Arts Archives

Brideshead revisited

Theatre

Nicholas Hytner’s new show, Alys, Always, is based on a Harriet Lane novel that carries a strong echo of Brideshead. A well-educated journalist, Frances, becomes entangled with the wealthy Kyte family (the closeness to ‘Flyte’ is doubtless intentional), and she befriends the silly daughter, Polly, before setting her sights on the enigmatic father, Laurence, a famous scribbler who never gives interviews. This slow-moving tale is intercut with scenes from Frances’s day job at a failing newspaper where the staff keep getting the boot. But Frances, mystifyingly, retains her post. How come? Floppiness is her most conspicuous quality.

Alexandra Coghlan

Deft and daft

Opera

Operas are like buses. Both are filled with pensioners and take ages to get anywhere, but more importantly they always seem to arrive en masse. You wait ages for a Magic Flute, then five come along at once. Opera North started us off in January, Welsh National Opera and English National Opera are currently following suit, with Scottish Opera and Glyndebourne covering the summer shift. It’s a mess and, when you consider that at least four of these are touring with inevitable overlap, a wanton, self-destructive splitting of an already small opera-going audience. With more Flutes than a school wind-band to choose from this season you can afford to be picky (assuming you haven’t already exhausted yourself with the three concurrent Katya Kabanovas).

Louise Levene

Some like it hot | 14 March 2019

More from Arts

Blame Kenneth MacMillan. The great Royal Ballet choreographer of the 1960s, 70s and 80s was convinced that narrative dance could and should extend its reach beyond boy meets sylph and began wrestling with heavyweight essay subjects such as the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire (Mayerling) or the last of the Romanovs (Anastasia). And now look: Queen Victoria, the pointe shoe years, a bold, good-looking ballet that almost triumphs over the absurdity of its premise. Cathy Marston’s latest work for Northern Ballet follows the success of her 2016 Jane Eyre, a spare, clever reworking of the novel that will be danced by American Ballet Theatre in New York this June.

Laura Freeman

Short circuit

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Choreographer Richard Alston is now 70 and his latest outing at Sadler’s Wells is a greatest hits medley. As with all clip shows, some of it is super, some soporific and some merely meh. We begin with Martin Lawrance’s Detour, first performed last year. The piece is a powerful hybrid of fluid dance and martial arts: kung fu meets pas de deux. The raking lamps by designer Zeynep Kepekli spotlight dancers in washed indigo and ochre tunics. The final image of a male dancer spinning his female partner like a storm-warning weather vane is striking. The trouble with minimalist soundscapes (very Tubular Bells) is that unless the dancers control both breathing and landings, it all gets a bit huffy, puffy, thud.

Kate Chisholm

Only connect | 14 March 2019

Radio

It’s not surprising given the way that electronic communication has taken over so much of our daily business, minimising human contact wherever possible, that podcasting (or what might be called aural blogging) has taken off in such a big way, anything from Griefcast to Love + Radio via The Breakup Monologues and To the Woman. We crave the sound of a human voice talking to us and no one else, and even better when it comes in disembodied form, stripped of all physical expression. This intense aural connection has been radio’s chief selling point since the 1920s, technology enhancing human interaction, the need to tell and listen to stories.

8 March 2019

Steerpike

Watch: Will Self and Mark Francois bust-up on Politics Live

It's something of an understatement to say that Brexit has incited passions in the past two years, even on live TV. But today Mr S thinks we came the closest we've seen yet to a full on fight breaking out in the studio, between the author Will Self and the Brexiteer MP Mark Francois on Politics Live. The argument began when Self made the rather inflammatory suggestion that: 'Your problem really Mark is not that you have to be a racist or an anti-Semite to vote for Brexit, it's just that every racist and anti-Semite in the country did.' In response, Francois called for Self to 'apologise on national television' for his remarks, which he said insulted the millions of people who voted to leave in 2016.

7 March 2019

Laura Gascoigne

Master of white

Arts feature

Artists can be trained, but they are formed by their earliest impressions: a child of five may not be able to draw like a master but he can see better and more intensely. The light of Valencia was burnt into Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida’s mental retina and he could not get it out of his mind: ‘I live here like an orange tree surrounded by heaters,’ he told an interviewer in Madrid in 1913. Never a studio painter, he worked best under the lamp of his native sun and returned to Valencia from wherever he was living every summer to set up his easel on the beach.

Melissa Kite

Real life

Russian Doll is a brilliant new Netflix drama in which a woman relives the same night over and over again. It is particularly enjoyable for me to watch because I feel like that is exactly what I am going through. The same problems present and re-present themselves, quite as though I never come to grips with them, when in reality I do nothing but try to come to grips with them. In Russian Doll, a New York software engineer called Nadia Vulvokov (‘It’s like Volvo only longer,’ she pleads) finds herself reliving her 36th birthday party in an ongoing time loop wherein she repeatedly dies horribly in a violent accident and the process begins again.

J.J. Charlesworth

Keep politics out of art

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If you want to lose friends and alienate people in the art world, try telling them you support Britain leaving the EU. As someone on the left, I’ve always argued a left-wing case for leaving. It is, to say the least, an unfashionable position, usually met with anxious looks, sullen silence or overt hostility from one or other artist, curator or art bureaucrat. That the art world should be against Brexit should come as little surprise.

The Spectator

Books and Arts – 7 March 2019

Deborah Ross

Now, that’s better

Cinema

Captain Marvel is the 654th film in the Marvel franchise — the figure is something like that, I think — and as the first one to be female-led it was mercilessly trolled before its release by the fan boys. ‘This movie is gonna bomb like no other and they only have themselves to blame,’ was one typical remark. The nastiness escalated further when the film’s star, Brie Larson, said she was sick of being interviewed by ‘white dudes’ while doing promotion and asked why so many film critics are white and male. (78 per cent are, according to the latest research.) I don’t know why I’m telling you all this except to say that I’m one of the 22 per cent and this is the first of these films that hasn’t entirely bored the pants off me.

James Walton

Comedy returns

Television

BBC2’s MotherFatherSon announced its status as a classy thriller in the traditional way: by ensuring that for quite a long time we had no idea what was going on. At first it looked as if the focus would be on a missing teenager whose phone we saw abandoned in the woods. But then we cut to an American called Max (Richard Gere, no less) arriving in London by private jet on an apparent mission to choose our next prime minister. Then to a younger man running fast and screaming. Then to a veteran female journalist being sacked — and not only because she’d just lit a cigarette at her desk. Then back to the young screamer, who by now had revealed himself as the newspaper’s coked-up editor. Then to a woman working in a homeless centre.

Lloyd Evans

Rooting for crime

Theatre

Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train by Stephen Adly Guirgis deserves its classic status. This wordy and highly cerebral play pulls off an extraordinary feat by leading the spectator inside the mind of a psychopath. The setting is Rikers Island, where an old lag, Lucius, befriends a younger detainee, Angel, who hopes to be acquitted of killing a pastor whom he shot in the buttocks. (The bullet-in-the-bottom detail is typical of Adly Guirgis’s macabre frivolity.) Lucius is a chain-smoking fitness freak who keeps himself in trim by jogging on the spot and performing bursts of press-ups in his cell. We first meet him as the victim of petty bullying by a sardonic prison guard and we aren’t told why he’s in custody.

Michael Hann

Everything he’s done

Music

On 29 June 1991, a record called ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’ by Bryan Adams entered the UK charts, at No. 8. At that point, I was blissfully in love with my girlfriend, had just got a first at university and had won a scholarship to a postgraduate journalism course. By the time it departed from the charts, on 14 December — after a run that included a still-record 16 weeks at No. 1 — I had been dumped by my girlfriend, had dropped out of the journalism course, and my dad, who had been poorly when the record entered the charts, was a month away from dying. During the course of one single’s chart run, all the certainties in my life had been overturned.

Michael Tanner

Sinking the unsinkable

Music

Garrick Ohlsson is one of the finest pianists of his generation. Why, then, was the Wigmore Hall not much more than half full for his recital last week? Brahms. Ohlsson is at present touring with four programmes, all Brahms’s solo piano music. He treated us mainly to solid chunks, though he ended with the enchanting and almost light-hearted Paganini Variations, fiendish for Ohlsson but enlivening for us. Actually, he played an encore by Chopin, the solitary Op. 45 Prelude, preceding it with a charming lecturette about how Brahmsian, avant la lettre, Chopin could be. Ohlsson was a student of the great Claudio Arrau, whose attitude to Brahms verged on the frosty.

Rod Liddle

Royal Trux: White Stuff

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Grade:A Royal Trux are back — kind of. Singer (if that’s what you want to call what she does) Jennifer Herrema is ankle tagged for some misdemeanour, almost certainly involving narcotics, so may not show up at some gigs to promote the new album. And her partner and ex-husband Neil Hagerty has washed his hands of the whole business: ‘The album — I didn’t approve of it. I have no idea what it is. I’ve heard like ten seconds of one song. I’m out, man.’ So as ever, it’s chaos all round, opiate chaos. How these two people are still alive is a wonder. How they crawled from their shack in Virginia to muster the energy for a new album is also a miracle. A wonderful miracle.

6 March 2019

Charles Moore

Should Michael Jackson’s music be banned?

Why does it follow that, because an artist or performer is an appalling human being, his work should be banned? Speaking at Oxford in the late 19th century, Paul Verlaine introduced himself thus: ‘Je suis Paul Verlaine — poète, ivrogne, pédéraste.’ His work survived. Yet nearly a century and a half later, Michael Jackson has his music banned by the BBC.

4 March 2019

Benedict Spence

It was Keith Flint’s aggressive, feral, live performances which made The Prodigy so great

Keith Flint, the fearsome looking frontman of British electronic dance group The Prodigy, has died at the age of 49. With him, you fear, has gone one of the most important music movements of the last 30 years. The Prodigy is, or was, a strange group, all things considered. They emerged from the rave scene of early 90s Essex, with hits such as ‘Charly,’ ‘Everybody in the Place’ and ‘Out of Space’. The latter became a popular, upbeat, conciliatory anthem the band ended every show with, whilst ‘Everybody’ just missed out on number one. But the group went mainstream with a much darker brand of music than the ‘kiddie rave’ of their debut work.

28 February 2019

Laura Gascoigne

Privates on parade | 28 February 2019

Exhibitions

‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’ If there’s an exception to prove Shaw’s rule, it’s Phyllida Barlow. The 40 years the sculptor spent teaching at the Slade, where her pupils included Rachel Whiteread, have not only left her creative energies intact, but completely failed to keep a lid on them. After turning Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries into a cross between a lumberyard and an enchanted forest in 2014, then filling the British Pavilion to bursting point at the 2017 Venice Biennale, the septuagenarian who can conjure a sculptural wonderland from the contents of your local branch of Travis Perkins has been let loose on the Royal Academy’s Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries. Unusually for Barlow, it’s not a jungle in there.

David Cairns

‘They’re finally going to play my music’

Arts feature

According to his friend and fellow-composer Ernest Reyer, the last words Berlioz spoke on his deathbed were: ‘They are finally going to play my music’. It has taken time, but he was right. A century and a half later, Berlioz 150 is the watchword of the hour. That is as it should be. Berlioz was a devotee of the ancient world (‘I have spent my life with that race of demi-gods’), where it was believed that at the moment of death one might be granted foreknowledge of the future. Why has it taken so long? In his native France there were plenty of reasons. As a forceful, witty but sardonic music critic he inevitably put Parisians’ backs up with his attacks on modern Italian music, which he regarded as frivolous, formula-ridden and fatally undramatic.

Deborah Ross

Cloak of invisibility

Cinema

Hannah stars Charlotte Rampling in a film where not much happens and not much happens and not much happens and then, finally, not much happens. One scene, for instance, involves changing a light bulb and that’s it, and as close to an action stunt as we ever get. (Unless you count doing laundry.) But. But. It is also peculiarly mesmerising, showcases an extraordinary performance, and cumulatively builds into a powerful exploration of pain, loneliness and invisibility. So not much happens and not much happens and not much happens — but a great deal is said.

Richard Bratby

The Rite stuff

Music

It was Stravinsky himself who suggested that, in order to preserve its difficulty, the opening bassoon solo of The Rite of Spring should be raised by a semitone every decade. And it was a performance by Birmingham Royal Ballet in 2005 that convinced me that he wasn’t entirely joking. The audience nattered away over the opening bars; the unlucky bassoonist wobbled and cracked. Clearly, this orchestra was not remotely prepared for what was about to hit it. Rhythms splintered like shrapnel and misplaced entries spattered across every silence. As they hurtled into the final Sacrificial Dance, you could almost hear the prayers of musicians audibly struggling simply to hang on. It’s still, without question, the most thrilling Rite of Spring I’ve ever heard.

Laura Freeman

You’ve been trolled

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Please believe that I try to give every production my full attention, to do due diligence, to blink and miss nothing. But when, halfway through Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch’s Since She, one of the male dancers appeared on stage with cowbells attached to his willy, I’m afraid I spent a fair few minutes looking hard at my notebook. The cowbells are not the strangest thing in this night of the grotesque. Since She is both danse macabre and Grand Guignol. A woodchipper whirrs at the back of the stage, the set is a mountain of mattresses. One man sniffs a sausage, another turns a spit. A woman defecates into an omelette, another is dragged across stage with wine glasses balanced on the fan of her hair.

James Delingpole

Accidental hero | 28 February 2019

Television

Steve Coogan is back as Alan Partridge but frankly who cares? Like Ali G, I’ve long thought, he’s one of those ‘classic’ 1990s comedy characters funnier in recollection than ever he was in reality. He should have been confined to brief sketches — like Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield mostly did with their cheesy has-been DJs Smashie and Nicey — not cruelly exposed in endless TV series where you’ve got the joke in the first five minutes and the rest is pure cringe. Actually, though, This Time with Alan Partridge (BBC1, Mondays) is genuinely funny, clever and enjoyable because finally he has scriptwriters who don’t hate him.

Lloyd Evans

This will hurt

Theatre

When reviewers call a work ‘important’ they mean ‘boring’ and ‘earnest’. And in those terms Shipwreck is one of the most ‘important’ shows I’ve ever seen. It’s not a play but a series of monologues and conversations spoken by a group of American liberals stuck overnight in a rural farmhouse. ‘It’s a red zone,’ they shudder when they learn that they’re in a Republican county. They pass the night carping loftily about the faults of Trump’s campaign and of his presidency between the inauguration and his dismissal of James Comey on 9 May 2017.

Kate Chisholm

Points of view | 28 February 2019

Radio

Is it me or are we now faced (or perhaps I should say fazed?) much more often by stories in the news that test our moral and ethical principles to the limit, forcing us to question ourselves and what we think to such an extent that it becomes impossible to be sure of what is right? I can never understand the high-minded righteousness and full-blown convictions of the panellists on Radio 4’s Moral Maze, who each week are given a topical issue and who then spend 45 minutes tossing it about, testing the pros and cons and questioning a group of often baffled witnesses who are invited on to the programme to provide evidence for differing points of view.

Rod Liddle

Ariana Grande: Thank U, Next

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Grade: D Among the many reasons for moving to Iran is this vapid, talentless, derivative, hyperbolically oversexed drivel aimed at your 11-year-old daughter. The land of the mad mullahs is about the only place on earth you’ll be able to avoid this unmitigated crap, a collection of chemically processed ur-songs that make Taylor Swift seem like Debussy. It’s No. 1 everywhere you look. The UK, the USA, Australia, Ireland… hell, you hear this stuff and think to yourself, Christ, I have to escape — maybe to some glacier in the far north of Iceland, or to the wolf-infested lower slopes of the Tatra mountains in Slovakia. Nah, sorry. No. 1 in those places too. Face it: Iran or bust. Forswear alcohol and infidelism.

26 February 2019

Toby Young

Bohemian Rhapsody’s Oscars win is a triumph over snobby film critics

Midway through Bohemian Rhapsody, the big screen biopic about legendary Queen frontman Freddie Mercury that won four Oscars on Sunday, we see a montage of the critical reviews given to the group’s 1975 song of the same name. Queen had put it out as a single and it wasn’t expected to be a success. At six minutes, it was twice as long as most top 40 hits and its bizarre blend of opera, pop and hard rock was like nothing anyone had ever heard before. “Pompous and overlong,” concluded one music critic. “All flash and calculation without soul,” opined another. “A song that should be sunk to the bottom of the sea and never heard from again,” concluded a third.

25 February 2019

Dominic Green

Oscars 2019: does Green Book deserve to be called ‘lying white guilt trash’?

It was a big night for Rami Malek and the Green Book team, and a big night for me too. My palms, closely shaved for the occasion, were sweatier than usual. My tux, freshly laundered and let out, suddenly tightened when the nominations were read out. I was afraid I’d be publicly humiliated, but it turned out that I was a winner. Yes, my Oscar tips were pretty accurate this year — until they weren’t. I thought I’d factored more racial tokenism than a Bernie Sanders campaign video, and more political gesturing than a fundraising disco for the Democratic Socialists of America. But I got the balance of tokenism wrong.