Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Peak wackiness: Lanthimos’s Bugonia reviewed 

Bugonia is the latest film from Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, The Lobster, Poor Things) and it’s about a conspiracy theorist who kidnaps a pharmaceutical boss. It’s extremely wacky – possibly in a good way, still not sure. You certainly get value for money; it smashes together several genres (absurdist comedy, sci-fi, thriller, body horror) and takes a swipe at everything from capitalism and conglomerates to echo chambers and internet rabbit holes. But whether it adds up to much or has anything to say, also still not sure. It has a script by Will Tracy (Succession, The Menu) and is a remake of the 2003 Korean cult favourite Save The Green

Rose Lyddon

Dimes Square on screen

I can’t watch films anymore without looking at my phone. If I watch a film on my laptop, I’ll be scrolling throughout – reading Wikipedia, checking group chats, looking up filming locations on IMDb. To properly watch a film, I have to take myself to the cinema. Luckily, and perhaps as a direct result of our scrolling habits, London’s indie cinema scene is having an ascendent moment. I recently ventured down to Peckham for two screenings at the Ivy House, a pub with a cinema room where films play on a stained pull-down projection screen. Both screenings were organised by Deeper Into Movies, which puts on arthouse films at cinemas

Rupert Christiansen

Let’s face it, Sleeping Beauty is a bit of a bore

Let’s face it, The Sleeping Beauty runs the high risk of being a bit of a bore. A wonderfully inventive score by Tchaikovsky fires it up of course, but precious little drama emerges after nasty Carabosse gatecrashes the royal christening, and there’s too much imperial parading and courtly kowtowing throughout. Connoisseurs may relish what survives of Petipa’s choreography as a lexicon of academic classicism, but it has to be magnificently danced if it is to be animated. And it almost never is. English National Ballet has revived Kenneth MacMillan’s production, originally staged by American Ballet Theater in 1987. On the first night of the current run, the lighting was prosaic

James Walton

The joy of Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing

If you didn’t already know that Down Cemetery Road was based on a novel Mick Herron wrote before the Slough House series – later adapted into TV’s Slow Horses – it mightn’t be too difficult to guess. After all, main character Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson, no less) is a cynical sixty-something with a dodgy hygiene regime, who works in a ferociously shabby office and communicates mainly through the medium of the heartless yet undeniably funny wisecrack – but who nonetheless shouldn’t be underestimated by the arse-covering intelligence services she’s up against. She is, in other words, a female version of Slow Horses’ Jackson Lamb (also played by an Oscar-winning Brit).

Michael Hann

No band should play Ally Pally

The last time Gillian Welch and David Rawlings played in London it was a different world: the world of David Cameron and Barack Obama and a Manchester United at the top of the Premier League. Welch and Rawlings have changed, too: Welch is silver rather than red, and Rawlings as grizzled as a bear. Welch was in brown floor-length dress and Rawlings in suede jacket and cowboy hat. With a rather younger upright-bass-player, Paul Kowert, the trio looked like farmers trying to save their land from The Man in some Taylor Sheridan TV series. And then they started singing. Welch and Rawlings have released records under their own names and

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Perfection: Hampstead Theatre’s The Assembled Parties reviewed

The Assembled Parties, by Richard Greenberg, is a rich, warm family comedy that received three Tony nominations in 2013 following its New York première. Hampstead has taken a slight risk with this revival. The cryptic title doesn’t suggest an easygoing drama full of excellent jokes. The Yiddish slang may be unfamiliar to English ears, and the social pedigree of the family needs explanation. These are wealthy New York Jews living in a 14-room apartment which they rent but don’t own, so their fortune is insecurely anchored. And the action starts in 1980 and fast-forwards to 2000 so it feels like a period piece aimed at the over-sixties. Those drawbacks aside,

Thursday

Tim Abrahams

The triumph of classical architecture

It is very hard to imagine the University of Oxford ever constructing a modernist building again. This is the significance of the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. In its sheer scale, in its prominence both within the city centre and within the university – the first multi-department, purpose-built structure to open in its history – it is the most important building to be erected in Oxford in half a century and an endstop to an architectural era. One can imagine that its use of a restrained classicism won’t just influence the architectural aesthetics of Oxford but also of other universities within historical cities, both in the UK and internationally.

Digby Warde-Aldam

The best artist alive? Probably

Taking place every October in Regent’s Park, the Frieze fair is probably the biggest event in London’s art calendar. It is also, as a spectacle, by far the least enjoyable. With works crammed into cubicle-sized booths, and punters battling a crossfire of air kisses and the palpable stress ricocheting around the flimsy partitions, I struggle to think of a worse context in which to look at art of any stripe. Still, it always used to be an occasion to take the pulse of the contemporary art world, to pick out the visual signatures of the reigning avant-garde tendency and clock what Jeremy Deller was doing with his facial hair at

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Why was the 19th century so full of bigots and weirdos? 

Da Vinci’s Laundry is based on an art world rumour. In 2017, Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ sold at Christie’s for $450 million but some experts claimed that the attribution was inaccurate. Could the world’s costliest artwork be a fake? Writer, Keelan Kember, considers the provenance of a fictional Leonardo owned by a thuggish oligarch, Boris, who claims to have bought the masterpiece at a flea market. He invites two posh British experts, Christopher and Milly, to authenticate the painting and when Christopher questions its origins he earns Boris’s instant displeasure. Boris threatens to toss Christopher from the roof of his luxury mansion. Enter a brash American, named Tony, who wants to

Matthew Bell

The staggering beauty of Fra Angelico

In 1982, Pope John Paul II surprised a few people by beatifying Fra Angelico, the 15th-century Dominican friar from near Fiesole. It’s not clear why he put Beato Angelico on the road to sainthood, given that the artist didn’t perform any miracles. And yet, after spending a few hours immersed in his works, which are both profoundly sacred but also staggeringly beautiful, you begin to understand the decision. He was certainly a hit with popes. Pius XII was such a fan that, in 1955, when the first major Fra Angelico exhibition was held at the Vatican, to mark 500 years since his death, he gave a handwritten speech praising the

Richard Bratby

A Magic Flute that will make you weep

English Touring Opera has begun its autumn season and the miracle isn’t so much that they’re touring at all these days, but that they do it so well. Two generations back, this was the natural condition of opera in the UK: not Netrebko at Covent Garden, but agile, medium-scale companies playing at the Wolverhampton Grand or the Sheffield Lyceum alongside the panto and the 1950s equivalent of Friends: The Musical and An Evening with Sandi Toksvig. Don’t believe it? It’s all in Alexandra Wilson’s new book Someone Else’s Music, which is out now, and which all British opera buffs should read because it’ll make their jaws drop. Case in point:

Deborah Ross

The new Springsteen biopic is cringe

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is a biopic of ‘the boss’ starring Jeremy Allen White. It is not cradle to grave and do not expect the usual crowd-pleasing beats. There isn’t a single montage. Instead, it focuses on 1981, the making of his sixth album, Nebraska, and his mental troubles at that time. This will doubtless satisfy the completists. But non-completists – I could have named only two of his songs, tops – may wonder if it’s that interesting. Also, as White’s performance isn’t a million miles from tortured chef Carmy in Disney+’s The Bear I kept expecting him to put down his guitar and go tweeze micro-herbs on some

Graeme Thomson

Fionn Regan has gone method Worzel Gummidge

Watching the Mercury Music Prize on television last week, I remembered that Fionn Regan’s debut album, The End Of History, was nominated for the award back in 2007. Proof were it needed that the prize is rarely a shortcut to superstardom for most of those it spotlights. The Irish singer-songwriter has never quite replicated the mainstream acclaim he gained for his debut – when, for a solid five minutes, he was the latest in a long line of ‘new Bob Dylans’. He has, however, carved out an interesting and worthwhile career across five further albums, expanding his core skill set of folk guitar and knottily poetic wordplay with experimental touches

James Delingpole James Delingpole

A great comedy about a terrible sport

I’m trying to think of things I’m less interested in than American football. The plant-based food section? Taking up my GP’s offer of a free Covid booster? Ed Miliband’s nostril depilation regime? No, apart from maybe baseball, I can’t think of anything so soul-crushingly tedious as a rigged game where men in shoulder pads and portcullised helmets shout numbers, bash into one another, then wait half an hour while the referee decides whether or not they’re allowed to throw a spinny ball and maybe one day end up being Taylor Swift’s latest boyfriend. So you’ll never guess what the subject is of my favourite new American comedy series, Chad Powers…

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Why I love blowing up worms

Grade: B+ War, as we all know, is hell. But if it involves small squeaky annelids blowing each-other up with bazookas, it is also hella fun. And so to the newest installment in the long-running turn-based strategy series Worms. Can it be a coincidence that Worms Across Worlds arrives on Apple Arcade just in time for the release of Philip Pullman’s final His Dark Materials book? Yes, it absolutely can. Nevertheless the latest Worms, like Pullman’s work, is set in a multiverse in which intrepid heroes travel through portals between worlds. The world of Worms, like the world of His Dark Materials, mingles science and experimental theology: you can see

Thursday

Michael Hann

In defence of Mick Hucknall

Before Simply Red came on stage at the Greenwich peninsula’s enormodome, the screens showed a clip of a very young Mick Hucknall being interviewed. What he wanted, he said, was to be a great singer. Usually, that’s the cue for a gag about fate having other plans. Not this time. He’s 65 now, and he truly is a great singer as he showed for the best part of two hours. He knows it, too. A couple of songs in, he benignly told his audience at the first of two nights at the O2 that he liked it when they sang along with the choruses, but maybe leave the verses to

Gus Carter Gus Carter

Very pretty and pretty gruesome: Ballad of a Small Player reviewed

Ballad of a Small Player opens with Lord Doyle, played by Colin Farrell, hiding from security in his trashed casino suite in Macau. After they’re gone, he slips into the corridor and sees a trolley holding a bouquet of flowers and a knife. I kept my eyes on the knife, expecting the jittery, paranoid gambling addict to grab the weapon. Instead he places a white rose in his green velvet lapel. Director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front, Conclave) enjoys playing these games of misdirection. It feels appropriate. Casinos – with their chandeliers, gaudy frescoes and croupiers in black tie – are contradictory places. Opulence in these temples

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Tracy Letts’s magic touch

Tracy Letts’s Mary Page Marlowe is a biographical portrait of an emotionally damaged mother struggling with romantic and family problems. Susan Sarandon shares the lead with four other actresses which makes the show a little hard to follow. And the timeline is jumbled up so that the audience has to find its bearings at the start of each new episode. Why? Perhaps to give the material a complexity it doesn’t deserve. We first meet our heroine, aged 40 (played by Andrea Riseborough), as she tells her kids that they’re moving to Kentucky without their dad. This unpromising scene is hilarious because the word ‘Kentucky’ is repeated so often that it

James Walton

Is there anything menopausal women can’t do?

Is there anything menopausal women can’t do (on television)? Last Sunday, as a couple of them were still working on the daring theft of a Salvador Dali painting in ITV1’s Frauds, BBC1 launched Riot Women in which five others form a punk band. Meanwhile, two regular features of British TV remain actresses lamenting the lack of older women starring in drama series – and older women starring in drama series. Virtually all these shows also recall the headline from the American satirical magazine The Onion: ‘Women empowered by whatever a woman does.’ And that’s certainly true of Riot Women, written by Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley, Gentleman Jack etc.) and therefore

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

Handel was derided in his own time – particularly by us, for which belated apologies

Here’s a patriotic thought for you: baroque opera, as we now know it, was made in Britain. Sure, there are your Vivaldis and Cavallis; there’s always someone (usually French) trying to make Rameau stick and a few years back Opera North – bless them – even tried to exhume an opera by Reinhard Keiser. But realistically, if you’re going to see a pre-Mozart opera from a major company anywhere in the world, and it’s not by Monteverdi, it’s overwhelmingly likely to be by Purcell or Handel. And Handel wrote practically all of his surviving operas in London, for British audiences and British taste. So it’s only right that UK opera