Arts Archives

Bonkers: Young Sherlock reviewed

Television

Judging from the two biggest new streaming dramas around, the taste these days runs towards the kitchen sink – not as in gritty northern blokes smoking Woodbines and moaning a lot; rather, as in the writers throwing in everything but. A fortnight ago, I reviewed Lisa McGee’s How to Get to Heaven from Belfast: a Netflix show that doesn’t so much combine slapstick, violence, cheery banter, mean banter, mystery, media satire and dark broodings on life, as simply shuttle between them. Now comes Young Sherlock, directed by Guy Ritchie, where again anybody searching for dramatic unity will search in vain.

Tom Slater

Morrissey is pop’s prophet of England

Pop

Morrissey is back. And he’s sassy as hell. At the O2 on Saturday night, the once-waifish Smiths frontman turned stocky solo crooner cast shade on the haters: ‘As you all know, the jealous bitches tried to get rid of me, but thanks to you, and thanks to me, I’m still here.’ It was classic Mozzer: withering, self-aggrandising, hilarious. With a European tour and a new album about to be released, Morrissey is in a score-settling mood. And with good reason. Make-Up Is a Lie, out yesterday, is his 14th album. But it wasn’t supposed to be. Bonfire of Teenagers, originally slated for release in 2023, still remains on the shelf, following rows with his former record label. As does another unreleased album. He claims it’s cancellation.

Lloyd Evans

Fans of George Eliot are in for a shock: Bird Grove at Hampstead Theatre reviewed

Theatre

Bird Grove by Alexi Kaye Campbell is a comedy of manners set in 1841. A portly suitor, Horace, arrives at a respectable house intending to propose to a rebellious and brilliant 22-year-old, Mary Ann. Horace’s father is dying and he must find a bride before nightfall or lose a substantial legacy. This ludicrous but very human situation starts the play. It’s instantly gripping. Mary Ann is in the drawing room being treated for headaches by a French mesmerist along with two wealthy radicals, Mr and Mrs Bray, who encourage her political activism. Her father, Robert, introduces his guests to each other and invites them to stay for tea. This fascinating glimpse of her early life shows George Eliot as a surly, arrogant, spoilt and heartless pest A hilariously awkward party ensues.

Richard Bratby

Bracingly inventive: Phantasy by the Piatti Quartet reviewed

The Listener

Grade: A You think you know a musical genre; then a new recording comes along and pulls something unexpected out of the bag. Walter Willson Cobbett (1847-1937) was an improbable culture-hero; a belt tycoon from Blackheath who devoted his spare time (and most of his profits) to domestic music-making, commissioning major British composers of his day and editing the single most readable reference book ever written about chamber music. Two ‘Phantasies’ from Cobbett’s competitions – reasonably familiar masterpieces of English pastoralism by Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells – are the starting point for this imaginative disc from the Piatti Quartet.

Michael Hann

Flexible and imaginative: Wednesday at the Roundhouse reviewed

Pop

How is it that two things that are fundamentally the same can be completely different? Two bands, each harking back to a specific historical reference point in heavy music, each using distortion and volume as an important part of their presentation. Standing just outside the big old turntable shed’s main room you could just hear them and easily imagine Wednesday and Airbourne following each other on some festival stage and sharing the same audience. Not so much inside the room, though. Wednesday, however they might care to describe themselves, are currently a grunge band, but with a singer-songwriter, Karly Hartzman, who dwells more in introspection and observation than rage and self-flagellation.

Oliver Basciano

A parade of monstrous and toxic generals: Beatriz Gonzalez reviewed

Exhibitions

You might be forgiven for thinking that a charity sale of particularly kitschy furniture has been set up just past the entrance of the Barbican Art Gallery. There’s a chunky brown dressing table, an ornate table several decades out of fashion and a trio of bedside tables. They are piled haphazardly and on each is a garishly painted picture, invariably a pastiche of a historical painting or a Biblical scene. Raphael’s 1512 ‘Madonna and Child with St John’ rendered slightly sloppily where the mirror of the bureau once was; ‘The Last Supper’ on the table top; three popes in profile staring impassively from the tops of the nightstands.

Richard Bratby

‘I didn’t expect to love Wagner’

Arts feature

By the end of Siegfried, the third opera in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the king of the gods is in freefall. In the first opera, Das Rheingold, Wotan is a confident protagonist; a world-builder. In Die Walküre, we’ve seen him discover the limits of power, and felt his heart break. Now, in Siegfried, he’s a haunted figure; the solitary Wanderer, searching the world for answers that his all-powerful wisdom can no longer supply. He confronts the young hero Siegfried, and his law-giving spear shatters on the sword of a reckless, clueless boy. ‘All he can say is, “Go, then.

Alex Diggins

Will the Houses of Parliament burn down?

25 February 2026

Hermione Eyre

Marvellous but repetitious: Gwen John – Strange Beauties reviewed

Exhibitions

A pilgrimage to Cardiff Central, sorry, Caerdydd Canolog (according to the signage in the station, which also had my return train’s destination ‘Lundain Padd’ton’) to see the new Gwen John show. She is being lauded as Wales’s greatest artist, but she left Tenby at 18 in 1895, and never went back. After studying at the Slade she moved to Paris, fell in love with Rodin, and adopted the Catholic faith.

Graeme Thomson

U2’s childlike response to world affairs

Pop

Whither the protest song in 2026? In January 1970, John Lennon wrote and recorded ‘Instant Karma!’ in a single day and had it in the shops a little over a week later – no mean feat given the mechanics of physical record production at the time. Nowadays, when the practicalities of releasing music are infinitely more streamlined, it has never been easier for artists to react to current events within moments of them occurring. And with the febrile news churn packing a year’s worth of drama into each week, there is certainly no shortage of material.

Lloyd Evans

The blandness of Hugh Bonneville

Theatre

Shadowlands, by William Nicholson, is a solid and unsurprising account of the brief marriage between C.S. Lewis (known as Clive), and the American poet Joy Davidman. Her cancer diagnosis overshadowed their romance but they snatched a few lustful holidays together before she expired in an NHS hospital in 1960. Hugh Bonneville, as Clive, delivers his standard three-note performance – bemused decency, bumbling hesitation, ironic charm – which tells us nothing about the author’s inner life. Bonneville has succeeded in building a huge presence in the movie industry from an almost complete dearth of actorly qualities. He’s not handsome, sexy, tough, athletic, amusing, mysterious, evil or even slightly unpleasant. He’s not brilliant or stupid. He’s not admirable or despicable.

Deborah Ross

Fascinating: EPiC – Elvis Presley in Concert reviewed

Cinema

EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert is a concert documentary that grew out of the 65 boxes of unseen Las Vegas performances discovered by Baz Luhrmann while researching his 2022 biopic Elvis. As I have little interest in ‘the King’ I approached with a heavy heart. But now? I’m abundantly interested. In fact, I’ve shifted from indifference to thinking that if I could see one musical artist live at their peak it would have to be him. He’s that electrifying. A warning, however: it’s a 12A. ‘Elvis picks up a bra thrown on to the stage during a concert performance and puts it on his head,’ notes the BBFC. I wish I’d had the chance to throw a bra that he’d put on his head. Hopefully, it would have been one of my nicer ones that day. They are of varying quality.

James Delingpole

Enjoyably old-fashioned: ITV’s The Lady reviewed

Television

I lasted all of five minutes with Netflix’s tasting menu-length Being Gordon Ramsay. This surprised me, because I’ve long had a bit of a soft spot for the irascible, crevice-faced, sweary old ham. I know that all reality TV is fake but I’ve always quite enjoyed watching carrot-top pretending to lose his rag yet again in some rat-infested culinary cesspit before transforming it, in the space of a month, into a Michelin three-star. Ramsay no longer even pretends that his programmes are anything more than extended plugs for his brand But the dishonesty and contrivance and brazen commercialism of this autohagiography are just too much to stomach.

Richard Bratby

A playful, big-hearted, intelligent new opera

Classical

Some people like art to have a message. So here’s one, delivered by Katsushika Hokusai near the end of Dai Fujikura and Harry Ross’s new opera The Great Wave. ‘Remember art won’t change the world,’ sings the great painter (as incarnated by the baritone Daisuke Ohyama), and for that line alone I’d gladly have given the show five stars, if the Spectator did anything as barbaric as award stars. Words to live by, at least if you’re an artist; and the very private bliss of a life devoted to creativity is the heart, mind and dramatic engine of The Great Wave. Is that enough to sustain a full-length opera?

Jonathan Meades

The genius of John Vanbrugh

Arts feature

Van’s genius, without Thought or Lecture,Is hugely turn’d to Architecture. Jonathan Swift’s dismissive jest has never been forgotten. It may not be as vituperative as ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’ but it is there ready for duty whenever the skirmish between the principals’ proxies is resumed in all its petty self-importance. It’s England, so social class looms. While Vanbrugh strode with ease among kings and bitchy duchesses, heavily made-up Foppingtons and grand cru horizontales, the resentful Hawksmoor – his collaborator – lurked in the shadows meekly giving great forelock and not receiving the commissions he deserved.

18 February 2026

Lloyd Evans

Dazzling: I’m Sorry, Prime Minister at the Apollo Theatre reviewed

Theatre

Jim Hacker is back in the West End. I’m Sorry, Prime Minister, written by Jonathan Lynn (who co-wrote the original TV series), brings us the former PM in semi-retirement as the Master of Hacker College, Oxford. Jim, now Lord Hacker, is facing a revolt by the students and the senior fellows who claim to have been offended by his high-table banter. He was overheard making positive comments about the British Raj and suggesting that the word ‘negro’ should not be expurgated from the work of James Baldwin. Both opinions are blasphemous according to the killjoy theocrats who govern our political discourse. Jim is ordered to quit his post but he refuses and the college authorities offer him a chilling compromise.

Daisy Dunn

The problem with books podcasts

Radio

The Rest Is History has a new spin-off podcast called The Book Club. If you listen to the former, you’ll know Dominic Sandbrook but perhaps not his producer Tabby Syrett, who has joined him as co-host for the new venture. Tom Holland had presumably nipped off early to feed the cats. The release follows, slightly unfortunately, on the heels of a Sunday Times article in which the current crisis in sales of non-fiction is attributed in part to the boom in factual podcasts. If people are no longer buying history books because they’re ‘getting their history’ from Spotify for free, then ought we to be wary of a podcast about novels, lest we stop buying those as well?

Sam Leith

Entirely absorbing – and wonderfully tense: Cairn reviewed

A highlight in an otherwise dull season: Pierrot Lunaire reviewed

Dance

Even if Schoenberg’s song cycle Pierrot Lunaire is never going to feature on anyone’s Desert Island Discs, it stands as a work of rich and complex resonance shot through with all the neurotically introverted obsessions behind expressionism. Through Albert Giraud’s 21 opaque lyrics, scored atonally for a soprano who declaims rather than sings them, accompanied by seven instruments, it presents some sort of parable of the tormented artist adrift in a hostile world. Perhaps one can’t be charmed by the result, yet its power is undeniable: it grips even when it baffles and repels.

Robin Simon

How Greece carried the arts to rustic Rome

Exhibitions

‘Cultural cringe’, that lovely Aussie coinage, perfectly describes the Roman attitude towards Greece. The curators don’t say so, but it is the theme of this inspired exhibition. By the time the Romans finally took control of mainland Greece in 146 BC with the Battle of Corinth, they had long admired everything Greek. That date marks roughly the middle of the Hellenistic period, during which Greek culture and language dominated the Mediterranean and the Middle East. In comparison with Greeks, Romans were oafs – and knew it. In comparison with Greeks, Romans were oafs – and knew it After the battle, Corinth was flattened – quite an oafish thing to do – and emptied of all its works of art, which were sent to Rome.

Michael Hann

John Mulaney at his best is unstoppable

Doesn’t put a foot wrong: The Secret Agent reviewed

Cinema

Kleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent, which is about an academic on the run during Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship, won two Golden Globes, and has been nominated for four Oscars, and it’s truly special even if it is languorous and sprawling. It is one of those long films (two hours and 40 minutes) populated by so many characters you may well find yourself praying: ‘Please let me keep track of who’s who.’ Do hang on in there. It will all come right and be so worth it. The house is run by Dona Sebastiana, who may now be my favourite film character ever The film is set in 1977 which, an intertitle tells us, with some understatement, was a period of ‘great mischief’. It has an opening scene that will likely become iconic as it’s so brilliantly tense.

Richard Bratby

What a masterpiece. What a man: Borodin at the Barbican reviewed

Classical

Gianandrea Noseda conducted the London Symphony Orchestra last week in a programme of Stravinsky, Chopin and Borodin. The Stravinsky was a relative rarity – the divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss – and Chopin’s F minor concerto was played by Seong-Jin Cho, a pianist with a large following and a soaring reputation. Full disclosure: I was there for the Borodin, his Second Symphony of 1877. What a masterpiece, and what a man! Alexander Borodin was a scientist of international standing and a campaigner for women’s rights. Deeply in love with his wife, and an inveterate rescuer of stray cats, he was, he confessed to Liszt, ‘only a Sunday composer’. ‘But after all,’ replied the wizard of Weimar, ‘Sunday is a special day.

Sam Kriss

The art of conspiracy

Arts feature

If you lived anywhere near Kilburn half a decade ago, you might have noticed the messages one of our neighbours kept spray-painting over our walls and bridges. They’d appear overnight across a fairly wide swathe of north-west London, always in an immediately recognisable loopy handwriting, and the content was always recognisably loopy too. This person was trying to communicate something, but it was hard to tell exactly what. The messages said things like ‘STAND UP TO BLACK MASSES’ and ‘MERCY FROM DR HACK’ and ‘TAKE MERCY UNTO ME TAKE IT OUT OF IT’. Every few days for about a year, I would come across another one of these messages, and try to piece together exactly what the author was trying to tell me. There was something going on in the world, something bad.

11 February 2026

James Delingpole

The BBC’s Lord of the Flies is mesmerically brilliant

Television

I don’t much like Lord of the Flies. It’s nasty, weird in an oblique, psychotic way and wrong. William Golding – a war-damaged, depressive alcoholic – wrote it as an antidote to the uplifting escapism of The Coral Island, a Victorian yarn by R.M. Ballantyne about plucky young British castaways surviving and thriving in the tropics. Golding turned it on its head and revealed, supposedly, the heart of darkness that lurks within us all. Au contraire, Golding’s misanthropic message was bollocks Says who? The lesson of the Christmas truce in the trenches is that ordinary men have to be coerced into killing one another. The lesson of Jena is that free-thinking individuals are averse to being slaughtered which is why, as a corrective, Bismarck invented the modern education system.

Graeme Thomson

Mumford & Sons are trolling themselves: Prizefighter reviewed

Pop

It is axiomatic that most artists spend the first few years of their career trying to achieve some level of success; the next few years building and maintaining it; and the following period trying to dismantle all the bothersome preconceptions such success creates. After the passing of a further period of time – and by now, perhaps, a little chastened – most artists desire only one thing: to return to that happy, uncomplicated first stage where, they now realise, they had never had it so good. Often, this tactical retreat proves to be significantly harder than they imagined. You get the sense that everybody involved desperately wants it to be 2012 again On Mumford & Sons’ sixth album, you get the sense that everybody involved desperately wants it to be 2012 again.

Deborah Ross

Eye-catching but superficial: ‘Wuthering Heights’ reviewed

Cinema

Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ had purists losing their minds from the get-go. They lost their minds at the casting – Margot Robbie is too old for Cathy; Jacob Elordi is too white for Heathcliff – and then lost their minds at the trailer, which is all heaving bosoms and kinky vibes set to Charli XCX beats. But Fennell has made it clear that it is her vision of Emily Brontë’s novel, hence the quotation marks around the title, and that she wants it to feel as she felt when she first read the book at 14 years old. I was willing to cut her considerable slack but did her 14-year-old self, I had to wonder, make it to the end? Who, in their right mind, would sell it as a Valentine’s date film if they had? I may be on #TeamPurist here.

Lloyd Evans

No chemistry between the performers: Arcadia at the Old Vic reviewed

Theatre

The Old Vic’s production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard has a vital component missing. The house. Stoppard’s brilliant historical comedy is set in a country manor owned by the Coverly family and the script examines, among other things, the evolution of decorative taste during the 18th and 19th centuries. But no architecture is present on stage. The audience has to imagine what the show fails to supply because the Old Vic’s interior has been redesigned ‘in the round’ with a central playing area encircled by pews as seats. This leaves no room for a large-scale set. Arranging the venue like a boxing ring ensures that parts of the action are invisible to parts of the audience.

Digby Warde-Aldam

Warhol meets Rauschenberg: John Giorno retrospective reviewed

Exhibitions

At the end of last week, I caught a budget flight to Milan to see a woman. As soon as I arrived I was bundled into a Fiat Panda and sped southwards for Bologna’s annual art weekend, its events ranging from the reverential to the ridiculous. In the latter camp was MAMbo’s John Giorno retrospective, which – for Giorno is a bona fide hero – promised to be superb. It wasn’t, but a bad homage to Giorno is a homage to Giorno all the same. Born in Brooklyn in 1936, he joined the merchant navy as a young man and, on returning to New York, became both a highwire avant-garde poet and an acolyte of Andy Warhol, who filmed him sleeping for five hours straight and presented the result as mode-shifting cinema.