The Sunday Telegraph - 01.09.2019

28 ***^ Sunday 1 September 2019 The Sunday Telegraph

Arts

EXHIBITIONS

ANTONY GORMLEY

by Alastair Sooke

The Royal Academy pulls out all

the stops for Britain’s most

popular sculptor, who is calling

this retrospective, somewhat

pretentiously, a “test site”. How

the 68-year-old artist’s never-

ending series of “body case”

sculptures will interact with the

Beaux-Arts galleries of

Burlington House is anyone’s

guess.

Royal Academy of Arts, London W1

(020 7300 8090), Sept 21-Dec 3

COMEDY

EDDIE IZZARD:

WUNDERBAR

by Tristram Fane Saunders

Eddie Izzard’s last touring show,

2013’s Force Majeure, was a

world-straddling behemoth,

performed over four years, in

four languages and 45 countries.

Tickets are already scarce for

this follow-up, and with good

reason: nobody does surrealism

better.

De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-

Sea (eddieizzard.com), Sept 15

and touring

OPERA

THE SILVER LAKE

by Rupert Christiansen

In February 1933, only weeks

after the Nazis came to power in

Germany and he was forced to

emigrate to Paris, Kurt Weill

collaborated with Georg Kaiser

on this satirical fantasy with sly

political overtones and a

marvellously vivid and

inventive score. English Touring

Opera’s new production of this

fascinating work, directed by

James Conway, will use

community groups for the

chorus.

Hackney Empire, London E8

(020 8985 2424), Oct 5, 7 and

touring

CLASSICAL

LONDON

PHILHARMONIC

ORCHESTRA

by Ivan Hewett

The LPO have bagged the most

eagerly-awaited premiere of

the autumn: the new Piano

Concerto by Thomas Adès,

conducted by the man himself

with terrific jazz-influenced

pianist Kirill Gerstein as soloist.

Holst’s The Planets and Sibelius’s

Night Ride and Sunrise make up

the bill.

Royal Festival Hall, London SE1

(020 7840 4242), Oct 23

POP

KEANE

by Neil McCormick

The post-Britpop band have

reunited after a five-year hiatus,

following singer Tom Chaplin’s

recovery from drug addiction.

New album Cause and Effect

(due on Sept 20) picks up where

they left off, with elegant,

emotional anthems driven by

sonorous piano.

Symphony Hall, Birmingham

(keanemusic.com), Sept 24 and

touring

DANCE

BIRMINGHAM ROYAL

BALLET

by Mark Monahan

BRB returns to Galina Samsova’s

and outgoing BRB director

David Bintley’s staging of the

1841 romantic classic Giselle,

which could well prove a

copper-bottomed (but also

lighter-than-air) treat.

Birmingham Hippodrome (brb.

org.uk), Sept 25-28 and touring

Book now The hottest tickets

Fears of a clown:

Joaquin Phoenix

in the title role

of Joker

NIKO TAVERNISE

ANTONY GORMLEY

MUST

BOOK

A

part of me found Todd

Phillips’s radical

rethinking of the

Batman villain Joker

thrillingly

uncompromising and

hair-raisingly timely. Another thinks

it should be locked in a strongbox

then dropped in the ocean and never

released. Make no mistake, this is a

film that is going to stir up trouble –

in the consciences of everyone who

watches it, and almost certainly in

the outside world as well. The dizzy,

punch-drunk atmosphere after

yesterday’s loudly applauded

screening at the Venice Film Festival

mirrored the mood when Fight Club

premiered here 20 years earlier, and

critics tried to work out if the film

was a sly critique of meathead

fascism or a feature-length recruiting

advert for it. To be clear, I don’t

believe for a second that Phillips and

his star, Joaquin Phoenix, actually

think that their version of the classic

Batman bad guy is in fact a hero to be

glorified and emulated. But I worry

that someone out there will.

Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck, an

unstable, narcissistic 30-something

loner who lives with his elderly

mother Penny (Frances Conroy) in a

version of Gotham City that is to all

intents and purposes Manhattan in

the early Eighties. Even Thomas

Wayne (Brett Cullen), billionaire

father of Bruce, is reimagined as a

puffed-up, Trump-like plutocrat.

Arthur works as a party clown at a

shabby downtown talent agency, but

dreams of making it as a stand-up

comedian, and collects his material

in a “joke diary” in a barely legible

scrawl, interspersed with explicit

magazine clippings. At times of

stress, he is seized by an urge to

laugh: comic-book catchphrase

recast as psychosomatic tic.

“Is it just me, or are things getting

crazier out there?” Arthur asks his

therapist after one such bout of

hysteria, and it’s true that the world

outside looks like a Martin Scorsese

film. Two specifically, in fact: Taxi

Far from a laughing matter

Robbie Collin was wowed

by Joaquin Phoenix in

Todd Phillips’s Joker, but

worries the anti-hero

worship may go too far

(^) ÌÌÌÌÌ
Driver and The King of Comedy, which
aren’t touchstones for Joker so much
as its bedrock. (In a smarter-than-
you’d-think self-referential turn,
Robert De Niro plays Arthur’s
favourite talk show host, Murray
Franklin, in a pair of Jerry Lewis-style
aviator glasses.) Yet if Arthur is written
as Travis Bickle crossed with Rupert
Pupkin, Phoenix uses his pipe-cleaner
physique (the actor reportedly lost
more than three stone for the role) to
draw out the character’s inherent
clownishness. His improvised
soft-shoe-shuffle dance routines are
carried off with Chaplin-esque
elegance, while his flat-footed sprint
recalls a Keystone Cops chase.
Not that you’ll be laughing much
yourself. Superhero blockbuster this is
not: a fireman’s-pole-based homage to
the old Batman television series is one
of a very few light-hearted moments in
an otherwise downbeat and reality-
grounded urban thriller in the vintage
Warner Bros mode. Besides Scorsese,
Phillips’s film draws heavily from the
real-life tale of Bernhard Goetz – New
York’s so-called “Subway Vigilante”
who in 1984 shot four black teenagers
on public transport on the grounds
that he thought he was about to be
mugged, and became a dubious folk
hero in some quarters for supposedly
taking a stand against the city’s slide
into lawlessness. After a fateful
confrontation with some obnoxious
Wall Street traders, Arthur effectively
becomes Gotham’s own Goetz, and his
clown make-up becomes a symbol of
underclass resistance.
Just as Heath Ledger’s take on the
character in 2008’s The Dark Knight
was rooted in the 9/11-shaken times

• as a source of terror he was
  inexplicable, emerging from
  goodness-knows-where – it seems apt
  that the Joker of 2019 should be the
  guy who was there all along. For
  anyone with an eye on the news,
  Arthur is a horribly familiar case
  study: quiet, bullied, overlooked, loves
  his mum, keeps himself to himself,
  then writes his manifesto and takes his
  grievances murderously viral. And
  artistic intentions aside, there is
  something inescapably and chillingly
  glamorous in watching Arthur’s Joker
  persona emerge. I admit I was glued to
  Phoenix, loved wallowing in the neon
  murk, and left the screen in semi-
  dazed awe of Phillips for having the
  nerve to take what is still essentially a
  studio film spun off from a superhero
  franchise as far as he has. Should he
  have? No question: cinema should not
  be squeamish about reflecting the
  world as it is. But even so ... eek.

Dir: Todd Phillips

Starring: Joaquin

Phoenix, Robert

De Niro, Frances

Conroy, Zazie

Beetz, Shea

Whigham, Bill

Camp, Glenn

Fleshler, Marc

Maron

Cert tbc, 118 mins

‘Instead of proroguing

Parliament, Boris has

diverted HS2 through here’

Sudoku with a twist

Pub Quiz

COMPILED BY GAVIN FULLER

week

NEWSPAPER CARTOONIST OF THE YEAR

‘All over Tuscany you can

hear the sound of British

MPs falling off their lilos’

‘If it’s true that pessimists

die sooner, some people

aren’t going to make it

to October 31’

‘Do try to concentrate!

There will be a test later’

1 Michael Douglas (pictured)

is the husband of which

actress?

2 British racing driver

George Russell is competing

in the 2019 Formula One

World Championship for

which team?

3 Who replaced Eamonn

Andrews as the presenter of

ITV’s World of Sport in 1968

and remained its main host

until the show ended in 1985?

4 Who is the only one of the

top three ranked British

men’s tennis players to have

been born in the UK?

5 Unfinished at his death,

the Summa Theologica was

the major philosophical

work of which 13th-century

Dominican friar?

6 Which company, founded

in 1932, is the UK’s market

leader in portable radios?

7 Which department store

chain was incorporated as a

limited company by the son

of its founder in 1929?

8 Which writer’s education

at Rugby School and Oriel

College, Oxford inspired

the novel Tom Brown’s

School Days and its sequel

Tom Brown at Oxford?

9 Who captained the

England cricket team to

victory in the 2019 ICC

Men’s World Cup?

10 Which Play School

presenter also created the

theme tunes for Bod and

Heads and Tails and voiced

SuperTed in the English

language version?

11 Which Air Force base

in California was the

location of 54 landings

of the Space Shuttle

between 1981 and 2009?

12 Which serial killer was

hanged for the “Brides in

the Bath” murders?

13 a) From the answers

above, can you work

out the theme of this

week’s quiz?

b) Also a male forename,

what comes next on the list?

Thomas 8 wis e John L 7 rts eRob 6 Thomas Aquinas 5 Dan Evans 4 s e ” Davie Richard “Dicki 3 Williams 2 s e ta-Jone Zerine Cath ANSWERS 1

s.eJamb) s e s in Wale most common surname Tha) 13 ph Smith e Joseorge G 12 Edwards 11 k Griffiths ereD 10 Eoin Morgan 9 s e Hugh

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