Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Laura Gascoigne

Masterclass of an exhibition: Impressionists on Paper, at the RA, reviewed

Viewers have different relationships with small pictures, or perhaps it’s the other way round: small pictures have different relationships with them. A big picture clamours for attention; a small picture you have to lean in to hear. No picture is more intimate than a drawing, and none brings you closer to the artist’s hand. A drawing can’t lie; it wears its facture on its sleeve. If you look closely, you can work out how it was made and even track the artist’s changes of direction. You can see, for instance, how Van Gogh launched into ‘The Fortifications of Paris with Houses’ (1887) in watercolour, then fortified the fortifications with gouache

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Fascinating: Radio 4’s Empire of Tea reviewed

I can scarcely remember a time before tea: I started drinking it at around four, at home in Belfast, as a reward after school. Before long I was as fiercely protective of my right to a brew as the workers of British Leyland’s Birmingham car plant, who were famously spurred to strike action in 1981 when the management proposed cutting tea breaks by 11 minutes. Decades on, my passion is undiminished. There is no problem to which tea is not at least a partial solution: it restores flagging spirits, calms the over-excited, warms in winter and refreshes in summer. Sathnam Sanghera’s recollections in his Radio 4 five-parter Empire of Tea

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

What a muddle: The House of Bernarda Alba, at the Lyttelton Theatre, reviewed

Green, green, green. Everything on stage is the same shade of eau de Nil in the NT’s version of Federico García Lorca’s classic, The House of Bernarda Alba. All the furniture and props are green. The mirrors, the walls, the crucifixes, the clocks and even the bucket and the knife-rack bear the same queasy pigment. The idea, perhaps, is to suggest a lunatic asylum or an NHS waiting room. Lorca’s steamy tale is set in a remote Spanish village in the 1930s where life is dominated by the repressive and superstitious Catholic church. The story opens with a nasty matriarch, Bernarda Alba, celebrating her husband’s death by ordering her five

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

The Spectator film critic who transformed cinema

‘Going to the pictures is nothing to be ashamed of,’ insisted the film writer Iris Barry in 1926. But it certainly wasn’t something to be proud of, either. To the cultural cognoscenti of the 1920s, Barry admitted, the cinema was barely an art at all – about as aesthetically significant as ‘passport photography’. And for much of polite society, seeing a film was done in secret, if at all. So it was a considerable boost for the fledgling medium when, 100 years ago, the word ‘cinema’ began to appear for the first time in this country above its own regular column, with its own dedicated critic, in the arts pages

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

An amusing playlet buried in 150 minutes of rhetoric: Mates in Chelsea, at the Royal Court, reviewed

Theatres outside London like to produce shows that appeal to their local communities. Inside London, where cultural attitudes are strangely warped, theatres are happy to disregard the neighbourhoods they serve, and they show little interest in the lives of their customers. But the Royal Court Theatre and Hampstead Theatre have both chosen to stage shows that feature characters who live nearby. Mates in Chelsea, at the Royal Court, stars a bone-idle superbrat, Tuggy, whose inheritance is threatened when his snooty mother (who is brilliantly played by Fenella Woolgar) decides to flog the family castle in Northumbria. An offer is received from a Russian billionaire, Oleg, and Tuggy promptly has a

James Walton

Embarrassingly addictive: Channel 4’s The Couple Next Door reviewed

For years now, lots of TV thrillers have begun with a terrified woman running through some woods. But not The Couple Next Door. Instead, the first episode opened with the sight of an isolated cabin and the sound of a gunshot – and only then did a terrified woman run through some woods. Why the woman was terrified we haven’t yet learned, but we do know who she is – because in the next scene, her pre-terrified self and her partner were moving into their new house in a quiet, well-heeled Leeds cul-de-sac where every adult not mowing a lawn was washing a car. ‘Hello, suburbia,’ said her partner, perhaps

Annie Nightingale

Britain’s forgotten female pop artist 

T o describe Pauline Boty as a ‘pioneer’ is a bit like calling someone a ‘one-off’. It’s not an adequate description of her in any way. Pauline was the only female British pop-art painter of the early 1960s. You may not know of her. She died in 1966, aged 28, and her name has remained very much in obscurity ever since. Pauline, in her youth, appeared to have it all. She had movie-star looks, a provocative intelligence and a magnetic personality. ‘She was beautiful, with this marvellous laugh: clever, very bright, very much the early feminist,’ says designer Celia Birtwell, who lived with her. Male interviewers would ask: ‘What’s a

Michael Hann

‘Stomp clap hey’ music: Noah Kahan, at O2 Forum Kentish Town, reviewed

I first heard of Noah Kahan in a cave in France this summer, when my 23-year-old daughter started wailing with distress at realising she had missed the chance to buy tickets to see him because she was in a cave when they went on sale (two shows at the Forum sold out in seconds). Kahan, a 26-year-old singer-songwriter from Vermont, has so far made very little impact on the world of the over-thirties, but his contemporaries and those a little younger adore him. If you Google reviews, you won’t find very much from the traditional music press or from big newspapers and magazines – but you’ll find plenty from student

Deborah Ross

Kaurismaki is the business: Fallen Leaves reviewed

Even though Aki Kaurismaki has won every award going and is a household name in his native Finland, where he is treated like a god, it may be that you’ve never heard of him. He is the business. He specialises in understated dramas about deadpan losers whose hopes are often crushed, but who somehow find comfort. If that doesn’t sell it, try this: he is so briskly clear-eyed that his films never outstay their welcome and his latest, Fallen Leaves, runs to just 81 minutes. Could we love him more? Might he not be our favourite auteur of all time? Kaurismaki somehow suffuses every frame with feeling Fallen Leaves, which

Calvin Po

The art of not taking out the bins: Madelon Vriesendorp, at the Cosmic House, reviewed

‘I was really angry at this fly,’ the artist Madelon Vriesendorp explains with a grin as I hold out my hand to shake hers, which is in a splint. ‘I jumped onto the bed to swat it, fell over and broke my wrist.’ Vriesendorp is showing me around her latest exhibition, which follows a long list of achievements: she co-founded the ground-breaking architectural practice OMA, and her illustrations of architectural theory defined its visual language for a generation. Now in her late seventies, she’s still characteristically unserious, except about one thing: ‘I’m very serious about jokes.’ Not taking out the bins has been made into an art form by Vriesendorp

Richard Bratby

Eloquent, understated poetry: Llyr Williams, at the Wigmore Hall, reviewed

Imagine being a concert pianist and choosing your own programmes. All those possibilities; all that power! ‘I am the orchestra!’ declared Hector Berlioz, imagining himself inside the head of Franz Liszt. ‘I am the chorus and conductor as well. My piano sings, broods, flashes, thunders.’ The heart lifts when a pianist thinks a little differently about their recital programmes and tries to make connections and tell stories beyond the familiar tramlines of Bach, Beethoven and late Schubert. Don’t get me wrong; the Austro-German big boys are a healthy part of a balanced musical diet. It’s just that – well, you know. There is a world elsewhere. Solo piano recitals leave

Rupert Christiansen

The award-winning choreographer who fell foul of the mob

Ebullient, articulate and eminently sensible, Rosie Kay never wanted to be a martyr to the culture wars. A modern dance choreographer with an impressive track record – including 5 Soldiers, an award-winning exploration of army life, contributions to the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympics and a fellowship at Oxford – she would rather be getting on with the business of creating new work for her small dance company. But she’s been given no choice – and all because of a party she held in August 2021 at her home in Birmingham. There were demands for her to be ‘re-educated’ in ‘gender intelligence’ Half-way through rehearsals for a new production

Wednesday

Graeme Thomson

Melodic elegance and literate sass: Ben Folds, at Usher Hall, reviewed

Choose your weapon. Artists are closely defined in the public imagination by their instrument of choice. Though the most untamed and transgressive progenitors of rock’n’roll – Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard – were piano pounders, and despite the later efforts of Elton John, over time the instrument has come to be associated with restraint and politesse; the straight second cousin to rock’s clichéd wild child, the electric guitar. He strolled on stage like a stranger and left 100 minutes later as an old friend I hadn’t realised I’d missed American singer-songwriter Ben Folds has been playing with these expectations for the best part of 30 years, first in Ben

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

‘My show is like life and death to people’: meet TalkTV’s Mike Graham

Hair combed and slicked, Mike Graham sits at his big shiny desk and waits on his cue. When his guest goes rogue backstage and starts swearing at a minion, it barely registers. He remains placid. Unruffled. It’s only his second week doing TV but Mike is in the zone. Three, two, one, zero. ‘Welcome to The Independent Republic of Mike Graham.’ He grins. ‘With you for the next three hours, of course!’ Of course. Independent Republic is a daily celebration of subversive tabloid television, beamed out on TalkTV to a dependable and swelling citizenry. Mike is the republic’s leader. During those three hours he skewers a museum for cancelling Santa,

Michael Amherst

Rich, beautiful and vital: John Craxton, at Pallant House Gallery, reviewed

The sensuality of the light in John Craxton’s painting ‘Two Figures and Setting Sun’ (1952-67) has to be seen to be believed. Viewing this large work in Pallant House, you feel its full force. Craxton was concerned with a scene’s essence, rather than simply its appearance and here he achieves not merely an effect but affect. In spite of most of the light being painted in yellows and oranges rather than white, the contrast and refraction of the rays produce a blinding sensation much like staring into the sun on a hot day.   It was as a chorister at Chichester Cathedral that Craxton’s daily encounter with two 12th-century Romanesque

James Delingpole James Delingpole

A calculated insult to the viewer: Channel 4’s The Princes in the Tower – The New Evidence reviewed

Major spoiler alert: if you don’t want to know the ending of The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence, skip the next paragraph. Still with me? Good. The answer is no, Richard III did not order the killing of the two princes. That was just Tudor propaganda. Both boys, the sons of Edward IV, survived, and escaped to Europe. Thence, supported by their aunt Margaret of Burgundy, they made separate, ultimately unsuccessful attempts to regain the throne for the Yorkists, one under the name Lambert Simnel, the other as Perkin Warbeck. I’m telling you this not to be a spoilsport but to spare you 82 minutes of valuable life.

Richard Bratby

Magical: The Box of Delights, at Royal Shakespeare Theatre, reviewed

In Stratford-upon-Avon, the wolves are running. And if you’re old enough to feel a little thrill of wintery excitement at those words, you’ll have questions of your own about the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Box of Delights. Questions about talking rats and flying cars, and whether time and tide and buttered eggs still wait for no man. John Masefield’s novel thrived on radio adaptations for decades after its publication in 1935 but the beloved BBC TV version was in 1984, and four decades is a horribly long time. Piers Torday’s new dramatisation faces the double challenge of entertaining a new generation of youngsters while also pleasing the nostalgia-addled oldies who

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Gloriously entertaining: Backstairs Billy, at the Duke of York’s Theatre, reviewed

Backstairs Billy is a biographical comedy about William Tallon, who worked as the Queen Mother’s chief footman for years following the death of George VI in 1952. Tallon was an enthusiastic gay cottager whom the tabloids suggestively dubbed ‘backstairs Billy’ during the 1970s when attitudes to homosexuality were growing more enlightened. The show, directed by Michael Grandage, is set in 1979 and Luke Evans plays Billy as a swaggering charismatic stud who loves his role as the unofficial head of the Queen Mum’s household. He adores his employer, ‘the last Empress of India’, and he praises her decision to remain in London during the Blitz rather than decamping to safety

Daisy Dunn

Can Italy reverse its falling birth rate? 

Anne McElvoy is on the road again, exploring the state of modern Europe. Following her Radio 4 programme, The Reinvention of Germany in April, the Politico journalist has travelled to Padua, in northern Italy, where reactions to the rise of the right-wing populist Giorgia Meloni appear to vary. Is the 46-year-old PM a breath of fresh air – the best chance Italy has for a future – or a hypocritical dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist? The reinvention (or rather restoration) of Italy is very much Meloni’s goal. Clinging to the familiar principles of faith, flag and family, she has eschewed measures that would allow those born in Italy to define themselves as Italian,

Deborah Ross

A bit too short: Napoleon reviewed

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix, has a running time of two hours and 40 minutes, which is scant by today’s standards, but don’t worry: a four hour-plus director’s cut is on its way. So this is Scott’s Napoleon Abridged, you could say, and it does have the feel of a film that’s been scissored to death. The battle sequences are spectacular but the jackhammer cutting-style – hang on, how did he get from there to here? – means the storytelling is hurried and confusing. I’m not too sure about this Napoleon either. Did you know one of the greatest military leaders in world history was essentially a man-child? Phoenix,