Arts Archives

The best British Nutcracker

Dance

The Nutcracker is one of those Christmas traditions that turns out to be not very traditional at all. First performed in St Petersburg in 1892, it didn’t catch on outside Russia until the late 1950s, when Balanchine’s version for New York City Ballet was repeatedly screened on network television in the USA and Festival Ballet’s production became a hardy perennial at the Royal Festival Hall. The Royal Ballet embraced it only in 1968; since then, it has become globally ubiquitous and an infallible money-spinner. The enormous affection that The Nutcracker inspires is underpinned by a magnificent score that shows Tchaikovsky at his most freshly inventive (it’s bizarre that he composed it joylessly, under duress). Yet the dramatic scenario it illustrates is insolubly problematic.

James Walton

The road to the final snow-gazing scene is tortuous: Sky Max’s The Heist Before Christmas reviewed

Television

When it comes to one-off family dramas for Christmas, two things are pretty much guaranteed. They’ll begin with credits announcing a starry cast, and they’ll end with a redeemed character gazing at some falling snow as the music swells. The only tricky bit, then, is what should happen in-between. Should the redemption take place against a backdrop of vaguely gritty realism? Should plausibility be a consideration, or can the writers just rely on the magic of Christmas to get them out of any plot-related trouble? If Santa’s involved – as he so often is – should the show believe in Father Christmas? In the case of The Heist Before Christmas – set in Northern Ireland – the respective answers are ‘up to a point’, ‘I’ll get back to you on that one’ and ‘er…’.

Guy Hayward

The art of walking

A short history of stained glass

In Mumbai, orchestras are playing western classics without apology

Classical

Choosing a concert opener is an art in its own right. Fashions shift: the traditional overture has fallen from favour in recent years, and you might go seasons now without hearing such one-time favourites as The Thieving Magpie or Euryanthe. The opening slot is more likely to contain something short and contemporary, or worthy and obscure (cynics call it ‘box-ticking repertoire’). Or it might be empty, tipping you straight into a symphony or concerto the way a Michelin-starred chef presents his signature creation – unadorned, on a bare white plate. The Symphony Orchestra of India began its latest UK tour with John Williams’s ‘Imperial March’ from The Empire Strikes Back – and goodness alone knows why.

Rod Liddle

Pleasant, underwhelming: Kurt Vile’s Back to Moon Beach reviewed

The Listener

Grade: C+ Maximum points for self-awareness, you have to say. The title track of this pleasant, if largely underwhelming, album include the lines: ‘These recycled riffs aren’t going anywhere, any time.’ Never a truer word spoken. Here, this fitfully engaging singer-songwriter shuffles through predictable chord changes pinioned by forgettable piano riffs and intones – deploying an often exaggerated southern drawl somewhat at odds with his Pennsylvanian provenance – basic and repetitive melodies which stay in the memory for about the half-life of Oganesson and then vanish. There is a pleasing twang to the guitar, bursts of scuzzy bottleneck and the occasional lap steel, but the songs go nowhere, as Kurt is generous enough to admit.

Lloyd Evans

You’ll want all the characters to die: Infinite Life, at the Dorfman Theatre, reviewed

Theatre

Infinite Life is about five American women, all dumpling-shaped, who sit in a hotel garden observing a hunger strike. Some of them haven’t touched food for days, some for weeks. ‘Don’t be afraid to puke,’ counsels one of the dumplings. ‘Puking is good.’ They pass their afternoons wittering inanely about nothing at all. One dumpling is an air hostess, another works in banking, a third has a job as a fast-food executive. Or so they claim. Each of the dumplings might be lying to the others but it would make no difference because nothing connects them, and they have no stake in the situation other than the desire to burn up time.

Deborah Ross

Fine for the kiddies, given they’re clueless: Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget reviewed

Cinema

The original Chicken Run (2000), which is generally considered the best riff on The Great Escape ever made starring stop-motion poultry, did not require a sequel – but here it is anyway. Now you’ll probably expect me to say that Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget isn’t a patch on the original so I will: it isn’t. It’s not bad-bad. It’s definitely something you can stick the kids in front of, given they don’t know any better. But it’s not nearly as inventive or funny or affecting and, while Aardman films have always looked and sounded like no other, this has a generic rather than a quirky, handmade feel. Chances are you’ve had bigger disappointments in life, but it is a disappointment all the same.

David Starkey

David Starkey on the inventor of the portrait

Exhibitions

On 12 November 1549, the 12-year-old Edward VI, newly liberated from the tutelage of his overweening uncle, Lord Protector Somerset, was at last able to enter his father Henry VIII’s private apartments in the Palace of Whitehall. From the extraordinary mixture of treasures and bric-à-brac he found there, he chose one thing: ‘a book of patterns of physiognomies’ by his father’s court painter, Hans Holbein, who had died in 1543. Edward was already familiar with his fellow European rulers from their portraits in the long gallery at St James’s, which seem to have been labelled and arranged as a teaching tool for the boy. Now, on the threshold of power, he wanted to familiarise himself with the establishment of Tudor England.

Laura Gascoigne

A Nativity that sends shivers down the spine

Arts feature

Hieronymus Bosch was not a natural painter of religious images. His terrifying visions of Hell may have helped to keep congregations on the path of righteousness, but they did not inspire feelings of devotion – which could explain why none of the large altarpieces he painted remained over their altars after his death. In the eyes of the church, his Last Judgments were titillating: one painting showing ‘monstrous creatures from the underworld’ was removed from a church in his native ‘s-Hertogenbosch during his lifetime by officials offended by its orgy of nudity. Even his ‘Adoration of the Magi’ (c.

12 December 2023

Michael Hann

Why I love the Hold Steady

Live music is thriving right now. According to the US trade magazine Billboard, Taylor Swift’s Eras tour has so far grossed an estimated $838m, and that’s just from 66 shows in the Americas. It’s already the second highest-grossing tour in pop history, and she hasn’t had to cross an ocean yet. At the top end, live music is indeed awash in cash. But at the grassroots end, it really isn’t: December began with one of the UK’s best loved small venues, Moles, in Bath, announcing its bankruptcy – one more historic room set to shut down. Bands complain about venues taking a third of their merchandise revenues, a recent practice that eats into one of the few areas where musicians really can make some money. International touring has become harder and harder.

6 December 2023

Damian Thompson

A marvel – how did Bradley Cooper pull it off? Maestro reviewed

Cinema

As the overture to Candide blazed away during the ovation for Maestro at the Venice Film Festival, three members of the audience flung their arms around in an imitation of Leonard Bernstein’s conducting style. They were his children, Jamie, Alexander and Nina, and their reaction said it all. Bradley Cooper, the film’s star and director, had pulled off a piece of cinematic chutzpah worthy of Lenny himself. His secret? The last quality you associate with the most embarrassingly flamboyant genius in American musical history: understatement. It’s easy to imagine the ghastly three-hour biopic Cooper didn’t make. West Side Story goes from near-catastrophe to wild triumph.

James Delingpole

Still the best thing on TV: Apple TV+’s Slow Horses reviewed

Television

Slow Horses is the best thing on television. And it’s now so successful and popular it can afford to launch series three with a sequence worthy of James Bond: Istanbul location budget; spectacular chase sequences involving cars and speedboats with some thrillingly dangerous manoeuvres round a huge container vessel; a beautiful, immaculately dressed female agent meeting (spoiler alert, though to be fair you can see this one coming a mile off) a tragically sticky end. Except it’s better than Bond – not that difficult these days, it must be said – because it is missing all that grim portentousness, over-earnestness and pomposity. The cars are beaten up and gadget-free; the stunts look plausible; and the agents behave like real human beings.

Graeme Thomson

Small moments vs Big Ideas: Peter Gabriel’s i/o reviewed

Pop

Peter Gabriel is terribly fond of a Big Idea. With Genesis he would sing in character as a lawnmower, a fox and as ‘Slipperman’. His final work with the band, in 1974, was The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, a double album driven by what we might kindly describe as a ‘kaleidoscopic’ narrative involving a Puerto-Rican protagonist on a voyage of self-discovery in New York City. Since going solo there has always been plenty of stuff whirling around each new Gabriel project. His Real World HQ in the West Country is part recording studio, part hi-tech hippie lab, encompassing conceptual technological probing, multimedia collaborations, NGOs and various foundations.

Richard Bratby

Simply not as good as Mozart’s: RCM’s Don Giovanni Tenorio reviewed

Classical

In Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, Don Giovanni finds himself in hell, chatting to the sentient Statue that dragged him to his doom. ‘It sounds rather flat without my trombones,’ admits the Statue, conceding that once you remove the genius of Mozart from the mix, you’re left with a trite (if titillating) morality tale. You could draw the same conclusion from the opera Don Giovanni Tenorio, by Giuseppe Gazzaniga (1743-1818), and if you haven’t heard of him you might wonder why not. Institutional racism? Patriarchal hegemony? Not this time. Gazzaniga was a Neapolitan composer of perfectly adequate operas that simply aren’t as good as Mozart’s. Anyway, Don Giovanni Tenorio made an amusing end-of-term show at the Royal College of Music.

Laura Gascoigne

Masterclass of an exhibition: Impressionists on Paper, at the RA, reviewed

Exhibitions

Viewers have different relationships with small pictures, or perhaps it’s the other way round: small pictures have different relationships with them. A big picture clamours for attention; a small picture you have to lean in to hear. No picture is more intimate than a drawing, and none brings you closer to the artist’s hand. A drawing can’t lie; it wears its facture on its sleeve. If you look closely, you can work out how it was made and even track the artist’s changes of direction. You can see, for instance, how Van Gogh launched into ‘The Fortifications of Paris with Houses’ (1887) in watercolour, then fortified the fortifications with gouache and chalk. A graphic artist by nature, he was at sea with watercolour washes.

Jenny McCartney

Fascinating: Radio 4’s Empire of Tea reviewed

Radio and podcasts

I can scarcely remember a time before tea: I started drinking it at around four, at home in Belfast, as a reward after school. Before long I was as fiercely protective of my right to a brew as the workers of British Leyland’s Birmingham car plant, who were famously spurred to strike action in 1981 when the management proposed cutting tea breaks by 11 minutes. Decades on, my passion is undiminished. There is no problem to which tea is not at least a partial solution: it restores flagging spirits, calms the over-excited, warms in winter and refreshes in summer.

Lloyd Evans

What a muddle: The House of Bernarda Alba, at the Lyttelton Theatre, reviewed

Theatre

Green, green, green. Everything on stage is the same shade of eau de Nil in the NT’s version of Federico García Lorca’s classic, The House of Bernarda Alba. All the furniture and props are green. The mirrors, the walls, the crucifixes, the clocks and even the bucket and the knife-rack bear the same queasy pigment. The idea, perhaps, is to suggest a lunatic asylum or an NHS waiting room. Lorca’s steamy tale is set in a remote Spanish village in the 1930s where life is dominated by the repressive and superstitious Catholic church. The story opens with a nasty matriarch, Bernarda Alba, celebrating her husband’s death by ordering her five unmarried daughters to spend the next eight years indoors, doing embroidery. No visitors are allowed.

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

The Spectator film critic who transformed cinema

Arts feature

‘Going to the pictures is nothing to be ashamed of,’ insisted the film writer Iris Barry in 1926. But it certainly wasn’t something to be proud of, either. To the cultural cognoscenti of the 1920s, Barry admitted, the cinema was barely an art at all – about as aesthetically significant as ‘passport photography’. And for much of polite society, seeing a film was done in secret, if at all. So it was a considerable boost for the fledgling medium when, 100 years ago, the word ‘cinema’ began to appear for the first time in this country above its own regular column, with its own dedicated critic, in the arts pages of The Spectator. Attending to this young art form was the even younger Barry.

29 November 2023

Lloyd Evans

An amusing playlet buried in 150 minutes of rhetoric: Mates in Chelsea, at the Royal Court, reviewed

Theatre

Theatres outside London like to produce shows that appeal to their local communities. Inside London, where cultural attitudes are strangely warped, theatres are happy to disregard the neighbourhoods they serve, and they show little interest in the lives of their customers. But the Royal Court Theatre and Hampstead Theatre have both chosen to stage shows that feature characters who live nearby. Mates in Chelsea, at the Royal Court, stars a bone-idle superbrat, Tuggy, whose inheritance is threatened when his snooty mother (who is brilliantly played by Fenella Woolgar) decides to flog the family castle in Northumbria. An offer is received from a Russian billionaire, Oleg, and Tuggy promptly has a meltdown. After an elaborate farce, the play ought to peter out.

James Walton

Embarrassingly addictive: Channel 4’s The Couple Next Door reviewed

Television

For years now, lots of TV thrillers have begun with a terrified woman running through some woods. But not The Couple Next Door. Instead, the first episode opened with the sight of an isolated cabin and the sound of a gunshot – and only then did a terrified woman run through some woods. Why the woman was terrified we haven’t yet learned, but we do know who she is – because in the next scene, her pre-terrified self and her partner were moving into their new house in a quiet, well-heeled Leeds cul-de-sac where every adult not mowing a lawn was washing a car. ‘Hello, suburbia,’ said her partner, perhaps unnecessarily.

Annie Nightingale

Britain’s forgotten female pop artist

Exhibitions

T o describe Pauline Boty as a ‘pioneer’ is a bit like calling someone a ‘one-off’. It’s not an adequate description of her in any way. Pauline was the only female British pop-art painter of the early 1960s. You may not know of her. She died in 1966, aged 28, and her name has remained very much in obscurity ever since. Pauline, in her youth, appeared to have it all. She had movie-star looks, a provocative intelligence and a magnetic personality. ‘She was beautiful, with this marvellous laugh: clever, very bright, very much the early feminist,’ says designer Celia Birtwell, who lived with her. Male interviewers would ask: ‘What’s a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?

Michael Hann

‘Stomp clap hey’ music: Noah Kahan, at O2 Forum Kentish Town, reviewed

Pop

I first heard of Noah Kahan in a cave in France this summer, when my 23-year-old daughter started wailing with distress at realising she had missed the chance to buy tickets to see him because she was in a cave when they went on sale (two shows at the Forum sold out in seconds). Kahan, a 26-year-old singer-songwriter from Vermont, has so far made very little impact on the world of the over-thirties, but his contemporaries and those a little younger adore him. If you Google reviews, you won’t find very much from the traditional music press or from big newspapers and magazines – but you’ll find plenty from student papers. What they like so much about him is a little mysterious.

Deborah Ross

Kaurismaki is the business: Fallen Leaves reviewed

Cinema

Even though Aki Kaurismaki has won every award going and is a household name in his native Finland, where he is treated like a god, it may be that you’ve never heard of him. He is the business. He specialises in understated dramas about deadpan losers whose hopes are often crushed, but who somehow find comfort. If that doesn’t sell it, try this: he is so briskly clear-eyed that his films never outstay their welcome and his latest, Fallen Leaves, runs to just 81 minutes. Could we love him more? Might he not be our favourite auteur of all time?

Calvin Po

The art of not taking out the bins: Madelon Vriesendorp, at the Cosmic House, reviewed

Exhibitions

‘I was really angry at this fly,’ the artist Madelon Vriesendorp explains with a grin as I hold out my hand to shake hers, which is in a splint. ‘I jumped onto the bed to swat it, fell over and broke my wrist.’ Vriesendorp is showing me around her latest exhibition, which follows a long list of achievements: she co-founded the ground-breaking architectural practice OMA, and her illustrations of architectural theory defined its visual language for a generation. Now in her late seventies, she’s still characteristically unserious, except about one thing: ‘I’m very serious about jokes.

Richard Bratby

Eloquent, understated poetry: Llyr Williams, at the Wigmore Hall, reviewed

Classical

Imagine being a concert pianist and choosing your own programmes. All those possibilities; all that power! ‘I am the orchestra!’ declared Hector Berlioz, imagining himself inside the head of Franz Liszt. ‘I am the chorus and conductor as well. My piano sings, broods, flashes, thunders.’ The heart lifts when a pianist thinks a little differently about their recital programmes and tries to make connections and tell stories beyond the familiar tramlines of Bach, Beethoven and late Schubert. Don’t get me wrong; the Austro-German big boys are a healthy part of a balanced musical diet. It’s just that – well, you know. There is a world elsewhere. Solo piano recitals leave me cold.

Rupert Christiansen

The award-winning choreographer who fell foul of the mob

Arts feature

Ebullient, articulate and eminently sensible, Rosie Kay never wanted to be a martyr to the culture wars. A modern dance choreographer with an impressive track record – including 5 Soldiers, an award-winning exploration of army life, contributions to the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympics and a fellowship at Oxford – she would rather be getting on with the business of creating new work for her small dance company. But she’s been given no choice – and all because of a party she held in August 2021 at her home in Birmingham.

22 November 2023

Rupert Christiansen

An awesome spectacle: The Mongol Khan, at the London Coliseum, reviewed

Dance

When the Ballets Russes first presented Fokine’s Polovtsian Dances at Covent Garden in 1911, such was its orgiastic savagery that ladies in the audience were said to be genuinely terrified that its grease-painted warriors were about to leap off the stage and ravish them. The Mongol Khan, a great hit imported from Ulan Bator, may not induce genteel screaming, but it has some awe-inspiring moments and belongs in the same ersatz orientalist tradition as Fokine’s ballet – primitive Asiatic culture made colourfully palatable to western tastes.

Graeme Thomson

Melodic elegance and literate sass: Ben Folds, at Usher Hall, reviewed

Pop

Choose your weapon. Artists are closely defined in the public imagination by their instrument of choice. Though the most untamed and transgressive progenitors of rock’n’roll – Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard – were piano pounders, and despite the later efforts of Elton John, over time the instrument has come to be associated with restraint and politesse; the straight second cousin to rock’s clichéd wild child, the electric guitar. He strolled on stage like a stranger and left 100 minutes later as an old friend I hadn’t realised I’d missed American singer-songwriter Ben Folds has been playing with these expectations for the best part of 30 years, first in Ben Folds Five, then as a solo artist.