Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Catherine Barnett

Kisses of Virtuous Renunciation

He was checked in under the name Immortality, Mr Immortality — but on the vanity were the little capsules of mouthwash and shampoo, a packet with needle and thread, and letters from his father, who was dead. (And books to write, and letters of instruction, to have read.) He’s a valued guest at the Clarion, at the Shelburn, like others in this inferno though I miss him most. ‘Time is a monster,’ he said before calling down for another hour. He had to spell his name to the woman at the front desk. ‘I am mortality,’ I heard him say between kisses I remember to this day.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Has-Bean

Richard Bean, the country’s most bankable playwright, knocks out a new script every four months. Thanks to the success of One Man, Two Guvnors, he’s not short of houses ready to stage his work. And the hunt for treasure in his back-catalogue continues. The Mentalists, from 2002, stars Stephen Merchant (co-writer of The Office) and Steffan Rhodri as two needy chums pursuing a whimsical dream in a cheap hotel room. Chum One is a hairdresser who makes porn films on the side. Chum Two is a salesman who dreams of founding a rebel colony overseas. Chum One films Chum Two delivering a sermon that will kick-start the revolution. That, ladies

Alexandra Coghlan

Salieri’s revenge

Magical transformations are a commonplace of opera. We see our heroes turned into animals, trees, statues; witness wild beasts turned suddenly gentle and even the dead brought back to life, with scarcely a raised eyebrow. But opera’s greatest metamorphosis — and one still less remarked upon — is the annual British phenomenon of country house opera. Auditoriums are conjured up in fields and gardens, ruins filled with light and life, and rural silence is exchanged for cosmopolitan croonings and tunings. With little more than a generator and a couple of portaloos, companies like Longborough, Bampton, Iford and Garsington serve up serious music season after season, taking risks the major metropolitan

Deborah Ross

Sweeney Plod

The Legend of Barney Thomson is the directorial debut of actor Robert Carlyle, and it’s one of those black comedies about a serial killer in which, as the bodies pile up, plausibility edges closer and closer to the window until it flies out completely. (No. Wait. Come back! I’ll massage your feet!) This wouldn’t, in fact, matter at all if there were something else to hang onto; if the characters were involving, or the story was told with wit, zip and panache, but it just monotonously drones on. The central figure is a barber so I guess you could say this is Sweeney Plod rather than, you know, that other

Kate Chisholm

Space case

The idea that Radio 2 should be sold off by the BBC to a commercial rival is as nonsensical as BBC1 losing Strictly Come Dancing, or Heinz giving up on baked beans. The station, in its former incarnation as the Light Programme, was a core product of the corporation, the home of the Palm Court Light Orchestra, Kenneth Williams, Semprini, Billy Cotton, Sid James and Edmundo Ros. It gave us ‘light’ entertainment — music to dance, exercise or sing to, comedy shows, magazine programmes, dramas of ordinary life rather than Greek tragedy. The comedy programmes on 2 were siphoned off long ago to 4 and then 4 Extra, as were

James Walton

Institutional feminism

Some revelations, it seems, are capable of being endlessly repeated while still remaining revelations. Think of all the books, articles and TV programmes over the years which have ‘revealed’ that the Victorians weren’t, after all, mad sexual repressives who had a fit of the vapours at the sight of an uncovered table-leg; or that the 1950s were a lot more fun than the drab conformist decade of popular imagination. Or that Rudyard Kipling was by no means a straightforward imperialist. (Feel free to add examples of your own.) And yet, no matter how many times these things are pointed out, it’s always with a proud flourish — as if what’s

Sarah Wardle

Amanda

When I didn’t recognise the number and saw the text with kisses, but no name — ‘Thinking of you: they’re playing Native New Yorker’, I racked my brain and was filled with shame. Was this the divorced father and one-night stand, or was this someone who had heard me sing in hospital when I was bored out of my mind, or was this a teenage flame rekindling? And then I was relieved to realise it was not a blast from the past, but you who heard me play that record in the Seventies when we were small, who shared with me and knew my childhood home, pets, dad and mum,

Tuesday

Thursday

Philip Clark

The London ear

The opening bars of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony (1914) are scooped out from the gloopy bedrock of the city. Vaughan Williams was dredging through the same mud, silt, slime and ooze as those scene-setting paragraphs of Our Mutual Friend (1865), where Charles Dickens shows that the real glue binding his book together will be the River Thames. Dickens’s famed ‘boat of dirty and disreputable appearance’ berths Our Mutual Friend in the earth and experience of London. Similarly, Vaughan Williams’s cellos and double basses, which launch his symphony, plod out from the sludge of the river. But, by the time his bucolic Scherzo waddles into view, you could be

Martin Gayford

Scholarship and folly

It has often been related how, towards the end of his long life, a critical barb got under J.M.W. Turner’s skin. ‘Soapsuds and whitewash!’ Turner apparently snorted, repeatedly, to himself. However, until now no one has traced the perpetrator of this memorably tart comment. Now we know. It was the scandalous, super-rich patron and novelist William Beckford, who made it in 1831 while taking a visitor on a tour of his collection. They paused in front of a watercolour of Fonthill Abbey, Beckford’s erstwhile house — and folly — that Turner had painted some three decades earlier. The guest remarked that the painter did not paint like that these days.

Mark Mason

National Busking Day is an insult to real buskers

This Saturday is National Busking Day, a series of events across the country proving that Britain’s arts establishment just don’t get it. The whole point of busking is that it’s free-spirited, independent, individualistic – exactly the sort of enterprise that doesn’t need or want a national day. ‘Let’s take something that lots of people do spontaneously, without any wish to be organised,’ goes the thinking, ‘and then organise it.’ First prize for Not Getting It goes to Gareth Powell of London Underground. ‘Busking on the Underground network,’ he says, ‘has been a rite of passage for London musicians for generations.’ Yes, Gareth – one that they pursued in spite of

James Walton

Serial thriller

For keen students of China, this week’s television provided yet more proof that Deng Xiaoping’s decision to open the country to the West has had consequences that he’s unlikely to have foreseen. He probably couldn’t have predicted, for example, that one day a former Bond girl would travel the country finding almost everything ‘thrilling’. Or that a bloke who made his name in a British makeover show would proudly explain to a group of Chinese journalists that ‘I’ve got the sunglasses, I’ve got the big hair — all [sic] of these things are what you’d expect from a celebrity.’ The Bond girl in question was Joanna Lumley, who began Joanna

Kate Chisholm

Tax return

Make no mistake: the Proms, whose 2015 season was launched last night, would not, could not, exist without the BBC, or the licence fee. Just under half the cost of putting on such an ambitious nightly series of concerts throughout the summer, drawing on orchestras from across the globe, commissioning new work, pulling together programmes that mix popular and safe with little-known and challenging, comes from the sale of tickets, the rest is subsidised by taxpayers. To social-justice campaigners this might seem like an outrage. Why should such an ‘elitist’ series of classical-music concerts, 92 this year, attended by some 300,000 members of the public (a considerable proportion of whom

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Night at the circus

Easy playwright to get on with, Ben Jonson. His world is simple, his tastes endearing. He likes golden-hearted swindlers and unscrupulous servants who outwit their bungling masters. Volpone, the ‘sly fox’ played by Henry Goodman, is a rich Venice merchant without a family who persuades three wealthy rivals that they stand a chance of inheriting his estate. He feigns mortal illness and accepts their tributes, or bribes, from his sickbed while secretly lampooning their folly. This is hardly the most sophisticated hoax but it’s fun to watch the slick, spruce millionaires queuing up to be despoiled of their loot. Trevor Nunn’s up-to-date version skilfully harmonises the Jacobean and the modern.

Geoff Brown

Eastern promise | 16 July 2015

These are nervous times at the opera. When should we expect the gratuitous rape scene? Will the director relocate the action to a Croydon laundrette? Who might be booed, and for how long? With Opera Holland Park’s Lakmé, however, almost any of these diversions might actually be welcome — anything to save us from the tasteful visual torpor that looms over Aylin Bozok’s production like a choking black cloud. Consider the riot of colours embedded in Delibes’ opera. We’re in India in the late 19th century, where officers of the British Raj fly the flag and march to fife and drums. There’s a bustling bazaar and glinting jewellery. Sensuous hues

Deborah Ross

To tell you the truth…

True Story is based on the book True Story, which is itself based on a true story, so there is a lot of truth knocking about, I guess you could say, but absolutely none of it is at all interesting. It sounds as if it will be fascinating, as it’s about the disgraced New York Times reporter Mike Finkel’s relationship with Christian Longo, a man accused of murdering his wife and three children, but it goes absolutely nowhere. At one stage someone says to Finkel about Longo, ‘He doesn’t deserve to have his story told,’ to which Finkel replies, ‘Everyone deserves to have their story told,’ to which I would

Ismene Brown

All you need is love | 16 July 2015

What could induce a grown-up, rational, childless person to go to see the ballet of Cinderella? You’ll expect to cringe at the panto comedy; on the other hand, you do not want to see verismo child-abuse and uglies-baiting. So what’s left for modern eyes? Two things: the Prokofiev score — as magical a charmer as Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker — which plays with the contrasts of grotesque and beautiful, misery and hopefulness, and glistens with fairy dust in the right places. The overture melts the heart, the waltzes make you want to dance up into the sky. The sweetness of the final bars does that nearly impossible thing in music of expressing

Sarah Wardle

Growing Up

This morning, as I commuted through Hendon Central, I remembered you telling me you saw that day’s newspaper there on a board, announcing the king had died, how life stalled for a moment. This evening I got the call I’d long dreaded, telling me you were dead. ‘We are not a grandchild,’ Thatcher might have said. My kingdom has lost its last queen. I grow tall into the footsteps of each late centenarian grandmother, may start taking the Telegraph. I cry, then hear both of them laugh with an obstinacy that skipped a generation, realise I’m now their only resurrection, have crossed the chess board, no longer a pawn.

Thursday

Jasper Rees

‘Shocking is too easy’

Brace yourself, reader. This is an account of a conversation with the director of the yucky trailer-trash comedy Pink Flamingos. Perhaps you won’t recall the final scene in which the overweight transvestite Divine munches on an actual dog turd. No, it wasn’t faked — this was in 1972 and there was no budget for trickery. ‘Because we were on pot all the time it didn’t seem that strange,’ John Waters recalls. ‘It’s lost today, but it was a political commentary. At the time Deep Throat had just come out; pornography had become legal. What’s left? What can’t you do?’ Waters is celebrated for his pencil moustache and transgressive movies, which

Martin Gayford

Curiouser and curiouser | 9 July 2015

Art is not jewellery. Its value does not reside in the price of the materials from which it is made. After all, the cost of the pigment, oil and cloth that made up a Rembrandt was negligible. It’s what he did with them that counts. On the other hand, spectacular works of art can be made from gold and gems, as is clear from some — if not all — of the items displayed in the new installation of the Waddesdon Bequest at the British Museum. ‘As soon as the swallows made their appearance,’ Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild wrote in his memoir Bric-à-Brac, ‘my father’s curiosities were packed and stored