Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Faroe Islands: A whale of a time

‘Have a good holiday, Camilla. Don’t kill any whales.’ That’s not the normal goodbye I get when leaving the office, but then I’m not normally off to the Faroe Islands. The country isn’t that far from the UK — in fact, we’re the nearest neighbour, with Scotland 200 miles to the south. But it’s not somewhere people know much about. If they have heard of the Faroe Islands, the one thing they know about is the ‘grindadráp’, or pilot whale-hunt, which supplies newspapers with gory photographs every year. Although I wouldn’t have been surprised to see whale on the menu (as you do in Norway), I hadn’t expected whaling to

James Walton

Losing the plot | 31 December 2015

On the face of it, ITV’s Peter & Wendy sounded like a perfect family offering for Boxing Day: an adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s novel, with a framing story about how much Peter Pan can still mean to children today. In fact, though, the programme suffered from one serious flaw for any Boxing Day entertainment — if you were slightly drunk, slightly hungover or both, it was almost impossible to understand. Then again, I suspect that even the most weirdly sober of viewers might have struggled with a drama that never seemed to know the difference between the intriguingly suggestive and the utterly baffling. The opening sequence played to one of

Kate Chisholm

Aural wonderland

My resolution this New Year is to get to grips with podcasts, to brace up and embrace this new aural wonderland stuffed full of sound stories, experiments, features, adventures. They’ve been around for a decade, and there’s now hundreds of thousands of them, lurking in the web, hoping for someone to stream or download them. But where to start? What will be worth listening to, and not a waste of time, or just a bore, or even worse nightmare-inducing (there’s nothing like stories told on radio for creeping insidiously into the mind)? How do you find just what you want to listen to amid this babel? The easiest place to

Deborah Ross

Bad manners | 31 December 2015

The Danish Girl is based on the true (if heavily revised and simplified) story of Lili Elbe, one of the first people ever to undergo sex reassignment surgery, but while the timing of this is right — transgender issues are surely the next equality frontier — the film itself somehow isn’t. It’s OK. It’s probably passable, if you’ve got two hours to kill. But it’s repetitive, excessively polite and also, given the subject matter, surprisingly dull. It opens when Lili is still Einar, married to Gerda, and if the two ever came round for dinner you’d be mouthing over their heads: ‘Who invited them?’ And: ‘Oh boy, do you think

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Passion play | 31 December 2015

Illness forced Kim Cattrall to withdraw from Linda, the Royal Court’s new show, and Noma Dumezweni scooped up the debris at the last minute. And what debris. All thoughts of kittenish Cattrall evaporated as Dumezweni strode on to the stage, a luscious blend of high-performance hair and trouser-suited luminosity. Linda is in her prime, at 55, a marketing director at a beauty firm, but she faces problems at home. Her balding husband, in midlife crisis, has joined a rock band. Her older daughter, Alice, is in deep trauma after internet trolls mocked an explicit clip of her posted by a jealous ex. Linda told Alice to pull herself together but

William Cook

Lessons from Utopia

As anniversaries go, the timing could hardly be more apt. As Europe braces itself for the next Islamist attack, the next assault on our civilisation, a season of events marks the 500th birthday of a book that outlined an enlightened vision of the ideal society. Utopia 2016 is a year-long celebration of Thomas More’s Utopia at London’s Somerset House, where the Royal Society and the Royal Academy used to meet. Somerset House is a building that encapsulates the free-thinking values of the Enlightenment, and More’s Utopia is a book that encapsulates the Renaissance sensibilities that built it. We all know what sort of society Isis wants (the clue’s in the

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

The Queen crops Charles out of her Christmas message

The Queen always judges her Christmas message perfectly – and today was no exception. As she knows, her subjects are mad keen on Kate & Wills. So she spent the longest chunk of her piece-to-camera with a picture of them, plus kids, facing the camera. To justify that, she flashed a small shot of Charles & Camilla beforehand – it didn’t last more than a few seconds. After that box was ticked, the camera zoomed in so the two of them slipped out of shot and we were just left with the five most popular royal figures in full view. Deftly done, your majesty.  

Tuesday

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Biblical art, like Christianity, is always renewing itself

This sign adorns a local church in Harlesden. I suppose it could be called a Pop Annunciation. Who says religious art is stuck in the past? Then again, it is a perennial – and fascinating – question in Christian art: how much contemporary life to include in biblical scenes. For centuries artists have shocked the public by including ordinary-looking young beauties as Mary, ordinary working blokes as shepherds or apostles. Caravaggio is a good example, but even before him nativity scenes were transposed to Tuscan landscapes. In fact the first realistic landscapes in Western art were posing as biblical backdrops. The shock was rehashed by the Pre-Rapahelites, whose sacred scenes featured

Monday

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

There’s nothing confusing about a black actress playing Hermione Granger

A news producer rang up this morning, asking me to talk about ‘colour-blind casting’. Noma Dumezweni has just been cast as Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the stage sequel to JK Rowling’s novels. So there I was, listening to a hack ask ‘isn’t it confusing when black actresses play white roles?’ When I was too stunned to answer, he added, encouragingly, ‘we thought you’d be happy to come on and criticise Sonia Friedman’. True, if you follow theatre, you’ll know that Sonia Friedman, the super-producer who brings Hollywood’s most commercial franchises to the West End stage, won’t be sending me a Christmas card this year. But for

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Why would a dissolute rebel like Paul Gauguin paint a nativity?

A young Polynesian woman lies outstretched on sheets of a soft lemon yellow. She is wrapped in deep blue cloth, decorated with a golden star. Beside her bed sits a hooded figure, apparently an older woman, holding a baby. In the background is a huddle of resting cows, suggesting that the setting is a barn or stable. There is something familiar about the set-up — baby, young mother, farm animals — but it may take a while to notice certain details. The head of the woman on the bed is encircled by an area of darker yellow, which forms a sort of halo, and the baby’s head is similarly ringed

Matthew Dennison

The art of Beatrix Potter

‘I will do something sooner or later,’ wrote Beatrix Potter in the secret diary she kept in a private code. It was March 1883 and 16-year-old Potter, still mostly confined to the nursery of her parents’ house in South Kensington, had made a second visit to the Winter Exhibition of old masters at the Royal Academy. She did not identify the ‘something’ she had in mind, but it almost certainly referred to art. Although a painting by Angelica Kauffman stiffened her resolve and bolstered her confidence, the statement was one of intent above conviction. ‘It shows what a woman has done,’ she reassured herself. By the end of the decade

Stephen Smith

A paean to the fleshy delights and tacky excess of Soho

The other evening, surrounded by Christmas shoppers in the West End of London, I happened to glance up at the illuminations and was moved all over again by the old, old story. Yes, the sign was lit up once more over the defunct Raymond Revuebar, all that’s left of the club where men and women used to act out the ageless tragicomedy of desire. Strange — even blasphemous — as it may seem, the lurid blazon of a topless dancer in feathers and stilettos affected me like a holly-decked hall or a Slade-loud department store. ‘Personal appearances of the world’s greatest names in striptease’, spelled out in throbbing neon, made

The Spectator

Barometer | 10 December 2015

Christmas birthday Next year has a claim to be the 400th birthday of Father Christmas. Ben Jonson wrote a short play for James I, called Christmas: his masque, performed at court in December 1616. The central character, named as ‘Old Christmas’ and ‘Captaine Christmas’, encouraged everyone to merriment. He had ten children, with names ranging from Misrule to Plum Pudding. While a 15th-century hymn had mentioned a ‘Sir Christmas’, Jonson was the first to give Christmas physical characteristics, including a tall hat and a beard. It’s their year 2016 is being promoted as: — International Year of Pulses (UN) — Year of the Whale (Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environmental

Roy Kelly

Proof and Belief

On the hearth of the working fireplace, the flags dusted with ash, we leave mince pies and a bottle of beer that Father Christmas might feed his face and wet his whistle while he is here, refreshment before he has to dash, having deposited the mystery of wrapped packages a further time in his series of deceptive appearances, the continuing collusion, what you see and what you get, and how they rhyme with the evidence of disappearances: the empty bottle a child lifts from the grate; the mince pies missing from a crumb-specked plate.

Connie Bensley

December

The ferns around the badgers’ sett are dying down, and fine webs fret the brambles. By late afternoon the moon will glint on foxes’ eyes and owls rehearse sepulchral cries, and then the badgers start to rise like shadows from the ground.

William Cook

The Heckler: those who doubt the brilliance of Phil Collins are snobs

Three boos for those rotten spoilsports who started an online petition against Phil Collins coming out of retirement (there’s already enough suffering in the world, they said). Fools. Don’t they realise pop music is supposed to be naff? It’s the soundtrack to our tawdry lives. How could it be anything but schmaltzy? Don’t they know there’s nothing quite so uncool as a bloke with really cool taste in music? Like a large penis, a large record collection is something that only impresses other men. Phil Collins fulfils all the basic job requirements of a middle-aged, middle-of-the-road rock star. He writes undemanding songs about falling in and out of love. He

Kate Chisholm

Radio is flowering because it’s so much more potent than TV

Who would have thought in this visually obsessed age of YouTube, selfies and Instagram that radio, pure audio, no images attached, nothing to hold on to but a voice, a tune, a blast of birdsong, could not only survive the arrival of the new image-making and digital technologies but experience an extraordinary flowering of talent and expression. Thousands of radio stations are popping up right across the globe, ready for you to tap into via your smartphone or tablet, taking you straight from SW9 or NE69 to Chicago, Cape Town, Lviv or Marrakech. The quality of the sound produced by these stations is less important than an ability to draw

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Was my article the inspiration for this brilliant BBC dramatisation?

The two things I hate most about Christmas are a) Advertland showing me how sparkly and joyous my home and bright-eyed kids are at this time of year, and b) the Doctor Who Xmas special telling me that if only I can open my heart and put cynicism aside, then I too can enjoy a mash-up of Dickens, C.S. Lewis and the Brothers Grimm, where daleks with tinsel round their guns exterminate the spirit of Scrooge as laughing children come pouring from the Ice Queen’s dungeon and something nice happens on a London housing estate. Or similar. That’s what was so great about We’re Doomed! The Dad’s Army Story (BBC2,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Tricycle’s Ben Hur is magnificent in its superficiality – a masterpiece of nothing

It’s the target that makes the satire as well as the satirist. Is the subject powerful, active, relevant and menacing? Patrick Barlow’s new spoof, Ben Hur, must answer ‘No’ on all four counts. The show takes aim at two principal irritants: vain actors and the Hollywood epics of the 1950s, whose titanic scale was offered as bait to audiences besotted with their cosy new TV sets. Old Hollywood is a spent ogre these days and the foibles of the acting trade are hardly a threat to civilised life, so the show can’t embrace our immediate concerns. But the execution is compellingly assured. The cast is led by John Hopkins, an

Deborah Ross

Grandma: a feminist comedy that punches magnificently above its weight

Apologies if you were expecting a review of Star Wars here, but Disney is not allowing critics access prior to the film’s opening on the 17th, and anyway, we’ve got Grandma, which was made for $600,000 in 19 days and has a running time of 79 minutes and stars a 76-year-old, so there is that. It’s also a feminist comedy with a plot driven by the need for an abortion, and if that doesn’t win you over, I’m not sure what else to say. It’s terrific? It’s small-scale, but punches magnificently above its weight? I laughed, and also cried? I could say that and have just said that, because it’s