Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Had the air of a Blue Peter Christmas special: Grange Festival’s The Yeomen of the Guard reviewed

The Yeomen of the Guard has been called the ‘English Meistersinger’ but the more you think about that, the dafter it gets. It’s not just the very obvious difference in scale and means between Wagner’s five-hour national epic and Gilbert and Sullivan’s sprightly opéra comique. Wagner’s whole drama builds to a collective affirmation of German art. The Yeomen begins by setting up a fantasy of an English golden age – the Tower of London in the 16th century – then systematically cuts it to ribbons. Act One’s gallant hero becomes Act Two’s callous seducer, whose march towards his own happy ending leaves a trail of collateral damage: a spiral of

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

If you see this show you’ll want to see it again – directed properly: The Glass Menagerie, at the Duke of York’s Theatre, reviewed

The Glass Menagerie directed by Jeremy Herrin is a bit of an eyeball-scrambler. The action takes place on a huge black platform flanked by 1930s antiques: a typewriter, a broken piano, a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a smattering of Anglepoise lamps. This cryptic setting suggests that the play is being developed in a Museum of the Great Depression, and the show we are seeing is the latest rehearsal. It’s not clear what purpose is served by this fiddly imposture. And although the act of sabotage doesn’t quite destroy the show, it’s touch and go during the opening 20 minutes. Herrin has shared the role of Tom between two actors. Tom

Rupert Christiansen

Paris’s glittering new museums

How do you manage a dictatorship? By producing ‘a succession of miracles’, according to Louis-Napoléon, that ‘dazzle and astonish’. In 1852 he inaugurated his Second Empire regime with a strategy of soft power predicated on the assumption that the loyalty of politically volatile Paris was to be won not by violent repression but by visible magnificence and grand designs. This wasn’t an original idea: it followed the policies of le Roi Soleil and Bonaparte, not to mention the Roman emperors. It worked again for Louis-Napoléon because, as well as such jaw-dropping follies as Charles Garnier’s extravagant opera house, it extended to Haussmann’s lavish investment in socially useful boulevards, sewers, housing

Thursday

John Phipps

No genre of storytelling is more formulaic or more exhausted than true crime

Nothing new under the sun. Or at least it feels that way these days, doesn’t it? The movies are TV shows are comic books are children’s toys. The TV series are podcasts are non-fiction books are magazine articles. The radio shows are real-life stories are Twitter threads are TV series. Even the interesting movies are remakes now. Intellectual property is king, franchises rule the entertainment world and audiences are left to chew the cud from a hundred-stomached cow. Sunrise, sunset and nothing new to offer. So it is with radio, and especially with true crime, the staple crop of narrative radio. No genre of storytelling is more formulaic or more

Richard Bratby

A thoroughly enjoyable grand old heap of nothing: The Excursions of Mr Broucek reviewed

Sir David Pountney, it appears, has been to Prague. He’s booked himself a mini-break, he’s EasyJetted out, and after (one assumes) necking a couple of pints of unfiltered Pilsner, he’s splurged the entire design budget for Janacek’s The Excursions of Mr Broucek on the loudest tourist tat that the Mala Strana has to offer. Scale it up, pile it on stage; job’s a good ’un. There’s a snow globe and a Lenin candle; there are dinky toy houses and a cardboard pop-up of the Charles Bridge. A massive souvenir plate (badly cracked) hangs over the stage, blazoned with a panorama of Hradcany Hill and the single word – at least

Deborah Ross

The hips are electric but you will be willing it to stay put: Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis reviewed

Elvis is Baz Luhrmann’s biopic of Elvis Presley and it’s cradle to grave but told at such a gallop you’ll be willing it to stay put even if it’s just for two minutes. You may even be begging: Baz, come on, just hold still. But no, we’re off again. I’ve had fever dreams that have been less delirious. But on the plus side, even if it’s never deep or enlightening, it has a fizzing energy, and because it doesn’t dwell on anything, we don’t dwell on fat, sad Elvis at the end. Which is a relief. Because it doesn’t dwell on anything, we don’t dwell on fat, sad Elvis at

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Bloated waffle: Jitney at the Old Vic reviewed

The Old Vic’s new show, Jitney, has a mystifying YouTube advert which gives no information about the play or the characters. If the producers paid for the marketing themselves, they’d do a better job. The advert fails even to mention that ‘Jitney’ is Pittsburgh slang for ‘taxi’ and that the action is set in a cab firm in the 1970s. The boss, Becker, is a growling despot who dominates his crew of uppity young drivers by glaring at them psychotically. The prattling cabbies hang around the office gossiping about casual sex and petty crime. Or they ogle porno magazines. Or they show off their bedroom technique by thrusting their pelvises

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The sad decline of my one-time favourites

I don’t think it’s my imagination: it really is getting harder and harder to find anything worth watching on TV. But then, why should it be otherwise? Entropy has afflicted every aspect of our culture from holiday flights to the supply chain to the efficacy and integrity of our political and legal system to the quality of pop singles, so we should hardly be surprised if the quality of material on the gogglebox has taken a dive too. One metric of this is the decline in quality of long-running TV series. Game of Thrones was not the exception but the rule. Even the series I sometimes consider to be the

Tanjil Rashid

The man who changed Indian cinema

At 6ft 4½in tall, Satyajit Ray was head and shoulders above his countrymen. His height was unheard of among Bengalis, ‘a low-lying people in a low-lying land’, as the colonial saying went. With his stature, jawline and baritone voice, he might have been a Bollywood hero. Instead, he chose to tower over the world of art-house cinema, a directorial giant among the likes of Bergman, Kurosawa and Fellini, alongside whom he is credited with inducting cinema into the temple of high culture. His standing was secured with his first film, Pather Panchali, which premièred at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1955. India then only churned out musicals which,

Laura Gascoigne

The women’s lips are pursed; the men’s are kissable: Glyn Philpot at Pallant House reviewed

Of all the photos of artists in the studio, the one of Glyn Philpot being served a martini by his white-jacketed Jamaican model Henry Thomas must be the strangest. Taken to publicise his 1934 exhibition, it would be unthinkable now but in the circles Philpot moved in at the time it might, I suppose, have been viewed as cool. For 20 years Philpot had been London’s leading portraitist, a position he inherited from Sargent. His sitters included admirals – four during the first world war – and King Fuad of Egypt, who commissioned a ‘dignified, decent, usual and rather sumptuous’ portrait from the 38-year-old artist for £3,000 in 1923, the

Thursday

James Walton

A masterclass in evenhandedness: James Graham’s Sherwood reviewed

James Graham has made his considerable name writing political-based dramas of a highly unusual type: non-polemical ones. And this certainly applies to his television work as well as his stage plays. Coalition (about the 2010 Conservative-Lib Dem alliance) and Brexit: The Uncivil War (which gave Dominic Cummings the signal honour of being played by Benedict Cumberbatch) both went so far as to suggest that most politicians try to do the right thing. Even when he abandoned politics to supply the lockdown hit Quiz, Graham’s unfashionable commitment to centrism remained. Rather than taking sides on the ‘coughing major’ scandal, he extended sympathy and understanding to all involved. Quiz was also the

Deborah Ross

It’s wholly impossible to look away: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande reviewed

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande stars Emma Thompson as a retired, widowed religious education teacher in her sixties who books sessions with a sex worker (Daryl McCormack) because, for the first time in her life, she would like to experience good sex. Her husband was a roll on, roll off sort of fella, she’s never slept with anyone else and her body, she says, ‘feels like a carcass I’ve been dragging round all these years’. You have to admire her courage. I don’t think I’d even have the courage to book a hotel room for two hours in the afternoon. I’d probably pay for the night so that no

Rupert Christiansen

Leave Bizet’s Carmen alone

I’ve always felt uncomfortably ambivalent about the work of Matthew Bourne. Of course, there is no disputing its infectious exuberance or its enormous appeal to a broad public beyond the ballet club. I suppose its eclectic mix of Ashton and MacMillan, camp jokiness, Hollywood movies and Broadway razzmatazz is quirkily unique too – at least sui generis, inasmuch as nobody seems to imitate it with his degree of commercial success. And Bourne’s house designer Lez Brotherston always gets it just right: the shows invariably look great. Yet there’s also a relentless brashness to them, an absence of psychological nuance and aesthetic restraint. I take a deep breath and try to

Graeme Thomson

The power of cultural reclamation

‘Version’ is an old reggae term I’ve always loved. It refers to a stripped-down, rhythm-heavy instrumental mix of a song, traditionally dubbed onto the B-side of a single. On paper the concept sounds throwaway, and often it was. Over time, however, using reverb and a fair degree of ingrained madness, pioneering Jamaican producers such as Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, King Tubby and U-Roy twisted ‘versions’ into mind-bending shapes. Time-stretched DJs toasted new rhymes over the top, and dub was born, an art form built from borrowed parts and hair-brained ingenuity. The notion that popular music is now obsessed with recycling old content is not necessarily fanciful, but it can be reductive.

Daisy Dunn

How interesting an art is fashion?

One of the New York Met Gala stylists is sharing tips for wearing a corset to an evening do. ‘Breathe a lot in the morning,’ he tells the Gucci Podcast, with a discernible smile, ‘and by the time you put on the dress, you’ll be full of oxygen.’ The image of a puffed-up toad comes to mind. It’s a bit nuts, isn’t it, the fashion world? The Met Gala is the ball where anything goes – the costumes are witty and extreme – but even so the commentary on it can be pretty earnest, especially in the American press. The stylists on this podcast speak of dressing celebrities like disco

Richard Bratby

A completely satisfying operatic experience: Opera North’s Parsifal reviewed

When Parsifal finally returns to Montsalvat, it’s Good Friday. He’s trodden the path of suffering but now the sun is shining. Confused, he turns to the aged and broken Gurnemanz: why, on this day of utmost grief, does not the whole of nature mourn? Gurnemanz gestures at the woods and meadows, glowing, as Wagner tells us, in the morning light: ‘You see, it is not so.’ At this point in Opera North’s new concert staging, Parsifal (Toby Spence), Gurnemanz (Brindley Sherratt) and Kundry (Katarina Karneus) are sitting on the lip of the stage, as if having a quiet chat and – with a gentle relaxation of the shoulders, the smallest

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Joyously liberating: Tony! [The Tony Blair Rock Opera] reviewed

Harry Hill’s latest musical traces Tony Blair’s bizarre career from student pacifist to war-mongering plaything of the United States. With co-writer Steve Brown, Hill has created a ramshackle, hasty-looking production that deliberately conceals the slickness and concentrated energy of its witty lyrics, superb visuals and terrific music. The last thing it wants to seem is sophisticated and it starts off with a parade of New Labour grandees, all grotesquely overblown. John Prescott is a violent northern drunkard who wants to punch everyone in the face – including the Scots because ‘they’re too far north to be proper north’. Robin Cook is a cerebral sex maniac. David Blunkett gets pulled around

Richard Bratby

The opera that wouldn’t die

When Erich Wolfgang Korngold completed his third opera, Die tote Stadt, in August 1920, he’d barely turned 23. Yet such was his reputation that what followed was practically a Europe-wide bidding war for rights to the première. The young composer had his pick of companies and conductors (the Vienna State Opera tried and failed). In the end – almost unprecedentedly – Die tote Stadt was launched on the same night in two cities simultaneously. Audiences in Hamburg and Cologne both erupted into applause, but Korngold, who could be in only one place, had chosen Hamburg – where he was so dazed by the response that Richard Strauss, who was present

Thursday

Rupert Christiansen

I suspect this was a rush job: Like Water for Chocolate reviewed

How much weight of plot can dance carry? Balanchine famously insisted that there are no mothers-in-law in ballet, and masters such as Fokine, Massine and Ashton largely confined the dimensions of their narratives to the back of a postage stamp. Yet in A Month in the Country Ashton also proved that ballet can communicate delicate nuances of psychology; MacMillan’s Mayerling has a complex historical-political setting that fascinates; and Matthew Bourne has devised a cartoon-ish mode of silent tale-telling that has proved very popular and effective. Although one could multiply these examples, the fact remains that plot-driven ballet is a tricky business: stories develop more naturally through words than images and

Michael Hann

They have the weakest catalogue of any major act: Abba: Voyage reviewed

One of the biggest talking points in pop these past couple of years has been how successful old musicians have become at making money. Swathes of stars have simply auctioned off their past: rather than collecting the royalties on their publishing and their recordings year by year, they have just sold the whole lot. Last year Bruce Springsteen collected half a billion dollars for selling the rights to his recordings and publishing to Sony. Bob Dylan got a similar amount for selling his recorded catalogue to Sony and his publishing to Universal. Abba have been in on the act, too. But not selling: a company founded by Bjorn Ulvaeus of