Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Enigma variations | 3 November 2016

On 2 August 1933 one of the more improbable meetings of the 20th century took place when Albert Einstein had lunch with James Ensor. Apparently, Einstein attempted to explain his theory of relativity to Ensor, who doesn’t seem to have understood it. That evening the painter gave a speech, entitled ‘Ensor to Einstein’, ending with a sort of apology. Painters, he exclaimed — ‘alas and alack!’ — were slaves to vision and resistant to ‘positive reason, to calculations, to probabilities’. However, Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans at the Royal Academy is an exhibition that is subject to the principle of relativity. This is not simply a display of work

James Walton

Losing heart | 3 November 2016

In 2015, the first series of Humans (Sunday) was apparently Channel 4’s most watched home grown drama since The Camomile Lawn: a programme broadcast when Neil Kinnock was still the Labour leader and given a obvious ratings boost by the tabloid outrage about its many nude scenes (and by its many nude scenes). In the case of Humans, though, the British people can’t be accused of ulterior motives, because this is a winningly intelligent piece of sci fi that ponders, among other things, the nature of consciousness and the future of the human race. Cleverly, too, it’s set, not in a domed city of jet packing commuters, but in a

Louise Levene

Mistaken identity

The Romanovs were a hot topic in 1967: it was the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, memories of Ingrid Bergman’s Oscar winning Anastasia were still fresh and Robert Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra was on every bestseller list. Kenneth MacMillan was ‘sick to death of fairy tales’ and his one act treatment of the Anna Anderson story, with its groundbreaking use of archive film and uncompromising Martinu score, was a ballet for grown ups that wrestled with the very nature of human identity. Lynn Seymour, the greatest dance actress of her generation, created the role of the mental patient who might (or might not) be a Grand Duchess and the

Jasper Rees

Heaven knows they’re miserable now

The Light Between Oceans is one of those films that comes issued with a handy how-to-use manual. Shudder as hero arrives on remote Australian island to man lighthouse. Cheer when in swift dash to mainland he secures hot bride to join him. Grimace when her womb proves incapable of holding anything in for a whole nine months. Bring heart to mouth as baby is somewhat implausibly washed ashore in rowing boat. For rest of film, carry on weeping. The source material is the 2012 novel by M.L. Stedman, which has sold millions in loads of languages. It features a Hardy-esque plot of flatpack sadism in which punishment is administered even-handedly

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Just kidding

Amadeus by Peter Shaffer is haunted by its own antecedents. Viewers are apt to feel that a new production lacks the beauties they’ve seen, or believe they’ve seen, in previous versions. Director Michael Longhurst opens with a fusion of time zones. The courtiers are attired in silk curtains like proper 18th-century toffs, while the musicians on stage wear the baggy subfusc of a contemporary orchestra. Electronic cries of ‘Salieri, Salieri’ are broadcast through a Tannoy as if the tardy Kapellmeister were being chivvied from his dressing-room by an irate stage hand. Early on we get the famous ‘voice of an obscene child’ speech, which is perhaps the most sublime piece

Alexandra Coghlan

Buried treasure | 3 November 2016

Wexford is to opera-goers what casinos are to gamblers. The uncertainty, the hope, the exhilaration — they’re all a crucial part of a festival that annually rolls the dice, plucking three obscure, often all but unknown, operas from the repertoire and giving them a staging. Dealing the cards is David Agler, the artistic director whose canny choices ensure that not only the house but also the audience always wins. Add to the mix Wexford’s ear for an up-and-coming star (Juan Diego Flórez, Mirella Freni, Joseph Calleja and Daniela Barcellona have all made their mark here), and you can understand the festival’s uniquely addictive quality. It’s somewhere between the Bacchanale, the

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Contours of the mind

In Australia, I have been told, the female pubic area is sometimes known as a ‘mapatasi’ because its triangular shape resembles a map of Tasmania. And since we are discussing cartography and the nether regions, it is wonderful to find in the British Library’s new exhibition, Maps and the 20th Century, that Countess Mountbatten wore knickers made out of second world war airmen’s silk escape maps. Maps certainly colonise our imaginations in many different ways. The allies in Iraq had a ‘road map’ rather than a strategy. So much of personal value can be lost in the creases and folds of our own ‘mental maps’. And couples who often travel

Nicky Haslam

Halloween hire

To use a vulgar phrase, I can’t get my head around this exhibition. It seems anything but ‘vulgar’. Daintily laid out and dimly lit in the gloomier cloisters of Fortress Barbican is a series of dresses — the chaps hardly get a look-in, save for some of those white-knee-britched, jaboty, gold-laced-coat get-ups that people like Philip Green struggle into for their fancy-dress parties — some ancient, some modern, a lot very pretty, a few laughably ludicrous; anyone wanting a frightening clown costume for Halloween will find inspiration here. The clothes are, for the most part, exquisitely made. Many are elegant, and several supremely extravagant; however, the organisers of the exhibition

Martin Gayford

Romantic modern

In 1932 Paul Nash posed the question, is it possible to ‘go modern’ and still ‘be British?’ — a conundrum that still perplexes the national consciousness more than 80 years later. It is true that the artist himself answered that query with an emphatic ‘yes’. But, as the fine exhibition at Tate Britain makes clear, his modernism was deeply traditional. The truth is that Nash (1889–1946) was what the author Alexandra Harris has termed a ‘romantic modern’. In other words, his art was a characteristic Anglo-Saxon attempt to have things both ways. Equally typically, he managed to do so — but only some of the time. Nash’s early drawings and

Laura Gascoigne

Going Dutch | 27 October 2016

In debates about what should and should not be taught in art school, the subject of survival skills almost never comes up. Yet the Dutch, who more or less invented the art market, were already aware of its importance in the 17th century. In his Introduction to the Academy of Painting (1678), Samuel van Hoogstraten included a chapter headed ‘How an Artist Should Conduct Himself in the Face of Fortune’s Blows’. Top of his casualty list of artists ‘murdered by poverty …because of the one-sidedness of supposed art connoisseurs’ was the landscape painter and printmaker Hercules Segers (c.1589–1633). This year, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has mounted three shows devoted to

The Spectator

Barometer | 27 October 2016

Folio society A new collection of Shakespeare’s work credits Christopher Marlowe as co-author of the three Henry VI plays. Some other candidates claimed to have written Shakespeare plays: FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626). His poems are said to share a similar structure. But lacks motive to use Shakespeare as a pen name. WILLIAM STANLEY, 6th EARL OF DERBY (1561-1642): A Jesuit spy claimed he was secretly writing plays. EDWARD DE WERE, 17th EARL OF OXFORD (1550-1604): Theatre patron said to have used pen name because an aristocrat could not take credit for public plays. Dead for the last 12 years of Shakespeare’s life. ROGER MANNERS 5th EARL OF RUTLAND. Said to have

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The lying game | 27 October 2016

‘Adam Curtis believed that 200,000 Guardian readers watching BBC2 could change the world. But this was a fantasy. In fact, he had created the televisual equivalent of a drunken late-night Wikipedia binge with pretentions to narrative coherence…’ You really must watch Ben Woodhams’s brilliant 2011 Adam Curtis-pastiche mini-documentary The Loving Trap, which you’ll find on YouTube. It’s so devastatingly cruel, funny and accurate that when I first saw it I speculated that Curtis would never be able to work again. But this was fantasy. Of course, I knew that Curtis would be back, not least because to be parodied in this way is not an insult but a sure sign

Richard Bratby

A night at the circus

The Royal Opera’s latest production is Shostakovich’s The Nose and to paraphrase Mark Steyn, whatever else can be said about it, you certainly get a lot of noses for your money. Noses are tossed from character to character, noses kneel in prayer and noses stroll casually past in the background. They poke through curtains, mingle in crowds, and form a high-kicking, tap-dancing all-nose chorus line. At one point, a little tiny nose toddles unaided across the vast, almost-empty stage. Around them swirls bustling, multicoloured madness: bearded ladies and moustachioed cops, women dressed like dayglo matryoshka dolls, and a couple of pigtailed cartoon Chinamen who might have wandered in from an

Bryan Appleyard

Net effect

As a documentary-maker, Werner Herzog is a master of tone. His widely parodied voiceovers — breathy, raspy, ominous — are cunningly ambivalent. The interviews he conducts are seldom less than strange, often shocking, and the pacing and tenor of his films are subtly modulated. Never more so than here. Lo and Behold is divided into chapters. The first is a fairly conventional documentary about the beginnings of the internet. Herzog talks to the people in California who made the first computer-to-computer connection in 1969, asking them reasonable questions and generally making them seem like comfortable, all-round good guys. This is then subverted by the appearance of Ted Nelson, a cyber-pioneer

Kate Chisholm

Identity crisis | 27 October 2016

You may not listen to them every year. Or even to every lecture in the current series. But the survival of the annual Reith Lectures on Radio 4 from the old days of the Home Service and Radio 3 (they were established in 1948 to honour what Reith had done for the corporation) is crucial to the existence of the BBC. Strictly Come Dancing and The Fall might pay the bills in overseas sales (not that a lecture series, no matter how costly to stage, edit, produce and broadcast, is a great burden on the licence fee) but without the Reith Lectures, perceptively chaired by Sue Lawley, it would be

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Sweet and sour | 27 October 2016

Great subject, terminal illness. Popular dramas like Love Story, Terms of Endearment and My Night With Reg handle the issue with tact and artistry by presenting us with a single victim and a narrative focus that reveals as much about the survivors as about the patient. Crucially, the disease is omitted from the title for fear of discouraging the punters from mentioning the work in conversation. A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer violates all these strictures. Half a dozen characters seated in a hospital ward shout at us about their failing health. These disjointed gobbets of testimony are interspersed with repetitive zombie dances and noisy songs with lyrics

Niru Ratnam

March of the makers

Until earlier this year, a squat sculpture nestled rather unobtrusively outside 20 Manchester Square in Marylebone, an address once made famous by the cover of a number of albums by the Beatles. The building has since been renovated into smart, slightly anonymous offices and the sculpture suited it. Few knew that it was a work by Tony Cragg, who towards the end of the 1980s was one of Britain’s best known artists, winning the Turner Prize in 1988 and representing the country at the Venice Biennale the same year. Last winter the sculpture, titled ‘Under Circumstances’, was taken away. There was no fanfare or report as to why, or where,

Wednesday

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

Emma Rice was never as radical as she thought she was

Towards the end of Emma Rice’s recent production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of the mechanicals decides to give us a piece of her mind. ‘It’s a visual concept!’ screams Nandi Bhebhe’s Starveling (for it is She), as the young lords and ladies mock her costume in the play within a play. ‘Why is everybody so obsessed with text?’  This was Rice’s gauntlet, thrown to her critics as she arrived as the controversial new artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe. But Rice, as usual, was tilting at a straw man. None of her serious critics in theatreland have a problem with textual experiment, nor with Rice’s yen for cross gender

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Face time

As a chat-up line it was at least unusual. On 8 January 1927, a 46-year-old man approached a young woman outside the Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris and announced, ‘You have an interesting face; I would like to do your portrait. I feel we are going to do great things together.’ The approach was successful, even though the woman in question, Marie-Thérèse Walter, was bewildered by his subsequent announcement, ‘I am Picasso!’, since she had never heard of the famous artist. Undeniably, great works did result from this chance meeting — as well as an intense affair, which lasted for years. Several are included in the splendid Picasso Portraits