Books and Arts – 17 January 2019
Arts Reviews
The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions
Thursday
The end of the beginning | 17 January 2019
One masterpiece, one dud, and one interesting rediscovery. That’s Pinter Five. Victoria Station is a hilarious sketch which might have been turned into TV gold by the Pythons or the Two Ronnies. A radio controller needs a cabbie to collect a fare from Victoria Station, but the only driver available is a charming lunatic whose car is idling near a ‘dark park’. The cabbie already has a passenger on board, who may be a murder victim, and although he claims not to know Victoria Station he insists that he’s the best man for the job. This dotty piece of verbal slapstick feels a bit dated because cab firms no longer
Target practice | 17 January 2019
As the Allies advanced towards Germany in September 1944, their supplies were brought all the way from western Normandy in a constant shuttle convoy known as the Red Ball Express. If you were making a realistic movie about this, three quarters of the truck drivers would be played by black actors, because that’s how it was in real life. Similar rules would have to apply to any remake of Zulu or Zulu Dawn. It is an awkward but inescapable historical fact that there was no diversity whatsoever among Cetewayo’s Impis: they were all, resolutely, from the same African tribe. At the Battle of Crécy, on the other hand, every single
Peak beard
Mary Queen of Scots is a historical costume drama that, unlike The Favourite, does not breathe new life into the genre, or any kind of life, even of the old accustomed sort. It is lifeless, in other words, and quite the slog, with jerky pacing, such an abundance of bearded men you lose track of which bearded man is which, and it reduces two of history’s most fascinating women to not much of anything. However, on the plus side, the scenery is ravishing, the two leads (Saoirse Ronan as Mary and Margot Robbie as Elizabeth I) are better than the film probably deserves, and the hair and make-up are cheeringly
Let’s hear it for the girls
Whether by accident or design, Zoë Ball took over the coveted early-morning slot on Radio 2 this week just as Radio 4 launched another of its Riot Girls series, celebrating ‘extraordinary’ women writers, those who have overturned convention, risen up against the status quo, proved themselves to be just as capable as their male oppressors (if not more so). Ball launched herself on to the airwaves on Monday morning at a pace it was hard to keep up with when it was still dark outside and the house had not yet warmed up. Her first track, that key statement of how she intends to reshape the breakfast show, give it
On Nobel Prize winners and Mastermind losers
I once worked my way through two whole books of IQ tests devised by Hans Eysenck and by the time I had finished I was much cleverer than that self-publicising ass Einstein, according to the helpful chart, and quite possibly the cleverest person ever to have walked on the face of the earth. So I came to two conclusions. First, that — as I had long suspected — I was indeed the clever-est person ever to walk the earth and it was pleasant to have this suspicion of mine validated. And second, that one can learn to excel at IQ tests, despite the insistence from their promulgators that they are
Thursday
Big in Japan
An early morning in late November in the peaceful glades that surround an ancient temple complex. A Shinto priest in sombre silks slips through a sliding door; a maple leaf catches the breeze. Suddenly, the silence is broken by the crunching thwack as two 400lb slabs of prime meat collide. It is the 15th and final day of one of Japan’s six annual sumo tournaments: the Kyushu Basho, held every autumn in the balmy southern city of Fukuoka. A group of visiting wrestlers have begun their pre-breakfast workout in one of the outbuildings of Torikai Hachiman-gu, preparing for the afternoon bouts at the arena three miles away. Sumo is as
Relative values | 10 January 2019
When he knew that he was dying, Thomas Gainsborough selected an unfinished painting from some years before and set it on the easel in his studio. It was a portrait of his nephew, pupil and assistant Gainsborough Dupont, begun more than a decade earlier and set aside. This little work, which he seems to have intended as a sort of artistic last testament, also hangs at the end of the exhibition Gainsborough’s Family Album. What did he mean to tell us by making a small, intimate picture of a relative the conclusion to a career of more than 40 years? This marvellous and brilliantly conceived exhibition at the National Portrait
Books and Arts – 10 January 2019
Thinking outside the box | 10 January 2019
Sweat, set in the Pennsylvanian rust belt, looks at a blue-collar community threatened by a factory closure. The script uses the flashback device. Scene One informs us that two lads were found guilty of doing a Bad Thing eight years ago. What Bad Thing? The author won’t tell us because the play needs suspense but the revelation is delayed so long that our patience is tested to the limit. The flaccid writing doesn’t help. Scene Two lasts 30 minutes and introduces us to the main characters, who visit the same bar every evening to get hammered and scream at each other. The only dramatic point in this lengthy scene is
Beat it
Here’s a tricky quiz question for you. What word completes this sentence from a BBC4 documentary on Friday: ‘The world as we know it was created by the…’? The answer, bizarrely enough, is ‘backbeat’ — because the documentary in question was On Drums… Stewart Copeland!, in which the former Police percussionist took a fiercely drum-centric view of well, more or less everything. This was a programme, for example, that compared Elvin Jones’s stick work for John Coltrane to Moses’s parting of the Red Sea; that attributed the Beatles’ success largely to Ringo; and that put forward Dee Dee Chandler as one of the key figures of 20th-century global history. So
Points of view
I suspect that whether or not you admire Neil MacGregor’s latest series for Radio 4, As Others See Us (produced by Paul Kobrak and Tom Alban), will depend on how you feel about Brexit. To my ears, it was shamelessly in favour of a Britain that stays in Europe and remains committed to its global role as the voice of moderation, a disseminator of liberal values, unusual in its ability to draw in other influences while retaining a strong sense of its own identity — and therefore to be cheered and recommended as essential listening. MacGregor is doing everything within his power to show us what we need to hear,
Love match
You mess with Laurel and Hardy at your peril. Their fan base is essentially the entire world. Samuel Beckett adored them: many think they inspired Waiting For Godot. Eric Morecambe’s reluctance to appear in bed with Ernie Wise melted when he was reminded that Stan and Ollie had used the same conceit. In Poland the duo are known as Flip i Flap, in Germany as Dick und Doof. I once attended a New Year’s Eve party at which the two dozen children present (toddlers to teenagers) were parked in front of a screen with a stack of Laurel and Hardy DVDs — not one of them left the room all
Thursday
The write stuff | 3 January 2019
Given their track record, you might think that Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais would be spared the struggles that lesser screenwriters go through to see their writing on screen. But this, it turns out, would be naive. Clement and La Frenais may have written some of the best-loved programmes in British television history: Auf Wiedersehen, Pet; Porridge; The Likely Lads; Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? Their CV may contain the huge hit film The Commitments — as well as more recently acclaimed TV dramas like The Rotters’ Club and Archangel. Yet, when I meet Clement on a solo visit to London, the two most striking things about him
Comic genius
For the hundredth, possibly the thousandth, time, Lucy van Pelt offers to hold the football for Charlie Brown so he can kick it. She cajoles him with the innocence of her eyes. He falls for it; he falls for it every time. Lucy, as she always does, whips the ball away. Charlie loops into the air and crashes to the ground. ‘What you have learned here today, Charlie Brown,’ she explains, ‘will be of immeasurable value to you for many years to come.’ Lucy is a cynic, a sadist, a huckster, a realist. Nevertheless, she would be right but for the fact that nothing is ever of ‘immeasurable value’ to
Books and Arts – 3 January 2019
Save the rabbits from the predatory BBC
For a while, as a 13-year-old, I was obsessed with rabbits — the consequence of having read Watership Down by Richard Adams. I tried to share my enthusiasm for the book with my parents, but my father told me that he thought the scenario depicted by Adams was ‘improbable’. However, they did consent to take me to that indeterminate, shifting area where the novel is set, with its back legs in Berkshire and its front paws in the last remaining unspoilt quadrant of Hampshire. We were on the way home from a holiday at some grim Methodist guest house in the West Country and were undoubtedly tired from the drive.
Women on top | 3 January 2019
The Favourite is a period romp set during the reign of Queen Anne, but it’s not your average period romp. The women are in charge. There is hot lesbian sex. It is savagely funny and often preposterous, with duck racing and ludicrous, vertiginous wigs and an astonishingly weird dance scene. Yet it is also involving and deeply moving with performances that are monumentally stellar. It stars Olivia Colman and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz and while they are all flat-out fabulous, Olivia Colman, good grief. She deserves thousands of Oscars and thousands of Baftas, and if she can’t fit another through her door she’ll just have to bin some. The
Chilling out
The Royal Ballet’s Les Patineurs is January as you would wish it. No slush, no new-year sales, no streaming chest colds. Winter, as imagined by Frederick Ashton, is an eternal ice rink lit by Chinese lanterns hung from icing-sugar branches. Ashton’s choreography is ingenious. His dancers really do seem to glide, the boards of the stage to freeze. You believe completely that they are on skates, not slippers. The men wear sheepskin jackets, the women bonnets and polka-dot tulle. Sleigh bells ring and fresh flakes fall. The ensemble slip, slide and dance a skating conga. Fumi Kaneko and William Bracewell are a Torvill-and-Dean dream in the pas de deux. Kaneko
All in the mind | 3 January 2019
The Tell-Tale Heart is based on a teeny-weeny short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The full text appears in the programme notes. Here’s the gist. A madman kills his landlord and is haunted by a ghostly heartbeat that prompts him to confess his crime. Anthony Neilson’s adaptation turns both characters into women and gives away the ending in the opening scene. An English writer lodging with a young Irish landlady is accused of murdering her by a detective. At a stroke, all uncertainty is effaced. The only remaining mystery is why Neilson can’t understand his chosen genre. He tries to interest us in the causes of the murder, and we