The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In 1982, Pope John Paul II surprised a few people by beatifying Fra Angelico, the 15th-century Dominican friar from near Fiesole. It’s not clear why he put Beato Angelico on the road to sainthood, given that the artist didn’t perform any miracles. And yet, after spending a few hours immersed in his works, which are both profoundly sacred but also staggeringly beautiful, you begin to understand the decision. He was certainly a hit with popes.
English Touring Opera has begun its autumn season and the miracle isn’t so much that they’re touring at all these days, but that they do it so well. Two generations back, this was the natural condition of opera in the UK: not Netrebko at Covent Garden, but agile, medium-scale companies playing at the Wolverhampton Grand or the Sheffield Lyceum alongside the panto and the 1950s equivalent of Friends: The Musical and An Evening with Sandi Toksvig. Don’t believe it? It’s all in Alexandra Wilson’s new book Someone Else’s Music, which is out now, and which all British opera buffs should read because it’ll make their jaws drop.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is a biopic of ‘the boss’ starring Jeremy Allen White. It is not cradle to grave and do not expect the usual crowd-pleasing beats. There isn’t a single montage. Instead, it focuses on 1981, the making of his sixth album, Nebraska, and his mental troubles at that time. This will doubtless satisfy the completists. But non-completists – I could have named only two of his songs, tops – may wonder if it’s that interesting. Also, as White’s performance isn’t a million miles from tortured chef Carmy in Disney+’s The Bear I kept expecting him to put down his guitar and go tweeze micro-herbs on some fancy dish. This may be a problem. ‘I know who you are,’ says a fan. ‘That makes one of us,’ he replies.
Watching the Mercury Music Prize on television last week, I remembered that Fionn Regan’s debut album, The End Of History, was nominated for the award back in 2007. Proof were it needed that the prize is rarely a shortcut to superstardom for most of those it spotlights. The Irish singer-songwriter has never quite replicated the mainstream acclaim he gained for his debut – when, for a solid five minutes, he was the latest in a long line of ‘new Bob Dylans’. He has, however, carved out an interesting and worthwhile career across five further albums, expanding his core skill set of folk guitar and knottily poetic wordplay with experimental touches of electronica and orchestration.
I’m trying to think of things I’m less interested in than American football. The plant-based food section? Taking up my GP’s offer of a free Covid booster? Ed Miliband’s nostril depilation regime? No, apart from maybe baseball, I can’t think of anything so soul-crushingly tedious as a rigged game where men in shoulder pads and portcullised helmets shout numbers, bash into one another, then wait half an hour while the referee decides whether or not they’re allowed to throw a spinny ball and maybe one day end up being Taylor Swift’s latest boyfriend.
Grade: B+ War, as we all know, is hell. But if it involves small squeaky annelids blowing each-other up with bazookas, it is also hella fun. And so to the newest installment in the long-running turn-based strategy series Worms. Can it be a coincidence that Worms Across Worlds arrives on Apple Arcade just in time for the release of Philip Pullman’s final His Dark Materials book? Yes, it absolutely can. Nevertheless the latest Worms, like Pullman’s work, is set in a multiverse in which intrepid heroes travel through portals between worlds. The world of Worms, like the world of His Dark Materials, mingles science and experimental theology: you can see off rival worms with a nuclear strike or a holy hand grenade.
Before Simply Red came on stage at the Greenwich peninsula’s enormodome, the screens showed a clip of a very young Mick Hucknall being interviewed. What he wanted, he said, was to be a great singer. Usually, that’s the cue for a gag about fate having other plans. Not this time. He’s 65 now, and he truly is a great singer as he showed for the best part of two hours. He knows it, too. A couple of songs in, he benignly told his audience at the first of two nights at the O2 that he liked it when they sang along with the choruses, but maybe leave the verses to him. The person next to you, he explained, had come to hear him sing, not you. But not just hear – Hucknall is worth watching as well. Seeing him was like witnessing one of the great standards singers of the 1950s.
Ballad of a Small Player opens with Lord Doyle, played by Colin Farrell, hiding from security in his trashed casino suite in Macau. After they’re gone, he slips into the corridor and sees a trolley holding a bouquet of flowers and a knife. I kept my eyes on the knife, expecting the jittery, paranoid gambling addict to grab the weapon. Instead he places a white rose in his green velvet lapel. Director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front, Conclave) enjoys playing these games of misdirection. It feels appropriate. Casinos – with their chandeliers, gaudy frescoes and croupiers in black tie – are contradictory places. Opulence in these temples of luck is both a way of hiding the brutality of emptying bank accounts, and a show of deference to the gods of fortune.
Tracy Letts’s Mary Page Marlowe is a biographical portrait of an emotionally damaged mother struggling with romantic and family problems. Susan Sarandon shares the lead with four other actresses which makes the show a little hard to follow. And the timeline is jumbled up so that the audience has to find its bearings at the start of each new episode. Why? Perhaps to give the material a complexity it doesn’t deserve. We first meet our heroine, aged 40 (played by Andrea Riseborough), as she tells her kids that they’re moving to Kentucky without their dad. This unpromising scene is hilarious because the word ‘Kentucky’ is repeated so often that it becomes a profanity. Pinter loved verbal games like this.
Is there anything menopausal women can’t do (on television)? Last Sunday, as a couple of them were still working on the daring theft of a Salvador Dali painting in ITV1’s Frauds, BBC1 launched Riot Women in which five others form a punk band. Meanwhile, two regular features of British TV remain actresses lamenting the lack of older women starring in drama series – and older women starring in drama series. Virtually all these shows also recall the headline from the American satirical magazine The Onion: ‘Women empowered by whatever a woman does.’ And that’s certainly true of Riot Women, written by Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley, Gentleman Jack etc.) and therefore set in the Calder Valley, with the author’s message never hard to detect.
Here’s a patriotic thought for you: baroque opera, as we now know it, was made in Britain. Sure, there are your Vivaldis and Cavallis; there’s always someone (usually French) trying to make Rameau stick and a few years back Opera North – bless them – even tried to exhume an opera by Reinhard Keiser. But realistically, if you’re going to see a pre-Mozart opera from a major company anywhere in the world, and it’s not by Monteverdi, it’s overwhelmingly likely to be by Purcell or Handel. And Handel wrote practically all of his surviving operas in London, for British audiences and British taste. So it’s only right that UK opera companies should go big on the old Saxon, and in truth they don’t need much encouragement.
When Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian Library wrote to John le Carré asking if the writer would leave it his papers, he got more than he could ever have bargained for. Le Carré not only responded with enthusiasm, explaining that ‘Oxford was Smiley’s spiritual home, as it is mine’, but also sent along 85 boxes of neatly arranged papers and memorabilia. After le Carré’s death in 2020 came a second larger tranche; the total archive consisted of more than 1,200 boxes. This was a writer who threw nothing out. Selected fruits of this vast haul can be seen in a new and impressive exhibition in the Bodleian’s Weston Library (formerly the New Bodleian).
Waldemar Januszczak and Bendor Grosvenor’s art podcast has returned after nearly five years. It is, says Januszczak, ‘the podcast they could not stop – but they did have a jolly good try’. What happened? It isn’t clear; there are teases that it revealed too much, which is anyway a good ploy for attracting listeners. ‘Subversive’ is not the first word that springs to mind when tuning in to the two unlikely chums. Their regular feature, ‘Shocking News from the Artworld’, is more Apollo than Nigel Dempster. For example: Christie’s has closed the digital art department that dealt in NFTs, the crypto tokens going the way of the dodo.
At the receptionist’s desk in Cosprop’s studio and costume warehouse, a former Kwik Fit garage, the sloping bleakness of Holloway Road is held at bay by a small chandelier, brassy lighting and a bound guest book. It’s a bit stagey, like a filmset for a cheap foreign hotel or an expensive shrink’s office, quite out of place in the real north London high street. But as the entrance to a costume house that builds worlds and people out of bits of fabric, feathers and jewels, it’s appropriate. Suspend all disbelief, ye who enter here. Cosprop was founded by the costume designer John Bright in 1965.
A few weeks ago I went along to a lecture on the Welsh artist, poet and soldier David Jones. Kenneth Clark considered him ‘the most gifted of all the young British painters’. The talk, by a recent art-history graduate with a first-class degree from a reputable university, began at a cracking pace. It was only when he started to show slides to illustrate his talk that I began to feel very hot and sweaty. The paintings were not by Jones but his near-contemporary Stanley Spencer. Jones did share with Spencer the experience of serving with the British Army during the first world war. And both were stimulated by this immersion into an unexpected, unwanted world. But there is no chance that their work could be mistaken for that of each other.
The National Railway Museum is 50 years old, and it’s come over all literary. A quote from Howards End stands at the entrance to the newly refurbished Station Hall: railway termini, proclaims Forster, ‘are our gates to the glorious and the unknown’. T.S. Eliot salutes you on the way out: ‘You are not the same people who left that station.’ Big claims, but as it turns out, largely to the point. The changes to the Station Hall are subtle but numerous, making the argument that as well as being the foundational technology of modern civilisation, railways are a culture in their own right. The aim, say the curators, is to reintroduce the human dimension to a museum that (fairly, and unfairly) is more generally associated with huge, gleaming machines.
R:Evolution is a pun, presumably intended to suggest that tradition is not static and the obvious truth that change always grows out of what has come before. A useful idea, of course, even if it’s one that the four short works selected under this title by English National Ballet doesn’t smoothly illustrate. The management is, however, due a pat on the back for trying; budget cuts and the power of the grey men in marketing means that such programming is becoming increasingly rare, victim of the regressive fashion for full-length narratives and fairy tales. ENB starts by juxtaposing two works conceived in 1947. Balanchine’s Theme and Variations is one of his periodic nostalgic homages to his roots in Tsarist St Petersburg.
I have my routine down to a science. At 6.59, I’m sitting in the stairwell, typing on my laptop or scribbling in a book. At 7.01, I’m speeding down the hall to Dressing Room 18, where the rest of the girls are semi-apparelled, laughing, blasting out Tyla; or some days, silent, headphones in, munching pre-show snacks and staring blankly into space. From 7.01 to 7.05, I’m putting on my costume as the ambient noise of my cast mates getting dismantled by the demogorgon plays over the intercom. At 7.07, I’m sprinting down the dozens of stairs between Dressing Room 18 and the ground floor. And at 7.09, I’m stepping out on stage, wearing an orange tartan two-piece set and a pair of horn-rim glasses, where 2,024 eyes are watching me.
Hamlet at the National opens like a John Lewis Christmas advert. Elegant celebrations are in progress. The stage is full of dining tables draped in white linen and adorned with flowers and beautiful glassware sparkling in the candlelight. Elsinore is reimagined as the home of a multicultural royal family. Claudius, resplendent in a dark dinner jacket, toasts his Asian bride, Gertrude, who wears a banana-yellow sari. Enter Hamlet, hunched and mutinous, in a snaky black suit like a moody star at a film première. He cheers up when he reaches his first soliloquy which he delivers to the crowd like a larky routine at a comedy club. Hiran Abeysekera (Hamlet) is a talented and hyperactive clown who gets big laughs from unpromising material. But he lacks the substance for the role.
The French lutenist Charles Fleury, Sieur de Blancrocher, is one of those unfortunate historical figures who are chiefly remembered because of how they died. He was climbing the stairs to his apartment near the Louvre after a court dinner in November 1652 when he slipped, fell head over heels and was dead a few hours later. We don’t know, though people have wondered, whether the wine was to blame. Only one piece of music by him survives, and he would probably be forgotten if he hadn’t been memorialised in several tombeaux – slow memorial dances – by royal composers, one of whom was a young harpsichordist whose genius is only now being fully recognised. Louis Couperin (c.1626-1661) will always be overshadowed by his nephew François (1668-1733).
The Last Dinner Party received quite the critical backlash when they arrived amid much fanfare in 2023. Posh, precocious and theatrical, armed with lofty ideas that matched their station as four young women who had benefited from very expensive educations, the band encountered widespread suspicion that they were industry ‘plants’, or had somehow bought their way to instant recognition. Happily, their debut album, Prelude To Ecstasy, proved sufficiently accomplished to repel these waves of hostility (strange how the success of privileged young women tends to attract far greater opprobrium than that of privileged young men). In any case, the excellence of the follow-up should settle the matter.
First the surprising news: not a single one of the four Guinness siblings in 1868 Dublin is black; and only 25 per cent of them – surely a record for Netflix – is gay. Now the bad: despite these oversights, House of Guinness remains very recognisably the work of Steven Knight, the Peaky Blinders screenwriter who once set a drama in 1919 Birmingham and said to himself: ‘I know just what this period needs to make it more echt: a cameo appearance by dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah.’ As a Brummie (more or less), I loathed Peaky Blinders.
Oh, how we lived. Or, how we thought we lived. Despite the numerous criticisms levelled at the BBC on a daily basis, the BBC Archive YouTube channel is one aspect of its work that cannot be faulted. It is a fascinating collection of broadcast material going back many decades, a portal into Britain’s past presented in film grain-soaked HD. A sobering reminder of what the BBC once was – and what it no longer dares to be. Much of it is made up of documentaries, many aspects of which will be peculiar to millennials and Gen Z. The form is strange: long, single-camera shots of people talking in living environments. Bathrooms, kitchens, workplaces, streets. Living spaces are as they would be on any day of the week. Workplace neon, living-room lamps. Light and shade.
Grade: A Bohuslav Martinu was a patchy composer; worse, he was also a prolific one, meaning that if you dip into his music at random you never quite know if you’re going to have your day made, or just half an hour wasted. Ideally, you need someone to do the choosing for you, and praise be, here’s one of today’s brightest and best chamber ensembles doing exactly that. Seriously: listen to one of the big-name string quartets of the CD era – the Alban Berg Quartet, say, or the Emersons – and ask yourself, hand on heart, whether the Pavel Haas Quartet doesn’t play the socks off them. The vitality, the intelligence; the headlong, needle-point virtuosity: all this is a wholly 21st-century phenomenon and there’s no finer proof than this new release.
Ivan Day pulls out an old Habsburg cookbook from his library. The 300-year-old volume is so thick it’s almost a perfect cube, and by some miracle the spine remains intact as he opens it. ‘It’s like a big Harry Potter spellbook,’ he jokes while flicking through drawings of pastry baked in the shapes of dolphins, tortoises, pelicans and griffins. I recognise one design from the half-eaten pie in his kitchen: a cross between a soup tureen and an embroidered throw pillow. Ivan is a curator, self-trained cook and Britain’s premier historian of food.
Clarkston is an American-backed production featuring a Netflix star, Joe Locke. He plays a young graduate with a terminal illness, Jake, who works at a Costco warehouse in a failing midwest town. Jake is a brainbox with an IQ of 140 who takes a scholarly interest in early American history. On his first day at work, he befriends a bookish intellectual, Chris, who loves literature and wants to dazzle the world with his fiction. The entry requirements for this branch of Costco seem to be tougherthan Harvard’s. The romance between the two boys is impeded by Jake’s clingy mum, Trisha, who feeds her meth habit by stealing his money and forbids him to leave town. Chris would have escaped from his mother ages ago but the playwright, Samuel D.
‘Goodness Triumphant’ is the alternative title of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, and you’d better believe he meant it. Possibly my reaction was coloured by last week’s experience with the weapons-grade cynicism of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, but honestly – it’s just so sweet. A gentle, put-upon girl gets her fairy-tale ending in the face of stepsisters and a stepfather who are basically buffoons rather than outright villains. We’re in the realm of panto, or children’s TV: nothing really dark can happen here and the only sorcery is worked by Rossini, whose fountain of laughing, crystal-bright invention is as life-affirming as Haydn, if he’d been born 50 years later and in Italy. Pure feelgood, then, for kids of all ages.
So, the Turner Prize: where do we start? It’s Britain’s most prestigious art award, one that used to mean something and now attracts little more than indifference. Taking place every year, it grants £25,000 to a winner chosen from four shortlisted artists, all of whom are obliged to display work together either at Tate Britain, or at a regional gallery. The latest iteration, at Bradford’s Cartwright Hall, is the best in a while – but before we get to that, some context. The Turner was established in 1984, but only really grabbed anyone’s attention when Channel 4 began televising the prize-giving ceremony in the 1990s.
Is Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest as good as everyone is saying? That it has a run time of nearly three hours and I didn’t drop off, and didn’t have to fight dropping off, may say it all. But if you want more, I can also vouch that One Battle After Another is funny and fantastically propulsive, and it also, I should add, reinvents the car chase – which I don’t believe any of us expected to see in our lifetimes. So while you can search for a deeper meaning if you want (many have), you can also simply enjoy it. (I give you permission.) The car chase at the end?