Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

John Phipps

A podcast about the literary canon that actually deepens your knowledge (sort of)

While most of life’s pleasures can be shared, reading is lonely. It’s more than possible for six friends to enjoy an exquisite meal, a bottle of wine and then settle down for a four- or five-hour orgy. Food, drink, sex: these things are better shared. But if, as dawn approached, someone cracked open Chaucer’s ‘Parliament of Fowls’ and intimated that it was time to really get down to brass tacks, it could only spoil the mood. Reading is lonely because so much of the reading that matters is hard. The books that change the world and shake the culture are rarely pure pleasure. The heaven sections of Paradise Lost. The

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Edinburgh Festival is in ruins – but there’s one gem amid the rubble

The virus has broken Edinburgh. The shattered remnants of the festival are visible on the internet. Here’s what happened. The international festival has been reduced to one filmed theatre commission and a handful of videoed musical offerings. The Fringe has survived but in a horribly mutilated form. Two of its most prestigious brands, the Pleasance and the Assembly Rooms (which host hundreds of shows between them every year), have pulled out entirely. They’re so well established that they’ll have no difficulty restarting in 12 months’ time. Another big name, the Gilded Balloon, is offering a few online shows and some recorded highlights from previous years. Lesser-known outfits such as the-SpaceUK

James Walton

A convincing and hair-raising depiction of showbiz at its most luridly weird: I Hate Suzie reviewed

Fifteen minutes into the first episode of I Hate Suzie, main character Suzie Pickles was doing a photoshoot in her country cottage for Esquire magazine. ‘We don’t know what we’re looking for right now,’ the photographer told her. ‘We’re just going to cycle through some feelings and see where we are.’ What he didn’t know, but we did, was quite how many feelings Suzie (Billie Piper) had already had to cycle through by then. The programme began with her thrilled to hear that she’d bagged a Disney film role and cracking open the champagne. A few minutes later, she learned that some sex photos of her had been hacked and

Thursday

John D. Halliday

The original Edinburgh Festival

Edinburgh, 3 November 1815. The university courtyard is buzzing. A band is playing. Surrounding streets are filled with thousands of excited spectators, many waiting since 10 a.m. From the Castle, from windows and rooftops, from Calton Hill, Holyrood Park and Salisbury Crags, all strain to get a glimpse. Then finally at 3 p.m., above the university, a large balloon suddenly emerges, climbing wondrously into the crisp November sky. Orchestrating this aeronautical display was pioneer English balloonist James Sadler. His balloon rose majestically as the westerly wind took it towards the sea. Sadler continued waving his flags as long as he could be seen, and the crowds applauded and gasped. Having

Martin Gayford

We’re wrong to think the impressionists were chocolate boxy

One Sunday evening in the autumn of 1888 Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin went for a walk. They headed out of Arles into the countryside and when they looked back towards town they saw a sunset so splendid that each was inspired to paint a masterpiece. One of these, Gauguin’s painting bearing the timely title ‘Human Misery’, is among the star exhibits in a new exhibition at the Royal Academy. All the works in this show come from a delightful small museum in the northern suburbs of Copenhagen, housed in the early 20th-century mansion from which it takes its name, Ordrupgaard. This was the dwelling of Wilhelm Hansen (1868–1936),

Selina Mills

Unique and disturbing: Donmar Warehouse’s Blindness reviewed

Okay, I admit it. I have a girl crush on Juliet Stevenson. Ever since I first saw her in the 1990 film Truly, Madly, Deeply with Alan Rickman, I have loved her sexy, round and intelligent tones. Imagine how excited I was to discover, therefore, that you can have Juliet in your ear for a whole hour and 15 minutes while you sit through a so-called ‘sound installation’ — or rather an audio staging — of Blindness, the current offering at the Donmar Warehouse and the first opening since lockdown. Sitting in a darkened theatre studio, with strobe lighting and headphones, you are seated in your own space, and socially

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Wholesome, intimate and suspiciously vague: The Michelle Obama Podcast reviewed

Back in March, I made a long-odds bet that Michelle Obama would be the Democratic party’s vice-presidential nominee. I knew that in her memoir, Becoming, she had said that she wasn’t interested in high office. But political candidates always claim they aren’t running — until suddenly they are. Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, had already said he’d take Michelle as his VP ‘in a heartbeat’, which struck me as funny since, if Biden’s heart stopped beating, his VP would become commander-in-chief. Since Biden had been Michelle husband’s running mate, the idea of a 2020 Biden-Obama ticket had a fairytale symmetry that would thrill the public. Strategists crunched the numbers

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Ludicrous – and the makers know it: Sky One’s Prodigal Son reviewed

‘By the way, my name is Max. I take care of them, which ain’t easy, because their hobby is murder.’ Back in the early 1980s, when everything was lovelier, we were all so innocent that our idea of a brilliant and original new detective formula went like this: they’re sleuths — but they’re also rich and married! (Or, in the case of Magnum: he’s a sleuth — but he has a moustache and he lives on Hawaii! Or, with Bergerac: he’s a sleuth —but he lives on Jersey and is named after a region of France. Etc.) These days, we are a lot more jaded and knowing and series creators

Thursday

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Looking at Barnett Freedman makes me weep at the government’s dismal graphics

Among the spoils of a lockdown clear-out was a box of my grandmother’s books: Woolf, Austen, Mitford and The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear with a jacket by Barnett Freedman. You only need to see a corner of the cover — a stippled trompe-l’oeil scroll — to recognise the artist. Freedman, a Stepney Cockney born to Jewish-Russian parents in 1901, delighted in paper games. Maps unfurl, book leaves fly, cut-outs and cartouches abound. His designs are a miscellany of silhouettes, decoupage, concertinas, peek-a-boos, lift-the-flaps and grubby thumbprints. Edges are ragged, endpapers torn. On the dust jacket to Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1931), a military map has been

Daisy Dunn

Hats (and knickers) off to the hosts: The Naked Podcast reviewed

I spent half an hour this week listening to a woman make a plaster cast of her vulva. Kat Harbourne, co-host of The Naked Podcast on BBC Sounds, opened a recent episode by buzzing her bikini trimmer over the microphone before squatting over a British Airways peanut dish. Jenny Eells, her partner in crime, stood close by offering to hold up her dress. ‘I feel a bit like a voyeur, almost,’ she said, as if surprised at herself. ‘Thanks for letting me be a part of it.’ Then the mould-maker, Phoebe, put a porridgy alginate in Kat’s dish, and Jenny thought it looked ‘tasty’. Jenny and Kat are used to

Deborah Ross

Why have they made Pinocchio look like Freddy Krueger?

Matteo Garrone’s live-action version of Pinocchio is visually sumptuous and there are some enchanting characters (my favourite: Snail). And unlike Disney’s version (1940) this is, apparently, far more faithful to the darker, original 1883 tale by Carlo Collodi, even if the Disney version was quite dark enough for some of us. (I screamed so much when Pinocchio turned into a donkey I had to be taken from the cinema, says my mother.) But while this may be more authentic it’s not narratively powerful for some reason. It should be. It’s a terrific (if twisted) story, after all. But it’s so episodic, and this Pinocchio is so unendearing, that the film

James Walton

Takes us deep into an unknown world: Channel 4’s Inside Missguided reviewed

If it’s a test of a good documentary series that it takes us deep into an unknown, even unimaginable world, then Inside Missguided: Made in Manchester passes with flying colours — especially for the more middle-aged viewer. Missguided, it turns out, is a fast-fashion company, which means that it spots what celebrities are wearing online and then designs, makes and sells much cheaper versions within days — all while indignantly denying the outrageous charge that ‘we just rip off other people’s designs’. The target market apparently consists of young women obsessed with Instagram and Love Island. And so, on the whole, does the staff, who have names like Treasure, Zee

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The New Normal Festival shows how theatre could return

So the madness continues. Planes full of passengers are going everywhere. Theatres full of ghosts are going bust. My first press night since March took place at a monumental Victorian building in Wandsworth where concerts are staged in an open-air courtyard. The entry process was less fussy than I’d expected. I didn’t need my phone and there was no ‘track and trace’ nonsense. A masked official aimed a ray gun at my face and showed me a reading — 36.4ºC. I’d passed the temperature test. He then pointed me towards a hand sanitiser. ‘Is it compulsory?’ I said politely. A look of fear crossed his eyes, as if violence were

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

Figurative painting is back – but how good is any of it?

An oxymoron is a clever gambit in an exhibition title. The Whitechapel Gallery’s Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium is designed to trigger the reaction: ‘Radical? Figures?’ before revealing quite how radical the figure can be. But like all good marketing, it is deceptive. Figurative art may have been consigned to history by Clement Greenberg 80 years ago, but history since — neo-romanticism, school of London, neo-expressionism — has repeatedly proved him wrong. The ten painters in this exhibition aren’t a school: the only thing their work has in common is its statement-making scale. The three-metre canvas at the entrance, Daniel Richter’s ‘Tafari’ (2001), was inspired by a news

Deborah Ross

Heavy-handed satire and schmaltz: American Pickle reviewed

American Pickle is a comedy based on a short story by Simon Rich, originally published in the New Yorker, and I was sold on the synopsis alone: ‘An eastern European Jew falls into a vat of pickles and is brined for 100 years before emerging in modern-day Brooklyn.’ It’ll be a fish-out-of-water film like Crocodile Dundee, I thought. But more Jewish. And it felt like I’d been waiting all my life for a film like Crocodile Dundee, but more Jewish. In fact, where have the more Jewish versions of Crocodile Dundee been until now? You think: an entire factory left un-redeveloped for 100 years? It’s prime real estate, isn’t it?

Michael Hann

‘Cocaine addiction is time-consuming’: the rise and fall of Kevin Rowland and Dexys

When Dexys Midnight Runners reached No. 1 in the singles charts in spring 1980 with the song ‘Geno’, the band had to travel to London for their coronation appearance on Top of the Pops. For the first time they could afford the train fare. But Kevin Rowland — their singer, leader, creative director, boss, whatever you want to call him — insisted they continue to jump the barriers at Birmingham New Street. ‘I said, “Come on lads, we’re still going to bunk the trains.” And they went, “What?” “Come on, the inspector’s coming. We’ve got to get in the toilets.” And the drummer said, “Kev. We’re No. 1 in the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

From riveting Hitchockian melodrama to bigoted drivel: BBC’s Unprecedented reviewed

Back to the West End at last. After a four- month lay-off, I grabbed the first available chance to catch a show in central London. I joined 20 enthusiasts at the ‘West End Musical — Silent Disco Walking Tour’, which convened outside a Fitzrovia pub. We were given a pink bracelet and a set of headphones that pumped musical hits into our ears. Our cheerleader, Sean, introduced us to his helpers, Tiny Tom and Sticky Vicky, who taught us a quick dance move. It transpired that we were the performers as well as the audience. We set off across the West End like a military convoy of unemployed choristers. At

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The only things left worth watching on the BBC are foreign buy-ins like The Last Wave

Soon, very soon now — even sooner than I imagined, if A Suitable Boy turns out to be as lacklustre as some critics are saying — the only things left worth watching on the BBC will be old repeats and foreign buy-ins like The Last Wave. A bit like The Returned (Les Revenants), The Last Wave concerns the effect of a supernatural event on a small community, not in the Alps this time but in a seaside resort on the Atlantic coast famed for its surf. During a competition, ten surfers are enveloped by a mysterious sausage-shaped cloud and disappear in the sea for five hours. They re-emerge, apparently unharmed

Sara Veale

Vigour and verve from a unique new Rite of Spring: Dancing at Dusk reviewed

Dancing at Dusk captures the final rehearsal of a new version of Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring. It’s only the third time a company other than Bausch’s own has been handed the reins to this piece, and it’s a treat to see its raw, convulsive rhythms reinterpreted by a new generation of performers. Filmed on a beach in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal, it features a cast of 38 dancers from 14 African countries, assembled to bring a fresh lens to Bausch’s 1975 cult classic, itself a modern reckoning of a decades-old ballet. (Bausch’s original famously underscores the misogyny of the sacrificial virgin, doomed to dance herself to death.) This collaboration

Thursday

Deborah Ross

An extraordinary debut: Make Up reviewed

Make Up is the first full-length film from writer–director Claire Oakley, set in an out-of-season holiday park on the Cornish coast where the wind blows, waves crash, rain lashes and gulls screech so you know it’s not a rom-com (foxes shriek in the night too). But while it’s easy to say what it isn’t, it’s harder to say what it is. It’s a thriller but not quite a thriller, and a horror flick but not quite a horror flick, and a psychosexual fantasy but not wholly a psychosexual fantasy… It may be we can settle only on one thing, and the one thing is this: it is very, very good.