Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Top oratorio-mongering: Elijah, at the Barbican, reviewed

As a young music critic, Bernard Shaw poked fun at anyone who thought Mendelssohn was a genius. Shaw conceded that Mendelssohn was capable of touching tenderness and refinement and sometimes ‘nobility and pure fire’, but his music was marred by kid-glove gentility, conventional sentimentality and – worst of all – ‘despicable oratorio-mongering’. Shaw’s pet hate was St Paul, with its ‘Sunday-school sentimentalities and its music-school ornamentalities’. He was only slightly less catty about Mendelssohn’s other oratorio, Elijah. Although he acknowledged its ‘exquisite prettiness’, he concluded that its composer was ‘a wonder whilst he is flying; but when his wings fail him, he walks like a parrot’. Nobody needed reminding that

Deborah Ross

It’ll haunt you forever: The Zone of Interest reviewed

I don’t know if it’s a Jewish thing, but I’m certainly always bracing myself for the latest Holocaust film. There have been some horribly dim ones, such as The Reader or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, both of which invite you to sympathise with the perpetrators and you know what? I won’t if it’s all the same to you. (Don’t get me started on Schindler’s List; we’ll be here forever.) But Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest dispenses with the usual conventions. There is no humanising or even dehumanising. There is no pretence at insight. It was what it was; look at how ordinary these mass murderers were. Treated

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The unique hell of being a wartime bomber pilot

Some years ago I did a short series of interviews for The Spectator with war veterans about their combat experiences. Most had found them exciting, fulfilling, even enjoyable: ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world!’ said infantryman Mike Peyton, who likened it to doing the black ski run at Tortin in Verbier. But the one who had nothing good to say about it was RAF bomber pilot David Hearsey. ‘All those films where you see fliers gather in the mess for a sing-song round the piano: didn’t happen in my squadron,’ he told me. ‘Our base was grim, cold and windblown. Everyone was miserable and terrified and barely socialised

Rupert Christiansen

Why do choreographers keep adapting films they can’t possibly improve upon?

Ballet has always suffered from a shortage of stories that can communicate without the medium of the spoken word or a lengthy synopsis in the programme. Recourse has often been made to familiar fairy tale and legend, but recently popular films and novels have also become a favoured source – Matthew Bourne, for instance, has fed off both The Red Shoes and Edward Scissorhands, while Christopher Wheeldon turned to Like Water for Chocolate and Cathy Marston to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The question that seldom seems to be asked in such cases is a basic one: can dance bring anything to the table, and can its language enlarge the source or

Friday

Tom Kinninmont

What would Alasdair Gray think of Poor Things?

It’s awards season in the movie industry and the film Poor Things, based on the novel by the late Scottish writer and painter Alasdair Gray, is flying high. To date, it has received more than 180 nominations in various award categories, including 11 Oscars and 11 BAFTAs, and has chalked up 51 wins. What Alasdair would have made of the film version of Poor Things, I don’t know. He could be a hard man to please. It has certainly brought his extraordinary imagination to an entirely new audience. I imagine Alasdair would have disapproved of the film leaving its Scottish roots behind (although Willem Dafoe has an odd stab at a Scottish

Thursday

Claudia Massie

The visionary art of Eduardo Paolozzi

On 10 June 1940, a riot erupted in Edinburgh as a 2,000-strong mob swarmed the streets, hell-bent on revenge. Their targets were barbers, delis and ice cream parlours; anything or anyone Italian. Mussolini had just entered the war and the mob scented blood. The police eventually quelled the violence and the city’s more sympathetic locals helped sweep up the broken glass and mop up the spilled wine. But nearly half of the city’s 400 Italian Scots were rounded up under Winston Churchill’s order to ‘collar the lot’, and sent to internment camps. Among them was the 16-year-old Eduardo Paolozzi, who was locked up at Edinburgh’s Saughton prison. While Paolozzi was

Laura Gascoigne

Joyous chaos: Lucy Harwood, at Firstsite, reviewed

‘Welcome to England’s Most Misunderstood County’, reads an imitation road sign inside the entrance to Firstsite gallery. It’s part of ‘The Essex Way’ (2021), a monumental collage commissioned from local boy Michael Landy to mark the 10th anniversary of the Colchester gallery’s opening. With its discombobulating mix of illustrations of native birdlife and views of landmarks such as the Veolia landfill site at Rainham, Landy’s mural is designed, like the gallery’s current exhibition series, to challenge assumptions about the county now most commonly associated with Towie. A fellow visitor swore she could smell hay coming off a painting of a sunlit cornfield The series started in 2021 with a show

Michael Hann

Without Pitchfork, bands like the Clientele would never have attracted any attention

The whole world might have been different had Alasdair MacLean, singer and guitarist of the delicate, pastoral, slightly psychedelic band the Clientele, had his way. In 2006 he told music website Pitchfork about the time he was working for a publisher and strongly recommended they turn down a children’s fantasy novel that had been submitted. They overruled him and published Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone anyway. We all know what happened to J.K. Rowling. MacLean ended up leaving the world of books, and in due course the Clientele got a music deal that enabled them to turn full time, though I have no idea whether they still survive solely

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Visually world-class, dramatically second-rate: Don’t Destroy Me, at the Arcola, reviewed

Don’t Destroy Me is the rather breathless title of Michael Hastings’s first play which he wrote when he was just 18. The material draws on his adolescent years in a south London boarding house and the action opens with an elderly husband, Leo, and his unfaithful young wife, Shani, preparing for a visit from their handsome teenage son, Sammy. Leo knows that his marriage is being undermined by Shani’s affair with a cocky spiv who lives next door but this tawdry business fades into the background as the play starts to come alive. The characters upstairs take over. The flat above is occupied by Mrs Pond, a pretentious fraud in

Richard Bratby

Fresh as an April shower: Opera North’s Albert Herring reviewed

Opera North has launched its spring season with Giles Havergal’s 2013 production of Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring, performed (as conceived) in the Howard Assembly Room – the company’s studio space next door to the Grand Theatre. The economics of opera are a dark and dismal science, but one of the few constants is that ticket sales are never the whole story. So if ON has revived a show that can only accommodate an audience of around 300, and which can’t tour, we should assume that’s all priced in. The problem here is that Havergal presents the opera in the round, a practice rarely seen on the unsubsidised stage but beloved

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Original and absorbing: A Highland Song reviewed

Grade: A- Why don’t you go outside and get some fresh air instead of playing that stupid game? A) I’ve been outside, and I didn’t like it. And B) there’s a game for that. A Highland Song excellently simulates the experience of going outside for a walk and regretting it. Moira sets off to meet her Uncle Hamish at the lighthouse – but like Virginia Woolf’s lot, takes her sweet time getting there. Once you’re 100 yards from her front door, she has no idea where she is. Despite her och-aye-hoots brogue, she turns out to be no less clueless than the tourists who head up Ben Nevis in flip-flops

James Walton

Highly effective slice of old-school storytelling: ITV’s Born from the Same Stranger reviewed

With its tales of close relatives reuniting after years of separation, ITV’s Long Lost Family has been reliably jerking tears since 2011. Now, from the same production company, comes Born from the Same Stranger: another thumping slice of highly effective old-school human-interest storytelling, this time served with a side order of ethical dilemmas. In the 1990s when, as the programme put it, ‘sperm donation was in its heyday’, donors did their thing in return for 50 quid and a promise of anonymity. On solid practical grounds, this seemed like a good idea at the time – and perhaps still does. But it reckoned without the deep human need to know

Deborah Ross

Mesmerising: All of Us Strangers reviewed

Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is an aching tale of grief, loss and loneliness starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, so I probably don’t need to tell you the acting is off the scale but I will anyway: the acting is off the scale. Scott, in particular, infuses his character with such vulnerability that you’ll want to reach into the screen and comfort him. And while it does feature ghosts, don’t let that put you off. They’re the doable kind rather than the walking-through-walls, ‘wooOOO-wooOOO’ kind. (Huge relief all round.) Haigh makes complex, intimate, single-protagonist films (Weekend, 45 Years, Lean on Pete) and this is no exception. Here Scott

Rupert Christiansen

Giselle is lovingly revived at the London Coliseum

Two archetypal ballet heroines have been facing each other across WC2: at the Coliseum, Giselle the blameless virgin, wronged in the first act, disembodied in the second; at Covent Garden, Manon the seductive, manipulative courtesan who can’t choose between love and money. Both in different ways are victims of a cruel world, and both must die. The men responsible for their downfall – of course – survive. Mary Skeaping’s staging of Giselle for the English National Ballet, first seen in 1971, divides opinion among the cognoscenti. It reverts to what is known about the original 1841 Paris production, retrieving a substantial episode of expository mime – that will baffle modern

Thursday

Christopher Harding

The man who got the West to fall in love with India’s sacred literature

The first European translation of the Bhagavad Gita, a dialogue between Prince Arjuna and Lord Krishna, appeared in English in 1785. Strangely, this classic of Indian spirituality, which is much concerned with liberation, was prefaced with talk of conquest, rightful dominion and chains of subjection. The translation had been produced under the auspices of the English East India Company, then in the process of claiming for itself ever-larger swaths of territory in India. The first edition incorporated a letter written by the governor-general in Calcutta, Warren Hastings, in which he compared the Gita with Homer and Milton. He also noted its usefulness as a source of intelligence on a newly

Graeme Thomson

Americans still think ‘punk rock’ was about the music, bless them

Of their many cultural quirks, Americans retain a slightly ridiculous and yet rather touching belief in the power of ‘punk rock’ (nobody in the UK ever calls it that, of course: it’s just ‘punk’). Despite laying claim to the progenitors of the whole punk thing – the Stooges, the New York Dolls, the Ramones – Americans still don’t quite seem to understand it. They actually think it was about the music, bless them. More bafflingly, they seem to regard ‘punk rock’ as something that has enduring currency, rather than being a brief – though significant – cultural phenomenon of the mid-to-late 1970s that was more or less over before it

Laura Gascoigne

Modern, timeless, effortlessly avant-garde: Pasquarosa, at the Estorick Collection, reviewed

In February 1929, an exhibition by a young unknown female painter opened at the Arlington Gallery on Bond Street. This was not surprising in itself, given that the gallery specialised in lesser-known artists. More surprising was the fact that this artist was a woman – and Italian. As the critic Emilio Cecchi noted in the catalogue: ‘As regards the best Italian art of today the English public knows very little.’ What piqued people’s interest in this particular Italian artist was her fascinating backstory. Born in 1896 in Anticoli Corrado, a small hill town northeast of Rome known as a nursery for artists’ models, Pasquarosa Marcelli had never painted and was

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Duff nonsense: The Enfield Haunting, at Ambassadors Theatre, reviewed

The Enfield Haunting is a good old-fashioned horror show that wants to be a documentary as well. It’s based on a hocus-pocus yarn that made the front page of the Daily Mirror in 1977 and was swiftly forgotten. The play opens in an Enfield terrace that resembles a bomb site, complete with charred plasterwork, missing walls and ripped out floorboards. Peggy, a harassed housewife played by Catherine Tate, is struggling to cope with three teenage brats and a ghost that’s got loose in her home. Two ghosts, in fact. Peggy’s daughter, Janet, has been possessed by a demonic spirit that forces her to rasp out nonsense in a hoarse, throaty

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

The Queen’s Reading Room needs more Queen

In the dog days of winter, when venturing out under darkened, sleety skies is to be avoided if at all possible, an online book club often seems the most appealing kind there is. Here in the UK, on territory in which the daytime TV hosts Richard and Judy once held undisputed reign, a bookish royal has entered the fray: Queen Camilla, whose ‘reading room’ and associated charity was launched on Instagram during the pandemic, and has now branched into podcasts. The first episode of The Queen’s Reading Room was introduced by the charity’s chief executive Vicki Perrin, to the background music of insistently vivacious strings, the kind they let rip

Richard Bratby

Everything hits the spot: Royal Opera’s Elektra reviewed

Aristotle wrote that classical tragedy should evoke pity and awe. With Richard Strauss’s Elektra, the awe can be taken as read: a certain irreducible level of epicness is written into the score, even if – like Sir Antonio Pappano on the first night of this new production at the Royal Opera – a conductor takes the composer’s advice and treats it like Mendelssohn’s ‘fairy music’. But I genuinely hadn’t expected quite so much of the other emotion – pity, or if you prefer, compassion. There it was, though, welling up from the bottom of the orchestra, worrying away at one’s preconceptions, until in the Recognition Scene the eyes started to