Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

If this play is correct, the Foreign Office is a joke

Safe Haven is a history play by Chris Bowers who worked for the Foreign Office and later for the UN as a human-rights activist. The two careers seem to be interchangeable. His drama follows an idealistic and oversensitive Oxford graduate, Catherine, who joins the diplomatic service during the first Gulf War in 1991. Catherine believes that the Foreign Office exists to throw money at basket-case countries that lack the maturity to govern themselves. The entire department acts as a sort of puppy rescue service for dysfunctional nations overseas. All her colleagues accept the wisdom of this approach even though it has the same effect as casting diamonds into quicksand. Catherine

James Delingpole

Gripping: Amazon Prime’s The Tank reviewed

I don’t know how it got past the increasingly powerful ‘All Germans were evil Nazis’ censors but Amazon has released a sympathetic portrait of a Tiger crew on the Eastern Front, translated, clunkily, as The Tank. It has been criticised in some quarters for its weird twist at the end, which the genre-literate will see coming a mile off. But don’t be put off by its structural and narrative shortcomings. This is still a very watchable, gripping and sometimes moving portrait of men at war, and likely the most realistic ever depiction of a second world war tank crew. It’s far superior to the ludicrous Fury, where Brad Pitt plays

Richard Bratby

Seductive Debussy and Ravel from the RLPO

Grade: A It’s a cliché that the best Spanish music was written by Frenchmen but it’s mostly true nonetheless, and here to prove the point is Domingo Hindoyan and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Debussy’s Iberia and Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole form the balmy, orange-scented heart of this Franco-Spanish album, featuring not a single note by an actual Spaniard. It’s a beaker full of the warm south; summer holiday music for these bleak, damp days. Four Spanish-themed French miniatures fill out the programme, including Ravel’s spicy orchestration of Alborada del gracioso. I’ll be honest, though, they had me at Chabrier’s Espana, that shameless little burst of sunshine from a composer who

Muriel Zagha

In praise of French brothels

In the days of the Belle Époque and Jazz Age, a trip to Paris would have included, for the discerning tourist, a visit to the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame and the Comédie Française, but also to Le Chabanais, the One-Two-Two or Le Sphinx. There would have been no need to give the driver an address: they would have known exactly where to go, for these were Paris’s most luxurious brothels, famous the world over for their beautiful inhabitants, sumptuous interiors, outlandishly themed rooms and specially designed erotic furniture. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the abolition of the French maisons closes system – also known as maisons de tolérance –

Wednesday

Sam Leith

The depressed duck detective is back

Grade: B– It’s a duck, except he’s a detective. Or a detective, except he’s a duck. Anyway he wears a fedora, seems depressed, quacks wise, and eats too much bread – so we can leave the rest to the philosophers. In this sequel to Duck Detective: The Secret Salami (who knew the world needed two such games?) this pleasingly drawn cartoon hero navigates a series of locations solving puzzles. Reminded me a lot of the 1990s. Fancy the funny-animal thing still going strong all these years after Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters I was about to write, but then I remembered Aesop. Likewise old-school point-and-click adventures, though now they’re swipe-and-tap

Lloyd Evans

Why is this low-grade Ayckbourn play in the West End?

Woman in Mind is a dyspeptic sitcom set in 1986 starring Sheridan Smith as Susan, a moaning Home Counties housewife who slips into a Yorkshire accent when she gets cross. Susan sunbathes in her leafy garden sipping coffee and carping about everyone close to her. She loathes her scowling sister-in-law, Muriel. She can’t bear her husband Gerald, a cerebral vicar, and she refuses to revive their moribund sex life. She constantly badmouths their grown-up son, Ricky, who lives with a community of mute hermits in Hemel Hempstead. How did this scout-hut show reach the West End? In Act One we learn that the rules of Ricky’s community forbid him from

James Walton

The worst Agatha Christie adaptation I can remember

When it comes to Agatha Christie adaptations, there are normally two possible responses to the denouement. One is a deep satisfaction that the unlikeliest suspects were the inevitable culprits after all. The other’s the same as that – except approximately a quarter of an hour later you suddenly find yourself thinking: ‘Hold on a minute…’ But with Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, neither was the case. The unlikeliest suspects remained laughably unlikely even as their guilt was revealed – and the ‘Hold on a minute’s came not after the show finished, but with pretty much every twist of a plot that, almost impressively, kept finding new levels of preposterousness to scale.

Daisy Dunn

Three cheers for Poems on the Underground

The idea for Poems on the Underground was thought up by a New Yorker 40 years ago this month. This may surprise you, given that the posters are synonymous with London. But then again, the creative possibilities of a transport system tend to be lost on its native commuters. Judith Chernaik, a lecturer in English literature, had recently relocated to the capital when she fell in love with the Tube: ‘Compared to New York it’s bliss – clean, safe and fast, too… if things are working of course.’ Ozymandias was soon riding the lines from Aldwych with Robert Burns In As You Like It, Orlando goes around the Forest of

Michael Hann

Why I will always have time for Bernard Butler

Bernard Butler has popped up a couple of times in this column, but not alone – once, with two fellow songwriter-guitarists as Butler, Blake & Grant; but also writing and performing with Jessie Buckley, to sublime effect. Over 30 years Butler has become one of pop’s great enablers. He’s worked on hit records, miss records and records that were never intended to be hits. He’s played with everyone, but has seldom sought much of a spotlight himself. Like Johnny Marr, he stepped away from a generational band – Suede – at the height of the mania for them. Like Marr – and unlike most others who step away from stardom

Deborah Ross

The cruelty of H is for Hawk

H is for Hawk is an adaptation of the bestselling memoir by Helen Macdonald who, following the sudden death of her beloved father, channels her grief through the training of a goshawk, Mabel. The film stars Claire Foy, who is superb, as is the nature photography, but is it right, keeping a wild animal captive, and depriving it of its natural behaviours because it helps you in some way? What’s in it for this gorgeous bird, I kept wondering. The cruelty is never addressed. This is solely about human need. We’re not even told who plays Mabel, so I can’t say what she has been in before or whether she

Richard Bratby

Rattle’s glorious Janacek

The Czech author Karel Capek is probably best known for his plays: high-concept speculative dramas such as R.U.R. and The Insect Play, bristling with wit and ideas. But he paid his bills as a newspaper columnist, and he seems to have been pleasantly surprised when Janacek approached him about turning his ‘conversational, fairly unpoetical and over-garrulous play’ (Capek’s words) The Makropulos Affair into an opera. Capek licensed Janacek to adapt it as the composer saw fit, in words that have the authentic ring of the working journalist – ‘because I simply wouldn’t get round to revising it myself’. No fear on that count. The Makropulos Affair is a brisk, nervy

Mike Pitts

Dazzling: Hawaii, at the British Museum, reviewed

Climb the Reading Room steps to reach the British Museum’s dazzling Hawaii exhibition, and you perform an obeisance. At the top is a representation of Ku, a larger-than-human god of war and chiefly power, carved in stylish fury from the trunk of a breadfruit tree. He once commanded a flight of stairs at the Museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens. In Hawaii he would have looked down with royal authority from a stone temple mound. We pass below him into the show, it feels, only with his consent. This is a landmark event that tells of moving encounters with stunning exhibits For that we should offer thanks. At an important

Arthur I. Miller

What drama gets right and wrong about science

A few days after Tom Stoppard’s death last month, Michael Baum, a distinguished surgeon, wrote a letter to the Times. He explained how Stoppard’s discussion of chaos theory in Arcadia had inspired him to discover a new and far more effective chemotherapy to treat breast cancer. ‘Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia,’ wrote Baum. I’ve long been fascinated by the relationship between science and drama. I knew Tom Stoppard and when I was professor of history and philosophy of science at UCL, we had several illuminating conversations about art, science and theatre, which he recalled in a 1994 article entitled ‘Playing with Science’ for the

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Oh, Mary!’s climax is an inspirational bit of comedy

High Noon, directed by Thea Sharrock, is a perfectly decent version of a trusty western which celebrates its 74th birthday this year. An elderly sheriff, Will Kane, marries a priggish beauty, Amy, on the day of his retirement but his marital plans are overturned by news that a dangerous convict, Frank Miller, has been released from jail and hopes to shoot Will dead. Amy is a devout Quaker and she grumbles bitterly as Will cancels their honeymoon and heads back to town to deal with the evil Frank. But Frank is not the brightest criminal in New Mexico. News of his plans have spread and everyone knows that he’ll show

Graeme Thomson

Zach Bryan is no Springsteen

There would, on the surface, appear to be little common ground between the wife of stuffy old Malcolm Muggeridge and the latest bard of blue-collar America. Yet the unlikely ascendancy of Zach Bryan brings to mind Kitty Muggeridge’s killer putdown of David Frost as the superstar who ‘rose without a trace’. You may be surprised to learn that Bryan, a 29-year-old US Navy veteran from Oklahoma, will headline two concerts later this year at Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium, as well as perform to 60,000 people each night in Edinburgh and Liverpool. He now ranks alongside Bon Jovi and Bruno Mars as a gold-star draw on the 2026 summer show circuit. Bryan

Angus Colwell

The rise and fall of the football presenter

What does it mean to be a ‘good’ sports presenter? Really, it should mean nothing. They aren’t important. They should have a sense of perspective, a sense of remembering that they are peripheral to the most popular consumer product and human activity that we have come up with. Of course, it doesn’t work like that. Look at Gary Lineker. The BBC paid him £1.3 million to ask Danny Murphy things like ‘Bournemouth look to have run out of steam a little bit?’ for 75 minutes a week. Such is our infatuation with sport that we end up really caring about who asks this kind of question. That person gets to

James Delingpole

Why has it all gone wrong for The Night Manager?

The Night Manager is finally back after ten years with three major drawbacks: no Elizabeth Debicki for the sex scenes; no Tom Hollander for the comedy scenes; and no Hugh Laurie for the evil-kingpin-in-his-toothsome-mountaintop-lair scenes, I nearly claimed. But only because at the very beginning of the new season the Laurie character’s grizzled body is identified by Olivia Colman (in her most irritating performance ever, as a dowdy but capable MI6 officer with a gratingly suburban accent). And I didn’t want to spoil the coming plot twist in case any of you were foolish enough to have fallen for this blatant case of Chekhov’s misidentified corpse. Now the cat’s out

Deborah Ross

Brendan Fraser is the king of the everyman: Rental Family reviewed

Rental Family stars Brendan Fraser as an out-of-work American actor living in Tokyo. He accepts employment with an agency that gets performers to play roles in real people’s lives. You may need a friend, for example, or a mourner should you fear your funeral will be sparse. (Tell me about it.) Fraser won an Oscar for a dark performance in The Whale but in this he’s back as a lovable, good-hearted everyman. (Is there anyone who does that better, aside from Tom Hanks?) Fraser plays Phillip, who arrived in Tokyo seven years before to star in a toothpaste commercial and has never left. Presumably, there is nothing, and no one,

Richard Bratby

This Royal Opera Traviata is no ordinary revival

First opera of the year, first night back in London, and the jolly old metrop was already springing surprises. A hulking pink Rolls-Royce was parked on Bow Street – a real oaf of a car, the lumpish nepo-baby of a Humvee and Lady Penelope’s Fab 1. And as we stood outside the Royal Opera House, cooling off from Act Two of La traviata, a large fox came jogging out of Broad Court and urinated against the front tyre before sauntering off in the direction of Aldwych. Pure magic. You should never take the capital for granted, just as you should never assume that a mid-season revival of a standard repertoire

Digby Warde-Aldam

Does Tate’s director care about art?

I met the Tate’s outgoing director Maria Balshaw only once, back when she was in Manchester running both the Whitworth gallery and the city’s municipal art museum. She was given to management-speak and annoying soundbites – she more than once described herself as ‘feisty ’ – but she’d done a superlative job. She was charismatic and supremely competent – in theory, the perfect candidate for the soon-to-be-vacant Tate leadership. She got the job two years later, but the confrontational demeanour that had worked so well up north didn’t wash in London, where the phrase ‘can do’ routinely elicits the same retort: no, you can’t. Meanwhile, a series of PR cock-ups