Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Lloyd Evans

LA story

Theatre

BREAKING NEWS: ‘Enjoyable play found at Royal Court.’ Generally, the Court likes to send its customers home feeling depressed, guilty, frightened or suicidal. And, generally, it succeeds. The Kid Stays in the Picture is based on the memoirs of Hollywood super-mogul Robert Evans. Director Simon McBurney uses artful lighting and complex staging effects to disguise

James Delingpole

Oh! What a lovely Waugh

Television

Jack Whitehall could have been perfectly awful as Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall (BBC1, Fridays). He has spent most of his career comically playing up to a common person’s idea of what a posh person looks like: the stand-up who went to the same public school (Marlborough) as Kate Middleton; JP, the Jack-Wills-wearing yah

Major to minor

Cinema

Ghost in the Shell is the Hollywood live-action remake of the 1995 Japanese anime of the same name and it’s set at a time in the future when, it would appear, the world is populated by blandly one-dimensional characters. Evil is perpetrated by our old friend, Corporate Evil Man — yes, still — and everyone

Ed’s diner

Radio

In a world where politicians can turn into newspaper editors and former newspaper editors can seize the most coveted job in radio news, it should not be at all surprising that a former shadow chancellor and Labour MP known for his bullish manner has morphed into a chatshow host on radio. Not only that, he’s

Rued awakening

Music

It’s always promising when the orchestra won’t fit on the stage. For the UK première, some 97 years after it was written, of the Danish composer Rued Langgaard’s Sixth Symphony (The Heaven-Rending), the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra filled every available inch of platform space, with four additional trumpeters perched in the choir seats. Everything was

Lost city of fantasy

Features

The new film The Lost City of Z is being advertised as based on the true story of one of Britain’s greatest explorers. It is about Lt-Col Percy Fawcett. Greatest explorer? Fawcett? He was a surveyor who never discovered anything, a nutter, a racist, and so incompetent that the only expedition he organised was a

Internal affairs | 23 March 2017

Arts feature

Over 20 years ago I wrote about Giambattista Tiepolo in The Spectator. Shortly afterwards I went to visit Howard Hodgkin in his spacious, white, light-filled studio close to the British Museum. It turned out that he had read my column and was pleased that someone had been discussing this 18th-century Venetian, who was just his

What’s That Thing? Award for bad public art 2017

More from Arts

Imagine climbing the hills that surround Belfast and stumbling upon this 11-metre-high steel bollock. ‘It will be visible from a number of different points throughout the city,’ coos the Arts Council. Haven’t the people of Northern Ireland suffered enough? ‘Origin’ is the winner of our second What’s That Thing? Award for the worst new public

Hide and seek | 23 March 2017

Cinema

Two films for you this week, one of which is surprisingly good and one of which does not surprise in the least. Shall we be unsurprised first? OK, Another Mother’s Son, set during the second world war on Nazi-occupied Jersey, is based on the true story of Louisa Gould, who took in an escaped Russian

Beyond belief | 23 March 2017

Television

As we know from all those newspaper articles and actress interviews, there’s a scandalous lack of high-profile British TV dramas starring women over 40. Indeed, if it wasn’t for No Offence, Unforgotten, Silent Witness, Last Tango in Halifax, The Fall, NW, Agatha Raisin, Broadchurch, Happy Valley and Apple Tree Yard, there’d really only be Vera,

Lloyd Evans

Royal prerogative

Theatre

No one should complain that My Country; a work in progress is a grim night out. It’s rare for a good play to be written by royal command. The co-authors are the Queen’s personal minstrel, Carol Ann Duffy, and the director of her Royal National Theatre, Rufus Norris. These inspiring artistes have sent their vassals

Let’s hear it for the boys

Television

Girls creator Lena Dunham has received criticism from all sides. Detractors on the right see her as an exhibitionist provocateur. Those on the left see her as a privileged narcissist, who can’t help but see feminism through a white middle-class prism — and who unforgivably rooted for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. The HBO show

Going underground

Radio

When Wireless Nights hit the Radio 4 airwaves in the spring of 2012, I was not at all sure about Jarvis Cocker’s particular, not to say eccentric, manner of presentation, butting in, making his presence felt, never letting us forget that it’s his programme, he’s in charge. His coy comments were too self-conscious for my

Damian Thompson

All’s well that ends well | 23 March 2017

Music

There’s a moment in the finale of Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata when the frenzied piano writing turns unexpectedly jolly. The late Antony Hopkins described it as a bit of an anticlimax, ‘a little too near to the traditional Gypsy Dance that appears so often in the less probable 19th-century opera’. I’m not sure whether I agree

Denial has rarely looked so good

Opera

Ceci n’est pas une Partenope. Forget the warring classical kingdoms of Naples and Cumae: this is surrealist Paris in the 1930s and imminent invasion is the stuff of conversational parenthesis, barely worth interrupting a rubber of bridge for, let alone an embrace. Man Ray, Lee Miller and their androgynous associates slink and affect their way

The odd couple | 16 March 2017

Arts feature

Only once did Michelangelo sign a sculpture. It was the ‘Pietà’ of 1497–1500, and he did so using an incomplete sentence in the past imperfect: ‘Michelangelo Buonarroti the Florentine was making…’. The implication was that actually completing a perfect masterpiece was an unattainable goal, so instead he just had to leave off (a great many

The return of the What’s That Thing? Award for bad public art

Wouldn’t it be nice, in these divided times, for humanity to have a common enemy – preferably an inanimate one. Welcome to the What’s That Thing? Award. We’re in our second year, hunting down the most execrable new pieces of public art that have appeared in the past year in this country and this time we’ve teamed up with the Architecture Foundation.

Fatal distraction

Opera

I don’t think that I have left a theatre many times feeling as depressed and irritated as after the Royal Opera’s Die Meistersinger, in the new production by Kasper Holten. The run of the Royal Opera’s recent productions of Wagner — appalling Tristans, a dire succession of Parsifals, mediocre Rings — hadn’t prepared me for

Melanie McDonagh

Got the message?

Cinema

To cut to the chase, my ten-year-old daughter really liked Beauty and the Beast. And given you’re probably going to be watching this as a child’s plus-one, I’d say hers is the view that matters. Her favourite character was Le Fou, the baddie’s gay sidekick, though I’m not sure she realised. But then the gay

James Delingpole

To die for

Television

Down the Mighty River with Steve Backshall (BBC2) was perfect Sunday-night TV — one of the most enjoyable adventure travelogues I’ve watched in ages. So I was quite surprised to see it reviewed lukewarmly by another critic. One of the critic’s objections was that the scene where Backshall spots a bird of paradise through his

Tail-end Terry

More from Arts

It is often said that Terence Rattigan’s ‘thing’ was his homosexuality and that his disguising of it coloured everything he wrote. But he had, I think, another secret up his sleeve that is still little known. He was a tailgunner in the RAF. Indeed the service was his family and a thread of blue serge

A matter of life and death | 16 March 2017

Radio

It was the crime story that showed us just how much China has changed since its years of social, political and economic isolation. The discovery on 16 November 2011 of the dead body of the British businessman Neil Heywood in Room 1605 of the Lucky Holiday Hotel in the Chinese city of Chongqing was not

His dark materials | 16 March 2017

More from Arts

The enticingly subversive films of Paul Verhoeven were very tempting to me as a schoolboy. When I hit 14, the Dutch director released RoboCop and the excitement among me and my friends at catching two hours of unmitigated ultra-violence reached fever pitch. He did not disappoint. That was in 1988 and it was interesting later