Arts Reviews Archives

Wednesday

5 Jul 2023

Still one of the great vocalists: Peter Gabriel, at OVO Hydro Glasgow, reviewed

Most artists begin an arena show with a bang: emerging from the floor, the gods, on a hoist, everything short of being sprung headfirst from a cannon. Touring for the first time in seven years, Peter Gabriel shrugged off such rote conventions. At 8 p.m. on the dot, he shuffled on alone in a flat cap, for all the world a man with nothing more on his mind than inspecting his spuds down at the allotment. He offered a few words, some avuncular jokes, a self-deprecating jibe at his appearance. I found myself bracing for a PowerPoint presentation, but the message was simple enough not to need one: there are

Daisy Dunn

A comedy double act from John Cleese and Justin Welby: the Archbishop Interviews reviewed

I’m listening to John Cleese talking to Justin Welby in the new series of The Archbishop Interviews when the thought occurs to me that he might unwittingly be comparing himself to Christ. The comedian has just been discussing the failure of the literal-minded to comprehend sarcasm and irony, and the inanity of tabloid headlines, when he circles back to the topic of religion. Though not a believer himself, he is troubled by literal-mindedness in the reading of scripture. ‘Christ taught in parables,’ he notes, ‘and parables are not supposed to be taken literally.’ One can almost feel another headline coming on. Cleese has been waging a war against the wokerati

Deborah Ross

Gripping: Name Me Lawand reviewed

You’d have to have a heart of stone to not be moved by Name Me Lawand. It’s a documentary about a Kurdish boy, deaf since birth, who has lived a lonely, isolated and shut-in life until he learns British Sign Language and slowly starts to blossom and reveal who he is. (Who are we without language?) There is only one big release this week – Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which I couldn’t see in time for my deadline anyhow – but this small film has to be more affecting than any mission that turns out to be possible in the end. Unless, that is, your heart is

Richard Bratby

Featherweight fun: La Cenerentola, at Nevill Holt Opera, reviewed

‘Goodness Triumphant’ is the subtitle of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, and you’d better believe he delivers. It’s the sweetest thing imaginable; true, the stepsisters are awful, but their spite bubbles over in streams of such sunny major-key effervescence that it’s hard to hold it against them. As for their father Don Magnifico, you can’t seriously hiss a villain whose principal ambition is unhindered access to the palace wine cellar. It’s testimony to just how deftly Rossini handles his material that the final scene – in which the now-royal Cinderella asks only that her stepfather address her, for the first time, as ‘daughter’ – can still make you go as gooey as

Melanie McDonagh

Free, noisy, fun: Young V&A reviewed

One of the annoying things about too many contemporary museums is that, having ditched old-fashioned closely typed descriptive labels and display cases, they often seem to be pitched at the level of a 12-year-old. So it’s refreshing to go to a museum that really is for 12-year-olds – or, at least, babies to 14-year-olds. Three cheers for the Young V&A, formerly the Museum of Childhood. It’s a combination of museum and playground, with an engaging Alice in Wonderland feel to it. A 1930s Whiteladies art deco dolls’ house is complete with a swimming pool and a party going on inside The £13 million refurbishment of the old museum includes letting

Louise Levene

The joy of kabuki

It’s a long climb up the 1,368 steps to the Shinto shrine at Kotohira. Many of the pilgrims are making comfort stops at the countless teahouses that line the route, but other worshippers break their journey at Kanamaru-za, the oldest surviving kabuki theatre in Japan. A middle-aged man in Barbara Cartland war paint, heavy black wig and kimono ought to be ridiculous Kabuki, with its vivid stock characters, juicy plots and sumptuous costumes, has always been the most popular and accessible of the Japanese theatrical traditions. In the early 17th century performances featured both sexes, but in 1629 the ruling shogunate decreed that actresses (many of them prostitutes) were a

Wednesday

28 Jun 2023

Deborah Ross

Did ChatGPT write this? Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny reviewed

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the fifth and final film in the franchise so it’s Harrison Ford’s last go at cracking the bullwhip as either the world’s greatest archaeologist or the world’s greatest plunderer, depending on where you are coming from. Ford is now 80 but they still make him appear to climb rock faces, jump between buildings, punch underwater eels in the face and gallop a horse through the New York subway – and there is no doubt about it: he could pluck the still-beating heart from your chest if he was of a mind, so steer clear and never grab the stool next to him

Michael Hann

Why aren’t Spoon filling stadiums?

Here’s a mystery for you. Why were Spoon, one of the most dynamic, sharpest rock bands in the world, playing a single night in a north London town hall (capacity 890) while Arctic Monkeys were playing three nights at Arsenal’s ground (capacity 59,000) as part of a UK tour that encompassed eight other stadiums in the UK, plus one arena, one park and Glastonbury? It’s not that Arctic Monkeys aren’t good – no one gets that kind of critical unanimity without being good. It’s just that Spoon are better, and better than almost everyone else. Onstage in London, aided by a genius sound engineer, Spoon were perfection So why aren’t

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

21 Jun 2023

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

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