Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Mark Mason

Hacking Trial: the movie

We may have had the verdicts and the sentences in the hacking trial, but the biggest question remains unanswered: who’s going to play everyone in the movie? There’s one clear and obvious frontrunner for the part of Rebekah Brooks: Bonnie Langford. Sadly, however, Ms Langford has heavy panto commitments and cannot be released for filming. So we’ll have to make do with a B-list purveyor of ginge instead – Nicole Kidman, perhaps, or Julianne Moore. (Cate Blanchett might have got a look-in if we’d avoided the temptation to base everything on the hair, but Brooks herself never did so why should we?) Andy Coulson should be played by Ewan McGregor,

Thursday

Ariane Bankes

‘I would find myself forging my own work’: Quentin Blake on how he came to found the House of Illustration

The illustrator Quentin Blake is uncannily like one of his own creations: tousled, bright-eyed, quizzical, and apologetic about his summer cold. He greeted me warmly and conducted me down a dimly lit hallway into his lair, a studio giving on to a leafy London square, piled high with the tools of his trade: papers teetering on plan chests, jars of brushes, palettes of paints, toppling books — all the shambolic clutter of a busy artist’s life and work. I was there to find out about the eagerly anticipated House of Illustration, which opened this week in the old railwaymen’s house on Granary Square, that ineffably cool destination north of King’s

Andrew Lambirth

Charles Hadcock – taking on the age of speculation with sculpture in the City

As the boundary between auction house and art dealer blurs yet further, with auctioneers acting increasingly by private treaty as well as taking over commercial galleries, and as West End gallery space becomes ever more expensive, alternative exhibiting venues are being sought with growing urgency. One solution is to move further into corporate territory, and Charles Hadcock (born 1965) is currently doing just that with an exhibition of his latest sculptures in the foyer of 60 Threadneedle Street in the City. There are a number of Hadcock’s monumental organic-abstract sculptures already on permanent display in London, from Canary Wharf to Chiswick Mall (his twisting, leaping forms are among the few

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Seeing London afresh, one bridge at a time

Bridges aren’t necessarily something you think of as being beautiful, particularly if you consider them primarily as the means to cross a river, rather than as works of art. London, however, has always been famous for its bridges, many of which are architectural marvels. From medieval London Bridge, piled high with shops and houses, to the gothic beauty of Tower Bridge, their variety is one of their most interesting assets. The capital has built itself up around the river over thousands of years, and its bridges offer contrasting viewpoints of the city. This is all emphasised in Bridge at the Museum of London Docklands (until 2 November).  It is one

Kate Chisholm

Why I’m switching to Danish radio

Out there in the great ether there’s a whole new world of radio beyond the stations of the BBC and the FM dial. This week I found myself listening to a programme in Danish. I know. It sounds mad. But there I was glued to my computer screen reading the English subtitles while I listened to Stig and his helpers chatting away in Danish as they fitted him with a new set of teeth. Stig’s Teeth (produced by Kim Hansen and Rikke Houd) was a runner-up in this year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest, which for the first time had an audio category. Doc/Fest was set up to celebrate the art of making

James Walton

The Honourable Woman could have done with some help from an overpaid executive in a suit

BBC2’s The Honourable Woman (Thursday) began with a rather portentous voice-over bringing us the unsurprising news that ‘We all have secrets. We all tell lies just to keep them from each other and …pause to indicate psychological profundity …from ourselves.’ Luckily for the viewer, this was accompanied by the sight of man in a restaurant being stabbed to death by a waiter in front of his young son and daughter. As it turned out, this would set the tone for much of what followed — an hour of drama that combined memorable set-pieces with slightly too transparent an insistence on its own significance. Meanwhile, we cut to 29 years later

Michael Tanner

Opera North’s Götterdämerung is astounding (nearly)

It seems a very short time since I interviewed Richard Farnes about Opera North’s planned Ring cycle, the dramas to be done one a year, semi-staged in an idiosyncratic way. In fact, it is four years, and now the complete cycle has been performed to universal acclaim, with the loudest cheers going to the conducting and the stupendous playing by the orchestra of Opera North, with some reinforcements — all six harps, and so on. Farnes explained to me in the interview that he was studying the Ring, with which he had previously had no professional connection. I jumped up and down with envy and excitement, but it was clear

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Fashion Victim – the Musical!: daft camp with a warm heart

Fashion Victim — the Musical!. There’s a title that’s been waiting to be used for ages. The Cinema Museum is a frumpy warehouse, tucked away in a Kennington backwater, crammed with big-screen memorabilia. A cobwebby salon fitted with a catwalk serves as the theatre. Charmingly camp Carl Mullaney kicks things off by introducing the cast as if they’re already Hollywood legends. Which they are. In their heads. The storyline is eccentric and a little out of step with the world it seeks to mock. A Canadian wannabe, Mimi Steel, descends on London determined to become a superstar. She seduces a Parisian hunk, Cedric Chevalier, whose list of contacts is sufficiently

Thursday

Matthew Stadlen

John Bishop interview: ‘My dream was to be Steven Gerrard, but he got there first’

John Bishop doesn’t just tell funny stories. He also tells the sort of life story that makes you sit up and listen. He grew up on a council estate outside Liverpool and, at the age of six, visited his father in prison. By the time he was in his mid-thirties he was working in middle management at a pharmaceutical company, had three children and was going through a divorce. Today he sells out 15,000-seat arenas, is still married to his wife and no longer works in middle management. It was a Monday night and Bishop was looking for something to do. His friends were tired of him ‘crying into his

Andrew Lambirth

Oceans and forests in kaleidoscopic flow – discovering Keith Grant

For decades I’ve been aware of the work of Keith Grant (born 1930), but it is only in recent years that I have come to know it at all well. During that time both the style and the subject of his paintings have undergone a series of remarkable revolutions, as he determined not to rest on his laurels, but to explore the fundamentals of his approach and interests. You don’t often see an artist doing this, particularly one over the age of 80, when an ‘everything goes’ Old Age Style is a more common development. Through his radical questioning of precepts, Grant has pioneered what might be called (somewhat paradoxically)

Peter Hoskin

A comic drawn by Bob Monkhouse in which a superhero battles giant penises? Yes, it’s all here

Fwoooosh! That, were someone to write a strip about it, would be the sound of a thousand comic books going up in flames. They used to do that, you know; burn comics. It was mostly in America, in the late 1940s, after these DayGlo fictions, with their monsters and superheroes and suggestive curves, were declared bad for children’s health. But it spread to Britain too. Parents and teachers would search drawers and desks. Any comics they found would be gathered in small piles outside. A responsible adult would pull out some matches. And then, like I said: fwoooosh! Of course, comics are now treated with greater respect. Whether it’s the

Hugo Shirley

Manon Lescaut: Puccini’s Anna Nicole?

This season has already seen Manon Lescaut appear in several different operatic guises across the UK, but it was Covent Garden’s new production of Puccini’s version (its first staging of it in three decades) that was the hottest ticket of all. The Latvian soprano Kristine Opolais and the superstar tenor Jonas Kaufmann were tackling the roles of the lovers, Manon and Des Grieux, for the first time. Antonio Pappano, in the repertoire where he most reliably excels, was in the pit. In an introductory talk before the production opened, the conductor tentatively drew a comparison between Puccini’s first major success and Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole, which opens the Royal Opera’s

Deborah Ross

Walking on Sunshine: the feel-ennui musical of the year

As far as ‘jukebox films’ go, Mamma Mia! was a riot, Sunshine on Leith was tolerable, just about, while Walking on Sunshine is a step too far and brings the genre to its knees.It’s being billed as ‘the feel-good musical of the year’ although, bereft of a single original idea, ‘the feel-ennui musical of the year’ may be the better fit. Also, ‘I-feel-really-really-bored-and-quite-insulted-and-also-rather-repulsed-and-I-keep-checking-my-watch-in-the-hope-it-will-be-over-soon’ would cover it quite adequately. Set to 1980s hits (‘Holiday’; ‘Don’t You Want Me’; ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’, etc.), it’s as if the screenwriter (Joshua St Johnston, who should be ashamed) and the directors (Max Giwa and Dania Pasquini; ditto) looked at Mamma Mia! and

Giannandrea Poesio

A swan to die for at Sadler’s Wells

Swans, swans, more swans. If the lifespan of a dance critic were calculated by the number of performances of Swan Lake attended, I’d be a few centuries old. Obviously, the list includes many revisions and re-creations of this quintessential ballet, which is the second most revisited in history after The Rite of Spring. In her 2010 take on the 1890 classic, Johannesburg-born Dada Masilo uses a striking combination of choreographic genres and a politically dense storyline. Those who have seen scores of Swan Lake know that the ‘gay’ slant is not new. Long before Matthew Bourne’s celebrated version, there had been at least 20 productions in which Prince Siegfried’s love

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Looking for a Game of Thrones substitute? Vikings is the closest you’ll get – but it ain’t close

Did you know that the 8th-century Kingdom of Northumbria was the epicentre of an international exotic reptile trade? I only discovered this myself from watching episode six of Vikings (History Channel, Tuesday) and being introduced to the snake-pit maintained by King Aelle. What particularly impressed me were not just the variety of pythons and boas at the bottom of the pit but also their excellent state of health. Somehow, the Northumbrians must have adventured as far afield as Africa, South America and Asia, captured the snakes, then learned to maintain them in optimal conditions, perhaps by inventing some early form of electricity to power the infrared lamps in their glass

Kate Chisholm

The gardener-soldiers of the First World War

First, a confession. Even an ardent radio addict can enjoy a fortnight away from the airwaves, disconnected, switched off, unlistening. On return even the programmes that are usually ignored because they’ve become so familiar catch your attention. I grew up with Gardeners’ Question Time as a regular weekly slot on Sunday afternoons, snooze time for my overworked Dad, but stopped listening after the great schism of 1994, when the entire panel abandoned the BBC and moved over to the new Classic FM station because they didn’t like the way the BBC was handing over its production to an independent company. The illusion that the programme was a bit otherworldly, not

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Has the rake progressed?

Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress has been a rich resource for artists. Film-makers recognise his modern moral subjects as an ancestor to the storyboard. But in this age of mass media can the format still hold its own and tell us something about ourselves? A new exhibition at the Foundling Museum (until 7 September) suggests so. The show is titled Progress — but don’t come expecting happy endings. Only Yinka Shonibare gives us a relatively light ending, in that the protagonist does not end up mad, bad or lying in a drain. His photographic series, Diary of a Victorian Dandy, refuses to moralise and instead toys theatrically with race, colonialism and

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Mark Benton’s Hobson spares us nothing in his journey from rooftop to gutter

Nice one, Roy. Across the West End secret toasts are being drunk to the England supremo for his exquisitely crafted belly flop in Brazil. A decent run by our boys in the World Cup has the potential to put a nasty dent in the box-office takings. As a welcome home present the lads deserve free tickets to Hobson’s Choice at the Open Air Theatre. The play is one of those dependable classics that directors don’t entirely trust. Few can resist the temptation to give it a tweak or stick it in a time machine. The storyline has the simplicity and boldness of a fairy tale. Hobson, a despotic widower, forces

Tessa Lang

Spoken For

What I want to tell you is I can dream with my eyes wide open, like riding a bicycle without hands down a tree-lined road, weaving in and out of shadow. What I count as treasure is a robin’s nest neatly cached in a corner of my windowbox, a tight squirm of five hatchlings, mum cheeping menaces nearby. What I long for is more than a memory of sharing a skiff tied out of river drift, feeding Pimm’s salad from an   upturned cup to pairs of paddling ducks, with one eye on the fruit and one on   each other.

Wednesday

Jack Wakefield

The next head of the National Gallery will be…

Nick Penny announced that he is stepping down as head of the National Gallery. Next door, at the National Portrait Gallery, Sandy Nairne also announced that he is leaving. Could he be after the job at the NG? Nick Penny’s predecessor, Charles Saumarez Smith, came from the NPG but his lack of knowledge about the NG collection is said to have led to an internal curatorial mutiny. Sandy Nairne could also be said to lack the knowledge of the collection necessary to do the job well. Furthermore, he is not currently popular with lovers of the gallery, some of whom believe that his dogged pursuit of the overpriced Van Dyck self portrait – an attractive work of so-so