Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Laura Gascoigne

Thoroughly unsettling, never simplistic: Mike Nelson – Extinction Beckons, at the Hayward Gallery, reviewed

You enter through the gift shop. Mike Nelson has turned the Hayward Gallery upside down and back to front for his survey exhibition, Extinction Beckons. ‘It’s been a very intensive four weeks,’ says an assistant putting the finishing touches to the multi-room installation ‘The Deliverance and The Patience’ (2001) when I visit two days before the opening. Lit by one of Nelson’s signature red lights, even the green sign reading ‘FIRE EXIT’ makes me nervous Having the place to myself feels like having sole occupancy of the haunted house at the fair. This is less of a house, though, more a warren of passages and poky rooms bearing unsettling signs

Daisy Dunn

Blue monkeys, bull-leaping and child sacrifice: why were the Minoans so weird?

Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford does not take the idea of a labyrinth too literally. It does not lead you through galleries to dead ends, nor are you left searching, like Theseus, for a ball of thread to find your way out again. The real enigma of the exhibition revolves around the Bronze Age civilisation at its heart. The Minoans, who occupied Crete between about 3,000 and 1,100 BC, remain some of the most mystifying people ever to have been stumbled upon in modern times. It is uncertain where they came from, what they believed, how they were governed and why they chose to

Thursday

Deborah Ross

The bear overacts the least: Cocaine Bear reviewed

With a title like Cocaine Bear you’ll probably be happily anticipating one of those B-movie cultural moments. It’s a bear! On cocaine! Sign me up! You go to a film like this in the spirit of trash-loving glee. It’ll be fun. It’ll be 90 minutes of low camp entertainment rather than a four-hour Oscar-contending head-scratcher – and that can be a relief. But, in fact, and despite the publicity blitzkrieg – it’s a bear! On cocaine! – this is a standard animal-on-the-rampage affair. The cocaine doesn’t even bring much to the party. (Kids: take note.) Quite what I was expecting, I don’t know. Maybe the bear would become euphoric and

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

How has it escaped being cancelled? The Lehman Trilogy, at the Gillian Lynne Theatre, reviewed

Standing at the Sky’s Edge is an ode to a monstrous carbuncle. The atrocity in question is a concrete gulag, Park Hill, built by Sheffield council in the 1960s as a punishment for hard-up locals who couldn’t afford to buy a house. The show is a propaganda effort on behalf of bossy, big-state, high-tax Labour authorities so the smiling residents of the brutalist eyesore keep telling us how much they love their multistorey dungeon. ‘You can see the whole city from up here,’ say the characters, as if no Sheffield resident had ever mounted any of the bluffs or heights that surround the area. The script is honest enough to

James Walton

Riveting and titillating: BBC2’s Parole reviewed

There’s a distinct and rather cunning whiff of cakeism about the new documentary series Parole. On the one hand, it can convincingly pass itself off as a sombre BBC2 exploration of the British justice system. On the other, it offers us an undeniably enjoyable, reality TV-style opportunity to compare our opinions with those of the experts. Who doesn’t welcome the chance to indulge in some serious – or even titillating – armchair psychology? Monday’s opening episode began with some solid statistical captions stating that 16,000 UK prisoners are considered for parole every year, that 4,000 are granted it and that each decision is made by a small panel drawn from

Michael Hann

The crowd was the star of the show: Carly Rae Jepsen, at Alexandra Palace, reviewed

The other week I saw a T-shirt bearing the caption ‘For the girls, the gays and the theys’. And if you want a very quick and easy demonstration of why someone might wish to wear a T-shirt specifically excluding straight men, I suggest you go to pretty much any big standing show, certainly any featuring a youngish guitar band. On the way out, my friend said it was the loveliest crowd he’d been in for a long time, and I pointed out why There you will see the straight man in his natural environment, moving from the bar in small herds of six or seven in a straight line through

Richard Bratby

Crapcore: ENO’s The Rhinegold reviewed

Tubas and timpani thunder in The Rhinegold as the giants Fasolt and Fafner, having built Valhalla, arrive to claim their fee: Freia, goddess of beauty and youth. It doesn’t go well. Suddenly Fasolt drops his defences and declares his yearning (the translation is John Deathridge’s) for ‘a woman who’d lovingly and softly live with us lowly mortals’. At those words the music melts, and a solo oboe sings a melody so poignant that Ernest Newman thought it worthy of Mozart. This is the first instance in the whole cosmic drama where Wagner gives us a glimpse, however unformed, of something that an adult human might recognise as love. It’s the

Laura Gascoigne

Humanity, clarity and warmth: Alice Neel, at the Barbican Art Gallery, reviewed

If you want to be taken seriously as a contemporary painter, paint big. ‘Blotter’, the picture that won the 34-year-old Peter Doig the John Moores Painting Prize in 1993, was over 8ft x 7ft. The pictures in his current show at the Courtauld are so big that only 12 of them fit in the gallery space. Lovers of paint owe Doig a debt of gratitude for rescuing the medium from the conceptual doldrums ‘Blotter’ was a dreamlike image based on a photo of the artist’s brother standing on a frozen lake in Canada, where Doig spent most of his childhood. Its title referred partly to his technique of letting the

Christopher Howse

The mysterious world of British folk costume

In a remarkable photograph by Benjamin Stone, from around 1899, six men in breeches of a criss-cross floral pattern hold up great reindeer antlers. (Carbon dating of these objects produced the year 1066, plus or minus 80.) A man in a bowler hat holds a squeeze box and on the right a serious-faced boy stands with a hobby-horse head emerging from the cloth that swathes him. The photograph features in the exhibition Making Mischief: Folk Costume in Britain. It shows the Abbots Bromley horn dance, performed annually on the Monday after Old St Bartholomew’s Day (4 September). Never mind that the breeches were made in the 1880s by Mrs J.

Wednesday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

What I love about Netflix’s Kleo is that it’s so damned German

I was almost tempted not to watch Kleo because it sounded like so many things I’d seen before: beautiful ex-Stasi assassin, mysteriously imprisoned for nameless crimes, suddenly out of a job after the fall of the Berlin Wall, takes brutal revenge on all who betrayed her. It’s reminiscent not just of everything from La Femme Nikita, Kick-Ass and Kill Bill to the ghastly, grisly Killing Eve, but of any number of hitmen-out-of-retirement dramas (most recently The Old Man), plus every revenge yarn from the Count of Monte Cristo onwards, all seasoned with a delicate hint of Deutschland 83. But the thing about TV, you realise, is that originality is overrated,

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The unknown German composer championed by Mahler

I was sceptical when the lady on the bus to Reading town centre told me that her father knew Liszt. Who wouldn’t be? This was a long time ago, mind: probably 1980, and I was on my way into school. I think our conversation started because I was reading a book about music. She was old and tiny, wearing a luxuriant wig. She introduced herself as Mrs Ball but her accent was unmistakably German. Even so, Liszt had been dead for nearly a century. Could it be true? ‘Oh, my father knew everyone,’ she said. ‘Richard Strauss was a great friend. And dear Bruno Walter. He lived in our house,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A sex farce reminiscent of Alan Clark’s diaries: Phaedra, at the Lyttelton Theatre, reviewed

Simon Stone claims that his new comedy, Phaedra, draws on the work of Euripides, Seneca and Racine. In fact, the porn-mag narrative resembles a passage in Alan Clark’s diaries where the priapic scribbler seduces a mother and daughter in rapid succession. That’s what happens to Sofiane, a homeless Moroccan lecher, aged 41, who has the looks of George Best and the sexy drawl of a Riviera gigolo. He befriends Helen, a senior Labour MP, who shares her picture-perfect London home with her two brattish children and her high-flying husband Hugo, who speaks 15 languages. Helen appears to be starved of sex and male attention, which seems rather improbable for a

Daisy Dunn

What a voice Plath had – stern yet somehow musical, long-vowelled, bear-like: Radio 4’s My Sylvia Plath reviewed

Can you ever truly know a poet? The question arises every time one publishes a collection that looks vaguely confessional. Is it real, we ask, or is it all persona? My Sylvia Plath, an Archive on 4 programme to mark the 60th anniversary of Plath’s death this month, presupposes that poets are to some degree unreachable. The ‘My’ belongs to Emily Berry, a contemporary poet, who knows that her Plath is different from another’s, is different from Plath’s own Plath, and so on.  Unexpectedly, given the emphasis on many Plaths and the gap between a writer and their verse, the framework of the programme is intensely personal. It comes as

James Walton

Bravely shows that depressed people can be quite annoying: The Son reviewed

For my money – and lots of other people’s – Florian Zeller’s 2020 film The Father was pretty much a masterpiece. Oscar-winningly adapted from his own play by Zeller and Christopher Hampton, it plunged us into the fractured world of Anthony, an old man with dementia (as Oscar-winningly played by Anthony Hopkins). With different actors playing the same characters and perfectly coherent scenes that kept contradicting each other, we shared Anthony’s struggle to work out who was who and what was what. The result provided a rare combination of tricksy intelligence and emotional punch. Now, with The Son, adapted with Hampton from another of his plays, Zeller brings us another

Graeme Thomson

Down with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame!

There is footage on the internet of Robert Smith, lead singer in the Cure, being interviewed on the occasion of his band being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. At high pitch and tremendous volume, the host yells up a storm about the incredible honour being bestowed upon the group, while Smith claws at his face, grimaces, and rolls his eyes. ‘Are you as excited as I am?’ she shouts. ‘By the sounds of it, no,’ Smith mutters – speaking, surely, for all of us. Of all the many reasons to dislike the RRHOF – some of which we’ll get to shortly; and yes, the

Richard Bratby

The musical émigrés from Nazi-Europe who shaped postwar Britain

Halfway up the stairs to the Royal College of Music’s exhibition Music, Migration & Mobility is a map of NW3, covered in red dots. It’s centred on the Finchley Road north of Swiss Cottage, and every dot (there are nearly 50) represents a business or an institution associated, in the middle years of the last century, with a refugee from the Nazis. Herr Zwillenberg offers upholstery repairs; a grocer stocks sauerkraut ‘and all Continental Delicacies’. There are adverts for fundraising concerts and political lectures; a Blue Danube Club and a Café Vienna. It’s urban Mitteleuropa in miniature, uprooted, transplanted, and clinging together for comfort and mutual support. They called it

Laura Gascoigne

How Vermeer learnt to embrace the everyday – and transfigured it

Has any artist ever painted fewer pictures than Johannes Vermeer? At the last authenticated count there were 37 still in existence, and five more are known from references in early sources. With allowance for wastage and disappearance historians estimate that he produced no more than 50, a rate of two a year over a career spanning two decades. So when 28 are assembled in one exhibition, as currently at the Rijksmuseum, it counts as a blockbuster. Astonishingly, this is the museum’s first Vermeer exhibition. Holland’s national gallery has not always valued its most popular master: when it opened in 1885, the only Vermeer on show, ‘Woman in Blue Reading a

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

Close to perfection: Opera North’s The Cunning Little Vixen reviewed

Opera North has begun 2023 with a couple of big revivals, and it’s always rewarding to call in on these things and see how they’re holding up. The long-lived, endlessly revived classic production is one of the quirks of operatic culture. It actually feels disconcerting, as a regular operagoer, to go to the conventional theatre (you know, the vanilla kind where they don’t sing) and discover that they’ve started again from scratch. A completely new Tempest? What was wrong with the 2016 staging? Possibly it’s to do with the financial realities of an art form that needs to keep a full orchestra and chorus on the payroll. A Year Zero

Rupert Christiansen

Pam Tanowitz is the real deal: Secret Things/Everyone Keeps Me, at the Linbury Theatre, reviewed

Civilisation has never nurtured more than a handful of front-rank choreographers within any one generation, with the undesirable result that the chosen few end up excessively in demand, careering around the globe and overworking, delegating or repeating themselves. Please can someone up there ensure that Pam Tanowitz doesn’t suffer such a fate. This fifty-something American has recently matured as one of the best in field, producing dance of rigorous clarity, austere yet richly nuanced, that makes the work of certain other big names look fuzzily derivative or gimmicky. Just don’t ask too much of her, because she works through fine detail, not a broad brush. Tanowitz is the real, rare

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Listen to the world’s first radio play

Radio works its strongest magic, I always think, when you listen to it in the dark. The most reliable example is the Shipping Forecast, that bracing incantation of place names and gale warnings, which – with the lights out – can transform even the most inland bedroom into a wind-battered coastal cottage. But darkness can heighten disturbance, too, as I was reminded when listening to Danger by Richard Hughes, billed as the BBC’s first-ever radio drama. It was first broadcast in 1924, with the audience at home under instructions to maximise its effect by turning off all their lights. The play’s first audience, in 1924, was under instructions to maximise