Category: Reviews

The Score

April 11, 2025

Brian Cox gives a masterly performance as J.S.Bach in The Score at the Theatre Royal Haymarket (whose opulent interior provides a suitably baroque background). The play, by Oliver Cotton and directed by Trevor Nunn, centres on the true story of Bach’s visit to the court of Frederick the Great, where he was challenged to improvise a three-part fugue on an ‘unfuguable’ theme – which he did, a feat of mental musicianship that seems hardly credible.

Here though, Bach rather implausibly uses the opportunity to denounce Frederick’s military ‘interventions’ and the horrors they bring with them. The King is portrayed as a precursor of later German belligerence, but Bach’s musical insights reveal the complexes that motivate him, rooted in an unhappy childhood. The play is neatly constructed and works pretty well apart from sometimes getting just a little bogged down.

The weakest part, in my view, is Voltaire, who appears as a secondary character but is written, not as the sharp and witty sceptic we know, but as a over-demonstrative French stereotype. He is allowed only one characteristic witticism (‘murderers are severely punished, unless they kill thousands, to the sound of trumpets’). If Voltaire had written this play it would have been shorter and funnier, but that’s a tough benchmark, and Cox’s bravura turn helps make it a well-spent evening.

The Seagull

March 30, 2025

We were lucky enough to get really good tickets at a reasonable price for The Seagull at the Barbican with Cate Blanchett. This is a modern, rather innovative (some might say gimmicky) production by Thomas Ostermeier. Most of the additions, changes and updates are OK, I think. Some, like regularly breaking the fourth wall, are intended to highlight a kind of dialogue about the relation between performance and reality: modern music and references are either irrelevant or legitimately funny. Probably the most uneasy thing imo is the way the character Semyon Medvedenko is changed from a poor schoolteacher into a ‘factory worker’ (how is a factory worker hanging around this country estate all the time?) who drives around on a quad bike and sings Billy Bragg songs – though of course we are made well aware that it is not Medvedenko singing, but the actor Zachary Hart.

The cast is terrific, by the way though obviously Cate Blanchett’s amazing performance as the famous actress (see what they did there) and attention-hogging narcissist Irina Arkadina outshines everything else. The tap-dancing and doing the splits are the least of it, I promise you.

It’s a terrific show, and the fact that it is so clever, funny and profound is largely due to the fact that none of the fancy tricks is ultimately allowed to get in the way of Chekhov’s classic play, which is delivered pretty well intact. I would strongly recommend it, but I think it’s sold out.

Earnest

January 23, 2025



A handbag

Reviews had led me to believe that The Importance of Being Earnest with Ncuti Gatwa at the National Theatre featured so much gay behaviour that the plot was seriously distorted. This was a huge exaggeration. Yes, the subtle gay hints in the text kind of get pointed out with a nudge and a wink: some extra references are put in, and the whole thing is framed with two dances in which the cast camp it up. But the play itself is delivered pretty straight, and actually very well. No-one who loves the play need fear that this version is a travesty.

Casting is obviously colourblind in this case. Lady Bracknell is nevertheless allowed to be West Indian, which is slightly confusing but allows for a performance by Sharon D Clarke which we wouldn’t have wanted to miss.

The cast also add the kind of reactions that could not have featured originally: punching the air, muttering ‘Oh fuck’ and so on. But really none of these little quirks is a problem.

Arguably a bigger difficulty would face any production: the fact that the play is one of the best-known texts in the English language. The audience knows the script almost as well as the actors. We might almost feel like the lady who said Hamlet was a disappointment – it turned out to be just a lot of popular quotes strung together.

Anyway, there is a film of the performance coming out, and I recommend it.

The Silk Road

January 9, 2025

What a wealth of intriguing artefacts at the British Museum’s Silk Road exhibition! The title is slightly misleading: the Silk Road is being used here as a central part and symbol for something wider: namely the far-reaching and complex exchanges of goods, ideas, art and religion that went on during what we used to call the Dark Ages, roughly the latter half of the first millennium. The exhibition is laid out geographically from Japan to Britain (both of which were well beyond the ends of the Silk Road, but as I say, this is broader). Hard to pick out the best, but I loved the cheery ancient Chinese picture of a horse and camel, and the flagon brought back from Syria by an English mercenary who went to fight for the Byzantines.

The geographical layout perhaps sidelines the chronology a bit, so it can feel as if all these artefacts are contemporary, whereas they cover several centuries of change (not that that isn’t very much spelt out within each location). But all these niggles are minor: this has at worst been a fantastic opportunity to show some marvellous things.

Francis Bacon: Human Presence

December 5, 2024

We went to the current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. People sometimes see a problem with the NPG’s remit – are they meant to collect paintings by famous artists or of famous people? But this show is unimpeachable, foregrounding an important aspect of a major artist’s work.

Bacon’s work never stopped being figurative, but he smooshes views in a way that combines and gives a sense of observer motion. It seems he often put one person’s head on a body painted from photographs of someone else. There’s also often a sense of horror, with the screaming heads and internal body parts.

The exhibition tellingly brings out his enthusiasm for certain great painters of the past: Velasquez, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, which helps situate an innovative painter within the great tradition.

The Duchess

November 23, 2024

The Duchess, starring Jodie Whittaker, is an updated version of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. As in the original, the widowed young Duchess secretly marries her steward and has children by him, leading to violent intervention from her brothers, one of whom is a cardinal. A bloody second act leaves pretty much everyone horribly dead (this is John Webster, after all).

Good performances and a suitably stark setting, but the update doesn’t work well. The Duchess’s seduction of her steward is played for laughs, which makes it hard to accept later on that this is a passion people will die for. The characters are given a sweary, casual, 21st century manner, which makes their Jacobean behaviour puzzling, and undercuts the horror of the later scenes. Are they just mucking about? The audience laughs at lines they are meant to take seriously, as if the whole thing were a parody or a historical sitcom.

It may be that the intended message is that our patriarchal attitudes are still all too much like those of the seventeenth century: but the play sort of demonstrates the opposite. These people actually seem pretty weird and keep doing things for no reason a modern, egalitarian mind can grasp. I think Webster needs a kind of claustrophobia and deep passion to achieve his impact, and neither is present here, unfortunately.

Drawing the Italian Renaissance

November 22, 2024

A remarkable exhibition of Renaissance drawings at the King’s Gallery. It features stunning works by Leonardo, Michaelangelo and Raphael as well as many other artists – in fact I thought the most memorable drawing of all was an amazingly vivid head of St Thomas by Caravaggio (not that one, the less well-known Polidori da Caravaggio, no relation).

It is astonishing what fine shading with chalk, ink and charcoal is achieved in some of these drawings, up to a smooth, perfect modulation that verges on photographic: but others are bold sketches which were only working drawings. Quite a few have the pinpricks which were used to guide copies: a few have the tiny black dots which resulted from blowing fine black powder through these holes.

The gallery provides paper and pencils for you to have a go yourself if you’re brave and/or talented enough. Not me!

RA Summer Exhibition 2024

August 10, 2024

What to do about the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition? Every year members may exhibit up to three works, but there is also an open competition to which anyone can submit a work, and this is the part that captures the public imagination (my late father submitted a couple of his surreal paintings, without success). Most of the pieces are for sale, at prices ranging from less than £250 up to tens of thousands or more. The result is a wildly varied ragbag of every kind of art from the cornily lowbrow to the most opaquely avant garde, and from works of peerless skill to casual daubs. Quite a few of the works on display are jokey or entertaining novelties. The Academy likes to show as many as it can, so some small pictures are left way up the gallery wall where they cannot be seen properly. It’s all sort of fun, but it isn’t coherent or representative and not much is memorable.

No information about the artists is given beyond their name, and if I were in charge, this is what I would change. I would give a picture and short bio of each artist beside their work. This year’s pieces would be low on the wall, with the opportunity to show others by the same artist directly above, with each vertical space reserved for one artist. I think a little context like this would make the whole thing more interesting.

That would mean fewer artists on the walls, but I would compensate with a big online show, which would also be displayed on screens in one gallery.

That’s that sorted out.

There is Light Somewhere

July 24, 2024

Tavares Strachan: There is Light Somewhere, at the Hayward, is striking and provokes both thought and quibbles. It features many striking pieces. Heads of black heroes, either huge and crisscrossed with cracks full of writing (which I couldn’t read), or open to reveal another head within, or fronted by an African tribal mask. Celebrations of the invisible (Strachan’s own encyclopaedia, glass statues suspended in clear oil). And pieces that relate to aspirational journeys, whether a Black Star ship amazingly on the gallery roof, black astronauts, or Strachan’s own journey to the North Pole, where he planted the flag of his native Bahamas, and shipped back a block of ice.

It seems clear that this show is about black aspiration, a search for light in the darkness and within the self. The message is encouraging, inspiriting, not downbeat, but even without that positive context most of the works are well worth seeing.

The quibbles? Some of the people in the encyclopaedia don’t seem all that invisible (Mary Woolstonecraft? Xenocrates?) while others perhaps deserve to be (minor characters from cartoons?). It’s not clear that the African people who made the masks would have liked their being used here, nor whether all the heroes would welcome wearing them. Is Septimius Severus the Roman Emperor here because he was born in Africa? But he is surely a leader of European imperialism (clue’s in his title).

But those are indeed quibbles. A memorable exhibition.

Down Street

June 27, 2024

We did the tour of Down Street, ably directed by a team from Hidden London under the aegis of the London Transport Museum. This is one of a number of abandoned tube stations, in this case on the Piccadilly line. Since opening in 1906, Down Street was never a great success. Down a side street and with better sited stations nearby it attracted few passengers and closed in 1932. In wartime, however, it got a new lease of life as a secret safe headquarters for the committee that ran the railways, and was used a few times by Churchill.

Conditions were not great, with corridors limited to the width of a standard tea trolley (obviously an essential). Yet people worked shifts, living in the station for weeks at a time without seeing daylight, putting up with limited bath and toilet facilities and rotating use of beds. The executive class were better looked after, with a kitchen that apparently served caviar and fine wines even at the height of the war. When peace came, it was pretty well abandoned, though it is still an official escape route from the Piccadilly line and the tube engineers make some use of it. There are plans to use its shafts to improve ventilation on the Piccadilly line, apparently.

These days it is a bit of a wreck. The platforms were walled off in 1939, but the trains can still be heard, and seen flashing by in a few places. Odd bits of signage from different eras are still in place, and some of the fine old tiling. It seems odd to me that a space like this in the most expensive part of London is not more imaginatively used.