Culture

Madfabulous is a biopic of Henry Paget, the fifth Marquess of Anglesey, who was probably mad and definitely fabulous. His prodigalities in jewels and clothing were enormous. He perfumed his automobile so it belched violets. He was partial to wearing women’s clothing. He set up his own theatre company to showcase his ‘butterfly dance’. Needless to say, he burned through his family’s fortune in a few short years. How could all this not be wonderful on screen? Who doesn’t wish for an automobile belching violets? Alas, the film leans towards the pedestrian but, still, it will send you down a most satisfying rabbit hole. Look him up. The spit of Frank Zappa, right? And this is the late 1800s we are talking about. Respect.

Northern Ballet commits itself almost exclusively to dance as a storytelling medium, and its weakness historically has been to home in on surefire box-office titles such as A Streetcar named Desire, The Great Gatsby and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which lose more than they gain by being deprived of their words. But adapting the source of the popular BBC television series Gentleman Jack proves inspired: the result must rank as one of the best things the company has ever done. Anne Lister was a real figure, a moneyed gentlewoman in early 19th-century Yorkshire whose masculine demeanour, dress and behaviour gave rise to the moniker Gentleman Jack.

Lucian Freud almost had a second career in the cinema. He acted as an extra in a couple of films during the early 1940s; the only one in which he made the final cut was a farce starring the ukulele-playing comedian George Formby in which his 19-year-old face can be seen peering out of the background in one scene. Years later, Lucian claimed, John Huston asked him if he’d like to play the part of his grandfather Sigmund in a biographical screen drama from 1962 entitled Freud: The Secret Passion (which had, at one point, a script by Jean-Paul Sartre). Eventually Montgomery Clift was cast instead, which was just as well because Freud was definitely an observer rather than a performer.

Everybody has been raving about Legends, the Netflix series about undercover customs officers in the 1990s busting a heroin ring. But even though it’s ‘based on a true story’, there are times when it feels more like a histrionically implausible, over-reverential recruitment drive for HM Customs and Excise. ‘Thought they were just those men in white shirts embarrassing you at the airport by exposing the stash of cheap baccy hidden in your holiday underwear? Think again!’, you can imagine the tagline running. The model here, of course, would be Top Gun – the 1986 movie, heavily supported by the US military, which supposedly caused the number of men applying to become US Navy fighter pilots to increase by 500 per cent (a figure that’s since been debunked).

If Olivia Dean is the girl next door, Rosalia is the girl next planet. Their shows in successive weeks at the O2 – Dean had six nights, Rosalia two – were object lessons in presentation. Dean’s gig looked like some high-end light entertainment from the 1970s, Rosalia’s like something the National Theatre might dream up for a new revival of Murder in the Cathedral. Rosalia emerged in 2017 as the apparent saviour of flamenco – though flamenco traditionalists disagreed: she was Catalan, not Andalusian, and she wasn’t even a gypsy. Then across four albums, she travelled so far that it’s hard to categorise her extraordinary latest one, Lux: a heavily orchestrated, intensely dramatic reverie about the lives of assorted recondite saints.

I’m bullish about AI. All aesthetic snobs should be. In the war on man-made slop – still the most pressing threat – algorithms are an ally. After all, how much of the output of Netflix, Hollywood or Sony will retain its allure once AI is ventriloquising it to perfection? The qualities that have made popular art popular – legibility, fluency, tidiness – will surely be fatally tainted, perhaps even start to repel us. What we will crave instead is for culture to look and feel weird – opaque, messy, frangible. The experimental might even become box office. Wishful thinking? Well if the Rewire music festival in The Hague is anything to go by – so rammed this year that it was actually rather unbearable – it might already be happening.