Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Daisy Dunn

Is Matthew Parris the modern Plutarch? Radio 4’s Great Lives reviewed

Whenever I listen to Great Lives on Radio 4, which is often, I am reminded of the gulf between fame and achievement. How is it that some people do so much, yet remain obscure, while others seem to be carried forward with perpetual momentum after doing just one thing? A good many of the lives dissected on the programme over the years have been completely unfamiliar to me. I’ll spend the half hour puzzling over why they are not better known. Where would we be without Great Lives? There is minimal appetite in trade publishing for books about esoteric figures. And just imagine pitching a biopic of Hertha Ayrton, Eleonora

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Heist drama with a novelty spin that isn’t very novel: Netflix’s Kaleidoscope reviewed

Kaleidoscope is a fairly routine eight-part heist drama with a supposed novelty spin: apart from the beginning and the end, you can view the episodes in any order, meaning that each viewer has a slightly different experience. If I sound mildly sceptical, it’s because the novelty isn’t actually that novel. B.S. Johnson got there 54 years earlier with his 1969 novel-in-a-box The Unfortunates, an account of a football match in which the chapters were loose bound so that they could be shuffled and read in whatever order you wished. A few years ago, I bought a rare first edition from Simon Finch which I thought would become very valuable but

Deborah Ross

Formulaic and untrue: Bank of Dave reviewed

Bank of Dave is the ‘true(ish)’ story, as this puts it, of Dave Fishwick, the Burnley businessman who wanted to set up a high street bank to help the local community. He was, Fishwick said in a recent interview, at home when the call came from Piers Ashworth in LA. ‘He’s the writer of Mission Impossible and he’d heard about my story and he said: “Dave, I want to make a Hollywood film about your life.” You get this a lot in Burnley, ha!’ I was made up for Dave, who seems like an excellent fellow, and this does have all the makings of one of those British underdog dramas

Laura Gascoigne

The grisliest images are the earliest: Bearing Witness? Violence and Trauma on Paper, at the Fitzwilliam Museum, reviewed

‘Graphic’ scenes of violence are now associated with film, but the word betrays an older ancestry. The first mass media images to shock the public were engravings documenting contemporary social ills pioneered by the Victorian magazine The Graphic, though the association goes a long way further back, to Jacques Callot’s etching series ‘Miseries of War’ (1633) recording atrocities perpetrated by both sides during the French invasion of his native Lorraine in the Thirty Years’ War. The grisliest of those images, ‘The Hangman’s Tree’, is the earliest work in Bearing Witness? Violence and Trauma on Paper, at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The prints and drawings on display are not all

Norman Lebrecht

Why I hate Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony

I loved music before I could walk. It seemed I could harmonise anything my sisters were singing. I had perfect pitch, a mixed blessing since wrong notes made me cry. I hated music when I first heard Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony.  I was nine years old. My mother had died when I was two and my father got remarried to a Hitler refugee, half unhinged by exile. My stepmother took me to orchestral concerts at the Royal Festival Hall. She liked all the crowd pleasers, best of all the Pastoral symphony which she played at home on a portable gramophone. I grew to revile the opening rustle of strings, the ‘Awakening

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Riveting: Tár reviewed

Todd Field’s Tár stars an insanely glorious Cate Blanchett – if she doesn’t win an Oscar I’ll eat my hat – as a world-famous orchestral conductor about to record Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. There is also Elgar’s Cello Concerto in this film, and a bit of Bach, but it’s not about music. To say it’s about music would be like saying Citizen Kane is about tobogganing. It’s about power: how you attain it, what you do with it. We enter the world of cancel culture and identity politics and address that old chestnut: can you separate art and artist? It’s basically everything you are certain will bore you to death, but

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Clever and witty state-of-the-nation play: Kerry Jackson, at the Dorfman Theatre, reviewed

The National’s new comedy by April De Angelis is a clever and amusing attempt to deliver that most elusive artefact, the state-of-the-nation play. It’s easy to pan this production because the plot lacks surprises and the script is overly indebted to Abigail’s Party. The two lead characters are formulaic creations who reflect political polarities: left vs right, Remain against Leave. Kerry Jackson is a stroppy Essex blonde who loves Thatcher, despises foreigners and supports Brexit. She takes a shine to an overeducated wine snob, Stephen, who rides a bike and lectures in philosophy. Kerry’s new bistro in Walthamstow needs customers and she begs Stephen to post a favourable review in

Laura Gascoigne

Other artists’ still lifes may be showier, but none are as companionable as Giorgio Morandi’s

There are various staples of still life painting, some symbolic, some not. Skulls and musical instruments suggest the transience of human pleasure; crocks and bottles are usually just vehicles for displays of technical virtuosity. Crocks and bottles are what Giorgio Morandi painted, not because he wanted to show off but because he liked their lack of symbolism. So it’s odd to find a still life of musical instruments in the Estorick’s new Morandi exhibition. The habitual axis of Morandi’s still lifes is vertical, but the dingy brown trumpet, mandolin and guitar in this composition lie in a heap as if too bored to exert themselves. The picture strikes a bum

James Walton

Guiltily compelling: Spector, on Sky Documentaries, reviewed

On 3 February 2003, the emergency services in Los Angeles received a call. ‘I’m Phil Spector’s driver,’ a voice told them. ‘I think my boss killed somebody.’ This was the inevitable yet still extraordinary starting point for Spector – a new four-part documentary on a man who, in the face of fierce competition, might well be the strangest figure in pop history. By that stage, he perhaps deserved the description of him in one news report as ‘a ghost, a phantom, a half-forgotten rock genius’. Except that – whether by coincidence or something more sinister – he’d recently granted his first interview for decades to the British journalist Mick Brown.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Gobbets of bile and hard-bitten wisdom: Iggy Pop’s Every Loser reviewed

Grade: A– James Newell Osterberg Jnr’s unexpected and unwarranted longevity on this planet has conferred upon him the status of irascible, but very loveable, grandfather of punk: it suits him just fine. A delightful contrarian in a profession otherwise staffed by vapid, guileless, liberals – Iggy actually meant it when he sang ‘I’m a Conservative’ – Iggy now sprays the profanities around with abandon while delivering gobbets of bile and occasionally hard-bitten wisdom in the direction of yoof. Which, given Iggy is now 75, means pretty much everyone. This album veers between the addled late-1970s pop rock of The Idiot and Lust for Life and the scabrous metal raunch of

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Petrol, seawater and blood: the horror of Cornwall

Penwith isn’t an island, but it feels like one. The heathland above the cliffs is filled with mine workings and Iron and Bronze Age relics: menhirs, fogous and quoits. To most visitors Cornwall is as simple as the GWR posters: gaudy pastels, happy children, ice cream. This Cornwall exists for six weeks in the summer holidays, the setting for a visitor’s bourgeois childhood – Enid Blyton’s Cornwall, principally – but it’s not the essential one. There are multiple real Cornwalls, and they have nothing to do with the tourist aesthetic, which the visitors bring with them. In this spirit, Cornwall’s famous writers are usually from outside: Virginia Woolf (Kensington); Daphne

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

I beg Sam Mendes to stop writing his own scripts: Empire of Light reviewed

Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, which he wrote as well as directed, is billed as a ‘love letter to cinema’ although, alas, in this instance cinema does not appear to love him back. The magic of film-going is the theme but there is almost no film-going in it and what there is isn’t magic. Peculiarly soulless, pedestrian and plodding, it is, however, wonderfully shot by Roger Deakins. It also stars Olivia Colman so now we can deal with that all-important question: can Olivia Colman save any film she’s in? No, is the answer. But it is probably a hundred times better than it would have been without her. The movie

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Eccentric triviality aimed at 1970s feminists: Orlando, at the Garrick Theatre, reviewed

Orlando opens with a pack of Virginia Woolfs on stage. All wear the same costume of horn-rimmed spectacles, long tweed skirts and woolly cardigans, and they comply with current diversity targets. There’s a white Woolf, a black Woolf, a mixed-race Woolf, an East Asian Woolf, and a male Woolf with a deep voice who seems to have wandered in from Little Red Riding Hood. The pack of Woolfs chat away about how to tell the story of an English aristocrat, Orlando, who was a teenager in the 1590s. He enters the stage dressed like a girl. (Confusion over sexual identity is the show’s big idea.) After an opaque interview with

Graeme Thomson

Not everything Bowie did was genius – he was more interesting than that

I’m generally not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, but one occurred to me recently as the younger members of my family were blasting out a patchy David Bowie playlist: Stand Up Against Revisionism. It’s harder than ever these days not to succumb to printing the myth – reality can be so so-so – but critics have a duty to keep a clear head while others are losing theirs. Even around the dinner table on New Year’s Day. Bowie would have been 76 this week; he was born on 8 January 1947, and died two days after his 69th birthday in 2016. He’s not getting any less popular in posthumous

James Delingpole James Delingpole

A Turkish dystopia that eludes western censors: Netflix’s Hot Skull reviewed

A strange new virus has infected half the world but the cure is worse than the disease: authoritarian tyranny, in which the populace lose most of their freedoms, are subject to endless testing and are corralled into gated communities. I’m talking, of course, about the wildly implausible plot of a dystopian sci-fi thriller called Hot Skull. On the downside, it’s a bit depressing, with relentlessly grey cityscapes so bleak it makes Blade Runner look like Pleasantville. On the upside, it’s Turkish which means that – as with the brilliant Russian post-apocalyptic drama To the Lake – you get a completely different, original and perhaps more honest satirical slant on the

Laura Gascoigne

Did this Lithuanian invent abstraction? M.K. Ciurlionis, at Dulwich Picture Gallery, reviewed

Trivia question: name a famous Lithuanian. Google came up with four I’d never heard of and one I had: Hannibal Lecter. It seems that Lithuanians are famous only in Lithuania unless they’re the monstrous inventions of non-Lithuanians – an injustice Dulwich Picture Gallery is helping to correct with its M.K. Ciurlionis exhibition. Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis is not just Lithuania’s most famous artist; he is also the country’s most famous composer. On his death in 1911 he left more than 400 musical compositions and more than 300 artistic ones, the latter squeezed into six short years before pneumonia carried him off aged 35. The son of a church organist, he was

Richard Bratby

Do conductors have to be cruel to be good?

Playing under the baton of Arturo Toscanini must have felt a bit like fighting in the trenches. There are recordings of him rehearsing in the 1930s or ’40s. The orchestra is bowling along; there’s a low muttering, and then suddenly, out of nothing, the explosion. A scream of rage: a huge, operatic, animalistic roar. There’s a barrage of Italian profanities and what sounds like a fist smashing repeatedly on wood. Bernard Shore, who played under Toscanini in the BBC Symphony Orchestra, witnessed him hurling his baton at a cowering viola section. With the NBC Symphony, Toscanini threw his gold pocket watch to the floor and stamped on it. The players

Wednesday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Detectorists Christmas Special is a triumph

They’re tricky things to get right, Christmas specials. Ideally, they should capture in one perfectly judged episode the very essence of everything you found wonderful about your favourite classic sitcom, be it The Royle Family, Father Ted or Peep Show, all dusted with the lightest sprinkle of tinsel, icing sugar and nostalgia. But if they get the mix wrong – usually by overdoing the saccharine and mawkishness – it takes you straight down to Christmas hell and tarnishes your memories forever. For example, I will never, ever be able to watch Only Fools And Horses again, not even the actually funny episode where the chandelier falls down, because of an

Tuesday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The Recruit might be the worst show on Netflix

The Top Gun series received generous support from the US Navy because it was such an effective recruitment tool. I wonder if something similar went on between the CIA and Netflix’s new series The Recruit, this time as an exercise in reputation management. ‘There’s nothing sinister or threatening about the Company,’ this bizarre, horribly ill-judged and tasteless comedy/thriller series squeals at every turn. ‘We’re just a bunch of lovable, kooky misfits doing our bit to defend your freedoms.’ If you think I’m exaggerating, consider that one of the biggest baddies in the series – right up there with the evil Russians – is the Senate oversight committee responsible for holding

Friday

James Walton

Irresistible: Sky Max’s Christmas Carole reviewed

What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions disproportionate to anything a particular story has earned; or b) nothing at all. And if you want to see how both of these are possible, two of this year’s big Christmas TV offerings provide handy illustrations. Firmly in category a) is The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, an animated film by Charlie Mackesy, based on his own mega-selling book and with some impressively big-name actors doing the voices. Its methods are established immediately when a boy lost in a snowy wood happens across a cute talking mole