Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Disappointed of north London

Disobedience is an adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel about forbidden, lesbian love in orthodox Jewish north London, starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams and I so wanted to root for the film and its characters. Go for it, women! Smash the patriarchy that says you must always be the object of sexual desire and never the subject! I’ll put you up, if needs be. I have a spare bedroom and it’s all yours! But while this should be a searing, Brokeback Mountain-style drama about love, longing and repression it just plods along, often clumsily. I didn’t root or not root as in the end it was impossible to much care.

Kate Chisholm

Last suppers

You don’t need headphones to appreciate, and catch on to, the unique selling point of radio: its immediacy, its directness, that sense that someone is talking to you, and you alone. In fact, if anything, headphones take away from radio’s ability to reach out to the isolated and the lonely, to create that connection between you, the listener, and that someone else, the person behind the mic. With headphones the voice gets inside your head, but it’s not like having a conversation. That USP also explains why listening in the car works so well, creating a companionship while driving alone along a road empty of human contact, surrounded by fast-moving

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Partners in crime | 29 November 2018

I know nothing about Patricia Highsmith. The acclaimed American author wrote the kind of Sunday-night crime thrillers that put me to sleep. Her best-known creation, the suave psychopath Thomas Ripley, has spawned a number of films that I’ve carefully avoided. But ignorance is an ideal starting point for Switzerland, by Joanna Murray-Smith, a brilliantly nasty comedy that features Highsmith in 1995 when she was past her artistic best. What a piece of work. A foul-mouthed, booze-soaked, chain-smoking misanthrope squatting in a glass-fronted hermitage in the mountains with nothing but a typewriter, a whisky bottle and an Alpine panorama for company. (Actually, it sounds quite tempting, put like that.) Her solitude

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Some day their prince will come

The Royal Ballet is a company in search of a prince. It has no lack of dancing princesses. You could search the kingdom and find no lovelier dancers than Marianela Nunez, Lauren Cuthbertson, Francesca Hayward, Natalia Osipova, Akane Takada, Sarah Lamb, Laura Morera and Yasmine Naghdi. But a true prince is as rare as a golden egg. Since Sergei Polunin went so energetically awol in 2012, the Royal Ballet has lacked a male principal with all four virtues of the leading man: classic handsome looks, height, faultless technique and some gift as an actor. Polunin had it all. He was dishy, dashing and dangerous. He had a fifth quality, too:

James Walton

Secrets and lies | 29 November 2018

Shortly before her husband’s funeral, the undertaker told the eponymous main character in Mrs Wilson (BBC1, Tuesday) that, ‘We’re here to make this tragic time as straightforward as possible.’ By then, though, we already knew this remark was the kind that, in a school set book, would soon be underlined with the words ‘Dramatic irony!!’ written in the margin. That’s because in its quiet way — devoid of both globetrotting locations and international terrorism — Mrs Wilson is as tangled and morally ambiguous as The Little Drummer Girl. The opening episode began in the far-off days of 1963: so far off, in fact, that Alison Wilson (Ruth Wilson) was first

Thursday

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

You be the judge

James I and VI liked to term himself Rex Pacificus. Like most politicians who talk a lot about working for peace, he was an appeaser. Inheriting the English throne after Elizabeth, whose foreign policy was defined by breaking Spanish dominance, James appears to have seen the purpose of his own Whitehall government as being to facilitate every Spanish demand. The first high-profile victim of James’s Iberophilia was the war hero and poet Sir Walter Raleigh. Within four months of Elizabeth I’s death in 1603, Raleigh was on trial for treason under the new regime. His death sentence was commuted until 1618, when it was carried out at the direct request

Martin Gayford

The ex factor | 22 November 2018

It is easy to assume that the contours of art history are unchanging, its major landmarks fixed for ever. Actually, like all histories it is a matter of shifting perspectives. As we move through time, the view backwards constantly alters. The rising and falling critical estimations of the painter Richard Smith are a case in point. Had you asked an art-world insider in 1963 who the brightest rising star of British art was there is a strong chance — though other names such as David Hockney might have been mentioned — that the answer would have been Smith (1931–2016). Appropriately, 1963 is the end date of an excellent little show

Dominic Green Dominic Green

The Green Room podcast from Spectator USA: What a Performance!

‘You’re a comical looking geezer. You’ll look funny when you’re fifty,’ Chas the gangster says to Turner the rock star in Performance, Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg’s notorious Sixties movie. ‘A heavy, evil film,’ the reviewer from It magazine wrote when Warner Brothers finally released Performance in 1970. ‘Don’t see it on acid.’ Fifty years on, I’m casting the pod on this week’s Green Room with cinema historian Jay Glennie, author of a definitive account of the legendary and still alarming making of Performance. Perhaps surprisingly, most of the protagonists are still alive: Mick Jagger, who played Turner; James Fox, who played Chas; producer Sandy Lieberson; Cammell’s co-director Nicolas Roeg;

Deborah Ross

Stealing beauty | 22 November 2018

The major releases this week are Robin Hood, as a big Hollywood retelling, and The Girl in the Spider’s Web, a reboot of the Stieg Larsson thriller franchise starring Claire Foy. But the film you want to see, even if you may not know it yet, is Hirokazu Koreeda’s Shoplifters. This is a film with no set pieces or major plot twists but it is wholly absorbing and it will steal your heart. (Among other things. There is a lot of stealing.) It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and is the latest from the Japanese filmmaker who mostly turns his camera on to families (After the Storm, Our Little

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A triumph for crony casting

Michelle Terry, chatelaine of the Globe, wants to put an end to penis-led Shakespeare by casting women in roles intended for men. To showcase her war on male cronyism she presents a version of Macbeth starring Paul Ready as the king. She plays the queen. In real life the two are married. This must be rather galling for the actresses who auditioned for the lead role only to find that Ms Terry’s pro-woman policy had collapsed before the demands of her lord and master. But their on-stage partnership is astonishingly powerful. Set in the Sam Wanamaker theatre, a gilded little playhouse with uncomfortably cramped seats, this candlelit Gothic thriller has

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Tigers and tutus

La Bayadère opens with a sacred flame and ends with an earthquake. In between, Marius Petipa’s ballet of 1877 gives us an India of the imagination, an India that never was. It is a place of tigers and tutus, scimitars and slippers. Cultural appropriation, you say? But who could object when it’s all so Pondicherry pretty: a durbar dream of silk harem pants, beaded bracelets, sun-goddess gowns, swags of hibiscus, palanquins, hookah pipes, snakes, divans and dances of the seven tie-dyed veils. The temple backdrops are gorgeous and preposterous. I’m the king of the swingers, oh… Besides you can hardly culturally appropriate when the company of the Royal Ballet is

Kate Chisholm

Leading ladies

I wonder what Michelle Obama, the former First Lady who remade that role in her own image, would make of Hannah’s attempts on The Archers to embody the 2018 version of an empowered, liberated woman? Does Obama secretly listen in to Ambridge each night? Has she been impressed by the soap’s attempt, via Hannah, to address the #MeToo movement? Does that explain why she blessed Radio 4 (rather than an online audio provider) with the great coup of reading herself from her new autobiography, Becoming? But first (for those unfamiliar with Hannah’s antics) let’s go back to Ambridge. She arrived on the scene as the new pig woman; Jazzer’s antithesis

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Just say yes

Narcos is back on Netflix, set in Mexico this time, with a cool, world-weary, manly voiceover swearily lecturing us at the beginning that if we smoked sensemilla in the 1970s, then we were partly responsible for the bloody, endless drug wars that went on to kill more than half a million people. Oh really? Sensemilla (derived from the Spanish for ‘without seeds’) is the kind of product of human ingenuity and free markets we should be celebrating, not decrying. It’s more compact than bog-standard weed, making it easier for entrepreneurs to ship, thereby increasing their profit margins. It affords a sweeter-tasting hit and a more euphoric high, thereby giving greater

Richard Bratby

Sound and fury | 22 November 2018

The People are angry. In fact, they’re bloody furious. As the lights flash up on David Pountney’s production of Prokofiev’s War & Peace, the entire cast confronts the audience: grim, braced, defiant. And before you’ve had time to wonder if this sort of thing is just the long-term legacy of Les Misérables, or whether opera directors really are in love with totalitarian imagery, they unleash hell. This is the chorus of Welsh National Opera, after all. You just know they’re going to slay, and they do. The massive, world-historical Epigraph to Act One shakes the walls and your place is no longer to question, but to sit there and be

Thursday

Horatio Clare

Pirates on parade

Avast there, scurvy dogs! For a nation founded on piracy (the privateer Sir Francis Drake swelled the exchequer by raiding the Spanish, who were in no doubt that he was a pirate), it is appropriate that Britain should give the international archetype of the pirate his language. The language of the Victoria & Albert’s exhibition A Pirate’s Life for Me at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green is a banquet of humour and doggerel. Whether you arrive a slipperslopper sea-cook, reeking of Havanas, or pushing treasures in a pram, you will stare at walls, speak in tongues and smile. These master (and mistress) mariners of yore have their grappling

Laura Gascoigne

All about his mother

Fin-de-siècle Paris was not just the art capital of the world, it was also the fashion capital. In 1901, 300,000 Parisians were employed in the rag trade, and one of them was Édouard Vuillard’s mother. Stout, sensible and self-sufficient, Mme Marie Vuillard was no Mimi out of La Bohème, embroidering flowers in a draughty garret. She was the independent patronne of a dressmaking atelier — more of a couture flat, admittedly, than a couture house, operating out of rented apartments in the garment district. Before being left a widow with three children, she had prudently invested in a small business producing dresses and made-to-measure corsets for a fashion-conscious petit bourgeois

Ed West Ed West

Brought to book | 15 November 2018

‘The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of death we are either drowned or killed.’ So wrote the British monk Gildas in his 6th-century proto-polemic On the Ruin of Britain, recording the arrival of the hated ‘Germans’ to the island. Bad news for the Britons, but fantastic for visitors to the British Library, now running perhaps the most significant exhibition of recent times, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms. Historians dislike the term ‘Dark Ages’, but by any measurement western Europe saw a collapse in living standards, literacy, population, trade and significant cultural output from 500 ad. Yet that only makes the flame

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

This will end badly | 15 November 2018

Pinter Three appeals to opposite poles of the play-going spectrum. The birdbrains like me will enjoy the music-hall sketches while the goatee-strokers will have fun pretending that Pinter’s deadly earnest memory plays are worth seeing. Watching the first piece, Landscape, is like receiving a jigsaw puzzle in instalments. Two characters, Duff and Beth, speak to us without acknowledging each other. Maybe they’re married. Maybe they aren’t. Duff, played by Keith Allen, is a barking, aggressive know-all who works as a chauffeur. Tamsin Greig’s Beth is a prattling Irish scullery maid who witters on about ‘having a baby’ with a lover who may be Duff, or an unseen chap named Sykes,

Deborah Ross

You’ve lost me

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is the sequel to the Harry Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and either J.K. Rowling’s plots are now so labyrinthine she makes your average John le Carré look like Noddy, or I failed to put in sufficient homework, or it’s a plain mess. Whichever, I hadn’t a clue what was happening most of the time. I like the whole Potter industry well enough, but I can’t say I’m a superfan. I don’t even have an opinion on whether Dumbledore is gay or not, which is the surest sign of non-superfandom. But while a film should cater to those in the