Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Claudia Massie

Northern lights | 16 August 2018

The Rembrandt show at the National Galleries of Scotland (until 14 October) has a problem. A mighty haul of Rembrandt paintings and prints are arrayed against a backdrop that mines the historical impact of his work on British artists and collectors. This is interesting. The problem is that the Rembrandt works are so astounding that there’s a danger you won’t bother with the rest. You should, because here Reynolds and Raeburn and Ramsay and more, all inescapably influenced by Rembrandt, tell fascinating and sometimes complicated tales of artistic heredity and homage. There’s no disgrace in going only for the Rembrandts, though. Hell, go there just to see the one wall

Kate Chisholm

Street life | 16 August 2018

‘What can you tell me just now,’ asks Audrey Gillan. She’s talking to Tara, who’s been sleeping rough on Fournier Street in Spitalfields, close to Gillan’s home. Tara, aged 47, sounds like a man, so deep and growly is her voice, ruined by drink, cigarettes and the hardness of her life. Gillan wants to know how and why she ended up living on the street. But beyond explaining that she was slung out by her mum when she was 14 there’s little that Tara can or is prepared to tell Gillan. In Tara and George on Radio 4 (produced by Gillan and Johnny Miller) we are taken on to the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Mind your language | 16 August 2018

David Greig has written the international festival’s flagship drama, Midsummer. This farcical romance is performed as a party piece by four actors supported by a plinky-plonky band playing satirical ballads. We meet two boozy drifters, Bob and Helena, who enjoy a night of rampant sex aftera chance encounter in an Edinburgh pub. Will their affair live or die? Well, since the show starts with two older actors reminiscing about the characters’ past we knowin advance how it all ends. An odd way to kill suspense. The lovers have little in common apart from alcoholism and the madcap plot sends them hurtling through a set of mishaps and scrapes as their

Jasper Rees

An artist’s eye

There are moments in The Guardians when you can imagine you’re in the wrong art form. Time stills, the frame all but freezes, and the film seems to have taken a left turn into an exhibition of fetching French landscapes and interiors from the early 20th century. The camera hovers over the harrowed earth, admires the sturdy sunlit front of a farmhouse, lingers thoughtfully on a face. The running time of 138 minutes could easily have been slashed to 100 by a heartless editor. But this is un film de Xavier Beauvois, a specialist in painterly exactitude. The writer-director’s greatest success came in 2010 with Of Gods and Men. This,

James Delingpole James Delingpole

His dark materials | 16 August 2018

Apparently there’s a new ‘character’ on University Challenge. I wouldn’t know. Last year, I vowed never again to raise my blood pressure by exposing myself to its new, gender-balanced questions: ‘Your starter for ten: which composer of Serenade for My Cat, rated by her father as the equal of Bach’s Goldberg Variations…’ Don’t know. Don’t care. You bastards ruined it, just like you ruined Sanpellegrino and Lucozade. Same applies, now I think about it, to all the other programmes on the BBC. I never watch anything on it for pleasure these days: only out of duty — to see what the enemy is thinking — and also so I can

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Return of the Muse

It’s October 1895 and the spirit of Music has been absent from Britain for exactly 200 years. Why she fled, and why she should return now — specifically, to the Leeds Festival — is not clear. Undaunted, Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, the poet Robert Bridges and the massed choral and orchestral forces of the West Riding send up a prayer to the exiled ‘Myriad voicèd Queen’: ‘Thy many-hearted grace restore/ Unto our isle, our own to be’. You read that correctly: the composer whom Edward Elgar would call ‘the head of our art in this country’ begins his Invocation to Music by swallowing whole the Germanic libel that 19th-century Britain

Daisy Dunn

The play’s the thing | 9 August 2018

Nothing was so interesting to Yves Klein as the void. In 1960 he leapt into it for a photograph — back arched, chin raised, spread-eagled. The same year, he took out a patent for International Klein Blue (IKB), a colour inspired by the limitlessness of the sky itself. He even went so far as to stage an exhibition of white walls and an empty cabinet. If there is a less appropriate place to exhibit his work than the lavishly adorned Blenheim Palace, I can’t think of it. Klein was born in Nice in 1928 and learned judo as well as art. In his late teens he visited the Scrovegni Chapel

Jasper Rees

Barking mad | 9 August 2018

Every so often there’s a news story in which neighbours quarrel over rampaging leylandii. The police are summoned, the case reaches the court, and whole lives are consumed by inextinguishable hatred. These nuclear tiffs are a Middle England staple. A boundary dispute is a border dispute writ small. Other European nations have watched their negotiable frontiers move around like a boundary rope on a cricket pitch. Surrounded by sea, we don’t have that in our DNA. And maybe Icelanders don’t either. Under the Tree is a social comedy from Iceland in which the eponymous tree sits in the more southerly of two abutting gardens. The shade it casts thwarts the

Richard Bratby

Great expectations | 9 August 2018

‘Outside this house the world has changed. Life is swifter than before; there is no time for idle gestures.’ Anatol, in Samuel Barber’s opera Vanessa, doesn’t pretend to be a romantic hero. The son of Vanessa’s old flame, he’s arrived by night at the remote mansion where she’s waited for 20 years with her elderly mother and niece Erika. He seduces the niece, beguiles the aunt and alienates the grandmother, but at no point is he anything less than honest. ‘I cannot offer you eternal love, for we have learned today such words are lies’, he sings, and Barber, remarkably, takes him at face value. Anatol’s music is lyrical and

Kate Chisholm

Poles apart | 9 August 2018

Much ado is being made of the latest listening figures, which have suggested that the percentage of those aged between 15 and 44 who turn on the radio at least once a week has fallen still further, down now to 13.8 million, or just 21 per cent of the population. Are we losing the listening habit? How worried should BBC Radio be, asked Roger Bolton on Radio 4’s Feedback (produced by Will Yates). He pointed out that while BBC Radio 5 Live is suffering a loss of audience, as is Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, other non-BBC talk-radio stations such as LBC are booming. Roger Mosey, a former editor of

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Edinburgh round-up | 9 August 2018

Trump Lear is a chaotically enjoyable one-man show with a complicated premise. David Carl, an American satirist, has arrived on stage to perform King Lear when Donald Trump’s voice interrupts him from the wings. The President threatens to kill him unless he delivers an accessible version of the Shakespeare classic ‘that isn’t boring’. With improvised puppets, Carl rattles through the play while Trump interrupts and offers directorial notes. Something weird happens. A curious mutual admiration springs up between the artist and his patron. Despite its messy presentation, the show works because Carl is a superb impressionist and his wide-ranging gags hit the mark more often than not. The action is

James Walton

Medical examination

Surprising I know, but judging from The Foreign Doctors Are Coming (Channel 4, Tuesday), Britain mightn’t be such a bad place after all. The programme followed a group of medics from non-EU countries whose dream is to work for the NHS, but who first had to pass a practical exam in Manchester known, for reasons left unexplained, as PLAB 2. ‘When I landed in Britain it felt like a breath of freedom,’ said a young Pakistani woman. ‘People here are helpful,’ declared Ahmed from Egypt as he walked the Manchester streets. ‘I see you have no problem with other cultures.’ Meanwhile, it also seems as if our doctors are less

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

BBC presenter takes a swipe at the Today programme

Oh dear. The Today programme has been in the news this week for the wrong reason after new data showed that the BBC’s flagship current affairs radio show had lost nearly a million listeners in the past year. The show’s editor Sarah Sands has been quick to go into damage limitation mode – arguing that this isn’t a sign of any problem with the show. Instead, it reflects the difficulties all broadcasters currently experience. But does everyone agree? It would seem not. Former Today presenter Sarah Montague entered the debate on Twitter where she made the point that her new gig – the World at One – had not lost

Thursday

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Colouring in the past

There is something of The Wizard of Oz about Marina Amaral’s photographs. She whisks us from black-and-white Kansas to shimmering Technicolor Oz. When Howard Carter leans over Tutankhamun’s open sarcophagus (1922), he does so in the glare of pharaonic gold. A photograph of fallen American soldiers on the Gettysburg battlefield (1863) shocks the more when we see the colour of the blood soaking through shirts. The Javanese dancers who performed at the Exposition Universelle in Paris (1889) are gorgeous in madder pinks, jades and golds. I’ve seen this picture a dozen times, rolled out to illustrate the influence of ‘exotic’ dancers on artists and choreographers, but I’d never considered that

Andrew Watts

The problem with Edinburgh

Edinburgh. Why do comics do it? We almost invariably lose money. Even if you don’t pay for your venue, the cost of accommodation is astronomical — I’ve met Edinburgh natives who pay their annual mortgage with the rent for August. You could conceptualise it as a loss-leader; but there are 1,333 comedy shows this year, and a loss-leader that can’t lead to anything is just a loss. Yet comics still go up. Partly because, for three weeks, there’s the thrill of having a real job: instead of travelling for gigs, you’re at the same place at the same time every day. Partly because comedy is a serious business in Edinburgh:

Jasper Rees

Ebbsfleet or bust

Dominic Savage had an early start. In Barry Lyndon (1975), Stanley Kubrick’s sprawling take on Thackeray, he played a prepubescent toff called Bullingdon blessed with a blond pudding-basin crop. By the time Savage started making his own films in the early Noughties, the hair had vanished, and so had any of Kubrick’s civilising varnish. For television Savage made a loose trilogy of dramas which plummeted circle by circle into a pit of social deprivation. His subjects were teenage parenthood (Nice Girl), underage drug use and prostitution (When I Was 12), and suicide in a young offenders’ nick (Out of Control). These cheerless vignettes felt all the more raw because his

Kate Chisholm

Beyond the grave

If proof were needed that radio will survive the onslaught of the new (or rather now not-so-new) digital technologies, albeit somewhat battered and slimmed down, then series like Radio 4’s Unforgettable (produced by Adam Fowler) should clinch it. Each episode is self-contained, and only 15 minutes long (the perfect length for podcasting). It’s cheap to make, requiring just a single guest, and inspired by a really simple idea — to create a conversation between a guest in the studio and someone they once knew who has died. You could make it at home, except that you probably couldn’t because an advanced editing machine is required, and an incredibly skilled operator.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

God save us from the King

Gandalf, also known as Ian McKellen, has awarded himself another lap of honour by bringing King Lear back to London. Jonathan Munby directs. His eccentric decision to hire actors who don’t resemble their characters will baffle anyone who hasn’t studied the play in advance. The casting may be ‘colour-blind’, but the audience isn’t. Anita-Joy Uwajeh (Cordelia) evidently has no white ancestry and therefore cannot be Lear’s natural daughter. A newcomer might deduce that the king’s cruelty towards her stems from her second-class status as an adoptive child. And anyone trying to unravel that mystery will be equally baffled by Sinead Cusack’s Kent. Of the four women on stage in the

Martin Gayford

Living the highly expensive life

It was Le Corbusier who famously wrote that ‘A house is a machine for living in’ (‘Une maison est une machine à habiter’). But it was a visit to a masterpiece of his great rival among modernist architects — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe — that brought home to me how literally accurate that celebrated aphorism was. His Villa Tugendhat at Brno is one of the great monuments of early modernism. To run smoothly, however, this luxurious dwelling required almost as much machinery as a small ocean-liner. The building has been restored with rigorous scholarship to look exactly as it did when its first owners, Fritz and Grete Tugendhat, moved

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Top Trump

The thing I most regret having failed ever to ask brave, haunted, wise Sean O’Callaghan when I last saw him at a friend’s book launch was ‘So tell me about Shergar.’ It has long been known, of course, that the legendary racehorse — one of the five greatest in the last century, according to Lester Piggott who rode him to victory in the Irish Derby — was kidnapped in 1983 by the IRA and never seen thereafter. What I didn’t realise, till after O’Callaghan died last year, was that the ex-IRA man is the only insider ever to have gone on the record as to his fate. Turns out that