Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Pádraig Belton

Postcard from Ukraine – meet the artists in exile from the People’s Republic of Donetsk

It was Orthodox Trinity Sunday when Luba Michailova received word that separatists would soon occupy the premises of the Donetsk art centre she founded. She was in Kiev at the time, and recalls now that her first response was religious: ‘Any difficulties in life you get, it’s for your good, and for testing you.’ The following morning, at 8 o’clock, several staff were at work cleaning when 15 men in balaclavas appeared, firing Kalashnikovs into the air. Michailova tells me, ‘So when it happened, I knew it would happen, but I never thought it would be so painful.’ Donetsk now is in the hands of the masked separatists who brought

Thursday

Hermione Eyre

Mike Leigh interview: ‘A guy in the Guardian wants to sue me for defamation of Ruskin!’

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/apollomagazine/Apollo_final.mp3″ title=”Tom Marks, editor of Apollo magazine, talks to Mike Leigh”] Listen [/audioplayer]Mike Leigh is in a cheerfully bullish mood when I meet him at the Soho Hotel. ‘Have you read today’s Guardian?’ Dammit — I should have seen that coming. ‘A guy in G2 would like to sue me for defamation of Ruskin!’ He seems almost pleased. His characterisation of the great critic as silly and effete in his new film, Mr Turner, does seem a little ungenerous. Ruskin did more for Turner than anyone. ‘That’s true,’ says Leigh. ‘Working with the brilliant young actor Joshua McGuire, I started to think how Ruskin was incredibly spoiled and cosseted

William Cook

Tate Modern’s latest show feels like it’s from another planet

‘Some day we shall no longer need pictures: we shall just be happy.’ — Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, 1966 Who says Germans have no sense of humour? OK, so their writers tend to be a pretty gloomy bunch — but like loads of other German artists, from Otto Dix to Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke’s paintings are illuminated by a dry, mordant wit. It’s encapsulated in an early doodle called ‘Mona Lisa’ (1963), which hangs near the entrance to this hugely enjoyable retrospective — the first comprehensive survey of his eclectic, eccentric work. ‘Original value $1,000,000,’ reads the handwritten caption. ‘Now only 99c, including frame.’ That Polke’s pictures now sell

Peter Scupham

Monsieur Clermont

That August, in La France Profonde, the frelons were out in force, honey-gold cruisers of late summer air, their poigniards sheathed. The heat lapped at a sticky terrace table, our observation post for village fictions — Jean, his bench-saw snoring to the hornets, a girl scraping her pans out to the hens, that old man in his garden chair — le petit vieux. We smiled, as if our smiles could throw a tremulous lifeline to one who seemed to have no need of saving, a kindly ghost, a dream of summer silence, the gentle answer to our drift of questions. That last day, when Jean came for the keys —

Kate Chisholm

Can Radio 3 escape the digital squeeze?

The new controller of Radio 3 has at last been appointed. Alan Davey (not to be confused with the former bassist from Hawkwind) comes to the BBC from the Arts Council and a career in the Civil Service. This will be his first job in broadcasting, and will be no small challenge. These are tough times for Radio 3, squeezed between the commercial charms of Classic FM and the trendy allure of BBC’s 6 Music, and, worryingly, in the last quarter its audience numbers went below 1.9 million for the first time since 2010. The BBC’s home of classical music and ‘culture’ is often criticised for being too off-putting, too

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Fellow saddoes rejoice: BBC4 has made a comedy-drama about metal detecting

Detectorists (BBC4) is a sad git’s niche comedy that would never have been commissioned if it hadn’t been written and directed by Mackenzie Crook (who sort of counts as a Hollywood star, now, because after making his name in The Office he went on to appear in the Pirates of the Caribbean series). But I’m glad it was because I’m one of the sad gits it’s targeting: desperate blokes who spend their every spare weekend at this time of year scouring ploughed fields for non-existent treasure. We’re a fairly eclectic bunch, we detectorists. Simon Heffer is one; Rolling Stone Bill Wyman is another; so, too, is Mackenzie Crook himself, which

Deborah Ross

The Best of Me is more of a sleepie than a weepie – especially when our old friend No Sexual Chemistry makes an appearance

Take tissues to The Best of Me, I’d read, as it’s such a weepie, so I took tissues, being a weeper at weepies — I still dab my eyes whenever I even think about War Horse — but it was rubbish advice. You don’t need tissues for this film. Instead, you need to line up several triple espressos, as many cans of Red Bull as you can reasonably manage, two matchsticks (one for each eye, obviously), replacement matchsticks for when the weight of your eyelids proves too much and they snap, plus a small hammer to knock yourself in the side of your head when you find yourself bored out

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Donmar’s Henry IV: Phyllida Lloyd has nothing but contempt for her audience

The age of ‘ladies first’ is back. Phyllida Lloyd reserves all the roles for the weaker sex, as I imagine she thinks of them, in this hybrid play assembled from Henry IV (i) and (ii). It’s a twin-layered production that poses as a piece of am-dram mounted in a women’s nick. The Donmar has been refitted, in and out, to resemble a prison. (Quite an expense. And there’s no interval either, so there are no bar profits to subsidise the fancy-dress party.) As we arrive we’re barked at by ushers attired as screws who harry and scold us into our plastic seats. Nothing surprising in this uppity aggression. Contempt for

Ismene Brown

Matthew Bourne’s Lord of the Flies: when boys turn feral

GCSE Eng Lit pupils are doing well from dance this season with two set books told in the medium of dance, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and even Dylan Thomas gets a look in. As the two stories have similar dynamics and dramatic themes, it was fascinating to see both in a single week and witness how mightily one succeeded and the other did not. Matthew Bourne is so famed as a rewriter of classical ballets that one might underestimate the boldness of imagination that underlies them. He showed his full daring in his stylish and sinisterly amusing riff on amoral Sixties London, Play

Anna Picard

Opera North’s Coronation of Poppea: a premium-rate sex-line of an opera

Virtue, hide thyself! The Coronation of Poppea opens with a warning and closes with a love duet for a concubine and a psychopath, their union celebrated in sinuous melismas over a blameless passacaglia. First performed in 1643, Monteverdi’s final opera is all about talking dirty and talking tough. Seductions, threats, boasts and betrayals are snapped, spat, stuttered and smooched over harmonies that pinch and squeeze like a premium-rate sex-line. Does it work in English? Yes and no. There are casualties in Tim Albery’s slick, vicious Opera North production, some historical, some poetic, some musical. In Laurence Cummings’s hybrid edition, drawn from the Venice and Naples scores, transpositions and cuts proliferate.

Elaine Feinstein

The Irony of Wislava Szymborska

In London, I remember the indignation.    Surely the Nobel prize should have gone to Zbigniew Herbert, the Polish poet we loved    – dissident, charismatic, much translated – not some woman we had barely heard of? I thought Polish poems should resemble films of Wajda,    charged with the electricity of war. Szymborska’s poetry held no such glamour.    She had not played a part in the Resistance. The poems were almost English in their texture, a bit like Larkin – though serene    where he was glum – never expecting to fill a football stadium.    Her voice was quieter than Cassandra’s – but equally we did not listen to her. Her vision lay

Tuesday

Anne Jolis

Bored bores boring – critics love the Dull Men’s calendar

The Telegraph has a nice photo gallery featuring the specimens of the 2015 Dull Men of Great Britain calendar, which our own Dot Wordsworth plans to give her husband for Christmas: ‘I had thought that dull, in reference to people, was a metaphor from dull in the sense of ‘unshiny’. ‘Dieu de batailles!’ as the Constable of France in Henry V exclaims of the English, ‘where have they this mettle?/ Is not their climate foggy, raw and dull?’ But I was quite wrong, as so often. It started off (in the form dol) meaning ‘foolish’. In English almost as old as you could care to have it, the author of The

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Without sci-fi, there would be no cinema

Do you know what’s hateful? The snobbery that film fans have to contend with. There’s the ‘it’s only a movie’ snobbery, by which cinema is suitable only for wastrels and dogs. And there’s the ‘if it ain’t Danish and silent, then it ain’t no good’ snobbery. Proponents of both should spend less time blowing conjecture through their Sobranie smoke, and more time watching the Hollywood films of John Ford, Nicholas Ray and William A. Wellman. Now that’s off my chest, here’s one way in which cinema is relatively free from snobbery. For decades, novelists and literary types have wrangled over whether science fiction books are anything more than — to

Andrew Lambirth

All my doubts about Anselm Kiefer are blown away by his Royal Academy show

In the Royal Academy’s courtyard are two large glass cases or vitrines containing model submarines. In one the sea has receded, dried up, and the tin fish are stranded on the cracked mud of the ocean floor. In the other, the elegantly rusted subs are mostly suspended like sharks in an aquarium: a fleet in fact, all pointed in the same direction. These works are the visitor’s first sight of the vast and glorious exhibition by Anselm Kiefer (born Germany, 1945) currently occupying the main galleries of Burlington House, and they are apparently related to his interest in the Russian poet and futurist Velimir Khlebnikov. At once we are confronted

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Were the cast of the Old Vic’s Electra clothed by Oxfam?

First, a bit of background. Conquering Agamemnon slew his daughter, Iphigenia, in return for a fair wind to Troy. This rather miffed his wife, Clytemnestra, who bashed his head in with an axe when he came swaggering home. Her retribution laid a religious duty on their son, Orestes, to avenge his dad by slaying his mum, which, in its turn, put a bit of a crimp in his social calendar. Sophocles’ play opens during a lull in the butchery. Orestes, now in exile, throws Clytemnestra off her guard by releasing details of his death. The details consist of an urn containing his ashes delivered to the palace. The arrival of

Deborah Ross

Effie Gray can effie off

Effie Gray, which has been written by Emma Thompson and recounts the doomed marriage of Victorian art critic John Ruskin to his teenage bride (he refused to consummate it), has a blissful cast. It stars Dakota Fanning, Ms Thompson herself, plus Julie Walters, David Suchet, Greg Wise, James Fox, Derek Jacobi and Robbie Coltrane. So it is period drama heaven, in this respect. It’s a cast you could watch all day, whatever, which is handy, as this is probably quite dull otherwise. It is adequate. It does the job. It gets us from A to B. But it feels as if it is missing something crucial, and I don’t just

Digby Warde-Aldam

Ukip’s logo is quite successful – in communicating a spirit of gung-ho crapness

Now that the conference season is over, we can compare not just the party policies, but their logos too. Last week’s Tory conference taught us the patriotic adaptation of their tree — now draped in the Union Flag — doesn’t work any better than the original green-tree symbol. The old symbol demonstrated Conservative values as imagined by the Innocent smoothie design team. It said ‘Tradition’. It said ‘the Environment’. It said, ‘Look what I can do with my crayons, Mummy.’ Stephen Bayley, design expert and Spectator colleague, was one of the hapless advisers tasked with picking the old logo. ‘Not so great,’ he told me, ‘but you should have seen

James Walton

We’re great and baboons are losers: this week’s lesson from Brian Cox

Anybody feeling a bit depressed about the shortcomings of humanity could do worse than watch Brian Cox’s new series Human Universe (BBC2, Tuesday) — which, judging from the first episode, is all about how great we are. Early on, Cox was shown hanging out, Attenborough-like, with some gelada baboons in the highlands of Ethiopia. They may share a common ancestor with us; by primate standards, they may have unusually complicated social structures and communication skills. Yet, as Cox rather gleefully pointed out, ‘They’re nowhere near as sophisticated as us.’ No wonder that while these losers are picking fleas off each other in a remote corner of Africa, we’ve not only

Kate Chisholm

Mary Beard vs Jeremy Paxman

‘Did you find it a good read?’ asked Harrriett Gilbert. An incredibly long drawn-out sigh from Mr Paxman. ‘I think it’s really unsatisfactory,’ he at last replied. ‘But Jeremy,’ retorted Professor Beard, ‘I don’t think you’ve read it carefully enough.’ The eminent classicist from Cambridge is not afraid of conflict. She must eat her students for breakfast, loving an argument, which she of course will always win. Mary Beard didn’t just disagree with Paxman but insisted that her way of seeing, her interpretation, was the right one. She and Paxman were Gilbert’s guests on the first of a new series of A Good Read (Radio 4), in which the guests

Hugo Shirley

ENO’s The Girl of the Golden West is irresistibly seductive

Puccini’s La fanciulla del West is, one suspects, one of those works that modern audiences struggle to keep a straight face through. The hero, for a start, decides to call himself Dick Johnson. The piece’s Wild West trappings, long since staled into Hollywood cliché, still seem a strange fit for the operatic stage (it was performed here as The Girl of the Golden West, with Kelley Rourke’s translation delivered in a variety of American accents). The redemptive, into-the-sunset conclusion takes for granted a belief that capitalism in its most primitive, brutal form could leave a group of hardened Gold Rush miners capable of forgiveness. That it might have done, ENO’s