Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Michael Hann

The joy of meat-and-potatoes rock

‘Meat-and-potatoes rock’ is the pejorative term critics use when describing groups of white men with guitars who play loud, uncomplicated music. Why would anyone enjoy such stuff, when there are the ceviches of hyperpop, the flavoured foams of experimental hip-hop, the chargrilled seasonal vegetables of jazz? Don’t they know the world has moved on? Unfortunately, the world has a habit of not listening to the critical consensus. The highest new entry in last week’s album chart came from the Snuts, a meat-and-potatoes guitar band. This week’s No. 1 album is all but guaranteed to be by Liam Gallagher and John Squire, the Toby Carvery of meat-and-potatoes rock. As the prevalence

Rod Liddle

The Last Dinner Party are sadly rather good

Grade: A- There is something decidedly fishy about this convocation of terribly well-bred young ladies who became a kind of sensation two years ago, before they had even recorded a single song – and now have their first album at number one, a sell-out tour in the US and a Brit award. All a bit too good to be true. Do they write their own stuff? Are they music industry nepo-kids, like everybody claimed Clairo was? For the first time, a glimmer of trouble afflicted them last week when a member of the five-piece band seemingly announced that people didn’t want to hear about the cost-of-living crisis. Cue outrage from

James Walton

Workmanlike romp: Sky Atlantic's Mary & George reviewed

If there’s such a thing as a workmanlike romp, then Mary & George might be one. This drama about political and sexual shenanigans during the reign of James I certainly has all the scheming, racy dialogue and nudity that any romp-lover could wish for. At the same time, there’s the slightly awkward sense that it’s harbouring a guilty secret: it wants to be taken seriously as history and thinks it has some important things to say about class, gender and sexuality in 17th-century England and beyond. As a result, the naughty stuff – while definitely naughty – occasionally feels rather dutiful, and the playfulness somehow rather solemn. (‘It’s really interesting

Friday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

In Bermondsey I heard the future – at the Barbican I smelt death: new-music round-up

To Dalston to witness the worst gig of my life. The premise of the Random Gear Festival was simple and rather inspired: gather some arbitrary objects; get people to play them. In previous iterations, the offerings had included an ice skate, a wet baguette and an exercise bike. This time we had a trampoline, a microwave, a dead fish. I kept an open mind. I was reminded that years ago at Cafe Oto I had seen the then chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Ilan Volkov rub two blocks of polystyrene together with the subtle virtuosity of Martha Argerich at a Steinway. I was reminded too of what

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Serious composers write ad music too

Next month in London, they’re celebrating a composer you’ve probably never heard of, but whose work you’re sure to have heard. If you’ve watched much British TV or cinema in the past half century, you’ll already know his music, and better than you think. A quick test of age: do you remember ‘The Right One’ – the song that used to advertise Martini (‘any time, any place, anywhere’) in a haze of wah-wah pedal and 1970s hair? How about Dennis Potter’s sci-fi swansong Cold Lazarus, or more recently, the Bafta-winning Édith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose? Still no? Then picture David Suchet as ITV’s Poirot: and come on, surely

James Delingpole

A turkey: Netflix's Avatar – The Last Airbender reviewed

Blimey, Avatar: The Last Airbender is a load of tripe. And I really didn’t want it to be. There’s nothing I like more than trawling the networks for exciting new cultural phenomena from the burgeoning, weird oriental TV market – such as Squid Game and One Piece – and bringing it to your attention. Perhaps it fails because, while based on a hugely popular echt Japanese anime series, this is made by Americans. Whatever the case this much-heralded fantasy offering (no relation of the James Cameron Dances With Smurfs movies) is a turkey. The premise is enticing. It’s set in a world divided into competing tribes – Earth, Air, Fire

Laura Gascoigne

Dazzling but it's all show: Tate Britain's Sargent and Fashion reviewed

Madame Ramon Subercaseaux, the beautiful wife of a Chilean diplomat, was not a Parisienne. So when the 25-year-old John Singer Sargent’s portrait of her in a black and white ensemble straight out of the Renoir playbook won a second-class medal at the 1881 Paris Salon, French pride was wounded. Édouard Pailleron, father of the purebred French children in Sargent’s other Salon submission, kicked up a fuss and had to be placated with another medal. But that was nothing to the scandal that erupted three years later over the American artist’s provocative portrait of femme du monde Virginie Gautreau, salaciously anonymised as ‘Madame X’. Two years later, he left Paris for

Lloyd Evans

118 minutes too long: The Picture of Dorian Gray, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, reviewed

Sarah Snook, who appeared in Succession, takes centre stage in Kip Williams’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s only novel. The best thing about The Picture of Dorian Gray is the narrative premise: a young aristocrat commissions a portrait of himself and the image grows old while he retains his youthful good looks. It’s a ghost story, really, and Dorian ‘dies’ when the portrait is completed and then haunts his own life as an ageless and untouchable spirit. Wilde used the book as a literary showcase for his aphorisms. On ageing: ‘The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.’ Imagine Orson Welles declaiming the

Deborah Ross

All I kept thinking was how the sand must get everywhere: Dune – Part Two reviewed

Dune: Part Two is not a sequel but a continuation of Dune, so picks up exactly at the point you’d started to wonder if it would ever end. All I can remember from the first film is sand, sand, so much sand, and it must get everywhere, and into your sandwiches. But it is set in a massive desert so it goes without saying there would be a lot of sand. I don’t blame the sand especially. There are all sorts of allegories at play; I’m not paid enough to think about them Directed by Denis Villeneuve and based on the series of books by Frank Herbert, this second outing

Daisy Dunn

Why are there so few decent poetry podcasts?

The late John Berryman described A.E. Housman as ‘a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but an absolutely marvellous minor poet… and a great scholar’. The Times obituarist went further, declaring Housman to have been, on occasion, ‘so unapproachable as to diffuse a frost’. That such a man could be so moved by a cherry tree in spring and by the dales of Shropshire in autumn says something about the separability of art and life. The greatest contradiction for Frank Skinner, whose poetry podcast has returned for a ninth series, lies between Housman’s work as a Cambridge classicist and his verse. As Skinner observes, there

Graeme Thomson

Twisted, fuzzy, psychedelic pop: Slowdive, at the Liquid Room, reviewed

Rachel Goswell, one of Slowdive’s two singers, has cool hair. It is dyed half black and half white, and by the end of this show I had a feeling it might have been trying to tell us something. Slowdive broke up in 1995 having made three albums. They reunited in 2014 and have since made two more. Can we spot the join tonight between the two eras? I think we can. When they first arrived on an independent music scene still subordinate to the critical whims of Melody Maker and NME, Slowdive were not exactly beloved. Back in the early 1990s they were more or less the whipping boys and

Thursday

Calvin Po

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

Rupert Christiansen

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

Richard Bratby

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

Michael Hann

He barely knows what he's doing: Oliver Anthony, at the O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire, reviewed

What does a chubby, bearded American feller wearing a plaid shirt and singing about his dog and truck have in common with a chic, sonically adventurous Irish art-pop star? Both, last year, were inadvertently parachuted into the battlefields of the culture wars. Oliver Anthony recorded a song called ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ – Virginia, not Surrey – that was picked up by MAGA-types from an obscure country music YouTube channel, became a talking point in the Republican presidential primary debates and ended up entering the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 1 last August. While the music is appealing enough, Anthony is an appalling lyricist. He trades in clichés That

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,

James Walton

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

Deborah Ross

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

Laura Gascoigne

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