Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

I, Bette Davis

It was called Frankly Speaking and by golly it was. The great screen actress Bette Davis was being interviewed by not one but two men: George Coulouris, with whom she co-starred in Hollywood, and a BBC producer. ‘It’s a little sad for some of us who adore your work that a lot of your best performances have been in fairly trivial films,’ said the producer, Peter Duval-Smith, as if to tempt Davis into dishing the dirt on the directors who made her what she became. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Davis replied, not a woman to be tricked into anything. ‘Who do you think made you a star?’

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Deadly, not dull

Blimey, there has been so much good stuff to watch on telly of late: the Grand National, the Boat Race and the Masters; The Island with Bear Grylls; the final of University Challenge (bravura performance from Caius’s Loveday, though how the winning Cambridge team’s hearts must have sunk when they realised that the public intellectual chosen to present this year’s prize was that literary equivalent of a Dalí melting clock poster on a pretentious fifth former’s bedroom wall — Will Self); and, of course, the first episode of the new season’s Game of Thrones (Sky Atlantic, Monday). I’m assuming you’re all on board with Thrones, now, and that it doesn’t

Deborah Ross

Cold frames

A Little Chaos is a period drama directed by Alan Rickman and starring Kate Winslet as a woman charged to design and build a grand fountain garden for Louis XIV at Versailles. The film is, I noted from the poster, ‘the official film of RHS Gardening Week’, which may or may not be a hotly contested title, I just don’t know. All I can tell you is that it is, in fact, more of a love story than a horticultural story, and while it has occasional pleasing moments, and is lavishly costumed, it manages to do what I do whenever I try my hand at gardening. That is, despite my

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Death by politics

Dead Sheep is a curious dramatic half-breed that examines Geoffrey Howe’s troubled relationship with Margaret Thatcher. Structurally it’s a Mexican bean. It leaps all over the 1980s and it keeps shifting genre from cabaret to tragedy via cheesy political satire. Some actors are impersonators, some are caricaturists, some are neither. James Wilby’s study of Howe avoids his personal mannerisms, the pensive shabbiness, the punctilious, worried eyes, and the soft beguiling purr of his vocal chords. Instead Wilby presents him as a bewildered monk tiptoeing around a lion’s den. Steve Nallon does Mrs Thatcher as a drag-queen which looks pretty odd next to Wilby’s straightforward Howe but Nallon is a master

Alexandra Coghlan

Falling down

This week, some 200 years since Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War’, almost 80 years after Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, and over 50 since Malcolm Browne won a Pulitzer for his photograph of a self-immolating Buddhist monk, the British media found itself questioning whether art should, or even could, ever represent the horrors of recent history. It was a conversation that picked minutely over the ethical responsibilities of an opera based on the events of 9/11 — was it too soon? how would the families feel? would it exploit tragedy for drama? — but one whose ceaseless moral whys and wherefores prevented it ever arriving at the only real artistic question: how? The

Candy Neubert

Turtle

As if a turtle you have laid your eggs in a bowl of sand. Unlike the turtle you sit next to your own heap overlong considering the wondrous thing    you’ve done, the babies wrestling in the gritty dark. And all the while the land cools steadily, a small white light somewhere over    the sea, over the sea out there and finally, deeply and slowly you remember it. You’re setting off now. Here are your    paddles, this is the pale underneath of your shell scraping the pebbles beneath the    moon’s glare. Yourself, one thing alone now. Can    you feel the water’s lift? You are already there.

Paul Deaton

Words

Late afternoon I speak to Mum on the phone; she’s sorting through her past, four hundred or so odd-sized photographs. ‘Well, you won’t want to do it,’ she says, ‘when I’m gone, I won’t leave you that task.’ We switch tack, not from fear, from silent truth, what can’t come back. We talk of mulish rough weather, April squalls, the wind’s choking embrace of a newly dressed willow, bringing it down, its road wreckage near her place. Dad’s death was like that tree. She talks in tangents. Is this what she means?

Duncan Forbes

By Air

Astonishing to think That not so long ago First the Brothers Wright Then Louis Blériot Initiated flight. And strapped into a seat Now we can choose a drink, Tomato juice, red wine, Some music or a film At 30, 000 feet. Remarkable to know That aviation fuel, Once vegetable remains, Comes from the earth as oil And energises planes. Comforting to presume The cabin’s pressurised And instruments of flight Are skilfully devised To navigate the night. Consoling to believe The forces that can heave The weight of this machine Above the ocean waves And alpine mountain scene. Strange to be conscious of The distant sea below And absent sky above

Wednesday

Alexandra Coghlan

Benjamin’s Into The Little Hill is a masterpiece: Speech Acts at Shadwell Opera reviewed

Speech Acts Shadwell Opera, Courtyard Theatre Election time is upon us again. But before we arrive at the main event there are the warm-up acts – televised debates, broadsheet profiles and daytime television interviews – to be endured. Making this political stand-up more bearable are the intelligent heckles coming from the arts. London’s theatres are filled with issue-plays talking about all the topics the politicians aren’t – the housing crisis, NHS, life on the dole – but despite a rich seam of politically-charged works at its disposal (The Marriage of Figaro, Don Carlo, Boris Godunov among them), the main UK opera houses aren’t following suit. Which makes Speech Acts –

Thursday

Ian Thomson

The dreamer

Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was a box-office triumph in Italy in 1960. It made $1.5 million at the box office in three months — more than Gone With the Wind had. ‘It was the making of me,’ said Fellini. It was also the making of Marcello Mastroianni as the screen idol with a curiously impotent sex appeal. No other film captured so memorably the flashbulb glitz of Italy’s postwar ‘economic miracle’ and its consumer boom of Fiat 500s and Gaggia espresso machines. Unsurprisingly, the Vatican objected to the scene where Mastroianni makes love to the Swedish diva Anita Ekberg (who died earlier this year at the age of 83)

Martin Gayford

Light fantastic

The most unusual picture in the exhibition of work by Eric Ravilious at Dulwich Picture Gallery, in terms of subject-matter at least, is entitled ‘Bomb Defusing Equipment’. In other ways — crisp linear precision, a designer’s eye for the melodious arrangement of shapes — it is typical of Ravilious. Characteristic, too, is the way he has given these implements associated with warfare and high explosives an almost jaunty air, shading into melancholy mysteriousness. That’s the Ravilious note, and I must admit I find it irresistible. Ravilious (1903–42) was one of the most beguiling of mid-20th-century British artists. Yet it is still not quite clear what position he has in art

Rupert Myers

James Bond

For fans of the franchise who remain unconvinced by Daniel Craig’s time on her majesty’s secret service, the stories leaking from the production of the latest film Spectre are further evidence that the time has come to hand 007 a glass of scotch and a revolver. Craig’s Bond always had less of an air of an expense-account gentleman spy and more the demeanour of a spornosexual plumber. This is a Bond who’d sooner take photographs of his abs in the bathroom mirror than go bird-watching. Stumbling after the surefooted remake of Casino Royale, there is no disguising the tedious drivel that was Quantum of Solace, nor that Skyfall borrowed heavily

Kate Chisholm

Keeping the faith | 9 April 2015

There was no shortage of Easter music and talks across the BBC networks with a sunrise service on Radio 4 followed by much fuss and fanfare for the ‘live’ relay of Libby Lane’s first Easter sermon as Bishop. A significant milestone for the C of E as women are at last allowed to don mitres and wield a bishop’s crozier. Three, not to be outdone, invited the Revd Lucy Winkett (who had to outride the brouhaha caused by her appointment as the first woman priest at St Paul’s Cathedral) on to Private Passions, where she proved herself an insightful musician and theologian. Her impassioned explanation of the Easter message, the

James Walton

Comics’ trip

Who says British television lacks imagination? You might have thought, for example, that every possible combination of comedian and travel programme had been exhausted long ago. After all, it’s now 26 years since Michael Palin set the trend by following in Phileas Fogg’s footsteps (sort of). In more recent times, we’ve had Stephen Fry going round America in a London taxi, Billy Connolly going round Australia on a Harley-Davidson trike and — perhaps drawing the short straw — Ade Edmondson going round Britain in a caravan. There’s also been Paul Merton in India, Sue Perkins in China, Sean Lock and Jon Richardson in the Deep South and… well, you get

Deborah Ross

All that glitters is not gold

Woman in Gold feels rather like a Jewish version of Philomena as this too is about an older woman seeking justice for what has been stolen from her in the past but, unlike the Jewish version of almost everything, this is not in any way superior, and may even be a dud. It is based on a true story, which is an excellent and fascinating story, but it’s the storytelling that counts, and the storytelling here is not only familiar and pedestrian, but so emotionally manipulative that it doesn’t come with one sentimental ending, but several in quick succession. ‘Oh good, it’s over,’ you will think to yourself, as you

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Ayckbourn again

Experts are concerned that Alan Ayckbourn’s plays may soon face extinction. Fewer than 80 of these precious beasts still exist in their natural habitat, so theatre-goers will be cheered to know that the National Theatre has created a genetically identical replica and released it into the wild. Rules for Living, fashioned by Sam Holcroft from the Acykbourn blueprint, is a bourgeois natter-fest in which bickering couples meet for a fractious Christmas summit. The characters are a bit nice and a bit nasty. Stephen Mangan plays a failed cricket star married to a soak in a frock. They have an only child who suffers from this year’s must-have mental disorder. The

Ismene Brown

Crossing cultures

For an Indian woman to make a dancework about La Bayadère is a promising prospect. This classical ballet of 1877 by Russia’s French-born genius Marius Petipa tells the simple story of an Indian temple dancer — essentially a religious sex slave — whose potential salvation by an amorous young soldier is dashed when he expediently marries the rajah’s daughter. Death and transfiguration ensue in some addictively gorgeous balletic poetry, along with all sorts of improbable exotica to please the tsar’s eye. Londoner Shobana Jeyasingh, born in India, trained as a traditional Bharatanatyam dancer, and is a contemporary dance choreographer of keen intelligence, if sometimes letting her brain get the better

Michael Tanner

Beauty and the bleak

The Ice Break is Michael Tippett’s fourth opera, first produced at Covent Garden in 1977 and rarely produced anywhere since, though there is an excellent recording of it. Its brevity (75 minutes) rather took the wind out of the Royal Opera’s sails, since they had envisaged a full evening’s piece. So, I imagine, did its wackiness, though more extreme things in that line were to follow from Tippett. There are numerous ingredients in The Ice Break, but it gives the impression that its composer was so fascinated by all of them that he restlessly moves from one to another, leaving his audience to see whether they can make sense of

Clive James

Too Many Poets

Too many poets pack a line with thought But melody refuses to take wing. It’s not that meaning has been dearly bought: It has been stifled, by a hankering For portent, as if music meant too much. Sidney called this a want of inward touch. True poets should walk singing as they weep, As Arnaut Daniel once epitomised; But nothing written will be worth its keep Composed by one who has not realised This to be true, and tested his own song On others, seeing if they listen long Or turn away. Verse is a public act To that extent at least. As cruel as love, The wished-for gift declines

Wednesday

Jack Wakefield

Who will be the next head of the British Museum? Here are the runners and riders

The hunt for the next head of the British Museum is not going to be easy. The director needs to have the confidence of his trustees, to inspire his curators and to convince the government to maintain the grant. In all of those areas MacGregor has been exceptional. The Standard reports that the internal candidate Joanna Mackle, deputy director, is unlikely to put her name forward. So who’s name is in the ring? One of the most prestigious jobs in the museum world, it suffers a handicap when it comes to salary. As such it is extremely unlikely that the most obvious candidate Thomas Campbell, currently director of the Metropolitan Museum (salary over $1m) could be persuaded to