Sunday Shortlist, from The Week
A 'spectacularly inventive' painting and a 'propulsive' read

 
THEATRE REVIEW

Twelfth Night

Samuel West's 'supercilious' Malvolio 'brings the house down'

Owing to its title, "Twelfth Night" often tempts artistic directors at Christmas, said Mark Lawson in The Guardian. Yet the closest thing to a festive allusion in Shakespeare's text is the name of the jester-musician Feste; and awkwardly, Olivia describes Malvolio's behaviour as "midsummer madness". Nevertheless, director Prasanna Puwanarajah has gone the "whole yule log" and produced a terrifically inventive, "tinsel-inflected" new staging. Here, midsummer madness has been switched to midwinter madness; and Malvolio illustrates his "infuriating Puritanism by snatching a Santa hat from a reveller".

This "bubblingly ingenious" production caps a "wonderful" year for the RSC, said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph. Samuel West is quite brilliant as Malvolio. A lordly, supercilious figure with a "grating nasal twang", he appears in the Olivia wooing scene atop the vast organ that dominates the set, and – in yellow stockings, bare cross-gartered thighs and Father Christmas headgear – "ho-ho-hoes" before descending a firefighters' pole. And as he advances towards his recoiling employer with "dainty, deluded, coquettish steps", it "brings the house down". Freema Agyeman makes an impressive RSC debut as Olivia; as does Gwyneth Keyworth, who fully captures Viola's elation and grief. And Michael Grady-Hall is very funny as Feste.

I enjoyed the production, said Clive Davis in The Times – but it's marred by the director's determination to add "capital letters, ad libs and a comic twist to every line and every gesture". The effect is like being at a "grand Christmas dinner where there are 21 courses, all your fellow guests are very nice but very loud and you're expected to eat ten mince pies for pudding". The "constant layering of joke upon joke" does threaten at times to unbalance the play, agreed Michael Davies on What's on Stage. But, overall, this is a pretty irresistible production.

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Until 18 January

 
 
ART REVIEW

Parmigianino: The Vision of Saint Jerome

'Quirky' altarpiece is back on display at the National Gallery after lengthy restoration

"It's a cosy tradition at the National Gallery to showcase one of its Christmassy paintings at this time of year," said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Its 2024 offering, however, "is different". Now back on display after a decade of restoration work, the Italian mannerist Parmigianino's "huge" altarpiece "The Vision of Saint Jerome" (1526-27) is no cosy nativity scene. It's a true oddity. The composition sees Jerome sleeping in the wilderness, as the Virgin and Child materialise above him in the night sky. In the foreground, a loincloth-clad John the Baptist gestures towards the divine vision. Yet instead of following conventional representations, Parmigianino chose to pack the already hallucinatory scene with "flamboyant" gestures, creating a painting that is "wild, quirky" and "subversive".

The work's genesis wasn't short of drama either, said John Evans in the Camden New Journal. Parmigianino (b.1503) was only 23 when he was commissioned to paint the altarpiece, but was already celebrated as "a Raphael reborn". He was living in Rome when he began "The Vision of Saint Jerome", the painting of which was interrupted when "Charles V's mutinous imperial troops brutally sacked the city". Soldiers broke into the artist's studio; but, according to the art historian Giorgio Vasari, they were so impressed by the work in progress that they allowed him "to carry on with it".

When the altarpiece was unveiled in Rome, it must have "turned heads", said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. "There cannot be many depictions of religious events as weird and wacky as this": John the Baptist, "with action hero muscles and a kung fu pose", seems to lean out of the picture into our world as Mary and Jesus float down from the heavens. Saint Jerome, meanwhile, "looks as if he's been hitting the grappa and has fallen over in a hedgerow". The excellent restoration has done nothing to dull the picture's originality, instead giving "a new lease of life" to this "weird, gripping and spectacularly inventive masterpiece". 

The National Gallery, London WC2. Until 9 March

 
 
PODCAST review

Self Help 

Podcasts aimed at self-improvement are, for "this grouchy listener, frequently irritating", said Fiona Sturges in the Financial Times. "Self Help", presented by artist and writer Scottee, is emphatically "not one of those". It's a "delightful" and "warmly intimate" series in which the listener joins Scottee on walks around Scotland while he delivers "compelling monologues" on what he calls "a life spent clinically mad".

 
 
BOOK OF THE WEEK

Hum  

by Helen Phillips  

Helen Phillips' "unnerving" third novel is set in a "near-future dystopia" where humanoid robots – "hums" – have taken over most jobs, said Olivia Ho in Literary Review. May Webb has just been made redundant from her job in AI. With two young children to support, and a poorly paid "gig worker" husband, she decides to become a guinea pig for a company that's developing a procedure to reconstruct people's faces so they can "elude facial-recognition software". With some of the money she earns, Webb takes her family on an "expensive getaway to the Botanical Garden, a green refuge in the barren city". She makes everyone leave their AI devices at home – a decision she'll "later regret".

"In spite of its clever science fiction elements, 'Hum' reads like a work of beautifully observed contemporary realism," said Karen Thompson Walker in The New York Times. While raising "unsettling questions", it tells a simple story about a "mother's day-to-day struggles to keep her children safe". The result is "propulsive" – and confirms "Phillips's position as one of our most profound writers of speculative fiction".