Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A play that explains why England’s football team are so lousy: Dear England, at the Olivier Theatre, reviewed

James Graham’s entertaining new play looks at the England manager’s job. Everyone knows that coaching the national side is just a hobby. The boss picks the squad for a handful of fixtures each year and gives a pep talk at half-time followed by a post-match press conference. He’s spared the bother of speculating in the transfer market and he’s never troubled by verbal monsterings from foreign owners or irascible chairmen. And no salary ought to be paid because the incumbent is assured large earnings as a public speaker. Instead of practising football the team fill up notepads with giddy jottings about their feelings Graham’s play opens in 2016 with the

Richard Bratby

Electrifying: the Grange Festival’s Queen of Spades reviewed

In opera, as in so much high-budget entertainment, expectation management is half the battle. With its massive Greek Revival mansion, approached through miles of rolling parkland, The Grange Festival has the grandest setting of any of the summer festivals; and that might have something to do with why the opera served up there has so often felt less than overwhelming. Possibly I’ve been unlucky in my choices at the Grange since it relaunched under the current management in 2017. But many different elements need to fall precisely into place at precisely the right time if an opera is really to catch light, and quite often, under those wide Hampshire skies,

Calvin Po

Policed conviviality: Serpentine Pavilion 2023 reviewed

As I sat down at this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, I overheard a curious exchange. ‘You mustn’t create art within art,’ said an invigilator frostily. He was telling off Fred Pilbrow, an architect, who had been taking in the Pavilion’s sociable atmosphere with friends and painting a watercolour of the scene. They proceeded to enter a perverse negotiation as the invigilator struggled with the theoretical parameters of his orders; apparently the watercolour may stain the furniture but dry media like pencils aren’t allowed either; actually, all art-making is not allowed in any of the exhibitions, ‘but photography is OK’. The timber structure has been stained in a shade of brown that

James Walton

Time to take your meds, Kanye

No one does agonising quite like Mobeen Azhar. In several BBC documentaries now, he’s set his face to pensive, gone off on an earnest quest to investigate a touchy subject and reached his conclusions only after the most extravagant of brow-furrowing. There is, however, a perhaps unexpected twist: the resulting programmes are rather good, creating the impression – or even reflecting the reality – of a man determined to get to the often dark heart of the matter. For a while, it did look as if the programme’s main appeal might be as a comedy of liberal discomfiture In the past, Azhar has applied his methods to such issues as

Laura Gascoigne

Joshua Reynolds’s revival

In front of the banner advertising the RA Summer Exhibition, the swagger statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) by Alfred Drury stands garlanded with flowers. But the Academy he founded won’t be marking his tercentenary with a retrospective, just a small display and a series of artists’ lectures. For an anniversary show, you have to travel to his native Devon. Ever since the Pre-Raphaelites dubbed him ‘Sir Sloshua’, Reynolds has been out of fashion Ever since the Pre-Raphaelites dubbed him ‘Sir Sloshua’, Joshua Reynolds has been out of fashion: blame the outmoded ideals of beauty he promoted in his Discourses and his role as portraitist to the Georgian establishment. But

Richard Bratby

Why the Chester Mystery Plays are more popular than ever

Hang around for long enough at Chester Cross, and theatre is pretty much guaranteed. It’s a Saturday morning in May: a human statue holds his pose, a remote-control buggy zips about advertising the spring sale at MenKind and three connoisseurs of discount cider are making their views known from the bench outside St Peter’s Church. All normal for Chester, and when the Town Crier strides up, crowds gather on the first-floor Rows like the audience at a Tudor playhouse. Oyez! The people of the city seek permission to stage the latest cycle of the city’s medieval Mystery Plays and tradition dictates that the Banns be read in public some six

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

Wes Anderson’s latest cliché: Asteroid City reviewed

After the screening I attended of Wes Anderson’s latest, Asteroid City, I overheard a couple of critics saying how much they loved his films and what a genius he is, and I was minded to interrupt with: ‘What, even though he’s been making exactly the same film for years now?’ Or: ‘What, even though I kept waiting for it to take a shape and it never did?’ But I was too shy, so I’ll let it all out here. The problem with Wes Anderson films, it now occurs to me, is that they are Wes Anderson films, and my patience has run out. Asteroid City is a film set within

Richard Bratby

Taut as a drumskin: Dialogues des Carmélites, at Glyndebourne, reviewed

The three Just Stop Oil protestors were sitting in the stalls, somewhere near the middle of the front row. Someone had shelled out a cool £600 for those tickets – navigating the Glyndebourne website without, somehow, clocking the company’s loudly proclaimed commitment to sustainability (they even produce their own dyes for costumes these days, using plants from the estate) and then arriving at the venue without noticing the hilltop wind turbine, visible for miles around, which makes Glyndebourne probably the only opera house on Earth to be powered entirely by renewable energy. That kind of commitment to protest, coupled to that level of dim-bulb unawareness, commands a certain respect. Kosky

Laura Gascoigne

Two artists who broke the rules: Soutine | Kossoff, at Hastings Contemporary, reviewed

Rules in art exist to be broken but it takes chutzpah, which could explain why so many rule-breakers in modern figurative art were Jewish. Given that they were breaking the law by making figurative art in the first place, they went for broke. Where Soutine’s subjects look small and doll-like, Kossoff’s feel monumental regardless of scale Born a generation apart, Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943) and Leon Kossoff (1926-2019) had much in common. Both were brought up in Jewish working-class families with no pictures on the walls: Soutine the son of a Belarusian tailor; Kossoff, of a Ukrainian immigrant baker in London’s East End. Both were rule-breakers – Soutine because he didn’t

Rupert Christiansen

Short of sparkle: Cinderella-in-the-round, at the Royal Albert Hall, reviewed

Having been unexpectedly delighted by the Royal Ballet’s revival of Christopher Wheeldon’s Corybantic Games at Covent Garden last week, I slapped my wrists for underrating him as a prolific craftsman. After a second exposure to his Cinderella, handsomely mounted by English National Ballet at the Royal Albert Hall, I have reverted to that ho-hum view. Clearly feeling he needed to excavate something different out of a familiar tale and Prokofiev’s score, Wheeldon commissioned the help of the playwright Craig Lucas in constructing a new scenario that removes most of the fantasy and attempts to establish some psychologically realistic back story. A wasted effort. She’s no longer the embodiment of virtue

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Netflix has struck gold: Tour de France: Unchained reviewed

I’m ideologically opposed to bicycles for all the obvious reasons: they don’t have lovely big nostrils which you can blow across gently or stroke inside to feel the soft, delicate skin; they can’t jump hedges; and the kit you’re expected to wear on them is quite hideous – not a smart, black, 18th-century-looking coat but vile, garish, deeply unflattering and unsexy Lycra. Still, after watching a few episodes of Tour de France: Unchained, I’ve softened my position slightly. Say what you like about those infuriating, car-impeding, road-hogging cyclists but the ones who participate in the big international races don’t half have some balls. (Three actually, if the stories I hear

Graeme Thomson

Is Richard Thompson Britain’s Bob Dylan?

There are artists you go to see expecting to be challenged, surprised, even let down. And there are artists you can rely on to deliver more or less the same experience every time. Each approach has its merits. Richard Thompson is a ‘death and taxes’ kind of guy. The fact that his excellence feels inevitable can make it seem less excellent somehow, which doesn’t entirely seem fair. Richard Thompson’s greatest songs drink deeply of the dark stuff A founding member of folk-rock pioneers Fairport Convention, Thompson has been described as the British Bob Dylan. This makes sense in some ways. Both men mine the centuries-deep tradition of their respective countries

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Gripping and admirable: BBC Radio 4’s Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origins reviewed

It’s the whodunnit – or whatdunnit – that has kept scientists, politicians, journalists and armchair sleuths speculating ever since the first stories of a ‘mysterious viral pneumonia’ began leaking out of Wuhan: where did Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, come from? Was it an unlucky natural occurrence, a bat virus which made the opportunistic leap from animals to humans somewhere in the pulsing zoonotic stew of a Wuhan wet market? Or did it stem from the accidental infection of a laboratory worker, most likely in the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which by 2019 had collected nearly 20,000 bat samples, and more than 1,500 individual coronavirus sequences? Many

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

An unreliable history: When Winston Went to War with the Wireless, at the Donmar, reviewed

When Winston Went to War with the Wireless is the clumsy and misleading title of a new play about John Reith’s stewardship of the BBC during the 1926 general strike. Churchill, chancellor at the time, has a minor role as an irascible plodder who makes jokes without a punchline. His role is intended to foreshadow Boris’s career and the characters keep mentioning the gold standard and its damaging effects on Britain’s economy. Gold standard is code for Brexit, of course. It’s unclear what purpose is served by casting Haydn Gwynne as Stanley Baldwin The real subject, John Reith, is played by Stephen Campbell Moore who runs the BBC like a

Robert Jackman

Is wrestling an art?

It isn’t easy selling out Wembley Stadium with its capacity of between 70,000 and 90,000 (depending on the exact arrangement). It’s a feat achieved by only a handful of performers each year – all of whom you’ve likely heard of. This summer, though, Wembley will play host to something rather different – an American pro wrestling show called AEW (All Elite Wrestling). A few months ago, AEW’s biggest achievement this side of the Atlantic was bagging a midnight slot on ITV4. Now it’s going head to head with Harry Styles on ticket sales. These days wrestling storylines are usually written by professional screenwriters Arguably, AEW isn’t even the most important

Wednesday

James Walton

One of the best (if not the jolliest) TV dramas of 2023: BBC1’s Best Interests reviewed

In the opening minutes of Best Interests (Monday and Tuesday), an estranged middle-aged couple made their separate ways to court, pausing outside it to look at each other with a mixture of furious reproach and overwhelming regret. From there we cut to a scene that perhaps overdid the evocation of Happier Times as the same pair laughed endlessly together on a train, before nipping off to the toilet for a spot of giggly conjugal naughtiness. Once they got home and picked up their two daughters from a neighbour, they soon showed what terrific and loving parents they were too – not least to 11-year-old Marnie, whose muscular dystrophy meant she

Rupert Christiansen

Same old, same old: Wayne McGregor’s Untitled, 2023, at the Royal Opera House, reviewed

My witty friend whispered that Wayne McGregor’s new ballet Untitled, 2023 put her in mind of Google HQ – it’s certainly a mint-cool, squeaky-clean, future-perfect affair. The set by Carmen Herrera, subtly lit by Lucy Carter, suggests infinite space and distant horizons. The costumes by Burberry are streamlined and sexless. Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s vaporous score hovers over it all in a meditative trance. Ordinary human emotions struggle to express themselves in this brave new world: we have left planet Earth. McGregor’s strengths and weaknesses are highlighted: on the credit side, there’s his energy and intelligence, his sophisticated visual taste, his empowering of young talent, his open questioning of boundaries, and readiness

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Like attending a joyous religious service: We Will Rock You, at the Coliseum, reviewed

One of the earliest jukebox musicals has returned to the West End. When the show opened in 2002 the author, Ben Elton, plugged his production on TV chat shows with a wisecracking slogan: ‘We Will Rock You isn’t just a title… it’s a promise.’ The easy-listening storyline draws inspiration from the Old Testament and from Mad Max. We’re in a dystopian future world ruled by faceless corporations that sell mass-produced garbage to zombified youngsters addicted to their mobile phones. A tribe of exiles, the Bohemians, roam the underworld in search of the relics of a vanished culture known as ‘rock’n’roll’. The Bohemians meet a visionary outcast, Galileo, who recites song

Deborah Ross

Magnificent: Pretty Red Dress reviewed

Pretty Red Dress is a debut feature starring a one-time X Factor winner so, you know, kill me now. But it’s a thin week and I’ll cut it some slack and be kind, like it says on the T-shirts. That was my thinking, because, as is now obvious, I can be a patronising fool. This is a terrific film. It’s original, has heft, is magnificently performed, and it blew me away. The writer-director is Dionne Edwards who, as I also now know, was named one of Screen International’s Stars of Tomorrow in 2019. One of her shorts, We Love Moses, is available on Disney+ and it is totally worth 15

Richard Bratby

To die for: Grange Park Opera’s Tristan & Isolde reviewed

There are a lot of corpses on stage at the end of Charles Edwards’s production of Tristan & Isolde for Grange Park Opera. At this stage in the drama, directors tend to fade out the bloodbath, the better to focus on Isolde’s final dissolution into bliss. But as Michael Tanner argues, Tristan, like the Ring, offers no bearable solution to its central problem, however much the music – that great deceiver – might try to persuade us otherwise. You want art to tell you the truth? Wagner knew that you can’t handle the truth. He declared that in Tristan ‘from the first to the last, love shall for once find