Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Yesterday

Richard Bratby

The forgotten story of British opera

British opera was born with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and then vanished for two-and-a-half centuries, apparently. Between the first performance of Dido in 1689 and the première of Britten’s Peter Grimes in 1945, serious British operas effectively didn’t exist – or so we’re told in textbooks and biographies. But what if there was a different story; a forgotten story of a lively, eclectic British operatic tradition that thrived in those missing centuries, and was buried only through a combination of accidents, economics and our enduring national snobbery about theatre that’s sung rather than spoken? And what if there was an organisation devoted to excavating these forgotten works and giving them

Geoff Dyer

Cinema has reached a nadir in the new Mission: Impossible

You have to time your arrival at cinemas carefully if you want to avoid the high-volume, rapid-fire edits of trailers for upcoming mind-rot. That’s conceptually impossible with Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The first half an hour is a debrief in the form of an extended trailer of highlights from previous missions. At one point during this hyper-extended prelude Tom Cruise and a pal sneak into a disused London tunnel, as if to an underground club. This planted the seed that the rest of the film would be an all-action allegory of a group of friends’ determined efforts to get into the Entity, a sinister Berlin nightclub whose bouncers

Sam Kriss

Wes Anderson’s latest is as hollow as anything AI could come up with

AI is coming for everyone’s jobs, but especially mine. There is absolutely no good reason for The Spectator to keep sending me to watch films with my wobbly biological eyes, not when they could just feed the latest releases into a computer, set the parameters to ‘contemptuous’, and watch a perfectly serviceable review assemble itself, for free, before their eyes. They’re losing money on every column. They may as well be paying a scriptorium full of monks to illuminate each copy of the magazine on vellum. I’m doomed, surplus to requirements, and the 21st century will replace me with a few lines of code. But it could be worse. At

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Magnificent: The Deep Blue Sea, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, reviewed

Richard Bean appears to be Hampstead Theatre’s in-house dramatist, and his new effort, House of Games, is based on a 1987 movie directed by David Mamet. The script sets up a rather laborious collision between two vastly different cultures. A gang of small-time crooks in Chicago are visited by a beautiful, high-flying, Harvard-educated academic who wants to investigate their lives. The catalyst for this unlikely set-up is therapy. Dr Margaret Ford is a successful shrink whose latest book has become a bestseller and she needs a new theme to write about. She speaks to a troubled young patient who owes $2,000 to a betting syndicate and when she visits their

Rupert Christiansen

Christopher Wheeldon’s real gifts lie in abstract dance

Christopher Wheeldon must be one of the most steadily productive and widely popular figures in today’s dance world, but I’m yet to be persuaded that he has much gift for narrative. His adaptation of the novel Like Water for Chocolate was a hopeless muddle; his response to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is mere vaudeville; and I’m praying to St Jude that nobody is planning to import his dramatisation of Oscar Wilde’s downfall, premièred in Australia last year. But as the elegant craftsman, and sometimes the inspired artist, of more abstract dance, he is without doubt a great talent. The Royal Ballet’s programme of four of his shorter pieces showcases his

James Delingpole James Delingpole

If you are of a certain age, you’ll really enjoy Tina Fey’s The Four Seasons

The Four Seasons is one of those shows you notice in the ‘Top TV Programmes on Netflix’ section, see it’s some kind of glossy romantic comedy starring American actors you’ve vaguely heard of, and skip past quickly in search of something with zombies or subtitles. This would be a mistake though because, at least if you are of a certain age, you’re really going to enjoy it. I think the litmus test is whether you’re old enough to remember the 1981 Alan Alda film on which it is based, which I do, just about, vaguely. It’s that kind of movie where a bunch of old friends who have been holidaying

Graeme Thomson

We’ve underestimated Francis Rossi

I have a friend who insists that had Status Quo hailed from Düsseldorf rather than Catford, they would nowadays be as critically revered as Can, Faust, Neu! and those other hallowed Teutonic pioneers of unyielding rhythm from the 1970s. Maybe so. Very probably not. Canned Heat and ZZ Top seem more reachable comparisons. But it’s true that ‘the Quo’ have been underestimated and unjustly derided throughout their six-decade career, not least by themselves. The band has happily perpetuated their position as rock and roll neanderthals: a 2007 album is titled In Search Of The Fourth Chord. There was always a little more to it than that. Personally, I have always

Tim Abrahams

Architecture has hit a nadir at the Venice Biennale

Much of Venice’s Giardini this year was as boarded up as a British high street. The Israeli pavilion was empty, apparently awaiting refurbishment. (At the 2024 art biennale, the curators had closed it in the face of pro-Palestinian protests, prompting the latter to demand it should be opened, presumably so they could protest its closure.) The Russian pavilion has been shut, by order of the Biennale, because of the Ukraine war. The Venezuelan pavilion was closed (‘Go look at nature instead,’ said the workman when I approached it.) The Czechoslovakian was shut, the turns taken by the two independent nations faltering during Covid. The French was closed for refurbishment, although

Richard Bratby

A spate of re-releases suggests that Wolfgang Sawallisch was no B-lister

Grade: A It’s clearance-sale time for the great classical labels of the 20th century. As streaming platforms drain the remaining value out of once-prestigious recorded catalogues, even B-listers are being pulled up from the vaults and remastered for one last re-release. Eleven-disc Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos edition? Walter Weller’s complete Decca recordings? Now’s your chance: everything must go! The Bavarian conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch, who died in 2013, was never exactly B-list. His name always commanded respect. But in the golden age of LP collecting he was regarded as a safe pair of hands rather than a blue-chip name. Listening to a mini spate of Sawallisch re-releases suggests that we underrated

Thursday

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

The odd couple: Austen and Turner at 250

History is full of odd couples: famous but unrelated people who happen to have been born in the same year. 1809: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. 1926: Queen Elizabeth II and Marilyn Monroe. Yet few historical pairings are as unlikely as the novelist Jane Austen and the painter J.M.W. Turner, born within a few months of each other in 1775. Usually the only time these two cultural icons encounter one another is in our purses or wallets: Turner depicted as a dashing young Romantic on the £20 note, Austen looking demure and doe-eyed (a heavily airbrushed version of the portrait originally sketched by her sister Cassandra) on the £10 note.

James Walton

Tantalisingly ambiguous – or just plain baffling: Hallow Road reviewed

An 80-minute film which for almost all of the time features two people in a car mightn’t sound particularly ambitious. In fact, though, Hallow Road is bursting with so many ideas and genres that by the end they risk blowing it apart completely. At first, it looks as if we’re in for a mix of family drama, psychological thriller and anxiety dream – which indeed we are, but only for starters. After some characteristically disorientating (it turns out) shots of an apparent crime scene – an abandoned meal, glass strewn across the floor – Maddy Finch (Rosamund Pike) receives a 2 a.m. phone call from her distraught daughter Alice (the

Richard Bratby

Our half-time scorecard on the Royal Opera’s Ring cycle

With Die Walküre, the central themes of Barrie Kosky’s Ring cycle for the Royal Opera are starting to emerge, and one of them seems to be wood. Not trees, so much; at least not as a symbol of life. After the rapid assembly of a world from theatrical nothingness (a bare stage), Hunding’s forest hall is simply a wall of blackened planks, with no World Ash Tree in sight. Then you notice the protruding hilt of the sword Nothung: no, that is the World Ash Tree, and Hunding has recycled it into building material. We knew he was a wrong ’un, but really: this is Sycamore Gap-level wickedness. Various ex-trees

Digby Warde-Aldam

Decent redesign, ravishing rehang: the new-look National Gallery reviewed

A little under a year ago, it emerged that builders working on the redevelopment of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing had discovered an unusual time capsule embedded in a pillar they had been instructed to knock down. It contained a letter signed by Sir John Sainsbury, who, along with his brothers, had thrown the museum a £50 million lifeline to realise the extension in 1990; and clearly, he wasn’t happy with the way his money was being spent. He expressed this with no small amount of elegance: ‘If you have found this note,’ his missive read, ‘you must be engaged in demolishing one of the false columns that have been

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Better than Hollywood: Netflix’s The Eternaut reviewed

‘Next time you do a review, you’ve got to find something you like. You’ve been far too negative,’ said the Fawn. ‘Well, it’s hardly my fault if everything on TV is crap at the moment. I can’t just call up good stuff to order,’ I said. ‘Try,’ said the Fawn. Luckily – and unwontedly – Netflix has come to my rescue with a dystopian sci-fi series called The Eternaut. Though I’m not totally convinced by the name – a conflation of ‘eternity’ and ‘astronaut’ – it’s a very enjoyable watch, which confirms, yet again, Delingpole’s Iron Law of Television: always go for the shows with subtitles. This one is from

Michael Hann

I think I’ve found the new Van Morrison

Young male singers won the right to be sensitive in 1963, when The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released. And in the 63 years since, being young and vulnerable and questing has been one of the great default settings. I’d say you can’t go far wrong singing sadly about your feelings, but of course you can, as the great mountain of discarded troubadours proves. Yet the size of that rejects mountain also tells us how alluring the prospect of baring one’s feelings to strangers can be. Zach Condon, who works as Beirut, and Dove Ellis are at different points on the sensitive young man spectrum. Condon is 39 for a start,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Two hours of yakking about Israel: Giant, at the Harold Pinter Theatre, reviewed

Two hours of yakking about Israel. That’s all you get from Giant at the Harold Pinter Theatre. Endless wittering laced with venomous bigotry. The year is 1983 and the celebrated kiddie author, Roald Dahl, has kicked up a massive stink by denouncing Israel for attacking Lebanon in late 1982. His latest scribble, The Witches, is about to be published in America but a handful of bookshops are threatening to boycott his work. Tom and Jessie, two executives from Dahl’s publishing firm, visit him at home and beg him to withdraw his anti-Semitic rant. Dahl refuses because he loathes the Jews, hates Israel and endorses all the usual myths about Jewish

Rupert Christiansen

Budget Ballets Russes: BRB2’s Diaghilev and the Birth of Modern Ballet reviewed

Although I doff my hat to Carlos Acosta’s BRB2, Birmingham Royal Ballet’s junior troupe, for a reminder of what is owed to the Ballets Russes – nothing less than the creation of a new art form – the programme it’s presenting in Diaghilev and the Birth of Modern Ballet is neither well balanced nor coherent. Between some highlights of the most familiar Fokine repertory, an extract from Nijinska’s Les Biches has oddly been inserted, and there was nothing here to suggest the fact that Massine was by far the most dominant choreographer of the Ballets Russes’s interwar era and someone indeed who had personally worked with BRB in its previous

Friday

Olenka Hamilton

Olenka Hamilton, Melanie McDonagh, Hannah Moore, James Delingpole and William Atkinson

31 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Olenka Hamilton ponders whether Poland’s revival is a mirage (1:24); Melanie McDonagh asks who killed the postal service (9:52); Hannah Moore argues that family cars aren’t built for families any more (14:35); James Delingpole reviews Careme from Apple TV and Chef’s Table from Netflix (21:15); and, William Atkinson provides his notes on Thomas the Tank Engine (26:48).  Presented by Patrick Gibbons. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Jonathan Meades

Art deco gave veneer and frivolity a bad name

The jazz style was the blowsy filling between the noxious crusts of two world wars. More than 30 years passed between its flourishing and its remonikered second coming as art deco, no longer gaudy ephemera, now a legitimate addition to the inventory of fashions. The coinage was initially ascribed to the antique dealer John Jesse. It is, more probably, Bevis Hillier’s. He was a scholar of the style, then organiser of its first retrospective, far ahead of the game, in Minneapolis-St Paul in 1971. The Twin Cities rival Tulsa in their abundance of ziggurats, sunbursts, sans-serif signs (favoured for appearance rather than function), streamlined-everything to effect a quick getaway, bas-relief

Deborah Ross

What did Leni Riefenstahl know?

Leni Riefenstahl: what are we to make of her? What did she know? Often described as ‘Hitler’s favourite filmmaker’, she always claimed that she knew nothing of any atrocities. She was a naive artist, not a collaborator in a murderous regime. This documentary wants to get to the truth. But even if you’ve already made your own mind up – I had! – it’s still a mesmerising portrait of the kind of person who cannot give up on the lies they’ve told themselves. Riefenstahl died in 2003 at the age of 101. A striking, Garbo-esque beauty in her youth she looked like a haunted Fanny Craddock by the end. She