! The exhilarating title melody of this musical set my nape tingling with static electricity and I was convinced that Harry Hill’s X-Factor spoof would stick around

Tuesday

Deborah Ross

Deborah Ross’s top five films of 2014

1. Mr Turner Mike Leigh’s infinitely superior biopic starring a sublime, if grunty, Timothy Spall. 2. 12 Years A Slave Harrowing – you’ll be harrowed to within an inch of your life – but it’s unflinching look at American slavery will stay powerfully with you unlike, for example, Django Unchained or The Butler 3. Boyhood Richard Linklater’s epic, heart-warming observational chronicle explores  the banality of everyday life without ever being boring; a rare achievement in cinema. 4. Twenty Feet From Stardom A host of extraordinary women and a sensational soundtrack take this documentary about backing singers to another level, and will take you with it. 5. Paddington Funny, satirical, political, extremely

Digby Warde-Aldam

A stunner of an exhibition at Paris’s flashiest new gallery

You can tell a lot about an art gallery from its attached eatery. The Tate has the grand but gratuitously naff Rex Whistler restaurant. The Serpentine its globular Zaha Hadid nouvelle cuisine joint. Then there’s the Mess Restaurant at the Saatchi Gallery’s newish space in the old Chelsea Barracks. To be charitable, the name is a bad but unfortunately appropriate pun. Anyway, I report from a children’s park in BCBG west Paris, where Louis Vuitton have just opened a new art gallery. Obviously, a luxury (and erstwhile collaborationist) megabrand were never going to settle for an ordinary white cube. Oh no. Instead they hired virtuoso architect Frank Gehry to build

Friday

Ismene Brown

The best (and worst) of ballet and dance over Christmas

The Nutcracker, English National Ballet, until 4 Jan *** The Little Match Girl, Lilian Baylis Studio, until 4 Jan ***** Edward Scissorhands, Sadler’s Wells, until 11 Jan *** Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Royal Ballet, until 16 Jan ** The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, Linbury Studio Theatre, until 17 Jan ** Amazing, the change in the dance weather this Christmas. Where usually there is snow, fairies, tinkly celestas, a glut of Nutcrackers, traditions have turned topsy-turvy. At the Royal Ballet the sun has broken out (if mildly) in its Don Quixote, as I reported last week, and only the dependable English National Ballet is serving up a trad Nutcracker over Christmas, at the Coliseum. Yet I can’t remember a Christmas when there was so

Barry Isaacson

Does Hollywood need bullies?

There have always been bullies in Hollywood; it’s institutionalised, like a form of hazing, but the key difference between the film business and the Marine Corps is that bullying in Hollywood is not meant to inculcate esprit de corps; its purpose, for the bully, anyway, is to provide confirmation that the hierarchy is working in his favour.  I was one of the last generation of studio executives at Universal that reported to the old mogul, Lew Wasserman.  Wasserman was a physically imposing screamer who had parlayed with gangsters, bootleggers and union enforcers as a supplier of dance bands to illicit nightclubs during Prohibition, so he could terrorise white-collar employees without breaking

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

Why Frozen is a fabulously irritating film

For a film I’ve never seen, I really, really hate Frozen. For those who don’t have children and don’t look into shop windows and don’t buy toys and are oblivious to merchandise, it’s the blockbuster, Academy award-winning Disney film, the most successful animation of all time and apparently the source of unending annoyance in car journeys, on account of children’s habit of singing the songs out loud. (The director, Jennifer Lee, has just issued an apology to parents everywhere.) My own children loathe it without any encouragement from me but they can’t get away from it either. My son had to sing the songs from it with his choir at

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Climate change, Bruegel-style

It is cold, but not in a cheery, robin-redbreast kind of way. The sky is slate blue; the sun, a red ball, is slipping below the horizon, figures carrying heavy burdens trudge across the frozen water. Yet this far- from-festive painting, ‘The Census at Bethlehem’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, is one of the earliest — perhaps the very first — to set the Christmas story in a northern winter landscape. There is no attempt to pretend that this is the Holy Land. The setting is a village in the southern Netherlands. The houses are brick-built, one with a northern European crow-stepped gable. In the foreground, a pig is being

Norman Lebrecht

The Nazi origins of the Vienna Phil’s New Year’s Day concert

It may be the last water-cooler moment in world television. On the first morning of the year, at 11.15 Central European Time, in a place that considers itself the epicentre of Europe, a group of men in formal dress mount the Musikvereinssaal stage in Vienna to perform a ritual that passes for culture and tradition. It is, of course, neither. The music is strictly bar-room, written by members of the Strauss family as social foreplay for the soldiery and serving classes in low taverns. Like most forms of dirty dancing, the music rose vertically from barroom to ballroom and was soon performed as encores by symphonic orchestras to dowager purrs

Matthew Dennison

Snow – art’s biggest challenge

In owning a flock of artificial sheep, Joseph Farquharson must have been unusual among Highland lairds a century ago. His Aberdeenshire estate covered 20,000 acres — surely enough to support the modest local ovine needs. But Farquharson was a painter, the fake sheep artist’s models. For cleanliness and biddability, few grazing ewes can match a woolly dummy. Joseph Farquharson was 27 when he scored his first hit at the Royal Academy in 1873. ‘Day’s Dying Glow’ depicts a handful of sheep negotiating a snowy incline alongside an icy burn. Leafless trees crown a mound. Behind them a sickly sun is sinking or possibly rising. It is an image of some

Jonathan Meades

Le French bashing has spread to France. Are things really that bad?

The French for French-bashing is le French bashing. This verbally costive nation is at it once again, torpidly borrowing an approximately English expression rather than coining its own. Such bashing is not an exclusively Anglo-Saxon practice. There is indigenous bashing. At least there is Éric Zemmour, whose salutary Le Suicide français was published a couple of months ago. Its very first sentence declares that France is the sick man of Europe — which prompted Manuel Valls, little Hollande’s prime minister this week and a man who is not growing into that poisoned office, to take the bait, exhibit a preposterously thin skin and denounce the book twice in a few

The Spectator

Tanya Gold went on to marry the person she had her worst date with, Jack Whitehall didn’t

Tanya Gold Food columnist My worst date was with the man who is now my husband. It was in February 1994, and we were both freshers at Oxford. He took me to see Schindler’s List. Schindler’s List is not really a date movie, even if its score does feature on The Most Relaxing Classical Album in the World… Ever! (Volume 2. I love the ‘Ever!’) It’s the genocide of European Jewry, I suppose; it just doesn’t make me want to mate with someone so tall, blond and blue-eyed they could conceivably be a Lebensborn baby. I realise now that he had a strategy; he thought I might be so upset

David Hare

David Hare’s notebook: The National Theatre belongs to taxpayers, not corporate sponsors

The nicest day of the year was spent at Charleston in May. The Sussex farmhouse shared by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell looked splendid in the streaming sunshine. As a dramatist, I’ve idly disparaged bald and white-haired audiences. But as soon as I started speaking at the literary festival, I realised that everyone in panama hats and cardigans was way to the left of me. The first question was about my local childhood, and I said that growing up so close to the Channel meant that stories of people like Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf sitting on English lawns and hearing the sound of battle in the first world war

James Delingpole

How to win MasterChef – and why salmon is the fish of the devil

If ever my near-neighbour William Sitwell is killed in a bizarre shooting accident and I end up taking his place as one of the guest critics on MasterChef: the Professionals (not likely, I admit, but you never know), here are some tips for competitors who wish to avoid a stinking review. 1. Don’t serve me salmon. Salmon is the fish of the devil, which is why Satan coloured it that particularly vile shade of pink. It is evil because it is almost certainly farmed and therefore pumped full of antibiotics to destroy all the parasites with which it would otherwise be pullulating. If it’s not farmed, well, it still tastes

Ismene Brown

Royal Ballet’s Don Quixote: Carlos Acosta is too brainy with this no-brain ballet

One feels the pang of impending failure whenever the Royal Ballet ventures like a deluded Don Quixote into a periodic quest to stage that delightful old ballet named after him. Twice in recent years has it tilted at the windmill and flopped back, dazed and bruised. It never remembers, though, and here it goes a third time. A Spanish romp in the sun, with brilliant dancing, silly comedy and a happy ending, makes a perfect change from the usual Christmas Nutcracker, does it not? And nowadays, with such a substantial cohort of Cuban, Argentinian, Brazilian and Spanish dancers the Royal should be able to scorch the floor in required style,

Kate Chisholm

Children’s radio was once at the core of the BBC – now it’s all but disappeared

It was a bit of a surprise to hear Jarvis Cocker, the embodiment of cool and former frontman of Pulp, confessing to a love of Singing Together, a BBC programme straight out of the 1940s, with its clipped pronunciation and uptight pronouncements. But in his edition of Archive on 4, broadcast just as the Advent season began (and produced by Ruth Evans), Cocker took us on a musical journey back into his past and to his memories of singing in the classroom, ‘which certainly left its mark’ on him and millions of others. He reminded us that children were once at the heart of BBC programming and Singing Together was

Deborah Ross

If you like bland films full of blondes, you’ll love Kon-Tiki

Kon-Tiki is a dramatisation of Thor Heyerdahl’s 4,300-mile, 101-day journey across the Pacific by balsa-wood raft, which took place in 1947, and was a remarkable achievement, unlike this film, which so isn’t. True, it does what it says on the tin. There’s an ocean, and it’s traversed. There is jeopardy, most notably in the form of a big plasticky shark. But it’s played as such a straight-up-and-down, old-fashioned, formulaic adventure that it lacks any intimacy or feeling and almost can’t be bothered with its own characters. Consequently, it’s as bland as it is blond, and it is exceptionally blond. As styled by Th’Oreal, I guess you could even say. To

Lloyd Evans

Panto season has arrived – and even the kids are turning their nose up at it

‘What is a panto?’ I asked my companion at the Hackney Empire’s Saturday matinee. ‘It’s basically a really bad play,’ said Coco, aged five and three quarters. She was there with her older brother and my son to help me appreciate the Christmas frolics. Half an hour in, I feigned confusion over the storyline. ‘People are trying to steal the duck,’ she said. Mother Goose is a parable of wealth and greed set in Hackney-topia where an impoverished family become rich when their champion egg-layer starts to produce bullion instead of breakfast. Menaced by an assortment of harpies and malefactors, they move into a spangly new palace and try to