Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Rupert Christiansen

Time for Akram Khan to move on from climate-change choreography

It must be 20 years since I first saw Akram Khan dance, and I will never forget the impression he made in a brief impassioned solo; here was a master of the Indian kathak school who had seen how its traditional vocabulary could be related to the less constricted realms of modernism. Since then he has gone on to fulfil his promise and broaden his aesthetic, notably through his extraordinarily powerful Giselle for English National Ballet. At 48, he has virtually retired from performing, but he continues to choreograph and direct his own company, enjoying a considerable international reputation. Most recently he’s homed in on an environmental agenda and I’m

Deborah Ross

Reframes Patricia Highsmith as a gay icon – and ignores her anti-Semitism: Loving Highsmith reviewed

I first discovered writer Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, Carol, the five Ripley novels) as a young teenager working my way through Golders Green Library. I guess she came shortly after Georgette Heyer, and I was hooked. I only later became aware of her virulent anti-Semitism, and on this count she was not half-hearted – she called the Holocaust ‘the semicaust’ as it failed to fully deliver – yet I still could not look away. I’m the same with the spiders at the zoo: horrified, but also mesmerised. We must, I suppose, separate the art from the artist as not everyone can be Paul McCartney, but any Highsmith documentary

Daisy Dunn

Crossing Continents is the best of the BBC

Ask a member of Generation Z where in the world they would most like to live, and chances are they will say South Korea. K-pop and kimchi have made it indisputably fashionable, and if the Instagram account of one of my Korean friends is anything to go by, life there is really quite idyllic, provided you can forget who your neighbours are. It would take the average worker more than a century to save enough money to purchase an apartment  A recent episode of Crossing Continents on Radio 4 presented a very different side of the story. John Murphy, a superbly enquiring producer and presenter, went to visit some of

Lara Prendergast

Is milk racist?

I was tired when I went to see Milk at the Wellcome Collection, having been up for much of the night feeding my baby. In European and Christian imagery, one sign said, ‘a lactating woman often represents fertility, charity and abundance’, but I was not feeling full of the milk of human kindness. Nor was I in the mood to be lectured about the evils of feeding children milk. As it turned out, this wasn’t really a show about milky motherhood. Cows and women produce milk but it’s unfashionable to dwell too much on that detail. The exhibition has a few sculptures of women; mostly they are headless. A massive

Graeme Thomson

Why can't I let go of my records?

I’m not a natural lender. I’m a reasonably soft touch when it comes to money, but regarding the important things in life – books, music, pens – I loan with a gently thrumming underscore of anxiety. While I’ve weaned myself off my mother’s habit of writing her name in every book she buys, I still tend to keep an internal inventory of where each one has gone, and when I’d like it back. Add in the fact that I’ve never possessed the zealot’s desire to convert others to my enthusiasms, and I’m forced to concede that I make a poor practitioner of the art of lending. Leonard Cohen was the

Lloyd Evans

An epic bore: A Little Life, at the Harold Pinter Theatre, reviewed

A Little Life, based on Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, is set in a New York apartment shared by four mega-successful yuppies: an architect, a fine artist, a film star and a Wall Street attorney, Jude, played by James Norton. A friendly doctor tags along occasionally and an older lawyer, in his sixties, joins the gang after legally adopting Jude. None of the men has a partner or a family, and they never discuss things like sport, cars, investments, movies or girls. Instead they hug a lot and cook pastries for each other in a kitchenette on stage. The play feels like a joke-free episode of Friends with an all-male cast. And

Richard Bratby

An old production that's aged better than most: Royal Opera's Turandot reviewed

Since its première in 1984, Andrei Serban’s production of Puccini’s Turandot has been revived 15 times at Covent Garden, not counting excursions to Wembley Arena. The current revival has been running (by all accounts, to capacity houses) since 10  March. The compelling reason for reviewing such a well-worn revival mid-run is that this performance featured the Royal Opera debut of the Nottingham-born Wagnerian soprano Catherine Foster – which by any reckoning was well overdue. Foster is hugely esteemed in the German-speaking world. In itself, that doesn’t prove anything – I mean, they rate Franz Welser-Möst too. ‘Big in Germany’ is often brandished as a rebuke to an imagined Little British

Adrian Tinniswood

Why Christopher Wren died thinking his life had been a failure

When Sir Christopher Wren’s servant went to rouse his master from an afternoon nap on 25 February 1723, and found that the old man would never wake again, the reputation of the nation’s greatest architect was already on the wane. He had walked away from St Paul’s in a fit of pique, with the cathedral still unfinished. He had been sacked from the royal post he held for nearly half a century, the surveyor-generalship of the king’s works. And the tide of taste was turning against his brand of restrained baroque in favour of a more rigid Palladianism. In old age he used to grumble that he wished he had

Tuesday

James Walton

Felt like the product of a night in the pub: BBC1's Great Expectations reviewed

By now a genuinely radical way to turn a Victorian novel into a TV drama would be to take that novel and turn it into a TV drama. But while we wait for someone to do it, Great Expectations stays true to the current ideals of junking large parts of the source material and infecting what remains with the neuroses of our own age – thereby demonstrating once again the strange modern neediness to believe in our superiority to all those benighted bigots who came before us. (Please tell us we’re the best people who ever lived! Please!) Or rather, it takes those ideals to new heights that are either

Rod Liddle

She has finally learnt to write a song: Lana Del Rey's new album reviewed

Grade: A– No, Lana, I didn’t, thank you – all cleared up. The most extravagantly talented of that lachrymose, self-harming genre, miserycore, returns with an album described by critics as ‘heavy’, as if we might have expected Mungo Jerry or the Venga Boys. The difference between Del Rey and the rest of those dispossessed chicks warbling bleakly in their bedrooms about all manner of woe is that Lana has a degree of self-awareness and, Christ be praised, even humour. Otherwise, why would she start a song with the words: ‘I haven’t done a cartwheel since I was nine.’ Really – you haven’t? Also, she has learned, over the years, how

Lloyd Evans

Deeply unsatisfying: Berlusconi – A New Musical, at Southwark Playhouse Elephant, reviewed

Berlusconi: A New Musical, an excellent title, has opened at a new venue in south London, Southwark Playhouse Elephant. The show begins with the former Italian prime minister preening triumphantly on a white marble set that resembles the Capitol in Rome where Caesar was murdered by rivals who’d grown sick of his power lust. Berlusconi introduces us to his nemesis, a state prosecutor called Ilda Boccassini, who pursues him for years through the courts. With typical coarseness he dismisses her as a ‘haggard old sow’. And yet the pair perform a strange romantic dance that culminates in a bizarre Berlusconi chat-up line: ‘If you weren’t so frigid we’d end up

Dan Hitchens

From the sublime to the ridiculous: Godland reviewed

Godland is a film to see on the big screen: not just for its awesome, immersive cinematography, but because it is so remorselessly bleak that if you’re watching it at home you are likely to give up. To get the most out of it you need to be trapped. Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), an upright, serious, bearded young Lutheran priest in late 19th-century Denmark, is being sent to Iceland as a missionary. ‘Lucas, you must adapt,’ his red-faced bishop (Waage Sando) tells him while munching through a lavish lunch of chicken and boiled eggs. ‘At times your task will seem monumental.’ The Icelandic weather is forbidding, the bishop explains; in

Rupert Christiansen

Distressingly vulgar: Royal Ballet's Cinderella reviewed

Despite its widespread rating as one of his masterpieces, Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella is chock full of knots, gaps and stumbling blocks – all of which the Royal Ballet’s new production throws into relief. Ashton isn’t altogether to blame: Prokofiev’s graphic score dictates an excessive amount of time given over to knockabout for the Ugly Sisters (mostly a matter of them bumping into each other) and a tiresome court jester. There’s nothing to be done with an inert third act, which in Ashton’s treatment merely recapitulates previous choreography and ends with a static tableau. The Prince has no personality whatsoever: he’s little more than a handsome porter. Yet genius shines through.

Laura Gascoigne

Artists' dogs win the rosettes: Portraits of Dogs – From Gainsborough to Hockney, at the Wallace Collection, reviewed

Walking on Hampstead Heath the December before Covid, I got caught up in a festive party of bichon frises dressed, like their owners, in Christmas jumpers. It seemed bizarre at the time but wouldn’t surprise me now. During lockdown the local dog population exploded and the smaller breeds now wear jumpers all winter. There are no dogs in jumpers in the Wallace Collection’s new show – though, given the level of anthropomorphism, there might as well be. The ‘Allegorical Dog’ section, devoted to Edwin Landseer, includes ‘Trial by Jury’ (c.1840) with a poodle sitting as judge, and a canine interpretation of the parable of Dives and Lazarus featuring a well-fed

Stuart Jeffries

A look inside Britain's only art gallery in jail

The centrepiece of the exhibition at Britain’s only contemporary art gallery in a prison is an installation, consisting of two broken, stained armchairs. They’ve been placed face-to-face, as if for a therapy session. Elsewhere there are silkscreen prints and paintings. This outbuilding-cum-art studio and gallery is where prisoners are also taught dry-point etching – surprising given the needles involved, but I am assured that all potential weapons are accounted for at the end of each session. ‘For two hours a week I come here and learn new skills,’ explains the silkscreen artist and inmate of HMP Grendon. ‘I get completely absorbed in printmaking. I feel freer here than any other

Wednesday

James Delingpole

Succession works because the writers don't care about the boring business storylines

I have a theory that many great artists’ strength is a product of their weakness. The flaw of the relentlessly frivolous creator of Succession Jesse Armstrong, for example, is that he is very easily bored by grown-up subjects such as big business, finance, corporate structure, legal affairs or anything involving depth and seriousness. Which ought, you might think, to pose a major problem for someone constructing an epic drama – loosely based on the Murdoch family – about the struggle for succession in a global media empire. But Armstrong’s saving grace is this: most viewers are not interested in such tedium either. The reason, for example, that Elisabeth Murdoch has

Graeme Thomson

Why supergroups nearly always suck

Recently in these pages, ruminating on the ghastly Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I wrote that music does not conform to any equation. I should have added: except, of course, for the occasions when it does. One tried-and-true formulation is that ‘super-groups’, those bespoke vehicles bringing together artists best known either for working alone or within other bands, tend to add up to considerably less than the sum of their parts. Supergroups are in thrall to the idea of their own existence; the music trails sluggishly behind We could blame Eric Clapton. Indeed, it seems remiss not to. Blind Faith – a fatally untidy union of Clapton (ex-Cream), Steve

Jenny McCartney

In praise of From Our Own Correspondent 

Most of us are familiar with the notion of writer’s block, that paralysis of invention induced by the appalling sight of a blank page. Composer’s block is less widely discussed, although musicians seem equally afflicted by creative drought. Perhaps the best known case is that of the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov, the subject of Radio 3’s Sunday Feature, which describes how the great man finally fought his way out of a numbing three-year ‘apathy’ with the help of a hypnotist.  Rachmaninov fought his way out of a numbing three-year ‘apathy’ with the help of a hypnotist The composer had been catapulted into his long despair by the hostile reception to

Deborah Ross

Emily Watson’s performance is extraordinary: God's Creatures reviewed

There are some films that you know will be quality simply by the actors who have agreed to be in them. They’re like a kitemark. Emily Watson is such an actor, as is Paul Mescal, who hasn’t put a foot wrong since Normal People and must have an excellent agent or just a feel for these sorts of things, even if he’s bound to turn up in the Marvel franchise one of these days. Both Watson and Mescal star in God’s Creatures, so it’s double kitemarked, you could say. It’s a tough watch, and a tense watch, but it’s powerfully affecting and plainly quality through and through. It asks: mothers

Lloyd Evans

Flawless: Accidental Death of an Anarchist, at the Lyric Hammersmith, reviewed

Accidental Death of an Anarchist has been performed all over the world with varying degrees of success. Written by Dario Fo and his wife Franca Rame, the script was inspired by an actual case of police brutality in 1969 when a train driver with anarchist leanings was found dead beneath the open window of a fourth-floor interrogation room. Official reports described the fatality as ‘accidental’. The plot structure is borrowed from Gogol’s The Government Inspector. A senior civil servant arrives in an isolated town and exposes the corrupt and self-serving ways of the townsfolk. After he departs, the civil servant is exposed as an imposter. Here, the authority figure is