Arts Archives

It’s no Citizen Kane: The Brutalist reviewed

Cinema

The Brutalist, which is a fictional account of a Jewish-Hungarian architect in postwar America, has attracted a great deal of Oscar buzz and has been described as ‘monumental’ and ‘a masterpiece’ and ‘an inversion of the American dream’ and ‘up there with Citizen Kane’. It’s three and a half hours (including a 15-minute intermission) and while the running time isn’t an issue, as it is engrossing enough, it did frequently feel familiar. What film about the American dream isn’t an inversion of the American dream? I couldn’t fathom if it had anything new to say. It felt more like classy potboiler – love! Sex! Money! Power! Raw concrete! What film about the American dream isn’t an inversion of the American dream?

Lloyd Evans

Pious bilge: Kyoto, at @sohoplace, reviewed

Theatre

The West End’s new political show, Kyoto, can’t be classed as a drama. A drama involves a main character engaged in a transformative personal journey. This is a secretarial round-up of various environmental summits, or ‘Cop’ meetings, held during the late 1980s and 1990s. If you remove the private jets, a Cop summit is a sort of parish council seminar about the probable weather during the summer fête. The material is extremely dull and yet it’s possible to turn dross into a gripping story if you hire a dramatist. So Big Oil has been torching the planet for 66 years and yet the West End hasn’t been burned to ashes The authors, Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy, aren’t up to the job and their script is a blank list of speeches and events read out by soulless busybodies.

James Walton

Certainly intriguing: Apple TV+’s Prime Target reviewed

Television

Needless to say, there have been any number of thrillers that rely on what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin: something, however random, that the goodies have to find before the baddies do. Less common are those where the MacGuffin is the mathematical formula for prime numbers – which is where Apple TV+’s latest show comes in. His first thought on seeing a 204 bus was that 2042 is the sum of three consecutive cubes Prime Target began in ‘Baghdad, Iraq’ – and therefore in a bustling market. Or at least it bustled until a large gas explosion opened up a hole in the ground leading to a spectacular medieval chamber. For a while, the chamber went unexplained as we cut to ‘Cambridge, England’ – and therefore to eight strapping young men rowing on the river.

Jenny McCartney

It’s moving to think how happy Van Gogh was in Brixton

Radio and podcasts

When a phrase really takes off in the political sphere, you will recognise it by the frequency with which it crops up on the Today programme. Many years ago, I noticed that politicians had begun using the line ‘it’s not rocket science!’ when attacking the alleged inability of their opponents to get even the basics right. It had a muscular, common-sense ring to it, which they clearly relished, and it spread like norovirus through a cruise ship. How times have changed. Where once we had politicians who never stopped talking about rocket science, the ascent of Elon Musk in the US has brought us a rocket scientist who never stops talking about politics. Painful as it was, I think I liked it better the first way round.

Rupert Christiansen

A jewel in the English National Ballet’s crown: Giselle reviewed

Dance

Since its première in Paris in 1841, Giselle has weathered a bumpy ride. For St Petersburg in 1884, Petipa gave Coralli and Perrot’s original choreography the once-over and Fokine grafted on further innovations when Diaghilev brought the ballet to London in 1911. Despite casts led by Pavlova, Karsavina and Nijinsky, it bombed here with critics and audiences, who considered its archetypal Victorian plot of the innocent village maiden betrayed by the local squire prissy and musty. Only a generation later, when the likes of Markova and Ulanova assumed the title role, did the scenario’s mythic simplicity find new life, albeit in versions that departed quite radically from the primary text.

Richard Bratby

A committed performance of Lerner and Weill’s flop: Opera North’s Love Life reviewed

Opera

Once upon a time on Broadway, Igor Stravinsky composed a ballet for Billy Rose’s revue Seven Lively Arts. After the first night, Rose felt that Stravinsky’s efforts might benefit from the attention of Robert Russell Bennett – the king of Broadway orchestrators, who’d collaborated with Cole Porter and the Gershwins. ‘YOUR MUSIC GREAT SUCCESS,’ he telegrammed to Stravinsky. ‘COULD BE SENSATIONAL SUCCESS IF YOU WOULD AUTHORISE ROBERT RUSSELL BENNETT RETOUCH ORCHESTRATION.’ Stravinsky wired straight back: ‘SATISFIED WITH GREAT SUCCESS.’ If you’re mad enough to revive Love Life, you have to commit. Opera North did There were moments in this revival of the Lerner and Weill flop Love Life when I wondered whether Weill, too, might have profited from a Bennett makeover.

22 January 2025

Zoe Strimpel

In praise of immersive exhibitions

'Immersive' exhibitions get a bad rap. And it's not hard to see why. But if, like me, you find yourself hard-pressed to concentrate on Important Art when troubled by the cares and complexities of life, then digitally amplified sensation and spectacle might be a decent alternative if your museal itch needs scratching in stressful times. There are two notable options in London right now. The first is Vogue: Inventing the Runway, at the Lightroom in King’s Cross. Drawing on Vogue's nearly 150 year old archive, it’s a show about the catwalk's flashpoints, narrated by Cate Blanchett.

16 January 2025

David Abulafia

Is the tide turning on restitution?

Arts feature

When passions are aroused, all of us are liable to overstate our case. Dan Hicks, a curator at Oxford’s extraordinary Aladdin’s Cave of anthropology, the Pitt-Rivers Museum, is perhaps a case in point. A Swedish academic, Staffan Lunden, has convincingly argued that Hicks is guilty of ‘distortion’ when writing about the British raid on Benin in 1897, which brought several thousand objects, including finely wrought brass statuettes, to museums across the world. Hicks published his uncompromising views in 2020 in a prize-winning book, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution.

Richard Bratby

The stupidity of the classical piano trio

Classical

It’s a right mess, the classical piano trio; the unintended consequence of one of musical history’s more frustrating twists. When the trio first evolved, in the age of Haydn, the piano (or at any rate, its frail domestic forebear) was the junior partner, and the two string instruments, violin and cello, were added to make the silly thing audible. Then the piano started to evolve, while its partners – give or take the odd tweak – really didn’t, much. The end result, by the second half of the 19th century, completely reversed the original balance of power, leaving the two string instruments thrashing for dear life against the onslaught of that glossy, black, all-devouring monster, the modern concert grand.

Deborah Ross

As good a Dylan biopic as you’ll ever get: A Complete Unknown reviewed

Cinema

It doesn’t have anything new to say, which is right. If you could figure Dylan out, it would all be over A Complete Unknown is the Bob Dylan biopic from James Mangold, who also made Walk The Line about Johnny Cash. It stars Timothée Chalamet, who is astonishing, and does his own singing. He may even be better at singing Dylan than Dylan is at singing Dylan. (Same sound but fewer of those bum notes that make you go ‘ouch’.) It doesn’t have anything new or insightful to say, which is right and proper. If you could figure Dylan out, it would all be over. Instead, the focus is on the four years leading up to his use of electric instruments at Newport Folk Festival in 1965. This was greeted by fans with such horror and outrage it was as if, live on stage, he was kicking puppies.

Lloyd Evans

Cheerless and fussy: The Tempest, at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, reviewed

Theatre

The Tempest is Shakespeare’s farewell, his final masterpiece or, if you’re being cynical, the play that made him jack it all in. Some actors admit that it can be hard to stage and dull to perform. What is it exactly? A children’s fairy tale and a soppy romance with snatches of drunken farce and political intrigue. Quite a muddle. The setting is famously eccentric. Shakespeare whisks the audience away from reality and drops them in a magical kingdom where a sanctimonious wizard rules over a population of goblins and fairies. The overbearing soundtrack keeps coming up with new ways to irritate your eardrums Some directors try to correct the Bard by turning Prospero’s island into an even weirder and less familiar realm.

Max Jeffery

A feel-good classic: The Armie HammerTime Podcast reviewed

Radio and podcasts

Relive with me and enjoy again the downfall of Armand Douglas Hammer. If you remember, Hammer’s Hollywood career had been going as smoothly as anything: there was his 2010 breakthrough playing the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network, his turn as Leonardo DiCaprio’s no. 2 in Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar, the 2018 Golden Globe for Call Me By Your Name. By 2020 he was a GQ cover star: ‘Soul seeker. Scene stealer. Leading man.’ And cannibal, allegedly. In January 2021 an anonymous Instagram account called @houseofeffie posted screenshots supposedly showing Hammer’s texts to a woman. ‘Thinking of holding your heart in my hand and controlling when it beats,’ the message read. ‘I am 100 per cent a cannibal.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The brilliance of Cicely Mary Barker

Exhibitions

When Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies of the Spring was published in 1923, a post-first world war mass wishful belief in fairies was at its height in Britain. Just over two years previously, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writing in the 1920 Christmas issue of the Strand Magazine, had stated that the ‘Cottingley Fairies’ (tiny winged figures visible in photographs taken near Bradford by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths) were almost certainly genuine and were clear evidence of the existence of psychic phenomena. Barker remained unmarried, and lived a quiet life of flowers and innocence The public – 21 years on from the birth of Peter Pan – were hungrier than ever for fairies: their innocence, their delicate beauty, and their hint of benign mischief.

Graeme Thomson

A new solo album by a former Beatle that – astonishingly – demands repeated plays

Pop

For artists lacking any obvious feel for the style, ‘going country’, similar to mainstream white artists dabbling in reggae in the 1970s following the breakthrough of Bob Marley, tends to elicit the sour whiff of a morning after the last chance saloon. Particularly at a time when a slick multi-hyphenate brand of country music is the pop trend du jour, carpetbagging and bandwagonism abounds. The lyrics on Look Up are elementary to the point of banality, which is as it should be Ringo Starr needn’t worry. Starr is the cowboy Beatle. He has loved this music from a young age, which is a long time. The Beatles wisely facilitated his enthusiasm. Starr sang a Buck Owens cover on Help!

James Delingpole

Irritating but watchable: American Primeval reviewed

Television

American Primeval should really be called Two Incredibly Annoying Women In The Wild West. Yes, the first title is more clickbaity, whetting the prurient viewer’s appetite for the savage, primitive violence that splatters over every other scene. But the second is more accurate. Not since Lily Dale in Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire have I rooted so fervently for the protagonist to meet a sticky end as I have with this series’ two feisty heroines. The Wild West depicted in American Primeval is grotesquely, mindlessly violent One, Sara Rowell (Betty Gilpin), is a mother on the run from the law.

9 January 2025

Calvin Po

The architectural provocations of I.M. Pei

Arts feature

When first considering architects for the new Louvre in 1981, Emile Biasini, the project’s head, liked that I.M. Pei was both ‘Chinese as well as American: Chinese in his respect of the past, and American in the way of radical solutions’. His controversial glass pyramid ignited much debate about which side won out. These entanglements, between traditionalism and modernity, East and West, would come to characterise both Pei’s Louvre and his six-decade career. After a seven-year gestation, the first comprehensive retrospective of the architect, at Hong Kong’s M+ museum, finally offered a longer view. Despite calling America home, Pei felt a duty to help China find its own architectural language Pei’s prolific career had a head start.

Deborah Ross

Jolie good: Maria reviewed

Cinema

Maria is a film by Pablo Larrain, who appears to have a soft spot for the psychodramas of legendary women (Spencer, Jackie) and has turned his attention to the prima donna Maria Callas. It stars Angelina Jolie, who trained as an opera singer for the role, God bless her, and while her voice is sometimes blended with Callas’s – isn’t that like adding ordinary plonk to a Château Lafite? – it still feels like karaoke, albeit karaoke of the most elevated kind. It’s not Mamma Mia!. It’s not your standard biopic either. This is Larrain, remember. Plus linear cradle-to-grave narratives are no longer in vogue – even though I wish they were. (I miss the moment when talent is first discovered, as well as, of course, those peeling posters noting the venues played.

Daisy Dunn

Why I’m obsessed with Farming Today

Radio and podcasts

Farming Today airs at an undignified hour each morning on Radio 4. On the few occasions I’ve caught it live I have felt, first of all, relief that I am not a farmer; second, inadequacy; and finally, a surge of evangelism for the farmer’s way of life. I am now reaching the conclusion that getting up early enough to listen to Farming Today is the very least we can all do. Listening to Farming Today helps dispel the romance of living off-grid By no means will everything discussed on the programme hold relevance for your life. One feature last week was dedicated to a project to preserve ten acres of salt marsh downstream from Totnes. Another recent episode explored the Lakeland barns being saved for cultural heritage.

Craig Raine

What makes a good title?

Exquisite: Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, at Hampstead Theatre, reviewed

Theatre

The Invention of Love opens with death. Tom Stoppard’s play about A.E. Housman starts on the banks of the Styx, where the recently deceased poet is waiting for Charon, the boatman, to ferry him across the water. Charon has been told to pick up ‘a scholar and a poet’ and he’s expecting two souls, not one. Houseman explains that he pursued both careers and is therefore a solo passenger. The play’s storyline emerges slowly and with immaculate taste. Stoppard is not one for cheap tricks This takes place in 1936, the year of Housman’s death, and we then flip back to Oxford in the 1870s. The river Styx becomes the Cherwell, where Housman and two chums are paddling upstream while discussing a flamboyant young intellectual, Oscar Wilde.

Isabel Hardman

The Natural History Museum’s new Evolution Garden is inspired

Playing Nice is beautifully done – but they miscalculated the opening scene

Television

There must have been a time when slow-burn psychological thrillers didn’t start with a scene of high drama followed by a caption that reads ‘Three months earlier’ – but if so, it’s getting hard to remember it. The latest programme to deploy the tactic was Playing Nice, which began with James Norton running towards the sea screaming ‘Theo!’ as a child’s body bobbed, face-down, in the waves. He was next seen, post-caption, laughing with his pre-school son in various picturesque Cornish locations while using the word ‘buddy’ a lot. Not to be outdone in the great-parent stakes, his wife also piled on the cuddles for little Theo. Before long, Miles had developed the habit of glowering menacingly when nobody was watching This idyll, however, didn’t last long.

Michael Hann

The problem with Paul McCartney is he wrote too many good songs

Pop

Don Bradman, the greatest cricketer of all time, was once asked if he reckoned he could have maintained his batting average of 99.94 against the fearsome West Indian bowling attack of the time. Oh no, he said. Not a chance. He’d probably be hitting in the 50s, like the very best batsmen of the time. But then again, he added, he was in his late 60s so it was unrealistic to expect better. Seeing the Stones is the only thing that compares to the human-jukebox effect of McCartney live That’s the position Paul McCartney occupies in the world of pop. No, at 82 years old he is not going to make a new Revolver or Abbey Road. And no, he can’t do the Little Richard scream like he used to 60 years ago. But he is still, as they say in sport, the Goat. The undisputed champion of the world.

30 December 2024

Richard Bratby

Our verdict on Pappano’s first months at the London Symphony Orchestra

Classical

Sir Antonio Pappano began 2024 as music director of the Royal Opera and ended as chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Around the middle of the year, there was a sort of retrospective; a stock-taking, if you like, as he made the transition to this third act of his career. Warner Classics released a box set of Pappano’s recordings with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome, where he held the top job from 2005 to 2023. And Pappano published a memoir, My Life in Music – a masterclass in diplomacy. No beans were spilled, and they were never likely to be. You don’t survive 22 years in an international opera house without learning discretion; not, that is, if you intend to remain sane.

Anthony Sattin

A dreamy, if overly ambitious show: Silk Roads, at the British Museum, reviewed

Exhibitions

Towards the end of the British Museum’s Silk Roads show, there is a selection of treasures found in England. Among them is a copper flagon made in Syria and buried in Essex in the late 500s. It is believed that the flagon belonged to an English mercenary who went to fight for the Byzantines against the Sassanians in the 570s. The flagon’s looping handle would have held it tight to a saddle, so perhaps it came to England attached to the warrior’s horse as he rode home from his adventures in the East. There are many spectacular objects in this exhibition. Very many If objects are to inspire more than awe in us, we also need a handle.

Rod Liddle

The real best album of last year

The Listener

Grade: A+ In a desperate wish to avoid the appellation of a derided genre, this young man from Asheville, North Carolina has been described by the press as Americana, slacker rock, indie and alt-country. But we at The Spectator will call it how it is: this is country rock, pure and simple. And if country rock isn’t slacker, indie and a little bit alt, then it’s the Eagles – and nobody wants to start going down that road. Of the four albums generally thought to have been the best of last year across a vast number of publications, I’ve reviewed three of them for you – Beyoncé, Fontaines D.C. and Charli XCX’s meretricious, boring brattery. This is the fourth and dang I wish I hadn’t missed it, because it’s the best of the lot.

Lloyd Evans

Brutal and brilliant portrait of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford

Theatre

The Last Days of Liz Truss? is a one-woman show about the brief interregnum between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. We first meet the future prime minister at a nursery school in Paisley where she orders the teachers to call her Elizabeth and not to use her first name, Mary. This establishes her combative, self-righteous nature and her utter dislike of authority. Truss is like the smell of gas indoors. Even a tiny amount is too much She left Oxford with a PPE degree and became a political activist while setting her sights firmly on parliament. (By researching the CVs of every sitting member, she had discovered that one in 30 of them held a degree in PPE from Oxford.) She was on her way.

Richard Bratby

A miracle at the RSC: genuinely funny Shakespeare

Theatre

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? Most subsidised theatres hanker for political relevance. Even so, when the Royal Shakespeare Company planned its new production of Twelfth Night, they can hardly have expected that by Christmas 2024 we’d have Malvolio as prime minister. The curious thing is that, as portrayed by Samuel West, Shakespeare’s eternal killjoy cuts rather a sympathetic figure. He’s elegant in dress and carriage, with a shadow of a northern brogue to suggest that this is a man who has strived hard for his status and sees himself as upholding values that have a real, and higher, worth.

James Delingpole

No one will convince me that Keira Knightley can fight: Black Doves reviewed

Television

If your heart sinks at the prospect of a thriller series starring Keira Knightley as a highly trained undercover agent with unfeasible martial skills, join the club. The reason I was drawn to Black Doves was when I realised it had been written by that master of tongue-in-cheek, ultraviolent, popcorn TV, Joe Barton (Giri/Haji). However disappointing Knightley might be, I thought, Barton’s mordant humour, surreal imagination and sassy dialogue would more than ease the pain.