Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

What a sad thing Strictly Come Dancing has become

Those of a violently masochistic disposition would have heartily enjoyed the Saturday matinée of the Strictly Come Dancing: Live Tour at the Utilita Arena, Birmingham. Talent loses out to glitter and hype, as shrieking vulgarity envelops all What deliciously perverse pleasure was to be drawn on this bleakly cold afternoon from the vast, snaking queues, the blared injunctions from the Tannoy, the drear concrete ambience, the over-priced merchandise tat and the chaos of the ultra-processed catering outlets – not to mention the £15 charge for leaving an empty backpack in the cloakroom. And then there was the show. How sad that what started off 20 years ago as a timely

Miserable but compelling: Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths reviewed 

Pansy is meant to be a sympathetic figure, but I felt sorrier for those who had to put up with her The central character in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths is Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), an angry, bitter, late middle-aged woman who rages against everyone and everything. Against her husband, her son, chuggers, dogs in coats, shop assistants, babywear with pockets: ‘What’s it going to keep in its pocket?’ Everyone, Leigh has said, ‘knows a Pansy’. Or is one, he might have added. Or is in touch with their inner Pansy. Why does babywear have pockets? This is not a cheerful film and, as with Leigh generally, there is no neat redemptive

The rediscovery of the art of Simone de Beauvoir’s sister

An exhibition of the art of Hélène de Beauvoir (1910-2001), sister of the great Simone, opened in a private gallery near Goodge Street last week. It was the first time Hélène’s work had been shown or received any attention in London, and young people in alternative clothing gathered to sip orange wine and listen, rapt, to the 75-year-old biographer and friend of the de Beauvoir sisters, Claudine Monteil, as her recollections helped elucidate Hélène’s abstract paintings. The reclamation of a new ‘lost’ artist was under way. De Beauvoir’s cubist self-portrait is quite good – but ‘Simone in red jacket’ must never be seen It is possible, these days, for gallerists

Lloyd Evans

An excellent sixth-form drama project: Santi & Naz, at Soho Theatre, reviewed 

Santi & Naz is a drama set in the Punjab in 1947 that uses an ancient and thrilling storyline about domestic violence. The main characters are a pair of young lesbians who plot to kill Naz’s bridegroom, Nadim, on the eve of the wedding. They discuss stabbing or poisoning him and eventually they decide to drown him in the village lake. This is a strange play. It wants to teach us about Indian society in the 1940s while assuming we’re experts There are many motives for this murder. Santi and Naz hate men. They detest the custom of marriage which forces women to endure painful sexual couplings. And Santi fears

James Delingpole

Not a complete waste of time: Netflix’s La Palma reviewed 

Netflix is the television equivalent of pasta and ready-made pesto: a slightly desperate but acceptable enough stand-by when you’ve got home late, you haven’t time to prepare anything more nutritious and at least it fills the gap without too much pain or fuss. It is an adamantine rule of television that foreign-language dramas are always superior La Palma is classic Netflix. You wouldn’t necessarily rave about it to your friends. But if, as I do, you have one of those wives who gets really pissed off if there’s not a programme ready and waiting to be viewed while supper’s still hot and, in a panic, you click on La Palma,

Was Brazil the real birthplace of modernism?

A paradox of art history: to understand the artists of the past, it helps to study how, and where, they conceived of the future. If today we foresee the future in the East, previous generations looked westward. In the last century, Europeans, having inherited a seemingly aged and decrepit civilisation, determined that the future of art was to be found in the New World. That much is well known. But this did not always mean America. Indeed, the true cognoscenti had a different country in mind: Brazil. Brazil’s modernists proudly integrated all traditions – European, Amerindian, African, Asian For the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, it was Brazil that was the

Sam Leith

Visual ingenuity and wit: Monument Valley 3 reviewed

Grade: A The original Monument Valley was a handheld puzzle game of beautiful design and high originality. Why it was called that I have no idea: the title suggests a desert landscape of red dust and sand-scoured buttes, but the playspace was a series of architectural arabesques hanging in space, around which the player navigated a mournful little stick princess. It made wonderfully clever use of isometric perspective: knobs and handles allowed you to rotate the playspace and slide structures together or apart. As you fiddled with the architecture, Escher-like perspectival tricks would open fresh paths or surfaces for Ida to walk on. The atmosphere was absorbing and the puzzles

Like lying down in front of a bulldozer: the Jesus Lizard, at the Electric Ballroom, reviewed

Many indie types from the 1980s and 1990s were secretly metal fans. But it’s not something they ever really wanted to admit to in public. They’d talk a good game about the Stooges and the Velvet Underground but back home – as was the case with Leeds’s goth overlord Andrew Eldritch, of the Sisters of Mercy – their living rooms were full of AC/DC videotapes. In fact, I’d go further and say the most influential track in the history of alternative music might very well be ‘Kashmir’ by Led Zeppelin rather than one of the hipster-anointed underground classics. It sometimes feels as though every indie band with one foot in

It’s no Citizen Kane: The Brutalist reviewed

The Brutalist, which is a fictional account of a Jewish-Hungarian architect in postwar America, has attracted a great deal of Oscar buzz and has been described as ‘monumental’ and ‘a masterpiece’ and ‘an inversion of the American dream’ and ‘up there with Citizen Kane’. It’s three and a half hours (including a 15-minute intermission) and while the running time isn’t an issue, as it is engrossing enough, it did frequently feel familiar. What film about the American dream isn’t an inversion of the American dream? I couldn’t fathom if it had anything new to say. It felt more like classy potboiler – love! Sex! Money! Power! Raw concrete! What film

Certainly intriguing: Apple TV+’s Prime Target reviewed

Needless to say, there have been any number of thrillers that rely on what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin: something, however random, that the goodies have to find before the baddies do. Less common are those where the MacGuffin is the mathematical formula for prime numbers – which is where Apple TV+’s latest show comes in. His first thought on seeing a 204 bus was that 2042 is the sum of three consecutive cubes Prime Target began in ‘Baghdad, Iraq’ – and therefore in a bustling market. Or at least it bustled until a large gas explosion opened up a hole in the ground leading to a spectacular medieval chamber.

Jenny McCartney

It’s moving to think how happy Van Gogh was in Brixton

When a phrase really takes off in the political sphere, you will recognise it by the frequency with which it crops up on the Today programme. Many years ago, I noticed that politicians had begun using the line ‘it’s not rocket science!’ when attacking the alleged inability of their opponents to get even the basics right. It had a muscular, common-sense ring to it, which they clearly relished, and it spread like norovirus through a cruise ship. How times have changed. Where once we had politicians who never stopped talking about rocket science, the ascent of Elon Musk in the US has brought us a rocket scientist who never stops

A jewel in the English National Ballet’s crown: Giselle reviewed

Since its première in Paris in 1841, Giselle has weathered a bumpy ride. For St Petersburg in 1884, Petipa gave Coralli and Perrot’s original choreography the once-over and Fokine grafted on further innovations when Diaghilev brought the ballet to London in 1911. Despite casts led by Pavlova, Karsavina and Nijinsky, it bombed here with critics and audiences, who considered its archetypal Victorian plot of the innocent village maiden betrayed by the local squire prissy and musty. Only a generation later, when the likes of Markova and Ulanova assumed the title role, did the scenario’s mythic simplicity find new life, albeit in versions that departed quite radically from the primary text.

A committed performance of Lerner and Weill’s flop: Opera North’s Love Life reviewed

Once upon a time on Broadway, Igor Stravinsky composed a ballet for Billy Rose’s revue Seven Lively Arts. After the first night, Rose felt that Stravinsky’s efforts might benefit from the attention of Robert Russell Bennett – the king of Broadway orchestrators, who’d collaborated with Cole Porter and the Gershwins. ‘YOUR MUSIC GREAT SUCCESS,’ he telegrammed to Stravinsky. ‘COULD BE SENSATIONAL SUCCESS IF YOU WOULD AUTHORISE ROBERT RUSSELL BENNETT RETOUCH ORCHESTRATION.’ Stravinsky wired straight back: ‘SATISFIED WITH GREAT SUCCESS.’ If you’re mad enough to revive Love Life, you have to commit. Opera North did There were moments in this revival of the Lerner and Weill flop Love Life when I

In praise of immersive exhibitions

‘Immersive’ exhibitions get a bad rap. And it’s not hard to see why. But if, like me, you find yourself hard-pressed to concentrate on Important Art when troubled by the cares and complexities of life, then digitally amplified sensation and spectacle might be a decent alternative if your museal itch needs scratching in stressful times. There are two notable options in London right now. The first is Vogue: Inventing the Runway, at the Lightroom in King’s Cross. Drawing on Vogue‘s nearly 150 year old archive, it’s a show about the catwalk’s flashpoints, narrated by Cate Blanchett.  For those who missed the wildly popular and – I hate to admit it – helplessly

Michael Gove, Mary Wakefield, Mitchell Reiss, Max Jeffery and Nicholas Farrell

32 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Michael Gove offers up some advice to Keir Starmer (1:33); Mary Wakefield examines the rise of the ‘divorce party’ (7:28); Mitchell Reiss looks at the promise and peril of AI as he reviews Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit, a collaboration between the former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt, the former chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft Craig Mundie, and the late US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (13:52); Max Jeffery listens to The Armie HammerTime Podcast as the actor attempts to reverse his spectacular downfall (20:45); and, Nicholas Farrell reveals the time he got drunk with the ghost of Mussolini (25:24).  Produced and presented by

Is the tide turning on restitution? 

When passions are aroused, all of us are liable to overstate our case. Dan Hicks, a curator at Oxford’s extraordinary Aladdin’s Cave of anthropology, the Pitt-Rivers Museum, is perhaps a case in point. A Swedish academic, Staffan Lunden, has convincingly argued that Hicks is guilty of ‘distortion’ when writing about the British raid on Benin in 1897, which brought several thousand objects, including finely wrought brass statuettes, to museums across the world. Hicks published his uncompromising views in 2020 in a prize-winning book, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. His opinions about the Benin bronzes – which have been instrumental in the restitution movement –

The stupidity of the classical piano trio

It’s a right mess, the classical piano trio; the unintended consequence of one of musical history’s more frustrating twists. When the trio first evolved, in the age of Haydn, the piano (or at any rate, its frail domestic forebear) was the junior partner, and the two string instruments, violin and cello, were added to make the silly thing audible. Then the piano started to evolve, while its partners – give or take the odd tweak – really didn’t, much. The end result, by the second half of the 19th century, completely reversed the original balance of power, leaving the two string instruments thrashing for dear life against the onslaught of

As good a Dylan biopic as you’ll ever get: A Complete Unknown reviewed

It doesn’t have anything new to say, which is right. If you could figure Dylan out, it would all be over A Complete Unknown is the Bob Dylan biopic from James Mangold, who also made Walk The Line about Johnny Cash. It stars Timothée Chalamet, who is astonishing, and does his own singing. He may even be better at singing Dylan than Dylan is at singing Dylan. (Same sound but fewer of those bum notes that make you go ‘ouch’.) It doesn’t have anything new or insightful to say, which is right and proper. If you could figure Dylan out, it would all be over. Instead, the focus is on