Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Deborah Ross

A Most Violent Year, review: mesmerising performances – and coats

A Most Violent Year is a riveting drama even though I can’t tell you what it’s about, or even what it actually is. (What’s new?) Set in New York City in 1981, against the improbable background that is the heating oil business (it’s sexier than you’d think), this isn’t quite a gangster film and it isn’t quite a thriller and it isn’t quite a morality play and it isn’t quite an exploration of the American Dream and it isn’t one of those parables about the evils of capitalism either. This is discombobulating, initially. We are used to the familiarity of well-defined genres. ‘Where is this going?’ you will keep asking

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Broadchurch, review: ‘unwatchable’

Probably the two greatest advances in western culture in my lifetime have been the Sopranos-style epic serial drama and the advent of TV on demand and/or the DVD box set. I don’t think I’m saying anything weird or contentious — or indeed original — here. For example, I’m writing these words at the end of a week with the Fawn in the Canaries, a holiday which I just know wouldn’t have been half as pleasurable if we hadn’t been able to retire to our room every evening after another hard day’s beach work to the solace of two more episodes of the Nordic miseryfest that is The Bridge. And just

Kate Chisholm

Radio 4’s War and Peace: almost as good as the book

To have listened to Radio 4’s marathon ten-hour adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as it was being broadcast on New Year’s Day must have been both wonderful and a bit weird. Like soaking in an ever-replenishing warm bath, indulgent, luxuriant, all-absorbing. Yet at the same time I imagine it was quite hard by the end to step back into your own world after being so taken over by the fictional cares of the Rostov, Bolkonsky and Bezukhov families. Needless to say, I caught barely one episode on that day (how many, I wonder, did listen all the way through?). Fortunately, there’s a chance to catch up in the old-fashioned

Wednesday

Edward Seckerson

Andrea Chénier, Royal Opera House, review: like a Carry On – but without the jokes | 21 January 2015

Andrea Chénier Royal Opera House, in rep until 6 February Who on earth could have predicted that a hoary old operatic melodrama set in revolutionary France would find resonance in the present where the pen as a weapon against bigotry and hypocrisy has suddenly achieved iconic status. But hold up, let’s not get carried away. We’re talking about Giordano’s Andrea Chénier. Though its eponymous poet does indeed extol free expression at the service of love, the sentiments — the voices of reason in a time of high anxiety — don’t run too deep. And so we’re back where we started, with a hoary old melodrama. So how to stage something that only

Tuesday

Alexander Fiskeharrison

Blunt is right. Being posh in the arts is career suicide

Yesterday saw Labour’s shadow minister for the arts, Chris Bryant MP, amusingly and justly savaged by the pop star James Blunt for some ill-advised remarks about the predominance of public school boys in the arts: he cited both the Old Harrovian Blunt and the Old Etonian Eddie Redmayne as evidence of a lack of diversity. Now, I am sure the multi-award-winning, multi-platinum-selling former Captain Blunt can look after himself, and during awards season, the Oscar-nominated Redmayne has other things on his plate, but it reminds this former actor of how narrow the arts really are. It was after my first successful audition in 2007, for a part in a Jacobean tragedy

Monday

Michael Tanner

Met Opera Live’s Merry Widow, review: kitsch, glorious kitsch

The Merry Widow Met Opera Live ‘Even today, at 75, the waltz from The Merry Widow sends me into a fit of rage,’ wrote Richard Strauss to his close collaborator Clemens Krauss in 1940. In a brilliant piece in his book Essays and Diversions Robin Holloway discusses why that waltz, and indeed the whole of Lehar’s masterpiece infuriated Strauss so much, and mainly concludes that Strauss was jealous of the man who could write the ‘deathless’ tunes of The Merry Widow. Five years before, Strauss had complained ‘to think that one must get to be 70 years old to discover that one’s best gift is for kitsch!’But that only shows

William Cook

How Kraftwerk did more to shape modern music than anyone since the Beatles

Normally, few things in life are quite so tedious as listening to a bunch of academics discussing pop music. However this week’s Kraftwerk Konferenz at Aston University may be the chinwag that refutes this rule. Why so? Well, speakers includes former Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flur, plus Stephen Mallinder from Cabaret Voltaire and Rusty Egan of Visage – remember them? OK, so these real-life pop stars are still outnumbered by a host of earnest academics, delivering lectures with mind-numbing titles like ‘Kraftwerk and the Issue of Post-Human Authenticity’ and ‘Kraftwerk and the Cultural Studies of Cycling’. However if any band can withstand two days of pointy-headed discourse, it must be Kraftwerk.

Thursday

Jasper Rees

Shirley Williams: Saving my mother from the scriptwriters

Shirley Williams sits at the head of a table in a large conference room in Lib Dem HQ. She will be 85 this year, but still has a finger in many a pie, most of which we’re not to talk about here, including the predicted wipe-out of a generation of her party’s MPs at this year’s election. It’s one of the reasons she never made it to see the Tower of London poppies. Too busy. She also had to dash to Russia where she is on the board of the Moscow School of Political Studies. ‘It is all about teaching people about democracy and has fallen under the frown of

Martin Gayford

Geometry in the 20th and 21st centuries was adventurous – and apocalyptic

Almost a decade ago, David Cameron informed Tony Blair, unkindly but accurately, ‘You were the future once.’ A visitor to the Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition, Adventures of the Black Square, might mutter the same words in front of the first exhibits. It is now a century since Kazimir Malevich painted the starkest abstractions in the history of art: one simple geometric shape painted on a background of another colour. It was not, one might have thought, an idea with much mileage. Yet those early geometric abstractions had the compressed power of revolutionary manifestos. For good or ill, there has followed 100 years of modernist, post-modernist, and now post-post-modernist geometry in art.

Paul Deaton

Bike

I sold the sleek black bike you said I should buy. My special treat, in the shop, on my own, I couldn’t fulfil. It took your love, your woman’s will to tutor me in the art of self-giving and not to fear the gifts that feed. My self-denial father’s handed down creed. Cycling was the emblem of our in-love-fun. We headed out evenings after work, met near the deer park, rode out that summer to an unending, un-setting sun. What now our love is done?

Kate Chisholm

Was Beethoven influenced by yoga?

How many digital radios have you bought over the years? How many are still working? Of the four I used to have, only two are now working and those only in certain parts of the house. I wonder, if a nationwide audit were conducted, how many DAB sets would be found that are still up and running and in daily use? It’s far easier for me to take a laptop into the kitchen and listen online than to struggle to hear through the wheezes and pops emitted by the DAB radio. Why the signal never seems to improve, even in crowded urban areas, is a puzzle. Meanwhile the amount of

James Walton

Channel 4’s Cyberbully: an unashamedly old-fashioned drama in being both well made and moral

Channel 4’s Cyberbully (Thursday), written by Ben Chanan and David Lobatto, turned out to be a brilliantly gripping drama, even if the average middle-aged viewer might have found the early scenes as baffling as Finnegans Wake. Teenage Casey Jacobs (Maisie Williams) was alone in her bedroom, although not in the way we used to be: with an LP playing and the latest NME to hand. Instead, she was skyping her friend Megan (‘Hey, bitch,’ they greeted each other cheerfully), while also tweeting, texting, instagramming and wondering who’d hacked into her Spotify playlist and replaced all the good stuff with dreary old Led Zeppelin. But then she saw a tweet from

Deborah Ross

Wild made me want to puke

Wild is yet another film based on a true story, as currently seems to be in vogue for some reason. (See The Imitation Game, Foxcatcher, The Theory of Everything, Testament of Youth etc.) Maybe the film world has run out of made-up stories, which was bound to happen sooner or later, as you can’t just pluck them out of the air? I don’t know. I can only tell you that this is the story of Cheryl Strayed who, after a series of personal struggles, opts to rebuild herself by walking 1,000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, from the Mojave Desert to the Oregon/Washington border. This is a female on-the-road

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Old Vic’s Tree: Beckett plus Seinfeld – plus swearing

‘Fucking hell. You twat. Fuck off. Fuck. Fuck.’ These dispiriting words are the opening line of Tree, a newish play by the lugubrious comic Daniel Kitson, whose stand-up show once transported me into the heavenly arms of Lethe. His script opens with a chance encounter between two oddball smart Alecs. The outdoor setting, borrowed from Beckett, is a suburban cul-de-sac where a single tree is about to shed its autumn raiment. One man crouches in the branches, another stands below. They exchange confidences, observations, food and witticisms. At the end, one departs. This is a play of quips and anecdotes but no significant action. The tree-dweller is an eco-warrior protesting

Alexandra Coghlan

Royal Opera’s Orfeo, Roundhouse: shouts its agenda so loudly the music struggles to be heard

What a week to stage an opera about art’s power to challenge institutional authority, oppression — even death itself. Orfeo’s weapon might be a lyre rather than a pen, but the metaphor is silhouetted clearly against the monochrome backdrop of the Royal Opera’s new production of Monteverdi’s opera. Director Michael Boyd, former artistic director of the RSC, has taken a world of nymphs and shepherds and stripped it for conceptual parts. A battle between Gods and men is reinvented as a struggle between individual creative autonomy and faceless obedience to church and state. In Tom Piper’s designs, meadows and bucolic loveliness are out and 24-style metal walkways and gantries are

Ismene Brown

ENB’s Swan Lake: the rights and wrongs of ballet thighs

There’s been heated disagreement over the past week about what’s right and wrong. Is the rocket-propelled ex-Bolshoi enfant terrible Ivan Vasiliev ‘right’ for Swan Lake? Is English National Ballet right to accept such huge thighs in this of all classics, when the sizeist cohorts of the Russian establishment always said nyet to the sturdy, forceful Belarussian? That peculiar balletic categorisation ‘emploi’ has been invoked even by British critics. Emploi means ‘rightness’ as a ‘type’ for a role. Emploi was what drove Mikhail Baryshnikov, another short man condemned at home by his build to demi-caractère parts, to quit Russia and its narrowmindedness and redefine himself as danseur noble in the West.

Wednesday

Alexandra Coghlan

Royal Opera’s Orfeo, Roundhouse: shouts its agenda so loudly the music struggles to be heard

Orfeo Royal Opera, Camden Roundhouse, in rep until 24 January What a week to stage an opera about art’s power to challenge institutional authority, oppression — even death itself. Orfeo’s weapon might be a lyre rather than a pen, but the metaphor is silhouetted clearly against the monochrome backdrop of the Royal Opera’s new production of Monteverdi’s opera. Director Michael Boyd, former artistic director of the RSC, has taken a world of nymphs and shepherds and stripped it for conceptual parts. A battle between Gods and men is reinvented as a struggle between individual creative autonomy and faceless obedience to church and state. In Tom Piper’s designs, meadows and bucolic loveliness

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

Eddie Redmayne reigns as king of the Hawkings

Mr S’s colleague Tanya Gold writes in this week’s issue of The Spectator, that Eddie Redmayne is ‘very good’ in The Theory of Everything even if the Stephen Hawking biopic fails to mention that the physicist was ‘a very bad husband indeed’. Script issues aside, the judges at the Golden Globes were also won over by Redmayne’s performance, awarding the Old Etonian the gong for Best Actor in a Motion Picture (Drama). In his acceptance speech, Redmayne found time to praise both Hawking and the physicist’s former wife Jane, on whose memoir the film is loosely based. ‘Stephen, Jane, Jonathan and the Hawking family allowed us into their lives and entrusted us with their story,’

Thursday

Ian Thomson

What unites Churchill, Dali and T.S. Eliot? They all worshipped the Marx Brothers

‘I had no idea you were so handsome,’ Groucho Marx wrote to T.S. Eliot in 1961 on receiving from him a signed studio portrait. The Missouri-born Eliot was the Marx Brothers’ devoted fan; three years later, in June 1964, Groucho called on the 75-year-old poet at his home in London. Eliot was interested in the Marx Brothers’ first undisputed film masterpiece, Animal Crackers (1930), while Groucho wanted only to quote from ‘The Waste Land’; however, the men agreed that they shared a love of cats and fine cigars. Winston Churchill was another who admired the Marxes and their deliciously mad repartee. During an air attack on London in May 1941

William Cook

The tragic tale of the Two Roberts is a story of two artists cut off in their prime

In 1933, two new students met on their first day at Glasgow School of Art. From then on they were inseparable. They lived and worked together. They became lovers. They stayed together throughout their lives. They shone at art school, then came to London, where their robust paintings soon became very fashionable. Yet a few years later, just as quickly, their work fell out of favour. They became increasingly impoverished, dependent on friends for bed and board, but they never stopped painting — or loving one another. They were both prolific drinkers. By 1966, they were both dead. The biography of Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde is so compelling that,