Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Rupert Christiansen

The highlight was a dazzling duet from Pam Tanowitz: The Royal Ballet – A Diamond Celebration reviewed

The Koh-i-Noor in this Diamond Celebration of 60 years of the Friends of the Royal Opera House garnered the least applause: Dispatch, a dazzlingly lucid duet newly choreographed by Pam Tanowitz, to a thrilling thrash of a score by Ted Hearne. Dressed in 1960s sports kit with white floppy short shorts, William Bracewell and Anna Rose O’Sullivan engage in a steely contest that brings them together and forces them apart, their arms flattened and their faces expressionless as they push and pull, box and fence. Echoes of Merce Cunningham and Balanchine’s Agon abound – who is in control here? – but Tanowitz has an entirely distinctive style of her own

Graeme Thomson

Like A-ha after an extensive rewilding process: Sigur Ros, at Usher Hall, reviewed

Plus: it’s quite clear that MUNA are going to be huge What is it with Icelanders and mushrooms? Just weeks after Bjork releases a fungal-themed album, Fossora, Sigur Ros appear on stage with dozens of sporey lights illuminating the gloom. It’s boom time for mycophiles, but with Sigur Ros the link makes a certain kind of sense. Their aesthetic is not so much post-rock as glacial. For almost three decades the Icelandic quartet have been making large-screen, epically elemental music: celestial choral pieces, art-house concert films, ambient soundscapes and the occasional relatively conventional rock and pop song. Whether aware of it or not, you will have heard ‘Hoppipolla’ on numerous

Laura Gascoigne

Does gender matter? Making Modernism, at the Royal Academy, reviewed

 The catalogue to Making Modernism opens with an acknowledgment from the Royal Academy’s first female president, Rebecca Salter, that in the past it has overlooked women artists. To compensate, it has bundled seven – four headliners and three of their lesser-known contemporaries – into this one show. Excluded from official art schools and reliant on private tuition and ‘ladies’ academies’, these seven women escaped the feminine curse of the three ‘Ks’ – Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen and church) – to forge independent careers in Germany before the first world war. They didn’t constitute an art movement, though Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin – both comfortably off – facilitated one.

Tanjil Rashid

A once-great engine of culture, slowly running out of steam: the BBC at 100

I had my birthday recently – one I share  with a venerable old aunt who shaped my formative years. Well-travelled and fluent in more than 40 languages, Auntie broadened my horizons well beyond the dreary suburb where I lived. She informed me about events in faraway lands, but also steeped me in ‘our island story’. On intimate terms with everybody in the arts, Auntie was unbelievably cultivated. Back then, she also spoke with an unmistakable clarity that was a model for non-native speakers – such as myself. Millions worldwide acquired English in this way, gaining with it a whole civilisation. And so last month, on my birthday, I was genuinely

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Rebecca Humphries is dynamite – pity about the play: Blackout Songs, at Hampstead Theatre, reviewed

Viewers watching a good romcom need to fall in love with three things. The boy, the girl and the affair itself. The new Hampstead melodrama, Blackout Songs, scores just one out of three. Rebecca Humphries is adorably chic and sexy as the Soho seductress who drifts from bar to bar, picking up men. Her toyboy is a disappointment, a teenage deadbeat who has none of her louche gusto. And his character is a puzzle when it ought to be crystal clear. At the start of the action he wears a neck-brace and speaks with a stammer. In the next scene, his neck has healed and his stammer has vanished as

James Walton

Riveting: C4’s Who Stole the World Cup reviewed

Have you ever seen film of the England 1966 football team holding the World Cup at the Royal Garden Hotel, Kensington, on the evening of their victory? The answer, I can guarantee, is no. Unbeknownst to everybody except a few policemen and FA officials, what they were holding was only a replica, made a few months previously after the real Jules Rimet trophy was stolenin London. But this was just one of the many eye-popping disclosures in Monday’s 1966: Who Stole the World Cup? Of course, it’s not uncommon for a documentary to claim the tale it’s telling is scarcely believable. Much rarer is for that claim, as here, to

Richard Bratby

Hugely entertaining: Royal Opera’s Alcina reviewed

A hotel bellboy, the story goes, discovered George Best in a luxury suite surrounded by scantily clad lovelies and empty champagne bottles. ‘George, George’, he sighed. ‘Where did it all go wrong?’. It’s the same deal, essentially, with Ruggiero, hero of Handel’s Alcina. As the curtain rises he’s in the boudoir of Alcina, a smokin’ hot love-witch who lives on a paradise island with her minxy little sister, Morgana, and whose only serious failing – and who are we, really, to judge? – is a fondness for transforming her enemies into animals. This being an epic tale of chivalry, and this being 1735, it’s universally understood that having this much

Rupert Christiansen

Exhilarating: English National Ballet triple bill, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

Headed for San Francisco, Tamara Rojo bows out of her directorship of English National Ballet with an exhilarating triple bill demonstrating her success in expanding the repertory and raising technical standards. If only the company could tour this class of work outside London.  The climax of the evening was a new version of The Rite of Spring by Mats Ek – his second stab at dramatising music so graphically vivid and violently aggressive that choreographers since Nijinsky have struggled to find imagery and movement to match its primal energy. Even Kenneth MacMillan and Pina Bausch didn’t quite hack it for me. Ek has avoided the clichés: nobody stomps about plastered

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What’s the point of these soul covers? Bruce Springsteen’s Only the Strong Survive reviewed

Grade: B What’s the worst-ever cover version (after Madonna’s hilarious stab at ‘American Pie’)? I reckon Creedence Clearwater Revival’s interminable mangling of ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’, or maybe the J. Geils Band stamping over ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ in hobnail boots – two bands I otherwise adore. Jeff Beck boring his way through ‘Superstition’? The Stranglers wrecking ‘Walk on By’? All Saints ripping the guts out of ‘Lady Marmalade’? I think you catch my drift, because the lesson is pretty clear: no, really, do not play that funky music, white boy. Brucie gets away with this album of familiar, but in the main not over-familiar, soul covers

Michael Hann

Odd, rich and adventurous: Erykah Badu, at the Royal Festival Hall, reviewed

You couldn’t call Erykah Badu one of the world’s most productive artists: it’s 12 years since her last album, and she’s released just five of them in 25 years, plus a couple of mixtapes. You’re more likely to see her name in the papers for something stupid she’s said – that she can see the good in everybody, even Hitler, because he was ‘a wonderful painter’, for example – than because she’s done something musical. Which is a shame because like her equally unproductive neo-soul contemporaries (Maxwell – five albums in 26 years; D’Angelo – three in 27 years), the music still sounds extraordinary. A key influence on neo-soul was

Deborah Ross

Ralph Fiennes at his most terrifying: The Menu reviewed

The Menu is a comedy-horror-thriller set in an exclusive restaurant on a private island and it gives the rich a good kicking, like The Triangle of Sadness, except here they manage to keep their food down, mercifully. (At $1,200 a head, you’d hope so.) But the diners are not spared otherwise, and it’s nastily fun, if not pure evil, and should possibly come with a warning: after this, you will never, ever wish to dine anywhere that isn’t Nando’s. The film is directed by Mike Mylod with a screenplay by Will Tracy and Seth Reiss. (Both Mylod and Tracy have worked on Succession.) The opening sees the group of diners

Mathew Lyons

The bleak brilliance of Peanuts

The numbers are extraordinary. Charles M. Schulz, whose centenary falls next week, spent nearly 50 years of his life producing daily comic strips for Peanuts. Between 2 October 1950 and his death in February 2000, he drew a staggering 17,897 of them. He retired in December 1999 after a series of strokes and a cancer diagnosis; he died the day before his farewell strip was published. It’s not just the longevity that is remarkable. At its peak, Schulz’s work had a daily global audience of some 355 million. More than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries carried his strip. Meanwhile, the licensing industry created around his characters was introducing 20,000 new

Thursday

Graeme Thomson

The joy of B-sides

Paul Weller releasing a collection of solo B-sides is cause for mild celebration. After all, the Jam were one of the great B-side bands. ‘Tales From The Riverbank’, ‘The Butterfly Collector’, ‘Liza Radley’ – all A-list songs, relegated to the subs’ bench. Remember the B-side? That bijou, creative safe space which didn’t merely permit but positively encouraged artists to write parallel narratives of exploration, experimentation and extemporisation. I still remember the first B-side I fell in fascination with. It was called ‘Christ Versus Warhol’, a queasily psychedelic, wilfully odd indulgence on the wrong side of the Teardrop Explodes’ determinedly poppy ‘Passionate Friend’. I felt like the protagonist in Gregory’s Girl.

Wednesday

John Phipps

The extraordinary case of Malcolm MacArthur

Non-fiction tells you what happened, fiction affirms the kinds of things that happen. According to Aristotle, anyway. So while journalism seeks out unlikely events, fiction creates pleasing inevitabilities. The problem as it pertains to our brave narrative podcasters is that they have to straddle the two worlds: their material must be interesting and unusual, but their final story should have the poetic coherence of good old unreality. They have to turn ‘some things that happened’ into ‘a kind of thing that happens’. Otherwise it’s all evidence and no charge, each event indistinguishable in its randomness from a bolt of lightning. Obscene:The Dublin Scandal has classy production values, a great, likeable

Deborah Ross

Astonishing cinema: No Bears reviewed

Jafar Panahi’s No Bears is, first and foremost, a wonderful film. More than this, you don’t need to know but I’ll tell you anyway. Panahi, an Iranian filmmaker, was banned from making films by the Iran government in 2010 yet has persisted clandestinely. One of his films (This Is Not a Film) was smuggled to the Cannes festival on a USB stick buried inside a cake. No Bears was wrapped in May this year; Panahi was arrested in July, and now he’s serving a six-year prison sentence for ‘propaganda against the system’. To make a film, any film, against such odds, is astonishing, but one as truly wonderful as this?

Laura Gascoigne

The careers of artists like Carolee Schneemann and Stephen Cripps are unthinkable today

During the 1964 debut of Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Meat Joy’ in Paris, a man in the audience tried to throttle the artist before being hauled off by three female spectators. Schneemann’s performance, an ‘exuberant sensory celebration of flesh’, involved semi-naked dancers tangling and grappling while bits of chicken, raw fish and hot dogs rained from above and buckets of paint sloshed underfoot. Since her expulsion from Bard College ten years earlier for the ‘moral turpitude’ of painting herself in the nude, Schneemann had made a name for getting naked while persisting in calling herself a painter – a claim that was just about tenable in the case of ‘Meat Joy’, less

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Riveting: Netflix’s The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself reviewed

Gratingly edgy soundtrack, stomach-churning gore, torture, witchcraft, sadism and an indigestible title. The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself sounds exactly the sort of series most of us would wish to avoid. It’s aimed at young adults (based on a trilogy by Sally Green called Half Bad) and the only reason I was keen to give it a try was that it has been freely adapted by Joe Barton. For my money, Barton is – along with Jesse Succession Armstrong – the most exciting and original screenwriter currently working in TV. His scripts (Giri/Haji; The Lazarus Project) are so engaging, pacy, witty, charming and weirdly unannoying that I bet whatever

Richard Bratby

A towering achievement: ENO’s The Yeomen of the Guard reviewed

The screw may twist and the rack may turn: the Tower of London, in Jo Davies’s new production of The Yeomen of the Guard, is a dark place indeed, and that’s as it should be. ‘Men may bleed and men may burn,’ intones Dame Carruthers, as she delivers a magic lantern show about the history of the Tower, complete with colour slides of famous beheadings. In The Mikado Gilbert uses capital punishment as a particularly spiky punchline, but in The Yeomen of the Guard, sentence of death has been passed before the curtain has even risen. The shadows are lengthening from the off, and even Sullivan’s cheeriest melodies have a

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

King Charles III’s love of classical music

The musical tastes of King Charles III are more sophisticated than those of our late Queen. That’s not being rude: it’s just a fact. Her favourite musician appears to have been George Formby, whose chirpy songs she knew by heart. No doubt she relished their double entendres – but the hint of smut meant that, to her regret, she had to decline the presidency of the George Formby Society. Our new monarch, by contrast, adores the Piano Concerto in E flat major by Julius Benedict (1804-85). He recommended it in an interview a couple of years ago. I’d never heard of the piece, which existed only in manuscript until Howard

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The UK Drill Project, at The Pit, reviewed

The UK Drill Project is a cabaret show that celebrates greed, criminality and drug-taking among black males in London. It opens with a septet of masked performers, sheathed in dark Lycra, singing a rhythmic poem while pretending to fire guns and stab people with knives. These sad young rappers are desperate to look scary because they’re scared themselves. And though they claim to be artists, their purpose in writing ‘drill’ songs and posting videos online is to protect their drug profits and to intimidate rival gangs. Musically, they lack accomplishment. They can’t play instruments and appear to own none. Harmony and melody are alien to them. One of the rappers