Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Will a new Labour government let architects reshape housing?

‘We make our buildings, and afterwards they make us,’ Winston Churchill said in 1924 in a speech to the Architectural Association. This was flattery of the highest order, designed to butter up the audience of budding architects and inflate their sense of how much power they had to shape society. It’s remarkable then, 100 years later, how powerless architects have become when it comes to the biggest architectural crisis of our time: housing. According to the Royal Institute of British Architects, only 6 per cent of new homes in the UK are designed by architects. Everything else is dealt with by volume housebuilders, with the top three alone building 25

Precious nonsense: Pina Bausch’s Nelken, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

Fifteen years after her death and the shrine to Pina Bausch is still thick with incense and adulation. Whether one acknowledges her as a genius or not, there’s no doubt that her influence has been baneful – a cult that has spawned a thousand imitators, all following her absurdist idiom, all mesmerised by subversions of everyday logic, all ultimately trapped in a vacuous dead-end aesthetic in which anything goes, the weirder the better. ‘Nonsense, yes,’ cries the aesthetic Lady Saphir in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. ‘But oh! What precious nonsense!’ Never Known includes one of the most staggeringly virtuosic lifts I have seen outside the Bolshoi Rejecting ballet for a

Lloyd Evans

Dramatically riveting and visually superb: Dear Octopus, at the Lyttelton Theatre, reviewed

Big budget, huge stage, massive temptation. The Lyttelton is a notorious elephant-trap for designers who feel obliged to fill every inch of space with effortful proof of their brilliance. Frankie Bradshaw, designer of Dear Octopus, avoids these snares and instead creates a modest playing area, smaller than the actual stage, which is bookended by a doorway on one side and a fireplace on the other. These physical boundaries draw the actors towards the middle of the stage with a staircase overhead to complete the frame. Brilliant stuff. Perfectly simple, too. Any director planning to work at the Lyttelton should see Emily Burns’s fabulous production. So should everyone else. This is

Gleefully silly: Scottish Opera’s Marx in London! reviewed

A bloke was working the queue outside the Theatre Royal, selling a newspaper called the Communist. ‘Marxist ideas, alive today!’ he shouted into the Glasgow drizzle. Was he part of the show; a Graham Vick-style touch of Total Theatre? In any case, he didn’t seem to be shifting many units. He might have been even more disappointed by the opera itself: Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London!, here receiving its first UK production, is a new opera buffa with Karl Marx as the protagonist of a gleefully silly period comedy. Readers know left-wing economics is absurd, but there’s a frisson in seeing it portrayed as outright farce Spectator readers already know

Sam Leith

Never achieves the flow of the Arkham series: Suicide Squad – Kill the Justice League reviewed

Grade: B- There was much to hope for with this game. Its developer is Rocksteady – the studio which gave us the superb Batman: Arkham series. A lot of money was poured into it, and a lot of time (the release date was much delayed). The premise is a winner, too: the Suicide Squad – Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang and King Shark (a massive bloke with a shark’s head) – are dispatched to murder the noisome goody-goodies of the Justice League because, y’know, alien invasion, mind control etc, etc. Who wouldn’t be tickled by the prospect of having Harley slap Wonder Woman upside the head with a giant mallet,

A neat fantasy that asks why Britons don’t revolt: BBC1’s The Way reviewed 

‘The British don’t revolt, they grumble,’ said someone in the first episode of The Way. But what if we ever reversed this policy? That was the question posed by a drama that’s clearly a passion project for its director, Michael Sheen – and therefore set in Wales. More specifically, The Way takes place in Port Talbot, the south Welsh town in which Sheen grew up and to which he moved back a few years ago, unexpectedly preferring it to LA. Or at least it takes place in a version of Port Talbot – because, perhaps necessarily for a show about a British revolution, there are hefty elements of the dream-like

It should be boring – but it never is: Perfect Days reviewed

Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days is a film about a Tokyo public toilet cleaner and if the gentle, meditative narrative doesn’t grab you, the toilets almost certainly will. (Trust me. They’re incredible.) It stars Koji Yakusho and, as much as it is set in Tokyo, it is also set on Yakusho’s face, which is so expressive and open that it’s capable of conveying depths of emotion even when in repose. It could be boring, this film, except it’s impossible to get bored of that face. And Wenders knows what he has and rarely strays from it. It stars Koji Yakusho and, as much as it is set in Tokyo, it is

The genius of Yoko Ono

The first I heard of Yoko Ono was when my sister’s boyfriend brought home a little book of hers called Grapefruit. It was 1970, four years after John Lennon took the bite out of an apple that led to the break-up of the Beatles. The apple had been on a plinth in Ono’s 1966 exhibition at London gallery Indica with a price tag of £200, for which the purchaser was promised the ‘excitement of watching the apple decay’. Lennon then offered Ono an imaginary five shillings to bang an imaginary nail into her conceptual piece, ‘Painting to Hammer a Nail’ (1961). ‘I met a guy who plays the same game

Cardinal Newman meets Paul Verhoeven: Bruno Dumont’s The Empire reviewed

Bruno Dumont was always a bit off. Initially he was bundled in with the directors of the so-called ‘New French Extremity’, alongside Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, and Gaspar Noé (a label bearing all the hallmarks of lazy journalese – though all the filmmakers involved did have a predilection for past-the-watershed violence). But then neither did Dumont’s output sit easily within social realism. He was not the straightforward heir to Bresson that many critics wanted him to be, despite the seeming austerity and reliance on non-actors in early films such as L’humanité (1999) and Flanders (2006). Whether it was Pharaon (the not-quite-there detective Dumont cast from a mental institution) levitating in

What were we all doing here? My 600-mile trip to hear an organ play a D natural

In the year 2000, in a small east German town, work began on the construction of an organ that had one purpose: to perform John Cage’s ORGAN2/ASLSP (1987) for precisely 639 years. The late avant-garde composer’s only instruction for the piece was to play the piece ‘as slowly as possible’. And so in 2001 – the instrument finally ready – the world’s longest organ recital began in St Burchardi church, Halberstadt, with a rest lasting 17 months before the first chord commenced droning in 2003. It consisted of two G sharps and a B. Two weeks ago, I – along with several hundred others – made the pilgrimage to the

Why I was wrong to think Idles obvious and depressing

I never had Idles down as a great Bristol band, I confess. In fact, I never had them down as very much of anything at all. Through occasional and accidental contact, I associated the quintet with a cadre of unlovely groups – Sleaford Mods, Shame, Soft Play (formerly Slaves), Viagra Boys – that emerged in the 2010s and made shouty, angry music which wanted to Say Something Important about our times, most of it pretty obvious and deeply depressing. Idles had a song called ‘I’m Scum’. It was a hard pass from me – more or less sight unseen. Turns out I got it wrong; or perhaps Idles got it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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