Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

Winning: When Forms Come Alive, at the Hayward, reviewed

In case you didn’t know, we live in a ‘post-minimalist’ age, sculpturally speaking. Not a maximalist age, though some of the works in the Hayward’s new sculpture show are huge – an age of revolution against neatness. Who’s to blame for this call to disorder? Women. The two prime movers of this movement, if you can call it that, could not be more different, but both rebelled against minimalist geometry. As a student at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s, Ruth Asawa travelled to Toluca, Mexico, and saw villagers looping wire to make baskets for eggs. It struck her as a way of drawing in three dimensions and later,

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Evocative and immaculate: Netflix’s One Day reviewed

One Day is a bestselling novel with a simple but effective premise: a delightful, made-for-each-other couple meet on their last day at university, narrowly miss getting off with one another, then continue narrowly to miss getting off with one another every year for 14 years until finally, eventually they do. Actually, I’m not sure about the pay off. I never got round to reading David Nicholls’s book, nor did I catch the poorly received movie version with Anne Hathaway playing the love interest. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed and shall be very disappointed if the dénouement doesn’t deliver what the plot seems to be promising. All right, so the

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

A thrilling new recording of Messiaen’s Turangalila-Symphonie

Grade: A Pierre Boulez once called Messiaen’s giant Turangalila-Symphonie ‘brothel music’. That was mean-spirited but you knew what he meant: a typical performance comes in at just under 80 minutes, much of it consisting of the B-movie sound of an ondes Martenot wailing over lush harmonies. There’s a constant zig-zag of polyrhythms, plus great towers of brass that represent ‘the heavy, terrifying brutality of old Mexican monuments’ – but, yes, it can hang around like cheap scent. But not in this recording by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra under its music director Gustavo Gimeno, who lingers only where he has to. The effect is not hurried but bouncy and clean-limbed, allowing

Richard Bratby

On the evidence of their Siegfried, Regents Opera’s Ring will be well worth catching

It’s sometimes said that if Wagner were alive today he’d be making movies, but come on – really? A generation of Wagnerites has grown up for whom the first and definitive encounter with Der Ring des Nibelungen was on the small screen – in my case, the BBC’s early-eighties serialisation of the Bayreuth centenary production. What lingered was not the spectacle, but the intimacy: Donald McIntyre and Gwyneth Jones enveloped in darkness, reaching into each other’s souls. If you grew up with Wagner on TV and came of age, culturally speaking, around the time The Sopranos first aired, it seems obvious that the Ring isn’t some effects-laden Marvel blockbuster before

Deborah Ross

Sensuous, languorous, soothing and rich: The Taste of Things reviewed

The Taste of Things, which is this year’s French entry for best international film at the Oscars, is a gastro-film but it is not of the ‘Angry Male Chef’ genre. It’s not Boiling Point or The Menu or The Bear. It is not stressful or adrenaline-filled. No one swears or screams ‘Yes, chef!’ Instead, it is sensuous, languorous, soothing and as rich and deep as (I now know) a consommé should be. It will also force you to reappraise vol-au-vents which, in the right, tenderly loving hands, need not be the mean little bullety things that were served here in the seventies. (My mother, I remember, bought them frozen from

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

It’s no Jerusalem: Jez Butterworth’s Hills of California, at Harold Pinter Theatre, reviewed

Fifteen years after penning his mega-hit Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth has knocked out a new drama. The slightly baffling title, The Hills of California, refers to a hit by Johnny Mercer (the US songwriter not the MP for Plymouth) and it suggests American themes and locations. But the show is set in a knackered old Blackpool boarding house in the 1970s, where three sisters are waiting for their elderly mum to croak. It takes an hour of chit-chat to explain what’s happening. When the sisters were little, their ambitious mother forced them to perform song-and-dance routines in the hope of launching them as kiddie superstars on the new medium of television.

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

How did the internet become so horrific?

I can dimly remember the internet getting going, gradually staking its claims on our attention with hardly anyone except tech nerds – and famously David Bowie – realising what was going on. In our defence it was the 1990s and we had a lot else to think about: Britpop, The End of History, lads’ mags, guacamole, supermodels, Tony Blair, Monica Lewinsky, etc. But here we all are now, in a world where I can do my banking from bed, America is fragmenting like papier-mâché in the rain, and primary school children can get porn on their smartphones. Can anyone recall the incremental steps that brought us here? If not, it

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

I was dreading this show – how wrong could I be: Entangled Pasts, at the Royal Academy, reviewed

In the wake of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s exhibition Black Atlantic about its founder’s ties to the slave trade comes the Royal Academy’s Entangled Pasts, less of a mea culpa than an examination of conscience by an institution which, although hailed by its first president Sir Joshua Reynolds as an ‘ornament’ of Empire, was innocent of direct links to slavery. The exhibition is less of a mea culpa than an examination of conscience I confess that I was rather dreading this show, which sounded from the pre-publicity like a hollow exercise in Britannia-Rules-the-Waves breast-beating, but from the moment I stepped into the courtyard and saw the posturing Sir Joshua on his

Richard Bratby

One of the great contemporary symphonies: The Hallé – Desert Music, at Bridgewater Hall, reviewed

Steve Reich describes his Music for Pieces of Wood (1973) as an attempt ‘to make music with the simplest possible instruments’. At the Bridgewater Hall five performers stood in a pool of light, each holding a pair of claves: plain sticks of wood. At first, unsurprisingly, it’s all about rhythm. Patterns weave and dissolve, building into a clattering digital tapestry of sound. You start to hear new timbres – even harmonies – and the mind locks on, allowing Reich to play tricks on the ear. Players drop out unnoticed, then re-enter in a flash of colour before you realise they’ve gone. By the end, you’re so thoroughly inside the music

Michael Hann

Monumentally good: John Francis Flynn, at the Dome, reviewed

John Francis Flynn is monumentally good. He’s kick-yourself-for-missing-him good. He’s so good that when he spoke between songs in the upstairs ballroom of an old Irish pub in Tufnell Park, it was almost a disappointment: how could the man making this extraordinary music be so normal? Flynn is part of a cohort of Irish musicians revisiting traditional music. There’s the Mary Wallopers, in broad terms the most Pogues-ish. There’s Lankum, shortlisted for the Mercury Prize for their eyebrow-raising, droning experimentalism. There’s Lisa O’Neill, subdued and stern. And there’s Flynn, whose music dances from the unadornedly old-fashioned and Irish – the ‘Tralee Gaol’ played solo, on tin whistle – into something

Rupert Christiansen

Lucid and lean: Metamorphoses, at the Theatre Royal Bath, reviewed

Literate, thoughtful and serious, Kim Brandstrup ranks as one of the most honest and honourable of contemporary choreographers. A proper grown-up, scorning bad-boy sensationalism or visual gimmickry, he compensates in solid consistent craft for whatever he may lack in striking originality, and the double bill he presented earlier this month as part of Deborah Warner’s season in the chapel-like Ustinov Studio behind Bath’s Theatre Royal is quietly and characteristically satisfying. Can we have a moratorium on the title of Metamorphoses? It’s become a tired cliché Its subject matter draws on that bottomless source, classical myth. First comes a version of an episode in the saga of Theseus, Ariadne and the

Deborah Ross

An endurance test that I constantly failed: Occupied City reviewed

Occupied City is Steve McQueen’s meditative essay on Amsterdam during Nazi occupation, with a running time of four hours and 22 minutes. There is no archive footage. There are no witness testimonies. It’s not The Sorrow and the Pity. It is not half-a-Shoah. Instead, this visits 130 addresses and details what happened there between 1940 and 1945 while showing the building or space as it is today. It should have its own power – what ghosts reside here? What was life like for the Jews who were deported from this square and perished at Auschwitz? – but I watched it from home via a link, as I had Covid, and

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Cheekface are uplifting and witty but also very punchable: It’s Sorted reviewed

Grade: B+ Cheekface are apt to divide opinion rather sharply. There are those who believe that the Los Angeles indie nerd-rock three-piece dissect late capitalism and the American psyche with an uplifting and insightful laconic wit. And then there are those who want to punch them repeatedly in the face, especially the singer Greg Katz – punch them and punch them until there is nothing left but broken teeth. I get that. I swing between both camps. In this respect, and several others, they are rather like Weezer, except a little less cute. In the end people decided that a punching was probably the right option for Weezer and they

James Walton

How does Larry David get away with it? Curb Your Enthusiasm reviewed

As Curb Your Enthusiasm begins its 12th and apparently final series, one key question remains: how does Larry David get away with it? While many entertainers are sent into exile for ancient tweets far less tasteless than the average episode of Curb, the show sails on – providing extended comic riffs on incest victims, Holocaust survivors and even fat women, while enjoying pretty much universal acclaim. I don’t know how Larry David gets away with it – but I’m still very grateful that he does Perhaps it helps that the jokes are funny – and that many of them are on David. You could also argue that his heartlessness about

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

An unmistakable hit: Till the Stars Come Down, at the Dorfman Theatre, reviewed

Till the Stars Come Down is a raucous, high-energy melodrama set at a wedding in Hull. The writer, Beth Steel, focuses on three female characters and virtually ignores the men in her story which is just as well because her male characters all talk and act like planks. Her women are full of courage, craziness and fun. This is a hit. West End, easily Broadway, maybe. Pack your bags, girls We meet Sylvia, the anxious bride, who fears that her family won’t accept her Polish spouse, Marek. Her sister, Hazel, is facing a romantic crisis because her husband has stopped paying her attention in bed. And sexy Maggie harbours a

Thursday

Barnaby Rogerson

How the Houthis wage war through poetry

Poetry is politics in the Yemen. When the last Imam of Yemen, who was also the hereditary ruler, was deposed in a coup in 1962, it was a local poet who announced the change of regime on the radio, in verse of course. And the current al-Houthi regime in the north of the country, like all its predecessors, asserts its legitimacy, confounds its enemies and rallies its supporters through poetry. As an aspect of their cause, they have consciously avoided high-Arabic poetry – a literate, urban cultural form – and have made use of the zamil tradition, which immediately speaks not of the palaces of emirs and princes, but takes

Daisy Dunn

Ought we not have some shrine to the pips?

Next week marks the centenary of the pips. On Monday at 9 p.m. a documentary will be broadcast on Radio 4 debating whether the six little tones which ring in each hour ought to be axed as obsolete or preserved for tradition’s sake. Some contributors will speak of them as annoyances – ‘the cockroaches of broadcasting’ is a memorable phrase – and others will ask what could possibly replace them. By the end of the programme, whatever your view, you will have the pips lodged firmly between your teeth. If we so worship the pips, ought we not to have some worthy shrine to their existence as well? The first

Laura Gascoigne

Like swallowing a pack of Parma Violets: CUTE, at Somerset House, reviewed

It’s funny how badly some 1960s films have dated. Watch What’s New Pussycat? today and you feel faintly sick. Never mind the chorus line of high-kicking cartoon cupids in the title sequence, what about the lyrics of Tom Jones’s theme song? ‘So go and powder your cute little pussycat nose…’ Yuck. Tim Berners-Lee, asked what uses of his invention he hadn’t foreseen, replied with one word: ‘Kittens.’ But if you think we’ve moved on, you’d better not visit CUTE. Coinciding with the 50th birthday of Japanese cartoon character Hello Kitty, Somerset House’s latest exhibition – ‘a landmark exploration of the irresistible force of cuteness’ – takes as its starting point

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Meandering, flat and witless: Plaza Suite, at the Savoy Theatre, reviewed

Plaza Suite is a sketch show by Neil Simon set in a luxury New York hotel in 1968. The play is rarely revived and it’s never been staged in the West End before. Simon’s idea (which Noël Coward accused him of stealing from his play Suite in Three Keys) is to place a trio of unrelated stories in the same hotel room. Simon struggles to find good endings for his set-ups and he keeps scribbling page after page of chit-chat in the hope of stumbling on a decent exit-line. He can’t do it. The dialogue sounds true to life but it’s also meandering, flat and witless – the sort of

Graeme Thomson

A stellar night at Celtic Connections

Sometimes I think, in the end, only the voice truly matters. Dress it however you wish, zhuzh it up with textural condiments: cool electronics, warm strings, harsh noise, romantic rhythm, ambient atmospherics. It’s all decoration. The human voice is what we respond to most fervently and instinctively in popular music. This – far from infallible – notion occurred to me while attending a concert celebrating 50 years of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra as part of Celtic Connections, Glasgow’s annual (and always inventive) festival of roots music. Led by American conductor Eric Jacobsen, the SCO opened with a lively rendition of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture before providing supple, sympathetic support for four