Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Jasper Rees

The still point

Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song is the best-remembered title of a short career. Born in 1901, he was dead by 1935. The novel hymned the rhythms of rural life in north-east Scotland in prose that to modern ears sounds as if it comes from a museum of Grampian folklore. At its heart is Chris Guthrie, a spirited young woman whose dream of bettering herself as a teacher is thwarted by tragedy. The world of Sunset Song is a bull’s-eye for Terence Davies, the British director who has always been nostalgically drawn to the travails of unlucky women. Leadings actresses form an orderly queue to emote in his gorgeously lit interiors.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Men behaving badly | 3 December 2015

Jamie Lloyd’s production of Pinter’s The Homecoming is a pile of terrific and silly ideas. Mostly terrific. The action takes place on a raised, thrusting stage surrounded by a steel canopy of scarlet rods like a boxing-ring. Ideal for a play about damaged men competing for a female trophy. Soutra Gilmour’s design is a model of sparse elegance. Centre stage, a worn green armchair like a waning tyrant’s throne. Stage right, a veneered sideboard that signals mass-produced chic. We’re in the 1960s so these pieces are from the previous decade. Well spotted, Ms Gilmour. Each scene is punctuated by racy music and strobe-y lights to remind us that this is

Ismene Brown

Bird brained

For all the billing and cooing on public forums about the Royal Ballet’s The Two Pigeons revival, there’s a silent majority out there who daren’t speak for fear of the Twitter ordure that would fall on them. The box office and the empty seats attest to them. You’ll have not the smallest difficulty in booking coachloads in for any of the 11 performances remaining as I write. The curious thing is that the revival of this ballet some 30 years after it last fluttered in Covent Garden came about because of overwhelming public demand, says the Royal Ballet’s artistic director Kevin O’Hare. It remains obscure how this public demand was

Richard Bratby

Lost in translation | 3 December 2015

About 15 minutes into act one of Jenufa, the student in the next seat leaned over to her companions and whispered, ‘They’re singing in English!’ And so they were, in Otakar Kraus and Edward Downes’s translation. Janacek was obsessed with the shapes and intonations of speech; for a non-Czech speaker, a first-rate singing translation is really the only way to make Jenufa strike home with anything like the immediacy and realism he intended. But even with surtitles, the effort is useless if — as was the case throughout much of act one of this performance by Opera North — the singers are almost inaudible. It might have sounded clearer in

Roy Kelly

Coffee with Annie

I am thinking about you Annie now that you are no longer a few miles of motorway and a couple of roundabouts from us here. I am remembering the meals, the easy chat and coffee; farewell coats and hugs in a doorway; that holiday we shared in Brixham, the fear of the foot noise on the stair which made us believe in ghosts that week, the sea house creaking, and the air screeching and crying with gulls in the dark or light until the wives couldn’t sleep in the haunted place. (How easy it is to be scared of no-one there.) And now you are not here, and your face

Connie Bensley

Heron

Walking to the bus stop after a hospital visit, in an unfamiliar, dusty suburb, I pass a small park on the left with a stream which dives under the road, and here only a few feet away, by the water, is a heron — surely larger than life and with each feather accurately modelled. I think how grateful we should be that some municipal person has commissioned this work of art and placed it where it can give pleasure to passers-by. But startlingly a breeze flutters the bird’s feathers, and it slowly turns its head, so that we find ourselves gazing at each other. It is so exciting that I

Roy Kelly

Bequest

Knowing he was ill he offered a free choice of the books on his shelves, but for every one wanted said, ‘Couldn’t bear to let that go’, and died two weeks later. Seers That age when if out and about you rigorously avoid shop mirrors, or any reflective surface, not wanting to see who looks back. That age.

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

The bicycle may have triumphed but it’s far from perfect

It’s extraordinary that it took civilisation so very long to discover the benefits of putting little wheels on suitcases. We knew how to fly before we realised it was no longer necessary to huff-and-puff baggage by hand. Even odder, steam and electricity were well understood before anyone got around to developing the ingeniously simple pedal-and-crank mechanism, an invention of decisive importance, which turned the ludicrous, wobbly old hobbyhorse into today’s smooth and sensible bicycle. Its eventual triumph over all our sensibilities can be seen today when, at some practical cost to the general mobility of the capital, London is being effortfully retrofitted with cycle lanes while oil-fired traffic is perpetually

Martin Gayford

Artistic taste is inversely proportional to political nous

‘Wherever the British settle, wherever they colonize,’ observed the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, ‘they carry and will ever carry trial by jury, horse-racing and portrait-painting.’ This doesn’t sound like a bad set of cultural baggage, even for those who don’t care for the races. There is clearly a lot to be said for trial by jury, and portraits make up the most enjoyable — in fact, downright humorous — section of Artist & Empire, a curious new exhibition at Tate Britain. Not, of course, that Tate approaches this subject in a playful spirit. At the entrance, a hand-wringing text declares that the British empire’s ‘history of war, conquest and appropriation

Kate Chisholm

You can’t forget what Will Self says – even if you wish you could

It lasted for just a few seconds but was such a graphic illustration of the statistics behind the bombing campaign in Syria — and not a word was spoken. Martha Kearney called it an ‘audio graphic’ on the World at One on Monday and explained how Neal Razzell and James Beard for the World Service had been monitoring the number of US combat missions on Islamic State targets in Syria, hour by hour, 24/7, and comparing them with earlier bombing campaigns. Each electronic beat we heard represents one hour, Razzell told us; each beep represents the launch of one combat mission. For Syria, the electronic beeps between each beat were

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I’m a Celebrity is like The Simpsons: good if you’re thick; even better if you’re not

The best bit in I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! (ITV) will be when the prisoners finally revolt and turn on their evil captors, Ant and Dec. The sparky Geordie comedy duo will be imprisoned in a semi-submerged, rat-infested cage like the one in The Deer Hunter, fed on a diet of liquidised kangaroo bottom and wombat testicle, and released only to participate in a series of amusing challenges, such as a recreation of the Lemmiwinks episode from South Park, involving two giant funnels, a bunch of inserted eucalyptus leaves and a pair of ravening koalas. Though it hasn’t happened yet I’m going to keep watching every night,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Why is there no one at the National Theatre preventing these duds getting staged?

Wallace Shawn is a lovely old sausage. A stalwart of American theatre, he’s taken cameo roles in classic movies like Clueless and Manhattan. He’s also a playwright whose new script has received its world première at the National Theatre. Lucky chap. He spent three or four years writing Evening at the Talk House and it reveals a peculiar methodology. A play normally features a central character grappling with a personal dilemma, which leads to suffering, change and self-discovery. Shawn doesn’t bother with any of that, he just lays on a gang of theatre types who spend two hours spouting cascades of circuitous chitchat. The show opens with a speech by

Deborah Ross

I wanted to beat it with a stick and cry, ‘Get on with it!’: Carol reviewed

Carol is an easy film to admire — so beautiful to look at; entirely exquisite — but such a hard film to feel anything for. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian novel The Price of Salt, this is a love story that, here, doesn’t venture below the waist, literally, emotionally or metaphorically. It glides across its own glittering surfaces, never investigating what may lie beneath, and playing restraint to the point of inertia. Its director, Todd Haynes, has spoken about how hard it was to make a Hollywood film about two women, starring two women, so I feel bad delivering the news, but deliver it I must: what was taboo

Alexandra Coghlan

Has there ever been a better time to be a lover of Baroque opera?

Time was when early music was a 6 p.m. concert, Baroque began with Bach and ended with Corelli’s Christmas Concerto, and speeds were so portentously slow that you’d have to start the B Minor Mass shortly after lunch in order to make it home in time for bed. Those dark days — caught between Baroque and a hard place — are over now. Period ensembles have never been better or more numerous, Handel and Monteverdi are a staple of operatic programming, and even Vivaldi, Cavalli, Cesti and Steffani are making their mark. Baroque is back, and this time it’s here to stay. One of the biggest success stories of recent

Roy Kelly

Treasure

Walking down the sands to investigate what they might find, shells or stones, flotsam pieces abandoned by tides, two figures walking, slowly walking, beyond my sight. One small, one smaller, a boy and his mum in jeans and tops, an everyday disguise that makes them look quite like everyone else scattered about here between the sea and the dunes. I watch his white T shirt for the longest time, tracking his progress down an indefinite edge stretching for miles. And then only the sun, and wind, and me watching other tops and jeans on the shore, waiting until the ones I love return bringing their unique pebbles, wood and shells,

Thursday

John Laurenson

Death watch | 19 November 2015

At the beginning of the summer of 1715 Louis XIV complained of a pain in the leg. In mid-August gangrene set in and by 1 September he was dead. He’d been on the throne for 72 of his 77 years. A new exhibition at Versailles looks at the elaborate rituals that followed. The Sun King died as he had lived — in public. Despite his illness, he carried on his daily routine until two days before his death, a decision made easier perhaps by the fact that he’d always conducted a good part of the affairs of France from his bedroom. It was no ordinary bedroom, and what went on

Martin Gayford

Artificial life | 19 November 2015

One day Julia Margaret Cameron was showing John Ruskin a portfolio of her photographic portraits. The critic grew more and more impatient until he came to a study of the scientist Sir John Herschel in which the subject’s hair stood up ‘like a halo of fireworks’. At this point, Ruskin slammed the portfolio shut and Cameron thumped him violently on the back, exclaiming, ‘John Ruskin, you are not worthy of photographs!’ He was indeed smackingly wrong to dismiss her work, as visitors to an exhibition at the V&A celebrating the 200th anniversary of her birth will be able to see for themselves. There are multiple ironies underlying this spat (they

Taki

High life | 19 November 2015

Blind is an indie movie that has an original screenplay by John Buffalo Mailer and is directed by his older brother Michael Mailer. It stars Alec Baldwin and Demi Moore, and the cast includes yours truly. Personal feelings aside, and from all reports and rushes, this is going to be a really good one. Alec Baldwin is an old pro at this game, and his advice has been immeasurable and very much appreciated. I’ve never seen a more contented cast and there is a brilliant Polish cinematographer whose sensitivity shines through the drama. Obviously, I will not give the game away, but it’s a hell of a story: a writer

Peter Hoskin

The history of Technicolor in ten films

Does the Queen only send telegrams to British subjects? If so, I guess the rest of us will have to celebrate Technicolor’s centenary without Her Maj’s involvement. I’ve already written about the occasion for last week’s issue of The Spectator; but I thought I’d return to it having spent most of yesterday gorging on films and cake. For yesterday was the anniversary day itself. The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation filed its start-up papers on 18 November 1915. One thing that I tried to communicate with my article is the great variousness of Technicolor. The word tends to conjure up a particular era and mood: the colourful Hollywood musicals and romances

William Cook

Lost in space | 19 November 2015

In a converted barn in Dorset, not far from the rural studio where she made many of her greatest sculptures, Elisabeth Frink’s son Lin is showing me his incredible collection of his mother’s work. More than 20 years since his mother died, he’s kept the vast bulk of it together. ‘I owe it to mum,’ he tells me. ‘I’ve been very close to her.’ We’re surrounded by maquettes and plaster casts — shelves and shelves of them. Enormous figures loom over us, like Easter Island statues. Drawings and paintings (many never before seen in public) are stacked against the walls. There’s a bust of Alec Guinness — a portrayal of