Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Putting the Boot in | 14 February 2019

‘I know, let’s repaint the Sistine Chapel. But this time we’ll get it done by Banksy.’ Perhaps this wasn’t the exact phrase used in the early production meetings for the Sky Atlantic reboot (ho ho) of Das Boot (Wednesdays). It does describe pretty well the net result, though. Yes, I know James Walton covered it last week but I’m going to have to strongly disagree with him: Das Boot — Wolfgang Peterson’s 1980s miniseries about life on a U-boat during the Battle of the Atlantic — is my favourite wartime TV drama ever. And I’m damned if I’m going to let this travesty of a new version through the net.

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Pearls and swine

The best booers, in my experience, are the Germans. There’s real purpose and thickness to their vocals. Italians hiss. The English grumble. The French? A bit of this, a bit of that. I approve of booing — or feedback, as I like to think of it. It’s galvanising and exhilarating, even when infuriating. Are you with them or not? One caveat: save it till after the performance, please. The French do not hold to such niceties. One piggy old Parisian thought it appropriate to shout at the stage during Sunday’s performance of Opéra Bastille’s new Troyens. And not once. But three times. On that third cry, he got on to

Kate Chisholm

A river runs through it

It sounds like something out of Dickens or a novel by Thackeray, a classic case of high-minded Victorian philanthropy, but the Glasgow Humane Society was actually set up much earlier, in 1790 (just after the revolutionary fervour in France demanded liberty, fraternity, equality), to protect human life in the city and especially on the river Clyde. It still exists and Glasgow claims to be the only city in the world to have a full-time officer dedicated to rescuing people from drowning. Back when it began the river and its banks were hectic with shipbuilding, trade and manufacturing. Now the city is almost ashamed of its river; no big ships, hardly

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Age concern | 14 February 2019

The Dumb Waiter is a one-act play from 1957 that retains an extraordinary hold over the minds of theatre-goers. It’s set in the basement of a Birmingham restaurant where two Cockney hitmen are preparing to execute an unknown victim. A dumb waiter, or shelf on pulleys, descends from above containing requests for two-course meals. Liver and onions are on the menu. Demands for cups of tea and sago pudding are sent down. The nervous thugs start to panic as they struggle to fulfil the instructions arriving from on high. It’s an absurd situation underpinned by an authentic sense of menace and violence. These are not just clownish villains but real

Deborah Ross

There’s something about Marie

A Private War is a biopic of the celebrated Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin who was, judging from this, brave, humane and utterly fearless as well as a drunk, lonely, traumatised and annoying. A complicated human being, in other words. And why did she do it? Why did she risk her life to get the truth out there? No easy answers are offered, thankfully. It may just be that she had to face death to feel properly alive. I can only say, with confidence, that the film features a magnificently fierce, alert and impassioned performance from Rosamund Pike, whose usual English rose delicacy is nowhere to be seen. It

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The waist land

Strange to think when you visit the Christian Dior show at the V&A that his time as designer was so very short. From the first show in 1947 when he brought the war to an end — at least in terms of clothes — with the New Look, to his sudden death at the age of 52 was just a decade. But in that brief time he brought about a revolution in fashion, creating some of the most beautiful dresses ever made for women, with a line that was wholly his own. It was both architectural and natural: the skirt of his celebrated Bar suit was based on the corolla

Daisy Dunn

Brightness falls

The little-known painter Cyril Mann (1911-80) saw a lot from his council-flat window. Beyond the parks and trees and red-brick houses was St Paul’s, rising triumphantly through the haze. Mann, who grew up in Nottingham and trained at the Royal Academy in the 1930s, had painted the bombsites around Spitalfields and the streets of postwar London when he finally turned his hand in 1961 to the view from his Finsbury tenement block. The resulting painting was exceptional. He captured the cathedral in the distance with such a swift brush that it seems almost to dance on the horizon. The optimism Mann clearly found in the city skyline reflected his own

Michael Tanner

Janacek’s rare gem

Janacek’s upsetting opera Katya Kabanova, which hasn’t been seen in the UK for some time, turned up in two different productions over the weekend, with a third to follow in Scotland. The Opera North production by Tim Albery dates from 2007, when it was conducted by Richard Farnes with the clarity and passion which characterises all his work. This revival had Sian Edwards making her Opera North debut, and all told it had a slightly muted quality. The paradoxical jagged lyricism of Janacek’s orchestral writing only struck home intermittently, and there were stretches which could almost have been by Smetana, against whom Janacek partly defined himself. Albery’s production and Hildegard

Deborah Ross

Soapy and second-rate

All Is True is Kenneth Branagh’s biopic of Shakespeare’s last years and All Is Not Very True, apparently, which we could live with, but All Is Not Very Interesting either, which is harder to endure, particularly at the midway point when you feel a nice doze coming on. I don’t get it. I mean, if you are going to conjecture, why not conjecture inventively as they did, say, with Shakespeare in Love? If you’re going to soar freely into the realm of imaginings, soar high! But this is leaden, lifeless, sentimental and afflicted by too many sub-plots that just don’t go anywhere. Also, if this portrait of the greatest writer

James Walton

A romp through royal hits and misses

You might well expect a royal documentary on Channel 5 to be unashamedly gossipy. You might also expect it to go for the simultaneous possession and eating of cake — lamenting the endless scrutiny the poor Windsors are subject to, while adding a fair amount of its own. What you mightn’t expect, however, is for the presenter to be Jeremy Paxman. But in Paxman On The Queen’s Children all three things are true. Stranger still, the result is undeniably enjoyable, thanks largely to Paxo himself, who comes across rather as Robert De Niro did in films like Meet the Fockers: as a man who, after decades of the serious stuff,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Love, sex, sponges and disability

Hampstead has become quite a hit-factory since Ed Hall took over. His foreign policy is admirably simple. He scours New York for popular shows and spirits them over to London. His latest effort, Cost of Living, has attracted the film-star talent of Adrian Lester, who plays Eddie, a loquacious white trucker from Utah. (His ethnicity is made clear in the dialogue and the relevant lines have been left unchanged.) Earnest Eddie tells us about himself in a 15-minute monologue at the top of the show. Rather a clunky device. He’s a bookish teetotaller with a strong work ethic who appreciates the landscape of Utah, enjoys listening to Erik Satie’s over-played

Kate Chisholm

Tables turned

It was odd listening to Jim Al-Khalili being interviewed on Radio 4 on Tuesday morning rather than the other way round. In his series The Life Scientific, Al-Khalili has developed his own brand of interviewing, encouraging his guests to talk about their work in science by leading them from personal biography —how they came to study science, what they were like at school, who influenced them — to the intricacies of their research and why we should know about it. He makes this sound so easy and natural, setting his interviewees at ease, and his listeners, too, with stories from school and university before delving into the complex ideas behind

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The edge of reason

My husband, usually a cool customer, watched Free Solo from behind his fingers, sometimes jumping up from the sofa and backing away from the TV. Audiences at Imax showings have behaved the same way, rising to their feet, clenching their sweaty fists as they watch  Alex Honnold, a 33-year-old rock climber from Sacramento, make his way up El Capitan, 2,700 vertical feet of granite in Yosemite National Park. Free Solo is a documentary, the story of Honnold’s record-breaking climb, and the reason for the excitement is that he does it ‘free solo’, without ropes or aid of any kind. It’s just Alex, his shorts, his shoes, a bag of chalk,

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Apocalypse Dau

Dau is not so much a film as a document of a mass human experiment. The result is dark, brilliant and profoundly disturbing. For three years up to 400 people, only one a professional actor, lived for months at a time on a city-sized set specially built for the shoot near Kharkov, Ukraine. Modelled on the real Kharkov Institute of Experimental Physics between 1938 and 1968, every detail on the set was scrupulously in period, from the light fittings to the lavatory paper. The participants — who included a real-life Nobel Prize winner and famous orchestra conductor as well as real former KGB and prison officers — were required to

Martin Gayford

The odd couple | 31 January 2019

The joint exhibition of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Bill Viola at the Royal Academy is, at first glance, an extremely improbable double act. Viola is one of the contemporary-art stars of the later 20th and early 21st centuries. He was one of the first to achieve fame in the new medium of video art, and is still its best-known exponent. While Michelangelo, as they say in showbusiness, needs no introduction. But there’s more to this bromance, across eras and continents, between a 16th-century Florentine and a contemporary Californian than might immediately be apparent. The more you think about the pairing, and follow the argument of the curator Martin Clayton, the more

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

You’ve been scammed

The NT’s new play is an update of Pamela, a sexploitation novel by Samuel Richardson. It opens with Stephen Dillane and Cate Blanchett stranded in a concrete garage dressed as French maids. On one side, a black Audi saloon. Mid-stage, colourful blinking lights. At the edges, four other actors lurking. The main characters have no names so let’s call them Stephen and Cate. Who are they? Adulterous workmates, or a divorcing couple, or a male boss and his abused underling? The script reveals nothing about their characters, their backgrounds, their location or their intentions, and the audience’s natural reaction to this indifference is further indifference. Stephen and Cate grapple physically

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

Resident Evil 2

Grade: B Resident Evil 2 takes the original zombie shooter, which has become a cult classic and, to many, the quintessential horror video game, and gives it a lick of digital paint. Gone are the blocky hallways of the Raccoon City police station, along with the slow moving hordes of undead who, if you squinted, might’ve had a pixel of drool at the corner of their mouth. In their place is a German expressionist labyrinth of disorientating shadows, and antagonists so realistically putrefied the game ought to come with the sort of warnings they put on particularly pungent cheese. As ever with the franchise, it veers between survival elements and

Deborah Ross

All the lonely people

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a true story based on the 2008 memoir of Lee Israel, the writer who turned her hand to forging literary letters and who became, as she puts it, ‘a better Dorothy Parker than Dorothy Parker’. So it’s that story, but it also isn’t. That story is here but the real story, I would say, is about loneliness and alcoholism and two outsiders who, in a Midnight Cowboy sort of way, form a friendship at a desperate time. And it is rivetingly moving on this count, as are the performances from Melissa McCarthy (Oscar-nominated) and Richard E. Grant, also Oscar-nominated. (Great, although it does now

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Relative values | 31 January 2019

Boy often likes to rebuke me for having impossibly high standards when it comes to TV. ‘Why can’t you just enjoy it?’ he says. This is disappointing. One reason I ruined myself to give him an expensive education is so I wouldn’t have to share my viewing couch with a drooling moron happy to gawp at any old crap. Worse, whenever I try to draw his attention to stuff I consider to be extra specially worth watching — Fauda, Babylon Berlin, etc. — he rejects it because it has been tainted by my recommendation. So the next brilliant thing he won’t get to see is Gomorrah (Sky). This relentlessly dour