Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Sorry, Gillian Anderson, but you’ve caught the wrong Streetcar

Streetcar. One word is enough to conjure an icon. Tennessee Williams’s finest play, written in the 1940s, is about a fallen woman trying to salvage her reputation before madness overwhelms her. All its horror and tension rely on the Victorian code that required a single woman to appear morally pure or to face ruin in the marriage market. The 1960s destroyed those conventions and this modern-day version feels like a lawsuit being pursued by a stammering counsel interrogating a corpse. The questions are baffling, the answers non-existent. Director Benedict Andrews trusts his own instincts far too much and the author’s not at all. To evoke the lush, exotic heat of

Giannandrea Poesio

Romeo and Juliet: a Mariinsky masterclass

According to some textbooks, one thing the fathers of Soviet choreography hastened to remove from ballet was that awkward-looking language of gestures generally referred to as ‘ballet mime’. Which explains why most Russian versions of Swan Lake lack familiar mime dialogues. And when it came to creating new ballets that required silent acting, such as Lavrosky’s 1940 Romeo and Juliet, the early Soviet dance-makers opted for a more naturalistic form of expressive gestural solutions. Yet, as is often the case with theatre practices, what was once innovative and naturalistic now looks as trite as 19th-century pantomime. Whether the problem comes down to training new generations of dancers in understanding the

Deborah Ross

Allergic to blockbusters? See Wakolda

Wakolda is not a sunny film for a sunny day, just so you’re aware, but as there is so little else around — August is a hopeless month for films; August is a dumping ground for the sub-par — you are going to have to take that on the chin, bear it as best you can, and while this is not sunny it is, at least, masterfully made. Set in Argentina in 1960, it’s a fictional imagining of how a German doctor insinuates himself on a family, and how that doctor turns out to be Josef Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death’ from the Nazi concentration camps. It’s not a thriller

Hugo Shirley

Jonas Kaufmann’s illness, a muddled production – nothing can stop Bavarian State Opera’s La forza del destino

Rather than brave the boos and the first reprise of Frank Castorf’s half-hearted Ring at Bayreuth, I decided to pay a visit to Munich and catch the last two days of its annual opera festival. Less of a festival, as one usually understands the term, than a ramping-up of activity in the final month or so of its regular season, it mixes new stagings with starrily cast revivals. I caught one of each: a new production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, with Christian Gerhaher in the title role, and a revival of La forza del destino that was rendered a little less starry by the last-minute illness of Jonas Kaufmann — that’s

John Greening

Two Roads

There are the fast people who check their emails hourly, engage with Twitter and multi- task their way through the day. And there are the slow ones who never reply even to your third request, and almost miss meetings and prefer pencil. The first — the fast — will be up to advise the worm, to value the cup, to out-tweet all competitors, whatever. The last (the least hurried), nevertheless, and surprisingly it has to be said, will, as in fact it turns out, succeed just as well, catching what the others were moving so quickly they missed: the prize deep-feeders.

Tuesday

Niru Ratnam

I take my kids to galleries to demonstrate my cultural superiority over the masses

Jake Chapman, one half of the YBA duo the Chapman Brothers, has been rude about taking children to art galleries. He told the Independent that ‘it’s as moronic as a child’ to expect a child to understand complex modern artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko as ‘children are not human yet’. His forthright views have elicited a predictable response. Stephen Deuchar, the director of the Art Fund (who seems to be angry on a regular basis about some latest insult to the noble visual arts), countered on the Today programme that children can indeed appreciate a work of art deeply. Anthony Gormley told the Times that art is there

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Home Front: Radio 4’s first world war drama will fight out the full four years

In a studio in Birmingham, there’s an air of excitement. Jessica Dromgoole and her team are recording new scenes for Home Front, Radio 4’s specially commissioned drama commemorating the first world war. They know that they’re about to launch on to the airwaves the boldest, most creative and enterprising venture yet heard on the station. The years of planning, of making endless decisions about how to do it, what to focus on, where to set it, which real stories to fictionalise, which to abandon, have paid off. A random scene between a volunteer at a makeshift hospital and a wounded soldier is being recorded. There’s no preamble, no explanation, just

Andrew Lambirth

Why did it take so long to recognise the worth of British folk art?

British folk art has been shamefully neglected in the land of its origin, as if the popular handiwork of past generations is an embarrassment to our cultural gurus and the kind of supposedly hip commentators who sneer at morris dancing. Last May I reviewed the archive display at the Whitechapel Gallery of Black Eyes and Lemonade, which re-visited the 1951 Whitechapel exhibition of the same name, a survey of vernacular art in Britain curated by the artist Barbara Jones; but that show, more than 60 years ago now, was probably the only specifically folk art exhibition in a major museum or public gallery to take place in recent years. Certain

Michael Tanner

I think I’ve found the new Maria Callas

Some of my most enjoyable evenings, when I reviewed opera weekly for The Spectator, were spent at the Royal College of Music, in the tiny but elegant and comfortable Britten Theatre. The performers, onstage and in the pit, are mostly current students of the RCM, led by one or another expert but puzzlingly little-known conductor. Repertoire is reasonably adventurous, but Handel, Mozart, Britten are perhaps the backbone. One of the pleasures of those performances is spotting the singers that one is sure will go on to big operatic careers, if they choose to. I spent a lot of time doing that, and almost always got it wrong. You have to

Toby Young Toby Young

Want to be a neglectful parent? Come to a festival and learn

I spent last weekend at Port Eliot in Cornwall. This is supposed to be a literary and music festival and my reason for being there was to talk about my new book What Every Parent Needs to Know. In reality, though, it’s just an excuse to go camping with old friends, drink plenty of alcohol and stay up late. You’d think this would be difficult with four children in tow, particularly children as young as mine, but Port Eliot is an object lesson in benign neglect. By the end of the three days I had been taught more about parenting by the festival–goers than I’d managed to teach them. Caroline

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

If the Edinburgh Fringe thinks it’s fine to give in to bigots, I might have to give up on the Edinburgh Fringe

When is a great international arts festival not a great international arts festival? When it can’t uphold even the most basic principles of free speech. Last night a play by an Israeli theatre company was forced to cancel its run at the Edinburgh Fringe as the result of the barracking of a group of anti-Israeli thugs. The show, The City, is now homeless and on the hunt for a new venue. Where exactly would they like these Israelis to perform, I wondered? Outside the walls of the city possibly? Would that be more conducive to their medieval vision of the world? Owing simply to their nationality – owing simply to their race

Sarah Wardle

Making

On these long, fruitful days, the Rioja which captures the sun of other Julys, is relaxing us, as is the summer, into this unwinding and earthy wine, into sex on the hoof, on the sofa, the Persian rug on the sitting room floor, in the hall, the kitchen by the cooker, up against the fridge, by the cupboard door, so I turn down the steaks as they sizzle and prevent potatoes boiling over, just as we turn up the heat, then simmer, get down to some sugar-icing drizzle, as if the baby we’re trying to make were spontaneous as a lemon cake.

Sarah Drury

A history of remembrance

One fight that seems to have been won is that spearheaded by the War Memorials Trust to preserve the thousands of memorials — monuments, statues, plinths, tablets — erected across the country to honour our war dead. Through conservation grants and hard graft, and a clampdown on the scrap-metal trade, many decaying and vandalised memorials have been rescued. Inventories are being compiled, guides published, and now English Heritage is staging an exhibition atop Wellington Arch (until 30 November) that explores the history of six London memorials in its keeping. Two are visible from the arch: Jagger’s Royal Artillery masterpiece (above) and Derwent Wood’s more controversial David, commemorating the Suicide Club,

Kate Chisholm

Glasgow and the Commonwealth go back a long way; Radio 4 explores a murky past

What’s been missing from the schedules during the Commonwealth Games has been a straightforward reminder about who makes up the roster of nations and why. When, for instance, did it suddenly become OK to talk about the Commonwealth without that frisson of embarrassment about its origins in empire? How come there are now 53 independent member states (although for some strange reason the Glasgow Games are boasting athletes from 71 nations and territories)? Surely there were never that many colonies flying the British flag? It’s a bit of a missed opportunity because this could be the good news story we’ve all been looking for in these weeks of relentlessly bad

James Walton

Barbie dolls? This girl aims for the head

Channel 4’s Kids and Guns (Thursday) began with an American TV advert in which a young boy’s eyes shone with gratitude when his parents gave him a large gun, proudly marketed as ‘My First Rifle’. And just in case that seemed a bit macho, the ad also pointed out that My First Rifle is available in pink. Next, we met the real-life Gia, who at the age of nine already has quite an arsenal — thanks to her dad Spyder, a firm believer in the old Texan motto that ‘If you know how many guns you have, you don’t have enough’. ‘Wouldn’t it be more usual to buy her Barbie

Deborah Ross

Moon Indigo: an all-you-can-eat buffet for the eyes – but your brain will feel famished

Your enjoyment of Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo may entirely depend on how much visual whimsy you can take, what your threshold might be, whether you can go with it or whether it wears you out and brings you to your knees. There’s animated food and little mice that zip around in cars and eels wriggling out of taps and rubbery human limbs that elongate and doorbells that scuttle like frenzied cockroaches — sit on that, Wes Anderson! You too, Terry Gilliam! — but it may be whimsy at the expense of coherence, feeling, story. My threshold is not that high, I now know. This is an adaptation of Boris Vian’s

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Let’s face it, Greek tragedy is often earnest, obscure or boring. Not this Medea

Carrie Cracknell’s new version of Medea strikes with overwhelming and rather puzzling force. The royal palace has been done up to resemble a clapped-out Spanish villa that seems to date from about 1983 if the kennel-sized TV set is anything to go by. (Weren’t TVs massive then? And always brown.) The villa’s peeling wallpaper and suppurating marble edifices form a balcony that straddles an eerie little copse, which manages to look both indoors and outdoors at once. These warring effects — villa and forest — do little to elucidate the play’s simple story: jilted Medea avenges herself on love rat Jason by murdering their two sons and bumping off his

Michael Tanner

In Norwich, a director is caught trying to murder Wagner’s Tannhäuser

Seventeen years ago the Norwegian National Opera staged two cycles of the Ring in Norwich’s Theatre Royal, performances that have remained vividly in the minds of anyone who saw them. Now Theater Freiburg has visited Norwich with two performances each of Parsifal and Tannhäuser. I was hoping to see both, but transport problems meant that I was only able to go to the second performance of Tannhäuser. I shall have quite a few criticisms to make, but all told it was a triumph, and was warmly received by a far from capacity audience. There aren’t many chances to see this problem child of Wagner’s, and this was the finest account

Kate Bingham

Rosa Wedding Day

More than a thousand buds have arrived in the garden. Yesterday I looked and there were none. Tangled into a slump of sullen green and bursting with sap they’ve over-run the armandii buddleia jasmine vine and cluster by cluster flick their swollen thumbs or sit on their fingers waiting to open, point their beaks up at the little sun. Their copper thorns will not be soft for long and something like a feather in a lung unfurls its spine inside their inside skin. A feeling wonders what it might become and daylight budges up, slips in between as if there were enough for every one. Rain or shine they will

Friday

Fisun Güner

Cultural boycotts are ineffective and wrong

Scotland’s national poet Liz Lochhead has been at it again. Two years ago she was petitioning against a dance company from Tel Aviv, this year it’s an Israeli theatre company that’s set to play the Edinburgh Fringe. Both companies are ‘guilty’ of being in receipt of state funding. So, we have another letter and another long list of high-profile signatories calling for boycott. However, we all know – as Lochhead must know – that a boycott won’t, of course, happen (it’s about being seen to take a ‘principled stand’, d’oh). The nature of Incubator Theatre’s production is irrelevant – I gather it’s some ‘film noir-type hip-hop musical’. Suffice to say it’s