Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Press night

Sam Mendes once said there is no such thing as the history of British theatre, only the history of British press nights. That observation takes us closer to understanding the taboo that constrains journalists from reviewing the opening performance of a West End play. A dozen or so previews take place before the critics are invited in for a star-studded gala, or ‘press night’, which is fixed by the producer to make the show appear in its most seductive light. Newspapers are usually wary of censorship in any form, so their assent to this convention must be considered a great anomaly. The vanity of the lead actor is a significant

Kate Chisholm

Loose women

Late Night Woman’s Hour has created a Twitter storm with its twice-weekly (Thursdays and Fridays) doses of ‘mischievous and unbridled conversation’. The 11 p.m.–midnight slot is an ideal opportunity for cardigans to be unbuttoned and tongues unloosed, a chance to show that Radio 4’s venerable magazine programme for women can still shake up the station. Lauren Laverne was brought in from 6 Music to host the first few editions, signalling that there would be nothing mumsy about these hour-long chats around the table with a selection of well-chosen guests. Her style is refreshingly different, frank and a little bit cheeky, not at all Radio 4. How could it be when

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Art by committee

Australia, 1788. A transport ship arrives in Port Jackson (later Sydney harbour) carrying hundreds of convicts and a detachment of English officers under orders to guard the prisoners and to implant the roots of a well-ordered colony. These facts form the basis of Our Country’s Good, which was created in 1988 by Timberlake Wertenbaker in collaboration with Max Stafford-Clark’s Joint Stock company. Stafford-Clark’s method is to prepare a script using committees of actors under the supervision of a writer and the invariable result is a show that prizes the concerns of players over those of play-goers. The director Nadia Fall has revived this script with lavish efficiency. We begin with

Guy Dammann

Shtumming the spiel

London may cry foul over Hamlet’s misplaced to-be-ing and not-to-be-ing but Edinburgh is in raptures over a Magic Flute which ditches its spoken dialogue entirely. Directed by Barrie Kosky and Suzanne Andrade, and first seen a couple of years ago on Kosky’s adopted home turf at the Berlin Comic Opera, the production turns Mozart and Schikaneder’s beloved singspiel into a sing-stumm, in which silent-movie captions and moon-faced gazes replace the original spiel, underscored by fortepiano improvisations with a spot of Chinese opera thrown in for good measure. Not your usual night at the opera, then, but it certainly drove the Festival Theatre audience wild. The visual style mixes up Buster

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Lifting the veil

Finally I realise why women are so pissed off. It all goes back to the first codified laws — circa 2,400 bc — when rules like this were invented by men: ‘If a woman speaks out of turn then her teeth will be smashed by a brick.’ Before that, apparently, women lived on a pretty equal footing with their future male oppressors. Indeed, in arguably the first civilisation — a hive-like collection of houses in central Anatolia called Çatalhöyük dating back to 7,500 bc, when mankind was just beginning to emerge from the Stone Age and living with semi-domesticated animals — not a single man was expected to put out

Matthew Francis

Mealybug Nymphs, Gossamer

after Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665)   A warm wall, heavy leaves, hard green grapes     and a cluster of berries         spun out of cobweb.   They were packed with brown roe, or, later,     an anarchy of hatchlings,         scattering crawlers   scarce larger than the eggs they once were,     two eye-dots on a body         the shape of an egg.   I counted nine scales at the rear end,     two whiskers, a two-pronged tail         six legs underneath.   Though I shut some in a box, thinking     they

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

WATCH: Why Steve Backshall is one of the best presenters on British television

At a time when so much of television is read from autocue, it’s a joy to come across complete professionals whose love for their subject is second only to their knowledge of it. Those who don’t have young children may not have come across Steve Backshall; those who do will know that he’s one of the best-informed and most impressive presenters on television on either side of the Atlantic. This above clip, from BBC3’s Big Blue Live filmed in California, gives a measure of his ability: he breaks off an interview after discovering a blue whale swimming behind him. His commentary was ad-libbed, yet dripping in facts and conveyed with wonderful drama. Backshall conveys passion as well

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

God’s architect

Somewhat magnificently, I made the notes for this article sitting in the back of a Rolls-Royce travelling between London and Goodwood. It’s a journey that provides ample evidence of how the classical language of architecture, at least in Palladio’s version, has infiltrated our imaginations and informed our concept of grandeur. I find Palladio’s spirit in the stately shell of the Rolls-Royce’s radiator, which apes a classical portico, in the famous Sussex country house itself, and in a bottle of Château Margaux: this finest of wines is made in a property of Palladian design. You can see it on the label. Palladio was the finest classical architect of them all, but

Martin Gayford

The only art is Essex

When I went to visit Edward Bawden he vigorously denied that there were any modern painters in Essex. That may not have been true then — this was in the 1980s — or even now. What is indisputable, however, is that there have been plenty of artists in the county. They are the subject of two small but delightfully jam-packed exhibitions at the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden. Bawden (1903–1989) is at the heart of both of them, even if the second point he made to me — equally emphatically — was that he called himself a designer rather than an artist (‘out of self-defence, mainly’). That distinction, and the

Matthew Sweeney

The Matador

The matador scowled at the back of the bar, and sipped his beer. He wanted to stab the people who stared at him. His black tie, his black suit didn’t shield him from their eyes. He ordered testicles, his unique entitlement, and a carafe of deep red wine. He flung his right arm around, as if he was twirling his cape, and declaimed a line of poetry, then giggled, and apologised. Tomorrow he was going out against a bull from Miura. Where was the flashbulb reception? He fixed his eyes on a bearded man who might be discussing him — he sipped his wine, remembering the white-socked bull in Toledo.

Kate Chisholm

The BBC’s music man

To Radio 2 to meet Bob Shennan, controller of the BBC’s most popular radio station (the station attracts one third of all listening hours) and now also head of the newish monolith that is BBC Music. Why corral all of the Corporation’s music output on radio and TV into one enormous sub-division (on a par with BBC News, BBC Drama and BBC Sport)? Isn’t this just another cost-cutting compromise, a way of saving money by smoothing out the BBC’s output (its first production was that weird mish-mash of God Only Knows by a constellation of stars)? How will specialist stations like Radio 3 and BBC4 survive if swallowed up in

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Edinburgh on Thames

Showstopper! The Improvised Musical offers a brand new song-and-dance spectacular at every performance. It opens with a brilliantly chaotic piece of comedy. A theatre producer on stage telephones Cameron Mackintosh and pitches him a new musical. Mackintosh answers and the producer invites ideas from the audience. ‘What’s the setting?’ Someone yelled ‘Late-night sauna’ at the performance I saw. The producer, without missing a beat, told Mackintosh that the show would be called, Sweat, Sweat, Sweat. If that was improvised it was world-class. The show develops along the lines suggested by the crowd and a number of hit musicals are parodied. The audience, I suspect, enjoyed this more than me. The

Deborah Ross

All from nothing

Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years stars Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as a long married couple whose relationship is disturbed by a letter relating to his first girlfriend, a German who died in the Swiss alps 50 years earlier. Aside from that, not much happens. A shopping trip to Norwich is about as exciting as it gets, on the action front. But this is one of those ‘inaction films’, as I call them, in which nothing happens, but everything happens; it is simple yet absorbingly profound. And it will resonate. It will resonate afterwards and it will resonate the next day and it will resonate the day after that. In fact

Ismene Brown

Martian moves

Every August when London dims, Edinburgh calls, promising nothing less than ‘the greats of the arts’ at the International Festival. As if this beautiful, haunting city wasn’t enough enticement, I always pack high expectations for the EdFest, which in the past has delivered some staggeringly good international dance events that commercially biased London could not entertain. Though in recent years things have gone off a bit, this year the ‘great’ box was ticked several times. Israel Galván’s mesmerisingly extraterrestrial flamenco dancing has been seen in London before. But this 110-minute fantasy on the fate of gipsies under Hitler, Lo Real (The Real), built the explosive bebop of his dancing into

James Walton

Will he was

In 2011, the Daily Mail carried a long story about how the Queen’s cousin Prince William of Gloucester, who died in a plane crash aged 30, had been Prince Charles’s boyhood idol. (Our own Prince William, it claimed, was named after him.) In passing, it tactfully informed us that William’s ex-girlfriend Zsuzsi Starkloff ‘no longer wishes to be reminded of her lost love’. Well, the good news is that Zsuzsi has certainly changed her mind since. The following year she gave the Mail an interview describing their relationship in some detail. And on Thursday, she appeared in The Other Prince William: Secret History to tell all over again what Channel

Michael Tanner

Strauss-ful

Richard Strauss’s Daphne is one of the operas he wrote during the excruciatingly long Indian summer of his composing life, where he seems, in one work after another, to be looking for a subject worthy of his skills, and only finding one in Capriccio, his last opera. For that, he and his ideal interpreter Clemens Krauss collaborated on a libretto that, while garrulous, has a real topic to deal with, and handles it with no portentousness or pseudo-depth. None of that can be said about the depressing series of operas he composed in the 1930s, which either have a serious topic to deal with but not the drama or the

Matthew Francis

Gnats

after Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665) Their world is a glass of rainwater. They move up and down through the clearness,    swallowing their way, or hang by their tails from the surface: tiny transparent caterpillars with their bristled segments of body,    horned trophies of head. The glass holds nothing that I can see, but they find matter to eat in it, which pulses through a black thread of gut.    They graze what they breathe, the blank element they dangle in. After some days, I observed their heads to fatten and grow monstrous, the tails    to curl and dwindle. They floated head-up now, like commas, not feeding, yet they were still alive

Thursday

Matt Trueman

The master returns

There’s a scene in 887, Robert Lepage’s latest show, which opened at the Edinburgh International Festival last week, in which the French-Canadian director stands alone in his kitchen, lit up by the glare of his laptop, watching his own obituary. Three beers sit on the work surface and he has a fourth in his hand. As it plays, he tuts, peeved that three decades of visionary theatre merit merely two minutes of screen time — inaccurate, at that. Even if his reputation has waned in recent years, Lepage is still considered one of the world’s great theatremakers. A slashie before slashies were slashies, he writes, directs and designs his shows

Martin Gayford

French connection | 20 August 2015

Walter Sickert was fluid in both his art and his personality: changeable in style and technique, mutable in appearance — now dressing as a French fisherman, now as a dandy, next shaving his head — and even in name (for a while he styled himself Richard, not Walter, Sickert). All of which makes his long artistic association with the seaside resort of Dieppe apt in more ways than one. This is the theme of an excellent exhibition at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. A century ago Dieppe was a very Sickertian place. In ancestry and artistic attitudes, Sickert was an exemplary cosmopolitan. His father was Danish-German; his mother the illegitimate daughter

Polly Walshe

Hills

As soon as you stop and rest you see more hills ahead, Great chains of hills to some improbable horizon. Will it always be like this? you ask yourself. Don’t let the hills tower over you, Don’t let their shadows creep before mid-afternoon And when they come, savour the blue. Enjoy the flatness of the land you’re on, lend it your weight And don’t look up too high; Ideally don’t lift your head at all, look straight. Remember, you are not being cowardly or slack, You have worked and now deserve to rest. Just think: no hills, no flat, Or, if you prefer, regard them as clouds, those hills, Great