Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Is it all an elaborate practical joke? Mac DeMarco, at Hackney Empire, reviewed

It’s not just who our pop heroes are that marks the passing of the generations; it’s how those heroes present themselves. Kevin Rowland, who turns 70 next week, appeared on stage for his London album launch in a jaunty sailor’s hat and striped top, looking as though he’d just come from a fashion shoot. Mac DeMarco, aged 33, ambled on in baseball cap, shlubby T-shirt and jeans. Rowland was upstanding, commanding and just a little forbidding. DeMarco sat on a stool and told a long story claiming that he and his keyboard player had been Oregon miners: a story which extended to include coprophagia, hair fetishism and maple syrup. Rowland

Lumpy, bulgy, human: Threads, at Arnolfini Bristol, reviewed

Trophy office blocks designed as landmarks are not welcoming to humans; their glass and steel reception areas feel more suited to robots. But this summer the cavernous lobbies of two City buildings – 99 Bishopsgate and 30 Fenchurch Street – have been humanised by To Boldly Sew, an exhibition of wall hangings by the winner of this year’s Brookfield Properties Crafts Award, Alice Kettle. As the owners of Renaissance palazzi and Jacobean mansions understood, wall hangings bring warmth and colour to a cold interior: once more prized than paintings, they doubled as decorations and draught excluders. Now, dignified with the name of ‘fibre arts’, fabrics are back in the fine-art

Our great art institutions have reduced British history to a scrapheap of shame

Let’s indulge in some identity politics for a second: I am from Hong Kong, born as a subject of the last major colony of the British Empire, minority-ethnic, descended from Chinese refugees, now living here in exile. This summer, both the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain are presenting new displays that are meant to reflect the ‘inclusive’ and ‘diverse’ identities of Britain. Supposedly, I fit nicely among their target audience. In reality, as an immigrant looking to be included in this nation, I am perplexed by my visits. For two publicly funded museums tasked with telling the story of this country through the portraiture of its eminent figures and

James Delingpole

A welcome antidote to UK crime drama: Netflix’s Kohrra reviewed

It has been quite some time since I’ve been able to bear watching UK crime drama. All right, I do cheat occasionally with series like the one featuring the delightfully grumpy, chain-smoking Cormoran Strike, but on the whole I can’t stand the mix of predictability and implausibility: all the goodies will be female and/or ethnic; the murderer will always be white, middle class and male; no one ever gets arrested for misgendering someone on Twitter because in the parallel universe of cop TV the police still actually think it’s their job to solve crimes. So, your options are either to watch classic episodes of The Sweeney or to find a

Lloyd Evans

Bizarre and outdated: Word-Play at the Royal Court reviewed            

The Royal Court’s new topical satire, Word-Play, opens with a gaffe-prone Tory prime minister giving a TV interview in which he commends Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. The Downing Street press team suffer a meltdown as they struggle to draft an apology or a retraction. Opposition parties try to profit from the blunder and the PM’s words spread across the globe and earn him praise from various authoritarian governments, led by China. This opening scene makes sense only if the British prime minister is a white male named Boris but the author, Rabiah Hussain, hasn’t troubled to update her script in the light of recent developments. The result is

The problem with pop-literary collaborations

‘We all secretly want to be rock stars,’ the 2022 Booker Prize-winning author Shehan Karunatilaka said recently. By ‘we’ he meant novelists, and he was more or less right. Most authors want to be rock stars, just as many rock stars aspire to bookish credibility. The former crave a whiff of glamour and instant gratification; writing offers precious little of either. Musicians seek gravitas and some wider recognition that they possess the tools to extend their literary genius beyond three verses and a killer chorus. Both parties tend to discover that they do what they do as a day job for a good reason. Morrissey tried his hand at long

Beautiful and illuminating: Radio 4’s the Venice Conundrum reviewed          

The playwright Carlo Gozzi marvelled at ‘The spectacle of women turned into men, men turned into women, and both men and women turned into monkeys’ in 18th-century Venice, and Jan Morris, visiting in the 1950s, did likewise. It would be more than a decade before Morris went under the knife, but already he was contemplating a transition more permanent than any he observed at carnival time. The Venice Conundrum, which aired on Radio 4 on Sunday, knitted together Morris’s most famous travel book with Conundrum, the story of his sex change, completed in the 1970s. I had my doubts about how well these two works would sit together, but the

An absolute romp framed by dutiful tut-tutting: Semele at Glyndebourne reviewed

If directors will insist on staging Handel oratorios as if they’re operas, it makes sense to pick Semele, which is practically an opera already. Under George II, opera was banned in London theatres during Lent (too exotick, too irrational), so Handel slipped his best material past the authorities by presenting it in concert format, set to biblical stories. Possibly by 1744 he was getting a bit careless, because there’s nothing remotely biblical about lovely, pouting Semele’s 24/7 shagathons (‘endless pleasure’, apparently) with King of the Gods and all-round studmuffin Jove. Handel’s sometime collaborator Charles Jennens denounced Semele as ‘no oratorio but a bawdy opera’: all the tunes, double the outrage.

‘She had no neutral gear’: Lindy Dufferin remembered

In 1957, when my dear godmother, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (1941-2020), was 16, she began her diary. The granddaughter of the Duke of Rutland and daughter of Loel Guinness, an MP, financier and Battle of Britain pilot, Lindy Dufferin had a gilded childhood. Her entries as a teen are like no other: ‘Randolph Churchill [Winston’s son] was staying the night here… It was most embarrassing because Randolph was very drunk…’ In October 1957, she was in Paris: ‘The Dutchess [sic] of Windsor came… I did a show of Rock & Roll. It was all great fun. Bon Soir!’ But, amid all the luxury, a note of seriousness enters

The joys of provincial repertory theatre    

Provincial repertory theatre, in which a semi-permanent company of actors performed a varied diet of plays for their community, week-in, week-out, has all but died out in Britain. Local theatres have become venues for visiting productions, one-off events and numerous outreach schemes, but the old continuity – a kind of magic – has gone. I caught the last of it as a child. I was nine years old when in 1979 the brand-new playhouse in my area – the Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich – opened its doors to the public, and for the next four years it would be the centre of my world. If I wasn’t watching shows there (and

In defence of the Arts Council

I once knew a monster who said she could not read Proust because there were no figures in Proust with whom she could identify… Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Aesthetics’ (1958-59) Getting an audience to identify themselves in a work – ‘being seen’ – is one of the only reasons why art is commissioned, celebrated or even allowed to exist today. In other words, the 21st century world belongs to Adorno’s monster: we just live in it.  The 20th century’s definition of art, as expressed by another Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, where ‘art is committed to that perception of the world which alienates individuals from their functional existence and performance in

The future of opera – I hope: WNO’s Candide reviewed

Bernstein’s Candide is the operetta that ought to work, but never quite does. Voltaire’s featherlight cakewalk through human misery, set to tunes from the West Side Story guy: what’s not to like? And what can be so wrong with its twinkle-toed score that the combined rewriting efforts (and this is not remotely the full list) of Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker and Stephen Sondheim have all failed to make it work as theatre? For my money it’s the ending. Voltaire coolly pricks his own bubble and tells us to get on with tending our gardens. Bernstein, the all-American idealist, just can’t, and he kills the whole thing dead with ‘Make Our

A giddy delight: Regina Spektor, at the Royal Festival Hall reviewed

We’ll get on to the brilliance of Regina Spektor in a moment. But first a question: why are pop music fans treated so abysmally? The afternoon of Spektor’s second sold-out show at the Royal Festival Hall, the venue tweeted that she would be on stage at 7.30 p.m. She actually took to the stage a few minutes past 8 o’clock. Spektor was absolutely magnificent once she did come on. She filled the room with charisma, charm and wit If that were a one-off, so be it. But anyone who goes to a lot of shows is familiar with how malleable the concept of stage-time is in pop music. Lana Del

Dense and spectacular – and not pink: Oppenheimer reviewed

Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant quantum physicist and ‘father of the atomic bomb’ who was later haunted by what he’d created. Starring Cillian Murphy, and his cheekbones, the film is dense, ambitious, complex, so very long (three hours) and impressive, even if it does drag by the end. (When a film is so very long, that’s the price you pay.) I could go on and on but, for many, the main selling point will be this: it isn’t Barbie and it isn’t pink. If that’s all the thanks you get for developing the next generation of weapon, I’m glad I never bothered It’s a

Lloyd Evans

Finally an entertaining play at the Royal Court: Cuckoo reviewed

The boss of the Royal Court, Vicky Featherstone, will soon step down and she’s using her final spell in charge to try an unusual experiment. Can she entertain the punters and make them feel happy rather than forcing them to confront various forms of gloom, misery and despair? The answer is yes. Featherstone can tickle our funny bone if she wishes. Why haven’t trans activists denounced this show and demanded the performer’s cancellation? Cuckoo, by Michael Wynne, is a hilarious kitchen-sink comedy set in Merseyside with an all-female cast. Some critics have likened it to a Carla Lane sitcom and the domestic set-up owes an obvious debt to the Royle

James Delingpole

University Challenge deserves Amol Rajan

I wish I could say that Bamber Gascoigne would be turning in his grave at what has happened to University Challenge. But unfortunately, I understand from people who knew the Eton, Cambridge, Yale and Grenadier Guards historian, playwright, critic, polymath millionaire and scion of the upper classes that he chose to compensate for his privilege by embracing progressive causes. So, chances are, the shade of Bamber is thrilled to bits at seeing his old quizmaster’s seat occupied by someone who drops his aitches and pronounces ‘h’ where it should be aspirated and landed a mere 2.2 from hearty, insufficiently medieval Downing. Bambi’s successor Jeremy Paxman probably isn’t too bothered either.

The wonders of 18th-century automata

At the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, Mark Twain was mesmerised by a life-sized silver swan with ‘a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes… swimming about as comfortably and unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweller’s shop’. The Silver Swan has been its leading attraction, drawing spellbound visitors to its afternoon performances The jeweller’s shop this mechanical marvel had been born in 100 years earlier was Cox’s Jewelry Museum in London, but its mechanism of 700 components powered by three clockwork motors was the invention of Belgian-born horologist John Joseph Merlin (1735-1803), aka ‘the Ingenious Mechanic’. Turning

The West has much to learn from Hungarian culture

In central Budapest a crew from Hungary’s state TV is filming the unveiling of a new street sign. In honour of his centenary year composer Gyorgy Ligeti now has a road named after him. Contemporary classical music is deemed newsworthy in Hungary. Even more astonishingly – and anyone working in British classical music might want to sit down at this point – the ‘Ligeti 100’ concert at the Budapest Music Centre, dedicated to a clutch of bracing new works, was being filmed for transmission prime time on the Hungarian equivalent of BBC1. Here, we’d be lucky if it got a midnight slot on Radio 3. If much of the West’s