Arts Archives

Does gender matter? Making Modernism, at the Royal Academy, reviewed

Exhibitions

The catalogue to Making Modernism opens with an acknowledgment from the Royal Academy’s first female president, Rebecca Salter, that in the past it has overlooked women artists. To compensate, it has bundled seven – four headliners and three of their lesser-known contemporaries – into this one show. Excluded from official art schools and reliant on private tuition and ‘ladies’ academies’, these seven women escaped the feminine curse of the three ‘Ks’ – Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen and church) – to forge independent careers in Germany before the first world war. They didn’t constitute an art movement, though Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin – both comfortably off – facilitated one.

Tanjil Rashid

A once-great engine of culture, slowly running out of steam: the BBC at 100

Arts feature

I had my birthday recently – one I share with a venerable old aunt who shaped my formative years. Well-travelled and fluent in more than 40 languages, Auntie broadened my horizons well beyond the dreary suburb where I lived. She informed me about events in faraway lands, but also steeped me in ‘our island story’. On intimate terms with everybody in the arts, Auntie was unbelievably cultivated. Back then, she also spoke with an unmistakable clarity that was a model for non-native speakers – such as myself. Millions worldwide acquired English in this way, gaining with it a whole civilisation. And so last month, on my birthday, I was genuinely more moved by the thought of the BBC turning 100.

16 November 2022

Lloyd Evans

Rebecca Humphries is dynamite – pity about the play: Blackout Songs, at Hampstead Theatre, reviewed

Theatre

Viewers watching a good romcom need to fall in love with three things. The boy, the girl and the affair itself. The new Hampstead melodrama, Blackout Songs, scores just one out of three. Rebecca Humphries is adorably chic and sexy as the Soho seductress who drifts from bar to bar, picking up men. Her toyboy is a disappointment, a teenage deadbeat who has none of her louche gusto. And his character is a puzzle when it ought to be crystal clear. At the start of the action he wears a neck-brace and speaks with a stammer. In the next scene, his neck has healed and his stammer has vanished as well. Is he two characters? Or is he a con man who assumes different personalities, and if so why? He dresses in a paint-spattered tracksuit but he claims to be a welder, a rock star and a fine artist.

James Walton

Riveting: C4’s Who Stole the World Cup reviewed

Television

Have you ever seen film of the England 1966 football team holding the World Cup at the Royal Garden Hotel, Kensington, on the evening of their victory? The answer, I can guarantee, is no. Unbeknownst to everybody except a few policemen and FA officials, what they were holding was only a replica, made a few months previously after the real Jules Rimet trophy was stolenin London. But this was just one of the many eye-popping disclosures in Monday’s 1966: Who Stole the World Cup? Of course, it’s not uncommon for a documentary to claim the tale it’s telling is scarcely believable. Much rarer is for that claim, as here, to be true.

Richard Bratby

Hugely entertaining: Royal Opera’s Alcina reviewed

Classical

A hotel bellboy, the story goes, discovered George Best in a luxury suite surrounded by scantily clad lovelies and empty champagne bottles. ‘George, George’, he sighed. ‘Where did it all go wrong?’. It’s the same deal, essentially, with Ruggiero, hero of Handel’s Alcina. As the curtain rises he’s in the boudoir of Alcina, a smokin’ hot love-witch who lives on a paradise island with her minxy little sister, Morgana, and whose only serious failing – and who are we, really, to judge? – is a fondness for transforming her enemies into animals. This being an epic tale of chivalry, and this being 1735, it’s universally understood that having this much fun simply isn’t on.

Rupert Christiansen

Exhilarating: English National Ballet triple bill, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

Dance

Headed for San Francisco, Tamara Rojo bows out of her directorship of English National Ballet with an exhilarating triple bill demonstrating her success in expanding the repertory and raising technical standards. If only the company could tour this class of work outside London. The climax of the evening was a new version of The Rite of Spring by Mats Ek – his second stab at dramatising music so graphically vivid and violently aggressive that choreographers since Nijinsky have struggled to find imagery and movement to match its primal energy. Even Kenneth MacMillan and Pina Bausch didn’t quite hack it for me. Ek has avoided the clichés: nobody stomps about plastered in scary face paint. I wonder if his scenario was inspired by Ari Aster’s elegant horror film Midsommar?

Rod Liddle

What’s the point of these soul covers? Bruce Springsteen’s Only the Strong Survive reviewed

The Listener

Grade: B What’s the worst-ever cover version (after Madonna’s hilarious stab at ‘American Pie’)? I reckon Creedence Clearwater Revival’s interminable mangling of ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’, or maybe the J. Geils Band stamping over ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ in hobnail boots – two bands I otherwise adore. Jeff Beck boring his way through ‘Superstition’? The Stranglers wrecking ‘Walk on By’? All Saints ripping the guts out of ‘Lady Marmalade’? I think you catch my drift, because the lesson is pretty clear: no, really, do not play that funky music, white boy.

Michael Hann

Odd, rich and adventurous: Erykah Badu, at the Royal Festival Hall, reviewed

Pop

You couldn’t call Erykah Badu one of the world’s most productive artists: it’s 12 years since her last album, and she’s released just five of them in 25 years, plus a couple of mixtapes. You’re more likely to see her name in the papers for something stupid she’s said – that she can see the good in everybody, even Hitler, because he was ‘a wonderful painter’, for example – than because she’s done something musical. Which is a shame because like her equally unproductive neo-soul contemporaries (Maxwell – five albums in 26 years; D’Angelo – three in 27 years), the music still sounds extraordinary.

Deborah Ross

Ralph Fiennes at his most terrifying: The Menu reviewed

Cinema

The Menu is a comedy-horror-thriller set in an exclusive restaurant on a private island and it gives the rich a good kicking, like The Triangle of Sadness, except here they manage to keep their food down, mercifully. (At $1,200 a head, you’d hope so.) But the diners are not spared otherwise, and it’s nastily fun, if not pure evil, and should possibly come with a warning: after this, you will never, ever wish to dine anywhere that isn’t Nando’s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_uTkUGcHv4 The film is directed by Mike Mylod with a screenplay by Will Tracy and Seth Reiss. (Both Mylod and Tracy have worked on Succession.) The opening sees the group of diners waiting to take the boat over to the island where the restaurant, Hawthorne, is located.

Mathew Lyons

The bleak brilliance of Peanuts

Arts feature

The numbers are extraordinary. Charles M. Schulz, whose centenary falls next week, spent nearly 50 years of his life producing daily comic strips for Peanuts. Between 2 October 1950 and his death in February 2000, he drew a staggering 17,897 of them. He retired in December 1999 after a series of strokes and a cancer diagnosis; he died the day before his farewell strip was published. It’s not just the longevity that is remarkable. At its peak, Schulz’s work had a daily global audience of some 355 million. More than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries carried his strip. Meanwhile, the licensing industry created around his characters was introducing 20,000 new product lines annually. The property as a whole was turning over $1.1 billion a year.

10 November 2022

Graeme Thomson

The joy of B-sides

Pop

Paul Weller releasing a collection of solo B-sides is cause for mild celebration. After all, the Jam were one of the great B-side bands. ‘Tales From The Riverbank’, ‘The Butterfly Collector’, ‘Liza Radley’ – all A-list songs, relegated to the subs’ bench. Remember the B-side? That bijou, creative safe space which didn’t merely permit but positively encouraged artists to write parallel narratives of exploration, experimentation and extemporisation. I still remember the first B-side I fell in fascination with. It was called ‘Christ Versus Warhol’, a queasily psychedelic, wilfully odd indulgence on the wrong side of the Teardrop Explodes’ determinedly poppy ‘Passionate Friend’. I felt like the protagonist in Gregory’s Girl.

9 November 2022

John Phipps

The extraordinary case of Malcolm MacArthur

Radio and podcasts

Non-fiction tells you what happened, fiction affirms the kinds of things that happen. According to Aristotle, anyway. So while journalism seeks out unlikely events, fiction creates pleasing inevitabilities. The problem as it pertains to our brave narrative podcasters is that they have to straddle the two worlds: their material must be interesting and unusual, but their final story should have the poetic coherence of good old unreality. They have to turn ‘some things that happened’ into ‘a kind of thing that happens’. Otherwise it’s all evidence and no charge, each event indistinguishable in its randomness from a bolt of lightning.

Deborah Ross

Astonishing cinema: No Bears reviewed

Cinema

Jafar Panahi’s No Bears is, first and foremost, a wonderful film. More than this, you don’t need to know but I’ll tell you anyway. Panahi, an Iranian filmmaker, was banned from making films by the Iran government in 2010 yet has persisted clandestinely. One of his films (This Is Not a Film) was smuggled to the Cannes festival on a USB stick buried inside a cake. No Bears was wrapped in May this year; Panahi was arrested in July, and now he’s serving a six-year prison sentence for ‘propaganda against the system’. To make a film, any film, against such odds, is astonishing, but one as truly wonderful as this? Mind-blowing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Laura Gascoigne

The careers of artists like Carolee Schneemann and Stephen Cripps are unthinkable today

Exhibitions

During the 1964 debut of Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Meat Joy’ in Paris, a man in the audience tried to throttle the artist before being hauled off by three female spectators. Schneemann’s performance, an ‘exuberant sensory celebration of flesh’, involved semi-naked dancers tangling and grappling while bits of chicken, raw fish and hot dogs rained from above and buckets of paint sloshed underfoot.

James Delingpole

Riveting: Netflix’s The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself reviewed

Television

Gratingly edgy soundtrack, stomach-churning gore, torture, witchcraft, sadism and an indigestible title. The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself sounds exactly the sort of series most of us would wish to avoid. It’s aimed at young adults (based on a trilogy by Sally Green called Half Bad) and the only reason I was keen to give it a try was that it has been freely adapted by Joe Barton. For my money, Barton is – along with Jesse Succession Armstrong – the most exciting and original screenwriter currently working in TV.

Richard Bratby

A towering achievement: ENO’s The Yeomen of the Guard reviewed

Opera

The screw may twist and the rack may turn: the Tower of London, in Jo Davies’s new production of The Yeomen of the Guard, is a dark place indeed, and that’s as it should be. ‘Men may bleed and men may burn,’ intones Dame Carruthers, as she delivers a magic lantern show about the history of the Tower, complete with colour slides of famous beheadings. In The Mikado Gilbert uses capital punishment as a particularly spiky punchline, but in The Yeomen of the Guard, sentence of death has been passed before the curtain has even risen. The shadows are lengthening from the off, and even Sullivan’s cheeriest melodies have a dying fall.

Damian Thompson

King Charles III’s love of classical music

Arts feature

The musical tastes of King Charles III are more sophisticated than those of our late Queen. That’s not being rude: it’s just a fact. Her favourite musician appears to have been George Formby, whose chirpy songs she knew by heart. No doubt she relished their double entendres – but the hint of smut meant that, to her regret, she had to decline the presidency of the George Formby Society. Our new monarch, by contrast, adores the Piano Concerto in E flat major by Julius Benedict (1804-85). He recommended it in an interview a couple of years ago. I’d never heard of the piece, which existed only in manuscript until Howard Shelley and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra recorded it for Hyperion in 2008.

Lloyd Evans

The UK Drill Project, at The Pit, reviewed

Theatre

The UK Drill Project is a cabaret show that celebrates greed, criminality and drug-taking among black males in London. It opens with a septet of masked performers, sheathed in dark Lycra, singing a rhythmic poem while pretending to fire guns and stab people with knives. These sad young rappers are desperate to look scary because they’re scared themselves. And though they claim to be artists, their purpose in writing ‘drill’ songs and posting videos online is to protect their drug profits and to intimidate rival gangs. Musically, they lack accomplishment. They can’t play instruments and appear to own none. Harmony and melody are alien to them.

5 November 2022

Rupert Christiansen

Arts Council England and the war on opera

Instructed by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to move money away from London and reassign it to the regions as part of the Levelling Up strategy, Arts Council England has ended up making some very risky decisions. It has thrown funds at small untested groupuscules without a firm audience base and penalising major reputable institutions such as the Royal Opera House for their success and expertise. Given that the sector is struggling from the effects of the pandemic and the energy crisis – not to mention historic under-funding – the result could well be a catastrophic reduction in the quality and quantity of our cultural life, and a further blow to our international prestige. Opera is being particularly hard hit.

2 November 2022

Tanjil Rashid

Kazuo Ishiguro: My love affair with film

Arts feature

Everyone has a type they can’t resist. For the writer Kazuo Ishiguro, it’s old men. Old men secretly worried they’ve spent entire lives on the wrong side of history. Old men born in a world of certainty, transplanted to a different, more dubious one. Old men asking themselves, as so many of us will do (if we haven’t already): ‘What was it all for?’ But as I wait at the offices of a West End PR firm to interview Sir Kazuo about his new film with Bill Nighy, Living, I can’t help but wonder what unlikely preoccupations these are for arguably the nation’s greatest living literary talent. Those of us with humdrum lives may daydream about winning a Nobel Prize.

Laura Gascoigne

Thrilling: Hieroglyphs – unlocking ancient Egypt, at the British Museum, reviewed

Exhibitions

‘Poor old Mornington Crescent, I feel sorry for it with this highly made-up neighbour blocking the view it had enjoyed,’ commiserated Professor C.H. Reilly in the Architects’ Journal in 1928. He was talking about the new reinforced-concrete Carreras cigarette factory designed by architects Marcus Evelyn and Owen Hyman Collins that had just gone up across from the station. It wasn’t the concrete that bothered him so much as the make-up: the gaudily painted façade with papyrus-form columns copied from the ancient Egyptian tomb of Panehsy and the two huge black cats representing the goddess Bast – while advertising Black Cat cigarettes – flanking the entrance. How did this time-travelling lump of Egyptiana come to land in north London?

Daisy Dunn

Manet’s Mona Lisa: Radio 4’s Moving Pictures reviewed

Radio and podcasts

Elizabeth the First is a ten-part American podcast series that isn’t about Elizabeth I at all. The assumption of its producers seems to be that the Tudor monarch was all right – a bit of a trailblazer, one might say – but not really worthy of her title. The real ‘Elizabeth the First’ was actually Elizabeth Taylor. The series aims to present the actress as the first ‘influencer’ the world has ever known, even though poor old Taylor didn’t even know what Instagram was. Taylor did, however, court the media before the word ‘social’ was attached to it. And she didn’t need to take selfies because people were always shoving cameras inher face. The podcast is narrated by Katy Perry, the Californian singer who kissed a girl and liked it and then married Russell Brand.

James Walton

Refreshingly macho: BBC1’s SAS Rogue Heroes reviewed

Television

Sunday’s SAS Rogue Heroes – about the founding of perhaps Britain’s most famous regiment – began with a revealing variation on the usual caption in fact-based dramas about how everything in them really happened, except the things that didn’t. ‘The events depicted which seem most unbelievable,’ it read, ‘are mostly true.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTWqFccBsgg And from there the same sense of somewhat incredulous, head-shaking admiration for its subjects remained. The unexpected result was a 2022 BBC drama that took an unashamedly gung-ho approach to macho heroism – and that, give or take a spot of swearing and heavy-metal music, didn’t feel very different in tone from those classic British second world war films of the 1950s.

Lloyd Evans

The dialogue ripples with energy: King Hamlin, at the Park Theatre, reviewed

Theatre

King Hamlin is a shock-horror drama about gang crime in London. Hamlin, aged 17, has left school without learning any useful facts or skills. He even lacks a shirt to wear so he shows up for a job interview looking like a vagrant and starts to swear at his future boss. No work for him. He dreams of studying computer software but he doesn’t own a laptop and seems incapable of getting one. His life is devoid of functioning adults. There’s no teacher, relative, or competent older friend to advise him. No father, of course. His poor dad was knifed to death because he was ‘too good for the hood’. Which is a new cause of crime in London. An excess of virtue can get you stabbed, it seems.

Richard Bratby

A total (and often gripping) theatrical experience: Scottish Opera’s Ainadamar reviewed

Classical

Do you remember Osvaldo Golijov? Two decades ago he was classical music’s Next Big Thing: a credible postmodernist with a lush and listenable tonal flair, and an Argentinian with an interestingly complex European heritage in a millennium where everyone agreed – for a while, anyway – that the future was Latin American. Major labels recorded his music as soon as it was premièred; he was popular. Too popular for some – I remember a contemporary music promoter lamenting, with the demeanour of a housemaster who’s just found the head boy smoking behind the bins, that Golijov ‘hadn’t developed as we’d hoped’. Anyhow, Golijov was big, and then something stalled. Commissions failed to materialise, there were rumours of creative block, and the parade moved on.

Michael Hann

A generational pop talent: Rina Sawayama, at the O2 Academy Brixton, reviewed

Pop

The first time I saw Franz Ferdinand was at the sadly lost Astoria, just after the release of their first album. I’d liked but not loved the record, but that night I experienced the single most exciting thing in live music: artist and audience absolutely united in the conviction that this – the biggest gig of their career so far and by far – was the last time this band would be playing a place this small. Both band and audience – and even the VIP enclosure of the balcony, in front of where I stood – radiated excitement about all of us being in this together: prepare for lift-off, next stop the stars! Rina Sawayama’s Brixton show was the same febrile, euphoric, shared experience.

Deborah Ross

Heartbreakingly tender: Living reviewed

Cinema

Living is a remake of one of the great existential masterpieces of the 20th century, Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), which didn’t need remaking, many will grumble, but once you’ve seen this you’ll be glad that it was. It is as profoundly and deeply felt as the original and as heartbreakingly tender. It asks the same question – what makes a life meaningful? – but this time with Englishness, bowler hats, the sweet trolley at Fortnum’s and Bill Nighy. Really, what more could you want? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2L8CP31-14 The film is directed by Oliver Hermanus with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, who first mooted the idea.

26 October 2022

Rupert Christiansen

One long moan of woe: Crystal Pite’s Light of Passage, at the Royal Opera, reviewed

Dance

I was moved and shaken by Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern when I first saw it in 2017. In richly visualised imagery, it proposed two ways of interpreting the horrific footage of the refugee crisis of 2016: either as a matter of anonymous, voiceless masses, portrayed as a body of dancers moving across the stage like a skein of migrating swallows beyond reason or control; or as a ragtag of desperate, furious individuals with every dignity and possession taken from them – somebody’s husband or wife, somebody’s daughter or son, fighting for survival – a plight conveyed in the impassioned dancing of Marcelino Sambé and Kristen McNally.

Lloyd Evans

Kids will enjoy this new show at the West End’s newest theatre more than adults: Marvellous, @sohoplace, reviewed

Theatre

London has a brand-new theatre – yet again. Last summer, a cabaret venue opened in the Haymarket for the first time. More recently, the Marylebone Theatre near Regent’s Park held its debut show. And now Nica Burns of Nimax Theatres has announced a new venture, @sohoplace, which she says is the first West End venue to open for 50 years. The playing area is a hoop-shaped enclosure with rising tiers of seats overlooking a deep oblong pit. Cage fighting and mud-wrestling could be staged here to great advantage. The poster for the debut show, MARVELLOUS, features the title in bright pastel letters with a yellow balloon, a pair of clown’s shoes and a perky budgerigar.