All three artists have evinced a profound commitment to teaching; Eyton working first at Portsmouth College of Art and Design and the University of Durham, before returning to Camberwell (from 1955) and starting at the Royal Academy Schools (from 1963). He has also enjoyed spells of teaching at Walthamstow and as far afield as St Lawrence College, Kingston, Ontario, where he was Head of Painting (1969–71). Camp moved from East Anglia to London and began to teach at Chelsea School of Art, and then the Slade, joining the staff in 1961. Camp’s belief in the importance of instruction for art students led him to write and illustrate two self-help manuals: Draw: How to Master the Art in 1981, followed by Paint in 1986. These books enshrine Camp’s approach to teaching, dwelling particularly on the discipline of copying, and became international bestsellers. In an age when art students are more often than not encouraged first to express themselves and then to market the questionable results, there is still a healthy appetite for real teaching.

It is often said that those who can’t face the insecurities of being professional painters turn to the stable career of teaching, but over the past century or so, teaching has been a legitimate part-time occupation for many dedicated artists. Not only did it provide a usefully reliable source of income, but it also kept its practitioners aware of contemporary developments in the art world. Coupled with that, artists of Camp, Eyton and George’s generation still experienced the call of public service and felt the need to give something back to society, which they could best do as practising artists by passing on the wealth of their knowledge and experience to subsequent student intakes. In those days, before part-time staff had been done away with, art teaching had yet to become an over-bureaucratised desk job and professional painters had a lot to offer in art schools.

All three have enjoyed distinguished professional careers and continue to paint today, and all have shown or are exhibiting their work this year. Patrick George had a successful solo show at Browse & Darby in Cork Street in February and March, featuring a mixture of old and new work, from 1950 to the present. He is perhaps the most reticent of the trio, a slow painter who has exhibited fewer than a dozen times since his first one-man show in 1975. But there are signs that his work is beginning to receive the attention it has long deserved: a film is being made about him, a monograph is planned, and last year he was a featured artist at the Royal Academy, at the invitation of the veteran abstractionist Tess Jaray. There is a general feeling that George has reached new heights in old age, that his precise, serene English landscapes have a greater potency than ever, and that the exquisite gentleness of his touch has even more poetry of evocation.

Jeffery Camp is soon to be celebrated in the seaside town where he once lived: in Hastings at the Jerwood Gallery will be The Way to Beachy Head (20 July to 9 October), featuring paintings from the 1970s and 80s that Camp made of the south coast and its denizens (see page 33). Meanwhile, at Art Space Gallery in Islington (27 June to 26 July) is Camp and Company, the painter showing with a select band of the artists he most admires. (These include Jock McFadyen, Neil Jeffries and Patrick George.) He comments: ‘As I’m a 90-year-old only child ready to boil over, my dealers, Oya and Michael Richardson, have labelled my selection “Camp and Company”. I suppose the company for this exhibition have little in common other than a strain of madness maybe.’ Jeffery paints with lyrical abandon, with what fellow East Anglian Michael Andrews called ‘an absence of strain…a balance of practice with spontaneity’. His sweet strong colours are allied to a habit of drawing that caresses rather than dissects a subject, and a vein of technical experiment that has him constantly pushing the bounds of realistic depiction. Not for Camp the restrictions of the rectangle: many of his paintings are diamonds balancing ‘en pointe’ like a dancer, or breaking out into unexpected shapes with correspondingly improbable rhythms and dynamics. Camp continues to surprise.

Meanwhile, Anthony Eyton is showing new work at Browse & Darby (until 7 June) under the title Near and Far. Of the three, Eyton is the most dedicated traveller, venturing to India or Australia in search of inspiration. Equally, he will paint his own back garden in Brixton with undiminished vigour, laying in the structure of trees and foliage with provisional impressionistic marks of dancing movement. All is flux and change in Eyton’s world, as he repaints a figure lining up on the banks of the Ganges to bathe, altering the composition to make it more telling, to carry more truly the fruits of long observation. His pastel and watercolour studies ripple with life, his nudes take the fall of light on living skin with heartening beauty, and even the studio still-lifes crackle with electricity.

From the authority, conviction and vitality of their work, it’s hard to believe that any of these painters is 90 this year. There are artists older than them and a very great many that are younger, but few are as consistently inventive and as determined to celebrate the glories of the world. Let us now offer them praise for the great gifts they have showered so liberally upon us. Happy Birthday, Messrs Camp, Eyton and George, and long may you continue to beguile us.

The post A tale of three nonagenarians appeared first on The Spectator.

Born into a family of writers and intellectuals, Trevelyan was not destined for an artistic career. When he dropped out of an English degree at Cambridge in 1931 to study art in Paris, his uncle G.M. Trevelyan expressed the hope that he was not ‘going to meet one of those Matisses or Picassos’ — which of course was just what his nephew had in mind. But during his four years of haphazard self-education in a Montparnasse studio adjoining Alexander Calder’s, the artist who had the most lasting influence on him was in fact an Englishman. It was while assisting the experimental printmaker Stanley William Hayter in his legendary Atelier 17 that Trevelyan rubbed shoulders with Masson, Ernst, Miró — and occasionally Picasso — and that, along with hands-on experience of developments at the cutting-edge of etching, Surrealism rubbed off on Trevelyan.

To mark the launch of Julian Trevelyan: Picture Language, a new book on the artist by his son Philip (published by Lund Humphries), the Bohun Gallery in Henley has put together an exhibition of some 30 works from all periods of his career, starting with a Picassoesque ‘Figure (after Piero della Francesca)’ painted in Paris in 1933 that would have confirmed his uncle’s worst fears. In the same opening room a fragile Klee-like construction of tensile lines describing a ‘City’ (1936), annotated with surreal pictograms of kites, boats, comets and keyholes, sits alongside a ‘Mediterranean Landscape’ — a juxtaposition illustrating the youthful personality clash between the representational images Trevelyan called his ‘Jekylls’ (which sold) and the Surrealist ‘Hydes’ (which didn’t). A collaged ‘Landscape with Church and Telegraph Pole’ (1937) dates from an eccentric episode in his early career as a volunteer for the anthropologist Tom Harrisson’s ‘Mass Observation’ project, a scheme involving posting middle-class observers to places like Bolton and Blackpool to record the ordinary British way of life. Never one to duck a challenge, Trevelyan chose collage as his medium of record, working out of a suitcase on the pavement with scissors, gum and Indian ink. To local observers with a small ‘o’, he must have seemed quite mad.

As a self-taught artist, Trevelyan passionately believed that art should be part of everyday life; he admired Alfred Wallis and visited the Pitmen Painters in their tin hut studio at Ashington Colliery. On the eve of war he resigned from the Surrealist Group, feeling that the movement had outlived its usefulness: ‘It became absurd to compose Surrealist confections,’ he later wrote, ‘when high explosives could do it so much better, and when German soldiers with Tommy guns descended from the clouds in parachutes dressed as nuns.’ His Jekylls and Hydes resolved their differences and eventually merged into a distinctive personal style. True, paintings like ‘Paddle Steamer’ (1986) and ‘Harbour’ (1988) show the marked influence of the St Ives School — Trevelyan had been in Cornwall as a camouflage officer during the war. He was more himself on his home stretch of water, the Thames flowing past his Hammersmith studio at Durham Wharf with its ceaseless traffic of floating forms, nautical and natural, including the rather comical wartime ‘Swans’ (1943). But his unique contribution was in the field of print. Here his elementary grasp of composition, in the truest sense, reduced reality to its essential elements — a tendency to simplification that became more pronounced after an attack of meningitis in 1963 left him better able to control an etching needle than a brush.

Having had to quit his post as inspirational Head of Etching at the Royal College of Art — where his students included David Hockney — Trevelyan went on his travels with his second wife Mary Fedden, each new journey sparking a new suite of prints. A procession of windmills on the coast of Crete inspired the first etchings made after his illness, along with a painting in the exhibition. Machinery had always fascinated him, and despite the exotic charms of his ‘Hindu Temple’ (1968) with passing Brahman bull, his most memorable images are urban or industrial. ‘Avenue of the Americas’ (1982), with its stream of black and white cars funnelling faceless passengers down Sixth Avenue under a violet sky, is an iconic image of New York, while ‘Runway’ (1973) and ‘Jets’ (1974) sum up the lumbering preposterousness of air travel from the perspective of someone living under the Heathrow flight path.

It’s the ‘deliberate persistence in his own kind of sophisticated innocence’ described by Mel Gooding in his foreword to the book that makes Trevelyan’s work such a visual tonic. His last big retrospective was at the Royal College in 1998. Time for another.

The post Jekylls and Hydes appeared first on The Spectator.

The exhibition opens dramatically with eight 12ft-high canvases by Anselm Kiefer. They were made especially for the show and provide the exhibition’s title, in turn taken from Madame de Staël’s famous book De l’Allemagne. Collaged with dramatic woodcuts and painted inscriptions — ‘Melancholia’, ‘der Rein’, ‘Vater, h. Geist, Sohn, Satan’, ‘Atlantic Wall’ — Kiefer’s portentous, doomy ensemble gets a room to itself. So, too, does Tischbein’s marvellous portrait of ‘Goethe in the Roman Campagna’ showing the great man on leave from the Weimar court, delighting in nature and the antique.

Alarm bells begin to ring in the first section of the show where an introductory storyboard argues for two strains in 19th- and early-20th-century German art and culture, the Apollonian (rational and classical) and the Dionysian (dark, illogical, cruel). The first rooms offer Apollo in the form of a fine group of narrative paintings by the Nazarenes and their circle and by later artists such as Johann Anton Ramboux and Adrian Ludwig Richter. Theirs was a romanticism that drew variously upon Greek temple structures, the pure colours of early Italian art, Dürer’s precise draughtsmanship, medieval German architecture and folk tales being noted down by the Brothers Grimm. All these paintings have a luminous charm.

The Dionysian section that follows, with paintings such as Franz von Stuck’s nastily neo-primitive ‘Fight for a Woman’ (1905) and Arnold Böcklin’s weird, late ‘Nereids at Play’ (1886), makes a suitably striking contrast. But does such work epitomise a strand of German-ness — the dark side? After all, von Stuck and Böcklin’s febrile imagery was hardly specific to German art at that date. One has only to turn to Edvard Munch or to the Polish Jacek Malczewski’s surreal confections to realise that Dionysus held sway all over Europe just before and after 1900.

The second part of the show, ‘L’Hypothèse de la Nature’, is also given a binary treatment, with Goethe’s colour theories and nature studies set against the visionary landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Gustav Carus. There are 17 very fine paintings by Friedrich. In a much less familiar section, chronology is abandoned and intriguing comparisons are drawn between the plant and mineral studies of Goethe and of Paul Klee. Philipp Otto Runge’s attempts at a symbolic cosmology using arabesques and floral symmetry inspired by the mystical writings of Jacob Böhme are ranged opposite Carl Wilhelm Kolbe’s etchings of fantastical trees and gardens. ‘L’Hypothèse de la Nature’ ends with a group of neo-Romantic landscapes full of melancholy foreboding painted in the 1930s by Otto Dix, George Grosz and Franz Radziwill.

The final part of the exhibition, ‘Ecce Homo’, concentrates on artists’ reactions to the first world war. An unnerving selection of photographs by August Sander dominates, alongside suites of prints by Max Beckmann and Otto Dix that meditate on the horrors of conflict. The mood of ‘Ecce Homo’ is grim and monochrome. Strangely, key interwar groups such as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter are excluded as are the design and architecture achievements of the Bauhaus — on the grounds that De l’Allemagne is not a survey show. There is no sculpture but some film, including, controversially, Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda masterpiece Olympia (1936), shown opposite Siodmak and Ulmer’s playful, hedonistic Menschen auf Sonntag (1930).

The exhibition has provoked fiercely hostile articles in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the weekly Die Zeit. Both argue that De l’Allemagne presents Germany as programmed for war and catastrophe, making the culture of National Socialism appear inevitable. One of the key German scholars involved in the exhibition, Andreas Beyer, director of the German Forum for Art History in Paris, has criticised the deterministic slant of the show. The Germans have a point. Although De l’Allemagne does not seriously engage with the art of the Third Reich, despite its cut-off date of 1939, the Apollo–Dionysius binary that floats up all through the exhibition is unfortunate. But despite its dubious intellectual framework, the high quality of the work included means that De l‘Allemagne is not an exhibition to miss.

The post Interrogating the German soul appeared first on The Spectator.

Such a sale is alarming for several reasons, not least because it may represent just the tip of an iceberg. In 1925, Senator William A. Clark bequeathed some 997 predominantly European fine and decorative arts to the gallery William Corcoran had founded in 1869. Yet there is no mention of this or any of the gallery’s European holdings in the Strategic Framework for a New Corcoran issued by its board of trustees in April. It seems that the current regime has decided to revise the museum’s mission, as American museum trustees are wont to do. The gallery will now narrow its focus to contemporary art, American art and, a new category, design.

This strategic plan was prompted by the financial difficulties of the privately endowed Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art + Design, and its process included identifying the institution’s core mission. This is the latest example of what could be called ‘museum mission creep’, an exercise offering an automatic green light to justify sometimes radical change — and cash in the coffers for future, and more fashionable, acquisitions.

The Corcoran is, of course, not the first American institution to deaccession. In the post-war years, major museums took to selling collections en bloc — Minneapolis alone selling 4,500 items. Since then, the Association of Art Museum Directors has issued professional guidelines (my italics) on what might legitimately be sold — essentially duplicates, poor-quality items and works with condition issues — and advocating that no funds realised be spent on capital or operational expenses. But even these allow for the sale of work ‘no longer consistent with the mission or collecting goals of the museum’. Restrictions that preserve the historical character of a collection are rare.

In 1989, for instance, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis decided to sell its entire holding of 19th-century American art to enhance its endowment for 20th-century art. In 2007, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo offloaded outstanding antiquities in order to buy modern and contemporary. Those sales realised $68 million. Such is the scale of this deaccessioning that both Christie’s and Sotheby’s now have dedicated museum liaison departments. Institutional collections are proving one of the richest seams of supply for the current art market.

The dangers of these disposals are self-evident. It is hard to imagine that potential donors are not alarmed by this kind of trading in, for even stipulations on gifts have been overruled in the courts. There is also the issue of overconfidence in current taste and curatorial interests. Certainly, the Corcoran’s curators would be extraordinarily fortunate, and prescient, to acquire works of art of a quality comparable with that of the ‘Clark Sickle-Leaf Carpet’.

This tour-de-force represents the pinnacle of Persian carpet weaving under Shah ’Abbas in the late 16th and early 17th century. Probably woven in Kirman, its rare ‘vase’ technique, which uses three weft ‘shoots’ — two of wool and cotton, and one of silk — allows for a particularly fine weave and crisp drawing, and its vitality lies in its vivid palette and dynamic patternmaking over three pictorial planes. Swirling, intertwining and overlapping vine leaves and flowering and fruiting branches are overlaid with curling serrated ‘sickle’ leaves and palmettes, and pierced by cypress trees. A real paradise garden, it comes to the block with a relatively conservative estimate of $5 million to $7 million — the current record price for any carpet sold at auction, £6.2 million ($9.5 million), was set in 2010 for a later and less complex ‘vase’ carpet. In this particularly polarised market, rare, early examples are now commanding huge prices from buyers across the globe.

The Corcoran’s chief curator Philip Brookman argues, not unreasonably, that carpets are ‘very much outside what we do — we have no Islamic art, no curatorial expertise for it, and no way of showing it in relation to the rest of our collection’ (one is being retained as an example of Clark’s collecting interests).

His comments highlight the contrasting attitudes to so-called permanent collections in the US and in Europe, where deaccessioning is not an option. But before anyone here thinks of gloating, they ought to reflect that, while national museums do not deaccession, there are no restrictions on regional collections belonging to local councils or other institutions. As I write, Tower Hamlets Council in London would sell a monumental Henry Moore if it could prove legal title, Northampton Borough Council is considering the sale of a 2400 BC Egyptian figure, while some members of Southampton City Council remain in favour of disposing of works from the city’s art gallery to help develop a new cultural quarter. Meanwhile, Bournemouth and Poole College quietly disposed of part of its art collection last year — including another Henry Moore bronze — to fund new facilities. It is not only money — or the lack of it — that can have a transformative effect on a museum or art gallery; it is the trustees and the councillors who hold the purse strings.

The post Selling the family treasure appeared first on The Spectator.

The press release said it was the ‘first exhibition anywhere of automobiles selected for design’ — as, indeed, it was. Eight fine cars were presented on a dramatic fake roadway with huge photographic enlargements of details as a backdrop.

Drexler’s boss at the museum, the architect and one-time Nazi sympathiser Philip Johnson — and in those days New York’s arbiter elegantiarum — explained, ‘Automobiles are hollow, rolling sculpture, and the refinements of their design are fascinating.’ Quite so.

Ten years later, the Jaguar E-Type was launched at a lavish event in the Parc des Eaux Vives, a spiffy restaurant on the shores of Lake Geneva. International correspondents were astonished by the car’s combination of lascivious (some thought flagrantly erotic) looks, category-bending performance and accessible pricing. Ever since, the Jaguar has routinely been described as ‘the most beautiful car ever made’. In 1996 an E-Type entered the permanent collection at MoMA, the first mass-produced car to do so.

It is neither a very old nor a very new idea that machines can be beautiful. John Ruskin found machinery repellent, especially if it involved pistons whose relentless intromittent action perhaps reminded him of the coition he found so disconcerting. But the inheritors of Ruskin’s art theory, early Modernists including Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, found cars thrilling exemplars of the mechanised perfection they wanted to bring to buildings. Indeed, both Gropius and Corb designed their own cars (although the former’s was not a success and the latter’s a high-concept publicity stunt).

Now that painting is moribund, a relic of a once-important but now irrelevant discipline, and artists will discuss anything other than beauty, manufactured products and experiences are most people’s introduction to aesthetics. Cars may not actually be art but, in speaking a language of form, colour, detail and in expressing collective yearnings for dreamworlds and escape from
tedium vitae, they have usurped art’s traditional role.

This was especially so of the original E-Type because, like the utilitarian 1959 Mini, it so completely anticipated (perhaps even influenced) the possibilities of its historical moment. Conceived before seat belts, clamps, speed limits, global warming, crash protection, Asian competition and consumerist Puritanism, the gorgeous Jaguar was what Tom Wolfe described as ‘freedom, style, sex, power, motion, colour, everything’. And all of this two years before the Beatles’ first LP.

The new Jaguar F-Type (above) will soon be on sale. Improving on perfection is a daunting task, the more so when these are precarious times for the motor car. The E-Type was launched into a world of moral and practical certainties, offering a remedy for melancholy that had very wide appeal. But, today, very few people see the car as a pleasurable instrument of liberation. Instead, it is an oppressive and expensive encumbrance whose potential always threatens to criminalise the owner.

Accordingly, the launch of the new F-Type Jaguar has been a tentative one, a drip, not a splash. It was first seen, as a teaser, in disguise at last year’s New York Auto Show. This was a nod to the significance of the American market where, 50 years before, the California sports-car cult had helped establish Jaguar’s reputation for athletic, elegant, sexualised speed. (Humphrey Bogart and Steve McQueen were early customers, a point often emphasised by public relations advisers.)

Thus the new car has to overcome the daunting obstacle of mountainous historical expectations as well as a deep trough of consumer apathy. It is less sensational than the old E-Type, but this is a more compromised world and anything more sensational than the old E-Type simply cannot be imagined.

Jaguar’s design team is led by Ian Callum, who has, over the years, made the study of the E-Type’s aesthetics a matter of meditative discipline. He understands the subtle but powerful semantics of curves and how a skilled designer can exploit minute changes in a radius to evoke a different set of emotional responses.

The old car, not so much ‘designed’ as wilfully sculpted by Jaguar’s empirical aerodynamicist Malcolm Sayer and its imperious boss Sir William Lyons, was a formal masterpiece from which nothing needed to be added nor subtracted to make an improvement.

It was, according to Callum, a matter of putting ‘enough style into a car to make it fascinating’. Form, you see, does not really follow function, it is instead an expression of artistic will that might, here and there, but not always, acknowledge certain technical constraints.

Since he cannot improve on the E-Type as curvaceous machine art, Callum has decided not to compete. No one is ever going to say the new F-Type is the most beautiful car in the world, but this is because in a global culture — fragmented and homogenised at the same time — there never could be any agreement on such a thing.

In 1957, Roland Barthes mused that ‘cars are our cathedrals’. Of course, we no longer make cathedrals. And perhaps machine art is as much a thing of the past.

It might be a fine machine, but the Jaguar F-Type makes me think that no one will ever again make a beautiful car.

The post Dream machine appeared first on The Spectator.

Perhaps the first thing to say is that the conducting of Edward Gardner and the playing of the ENO orchestra were at least as fine as any that I have heard in this work, achieving the remarkable feat of observing, as much as any set of performers ever has, Berg’s ‘analytical’ compositional methods, while also just avoiding recklessness in the passion of their commitment to this extraordinary score. Despite their fervour, they never drowned the singers, and almost every word of Richard Stokes’s excellent translation was audible.

That could have been undermined by a stupid production, but Carrie Cracknell, working with the set designer Tom Scutt, avoided the pitfalls that this opera is prone to, and came up with a claustrophobic and serviceable and direct account. The setting is contemporary, somewhere like RAF Brize Norton, with disabled soldiers returning in wheelchairs, dead ones in Union Jack-draped coffins. That could suggest that the weird behaviour of many of the characters is PTSD, but that certainly wasn’t emphasised, and one wouldn’t want it to be. One of the things that makes Wozzeck, the play and the opera, so oppressive is that one can’t profitably look for causes of the characters’ upsetting behaviour, they are just made that way. Nonetheless, giving them so resonant a context does stop us from wasting time on speculation, so we can simply be appalled by the way people treat one another.

The set is on three layers, the second one up being devoted to Marie’s flat, no more cheerful than you might expect. The third is a row of urinals, unemployed throughout — after the production has closed they could usefully be resituated for use at ground-floor level in the Coliseum. Possibly the fact that all the action takes place indoors is unfortunate, since the eeriness of the outdoor scenes as written is powerful; but this is a very non-expressionist production of the work.

The singing actors are of a uniformly impressive standard. Leigh Melrose is the more moving as Wozzeck because he is not merely a bewildered sufferer, and his scenes with Sara Jakubiak, the brilliant Marie, are harrowing partly because one sees she is rejecting an appealing, attractive man for an idiot of a Drum-Major. The ever-experimenting Doctor is played by James Morris, no less; not so demanding a role as his usual Wotan, but played and sung with at least equal conviction. The exasperating Captain is tolerable, just, thanks to Tom Randle’s rich characterisation. The only mistake in casting is Marie’s child, who looks about 11, so that he would clearly understand what was meant by ‘You, your mother is dead’, instead of simply going on playing; since he has already examined the corpses of his parents, Wozzeck having cut his own throat after Marie’s, but in the kitchen with blood running down the walls.

There remains the question, elementary and radical, of the status of this undeniably shattering work. The great orchestral interlude shortly before the end is not cathartic, it is the penultimate thud in the guts, so, in a performance as lacerating as this, one is left in a state of utter misery. We know that life is appalling for almost everyone, has always been and is only likely to get worse. A great artist can remind us of that with terrible vividness, but if we don’t do anything about it — and nothing radical can be done — what is the point of sitting in comfortable pseudo-misery watching people in uncomfortable non-pseudo misery? Someone tell me.

Four evenings earlier I had been to the Royal Opera’s latest revival of Die Zauberflöte in David McVicar’s ever-more subtle and serious production, with this run’s second cast. This, too, was near-perfection, and as exalting as Wozzeck is lowering. In Julia Jones the Royal Opera has a real find of a Mozart conductor, a rare species. The opening chord of the Overture, solid, solemn, carefully weighted, led to a wonderfully detailed account not only of this slightly academic orchestral piece but of the whole sublime masterpiece too. Simon Keenlyside’s Papageno is even more moving than it was, one of the half-dozen or so definitive operatic characterisations I have seen. The new hero and heroine, Andrew Staples and Sophie Bevan, are already admirable as Tamino and Pamina. Albina Shagimuratova makes as intimidating a Queen of the Night as her name suggests, and Matthew Rose, though he needs to work on his lowest notes, is a moving, unusually convincing Sarastro.  When you emerge from an opera with as strong a sense of the possibilities of life as this, you are bound to feel not only gratitude, but also the conviction that this is the truest, deepest function of art.

The post Highs and lows appeared first on The Spectator.

Nichols sets his drama in a swish London suburb where James, an ageing art dealer, is seduced by Kate, a killer bimbo with a penchant for lovable old daddy-bears. David Leveaux’s production is stylish, snappy and great to look at. Owen Teale is pleasingly daft and vulnerable as the tousled rogue James. And Annabel Scholey is heart-thumpingly sexy as the granddad-grabber in a black suspender-belt. Oliver Cotton, who plays James’s inner voice, has such an extraordinary visual presence that he threatens to knock the play off course each time he bursts on stage. With his great black panda-eyes, and his surging mane of snowy white hair, he looks like a heroin-addicted Old Father Saturn standing in a wind tunnel.

Some of Nichols’s plotting is a little hard to swallow. In Act II he asks us to believe that Eleanor, having learnt of James’s adultery, would take Kate out on a shopping spree. No chance. Nichols also plays with the form and supplies James and Eleanor with an alter ego who articulates their private thoughts. The result is complicated, technically brilliant and dramatically rather distancing. What thrills us here is the playwright’s performance rather than the agonies and ecstasies of his characters. And because Nichols leaves Kate without a private voice he disrupts the balance of the play. We never discover what motivates her other than a perverse lust for balding scalps and sagging bellies.

There’s another snag as well. And this involves breaking a taboo. Zoë Wanamaker has overlooked the past 14 years in order to play Eleanor, 50, and although one shouldn’t mention tree rings at all, this large gulf coarsens the play’s emotional texture and deprives it of poignancy. A margin of 19 years between two rival women, as the script sets out, represents a far more intriguing and tricky dilemma than a margin of 34 years. Sorry to mention it but there it is.

Last year, the Liverpool Everyman commissioned Frank McGuinness, a playwright and lit-crit boffin, to investigate life in the crime-torn inner city and to reveal his findings to an eager world. Professor McGuinness chose to deliver his dramatised report through the eyes of Sal, a young single mum, whose 12-year-old daughter has been killed in a gangland crossfire mishap.

Without wishing to speculate on the professor’s personal experience of motherhood in northern English towns, I must point out that he gives Sal’s biography some very peculiar adornments. Sal raises her daughter alone while maintaining a car, a college career and three part-time jobs. She also acts as zoo-keeper to the family rabbit which — like many a pet ensconced in a Liverpool council estate — is named after the Roman playwright Terence.

Sal’s Irish parents are a pair of feckless whining brutes who label her ‘a thundering disgrace’ after she releases a press statement offering to forgive her daughter’s killer. ‘Get out of this house,’ her nasty dad tells her. Her even nastier mum flings a pile of condolence letters on to the floor and says, ‘I would not clean my arse with them.’ Vigilantes take revenge on the gun-toting gang and when Sal hears that the killer’s mother is herself bereaved, she sends her a gloating, facetious message. Sal turns out to be even colder and more misanthropic than her hideous parents. She ends the play as a borderline basket case.

Leanne Best, a well-drilled actress, was able to show us Sal’s nervous breakdown with a variety of stage techniques. She fell to the boards in a foetal shape — or possibly the recovery position — whimpering like a marmoset with tonsillitis. Then she stood bolt upright and delivered an award-winning emotional implosion, which involved much violent slapping-about of her shiny brown hairdo. This burst of percussion, I couldn’t help noticing, consisted of sideways blows calculated to send a nice resounding thwack across the footlights without damaging the precious noodle of the actress herself who — let’s be fair — must live to fight another day, and play another council-house nitwit. At the curtain call, some spectators were in tears. A few more were asleep. I was alert but unmoved. I’m afraid I didn’t believe a word of this.

The post Passion killers appeared first on The Spectator.

Most of the magic has thus gone, and the only supernatural being is the Sandman, seen here as an overgrown ventriloquist’s dummy (inspired by the famous and somewhat unsettling Charlie McCarthy), who lures little Hansel away from home. We all know what happens when a pretty boy — who is morbidly attached to his teddy and constantly overprotected by a strong-minded sister — decides to follow a strange gentleman into the night. Forget the gingerbread house with marzipan tiles and candyfloss windows. He and his sister enter a creepy replica of the old shed I have at the bottom of my garden to meet the local weirdo.

The ‘witch’ is a peroxide-blond neurotic man, lost in a sort of mentally troubled fatal attraction for the dummy. He shares his abode with the body of a dead woman whose head is stuck in the oven. Clichés and predictability abound in this The Lovely Bones meets Psycho as well as one of the many scary movies in which the ventriloquist becomes the victim of his own puppet. The moment the ‘witch’ makes his first appearance, it is clear what will come next, including the slightly sickening ‘beauty-and-the-beast’ like homosocial bonding between the predator and the boy, and the former’s self-immolation at the end.

Lack of refined dramaturgy is indeed one of the three major weaknesses of this new work, the other two being lack of narrative focus — the whole action could have been condensed into one hour, instead of two seemingly endless acts — and a not-so-consistent language vocabulary. True, Scarlett knows how to make great duets, and here and there his movement choices sparkle with genius, adding effectively to the story’s tension. Yet there are also far too many steps that come across as purely ornamental if not downright superfluous.

If boredom never fully kicks in, it is thanks to the more than commendable interpretative efforts of the artists involved. Leanne Cope and James Hay as the two protagonists were credible throughout and truly conveyed the horror of having their youthful innocence stripped away so viciously. As their stepmother, Laura Morera was the quintessential incarnation of the slut from hell found in any second-rate Technicolor Hollywood movie of the Fifties. Next to her, Bennet Gartside was a more than convincing alcohol-prone father. Yet the two show-stealers were Steven McRae, as the splendidly nightmarish, overpowering overgrown dummy, and Brian Maloney, for his mesmerisingly multifaceted rendition of the Norman Bates-like witch.

Add to that a damn good score by Dan Jones, impressive scenic ideas and designs by Jon Bausor, effective lighting by Paul Keogan and you will understand why the opening night ended with an ovation. As for me, this new Hansel and Gretel is but another addition to the list mentioned earlier.

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It’s a long film, at two and a half hours, but it won’t seem like it, and for the first hour or so you may even feel as if you are on some kind of Great Gatsby theme-park ride at a Disneyland somewhere. I mean this in a good way. It’s 3D. The colours are so vivid it’s as if you’ve never properly seen green before. Phones actually jiggle when they ring. The text jumps out from the screen. The costume budget must have been out of this world. The camera swoops in and then out, breathlessly. And the parties? Jay Gatsby’s famous parties? The parties are all dazzlingly lavish spectacles with champagne corks a-popping and so densely populated every frame is like a Where’s Wally? of the Charleston-mad, liquor-mad, jazz-mad 1920s.

So it’s visually breathtaking, but the rest? Unlike the 1974, rather opaque version starring Mia Farrow and Robert Redford, this does not dispense with Nick Carraway as narrator and framing device. Even if you only ever skim-read the novel at school, which is something you should say even if it isn’t true, just to rile everyone further, you’ll have understood Carraway is essential for providing insight into Gatsby’s mind and motivations. Here, Nick (Tobey Maguire) has taken residence in a mental asylum, where he broods over the summer of 1922, and puts his thoughts on paper — a memoir that will become The Gatsby until he takes a pen, and inserts Great between the words. Nothing in this film is especially subtle. I will give you that.

Anyway, Nick is an honest if naive young man who is trying to get a toehold in Wall Street when he rents a little house in West Egg, Long Island, across the bay from his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and her husband Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), a brutish philanderer. The house is also in the shadow of the stupendous mansion owned by Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). The whole of New York, more or less, truck up to his wildly extravagant weekend parties where the carousing goes on all night and if no one asks where all this money is coming from, it’s because no one much cares. Gatsby’s own entrance is delayed, in time-honoured dramatic fashion, for half an hour or so, and when the moment comes, old sports, it’s as if DiCaprio is Gatsby, in the same way Orson Welles was Citizen Kane. Previously, I’ve never much cared for DiCaprio. His little round face and little round mouth always make me think of Gomez from Charles Addams’s original cartoons of The Addams Family, and I want to pen a wispy moustache on him, but here he is so self-possessed and charismatic I not only believed in him, but felt I could watch him for ever as well.

Gatsby is, of course, intent on wooing back Daisy, his sweetheart from five years earlier. Everything he has done, including making a fortune, has been for her. He befriends Nick, and asks him to arrange a rendezvous. This happens in Nick’s living room, which Gatsby fills to the rafters with flowers and cake. It’s a superb scene. ‘Is it too much?’ he asks, as if he were asking about the film, too. And there are many more superb scenes, including one where, showing Daisy around his mansion, he takes his silk shirts from where they are stored on a balconette, and lets them flutter down on to the bed. It’s so beautiful I practically trembled with delight. And Ms Mulligan? Rather wonderful, too. Gorgeous, in her white floaty dresses, plus capable of an essential duality. She is the prize but, at the same time, she must always make you question if she’s a prize worth having.

It all works. It works as a love story, to the extent it is a love story, and it works as a commentary on the disintegration of the American dream and the carelessness of the rich. And although some critics are complaining about an absence of feeling, I was moved at the end by Gatsby, and his sincere and loyal heart. My only wish now, in fact, is that Jay-Z and Jay G would get together more often. The results are intoxicating, old sports. Intoxicating.

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His thoroughness is chilling. First he checks out what they do for a living: architects and lawyers are ideal because then people at opinion-forming, BBC executive-frequented Islington dinner parties will definitely be talking about it, whereas they might not if it were just smelly prostitutes. Then, he puts off killing his victims until after we’ve got to know them, so they’re not just any old hideously tortured and murdered corpse in a photograph, they’re real people with attractive, husky voices and a flirtatious manner and a bright future about to be cut tragically short.

More evilly still, the killer is married. With a nice wife. And delightfully cute kids who sit on the stairs and say tearfully, ‘Daddy, where have you been?’ when he returns from one of his late-night killing sprees with a sinister black bag whose contents he has to lie to them about. He also has one of those jobs which in BBC-land would be considered caring and psychologically grounded and validatory: he’s a marriage-guidance counsellor.

So you see this ain’t your routine, fava-bean-n-liver-eating, Hannibal Lecter-style, black comedy psycho we’re being asked to spend five hours of our life with, here. This guy is fully fleshed, perfectly rounded and kinda sexy too — the sort of guy the target demographic wouldn’t actually mind sleeping with themselves if he weren’t so busy strangling them with the underwear he’d just riffled from their knicker drawers. Oh, and he’s played by a former Calvin Klein underwear model — Jamie Dornan. Did we mention that?

Luckily there’s something in this for the boys, too, in the form of investigating officer DSI Gibson played by a still-very-foxy-looking Gillian Anderson (out of X-Files and, more recently, the No Pressure exploding kids commercial that teasingly suggested that people who don’t believe in reducing their CO2 emissions should be executed).

Anderson, we can tell, is our kind of girl because a) she can eat burgers — really fat, juicy man-size burgers — while simultaneously looking at gruesome pictures of murder victims on her laptop and drinking lots of wine without it affecting her weight; b) she’s foxy (did we mention this already?) and doesn’t take any shit from anyone and is totally right in all her hunches, unlike her crap colleagues; and c) she’d definitely want to have sex with us.

Here’s what she’d do: she’d be driving past in her police car and she’d see us marshalling some crime scene in a capable way. ‘Who’s that?’ she would say to her colleagues in her whispery, distant, ice-cool voice. ‘Introduce me.’ Then she’d pointedly tell us what hotel she was staying in and what room number. Yes! Why aren’t all women like that?

But on to the key question: is it worth staying on to watch the remaining four episodes of this handsome, stylish, torture porn? Well, I’m torn. On the one hand, now that the attractive lawyer character has been got (and while so tantalisingly, frustratingly close to being rescued too), you do very much want to be there when the bastard who did it is finally brought to justice. On the other, if I’m absolutely honest, I find it a bit of an ordeal sitting through über-bleak serial-killer dramas, even when they’re as well done as this. Weird of me, I know, but I don’t like seeing girls being tortured and murdered for my shock and delectation. I’d rather be reading a book.

Or watching something like Sunday’s night’s BBC Culture Show special — Not Like Any Other Love: The Smiths. If you’re the wrong generation I don’t suppose you’ll give a toss, but for some of us The Smiths were everything. When they split up in 1987 with just four proper albums under their belt, we kept waiting for the new Smiths to come along and carry on where they left off. We’re still waiting now.

Tim Samuels’s tribute — marking the 30th anniversary of The Smiths’ first single ‘Hand In Glove’ — very sensibly avoided talking to any of the band’s ex-members in order to concentrate on shameless nostalgia and fan worship. Various talking heads — a musicologist, the poet Simon Armitage, Stuart Maconie — attempted to explain why their songs worked so well, why Morrissey’s lyrics were so special, how Johnny Marr’s jangly guitar was the business. But it was Noel Gallagher who got closest: ‘They were just fucking great

The post Serial ordeal appeared first on The Spectator.