Motoring
John Webster had one amazing skill. He could craft lines that glow in the memory like radioactive gems. ‘A politician is the devil’s quilted anvil; he fashions all sins on him, and the blows are never heard.’ Eliot loved him. Pinter used to stroll around the parks of Hackney shouting his soundbites into the sky. But Webster never discovered how to put his highly wrought lines into the mouths of likable or captivating characters.
The Duchess of Malfi is a Jacobean slasher-play, a straight-to-video Tarantino blood-fest, full of cloaked assassins and scheming dukes. We’re in an Italian court where...
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Andrew Lambirth meditates on a Crucifixion by the painter and poet David Jones
As the focus for an Easter meditation, David Jones’s ‘Sanctus Christus de Capel-y-ffin’ (1925), a small, heartfelt painting in gouache on paper, could scarcely be bettered. The Crucifixion takes place in a luminous landscape with the bird of hope in attendance. This is the world of medieval illuminated manuscripts and ivory carvings, a highly sophisticated spiritualised and classicised vision of existence that is sometimes dismissed as primitive. A Welsh hill pony is set off against a chapel, trees and a bridge over running water in an arabesque design quivering with natural and spiritual life. Rhythm is crucial. As Jones said,...
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Ten years ago, Duncan MacAskill went into Rymans to buy some drawing pins and was struck by the range of colours on offer. That moment of revelation led him to construct a self-portrait from drawing pins, adapting the ideas of Seurat’s pointillism, and the ben-day dot approach of Roy Lichtenstein, to contemporary needs and materials.
Now he has been commissioned by the Royal Opera House’s Deloitte Ignite festival, curated by Mike Figgis, to make two vast pin portraits for The Link at the ROH. These ‘paintings with pins’ hang near the box office over the exit to Covent Garden Piazza,...
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If only there was an alternative ending to the Titanic story. We could use a change. ‘Phew, we almost hit that iceberg!’ Or, ‘Thank goodness the White Star Line made sure there were ample lifeboats for everyone on board!’ Or even, ‘So it’s true — this ship really is unsinkable, and tomorrow night we will be safe and well in a rat-infested tenement on the Lower East side shared with seven other families!’
But of course it’s not a story, it’s a myth. You might as well have a happy ending to Oedipus Rex. And in the same way we...
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He’s got the perfect voice for radio, gruff and gravelly, slow and measured so you can catch every word. His new series is not, as you might expect, on 6 or 1, or even 2, but on 4. Jarvis Cocker’s Wireless Nights (late on Thursdays) is quite a coup for the former Home Service, the Pulp frontman bringing a touch of street cred to the network once proud to be considered middle-of-the-road.
Cocker promises that his series will wander through aspects of the night, drawing on the stories of those who stay awake through the witching hours. Tilly, a young...
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Of all the operatic ventures that have sprung up in England in the past 20 years, Birmingham Opera Company may well be the most remarkable. Its artistic director is Graham Vick, who is well acquainted with opera at its most elitist — he was artistic director of Glyndebourne from 1994 to 2000. BOC is at the other extreme, in that productions now regularly take place in a disused steel foundry on the outskirts of the centre of Birmingham, and the aim is to involve as many local inhabitants as possible. Over the past few years there have been impressive performances...
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