Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Grace of Monaco: a big, glistening, strutting, irresistible turkey

Grace of Monaco, the Grace Kelly biopic starring Nicole Kidman, is an absolute joy, and I highly recommend it. Unless you live under a rock, which I think I might envy (dark, quiet, peaceful, but maybe dank?), you’ll know it was savaged at Cannes, but don’t let that put you off, as this isn’t just some middling turkey; this is a big, glistening, strutting turkey. This is one of those turkeys so jaw-dropping it achieves grandeur of the kind I find quite irresistible. Also, as a reviewer, sensationally bad films are always a pleasure because they are easy to write about — I plan to knock this off in under

David Grubb

When the Rains Came

When the rains continued the rivers rebelled, the swans moved inland and even the bank was sandbagged and we saw images of villages cut off and deserted schools and people being carried out of old folks homes and the cathedrals that somehow began to look like galleons; and as each day drenched we began to wonder how trees remained tethered by root systems and there were stories of people who refused to leave their cottages and a man and his dog got stuck in a chimney and from a distance the Malvern Hills began to look like an island.

Nigel Prentice

Research Centre

Beyond the measured stretch of lawns and hedges are cultivated rows where snug plastic tunnels creep. Indoors, the fantastic spores fluff up on jelly: fungus rages under glass and germination bristles. In a sealed hot-room, in tanks lined with foil predators quietly chew and scrat; aphids suck their fill of sap. A forest of corn in pots jostles in the breathless light of the glasshouse, each plant drip-fed, wired to dream on growth. This is calm towering work, where light is monastic, clean or flares briefly on a clear pane, a white coat. All builds, for the one to burst into the room with a bouquet, steal the studied scene.

Wednesday

Mark Mason

Did we know TV was crap in the old days?

Here’s a question for those of you old enough to remember 1980s television: did we realise at the time how crap it was, or did we simply not know any better? I’ve been struggling with my own answer to this, ever since watching Danny Baker’s World Cup Brush Up on BBC4 the other night. Yet again the fabulous Baker boy proved that the ‘clip show’ doesn’t have to be an insult. Among the many choice morsels was an early-80s side-splitter from Blue Peter, in which Kevin Keegan was shown a 3D model of himself made by artist Silvia Gardner. (That’s a guessed spelling by the way – inexplicably Google doesn’t

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Sorry, Tara Erraught, but the age of the fat lady singing is over

London’s opera critics have been roundly condemned for suggesting that a female singer’s personal appearance could make her unsuitable for a role. The singer in question is Tara Erraught, a young Irish mezzo-soprano based in Germany, who has just made her British debut in the new Glyndebourne production of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. She takes the part of Octavian, who, although always played by a woman, is supposed in the plot to be an irresistibly attractive young man. The critics all admired Erraught’s voice, but took the view that she was too stocky, dumpy, chubby and unsightly (to use four of their adjectives) to be even remotely plausible as an

Andrew Lambirth

Can Lynn Chadwick finally escape the 1950?

Lynn Chadwick was born 100 years ago in London, and died in 2003 at his Gloucestershire home, Lypiatt Park, where he is buried in the Pinetum. He was one of the great names of 20th-century sculpture, not just in England but recognised and celebrated internationally, too. He first came to prominence in the 1950s, and the aura of that decade clung to him for the remainder of his career. He was included in the 1952 Venice Biennale with seven other sculptors (including Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler and Eduardo Paolozzi), when Herbert Read coined the phrase ‘geometry of fear’ to describe their work. In conjuring up this postwar angst, Read spoke

William Cook

Bill Forsyth interview: ‘If we hadn’t made a go of it, my plan was just to disappear.’

I watched the new DVD of Gregory’s Girl on the train from London up to Edinburgh. I hadn’t seen Bill Forsyth’s school-yard comedy in more than 30 years. Incredibly, it hasn’t dated in the slightest. When I saw it in the cinema, in 1981, as an acne-ridden adolescent, this tender romance was a revelation — for me, and millions like me. Funny yet heartfelt, it was that rare and precious thing — a rite of passage movie that was neither patronising nor pretentious. Half a lifetime later, Gregory’s Girl still rings true. A reticent, retiring man, Forsyth doesn’t do many interviews, but to promote this new DVD he’s agreed to

Molly Guinness

Tracey Emin’s knickers – a short history of contemporary British art

Tracey Emin’s bed is to be sold at auction this summer with a guide price of £800,000 to £1.2 million, although the man who sold it to Charles Saatchi has said it’s priceless. Emin was part of the British art movement in the ‘90s that gave Richard Dorment trouble at dinner parties; this scene is an occupational hazard of being an art critic, he said. ‘The beautiful person I’m sitting next to has bluntly informed me that modern art is rubbish. We’re only on the soup, and a long evening stretches ahead. Whether or not we round this dangerous corner depends on my neighbour’s tone of voice, which can range

Angus Wolfe

The rights and wrongs of box-set viewing

Admit it. Say it! ‘My name is Blah and I am a boxaholic.’ Life on hold, marriage in bits, job swinging from a rusty nail, the box-set fanatic grabs every available minute to feed an addiction. I mean, you can’t leave, can’t breathe until you find out whether Jesse and Walter make it up before someone else gets killed in Breaking Bad, or how on earth Jack can keep his daughter safe in 24. Box sets are not movies. They have a different time scale. What can you say in two hours that can’t be said better in 400? Relationships change, grow, collapse, move on. Fear is faster, immediate, for

Peter Hoskin

I suspected Maleficent would be terrible from the very first shot

If a gang of knife-wielding toddlers ever presses you for the name of the best Disney film, Sleeping Beauty (1959) is a pretty good answer. It has everything you expect from those features animated during Walt’s life: a simple story translated from a fairy tale; beautifully painted castle and forest scenes; a baddie that you can really root against, and all that. But it also has more: widescreen; a wild and luminous colour palette; and a score borrowed from some bloke called Tchaikovsky. Today’s animators are given to cooing about its invention and daring. I’d join them if I had a switchblade raised to my knees. Even if I didn’t.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Harry and Paul’s Story of the Twos is just too funny for its own good

On Harry and Paul’s Story of the Twos (BBC 2, Sunday), there was a particularly cruel sketch in which Paul Whitehouse gave Harry Enfield a Paxman-style grilling as to whether he felt bitter that his comedy series had never won a Bafta award whereas its big rival The Fast Show (featuring, inter alia, one Paul Whitehouse) had won lots and lots and lots. The more Enfield tried to deny that it had bothered him, the more Whitehouse pressed him to admit that it had. But the real victim of the joke, as it would turn out this week, was not Enfield but The Fast Show. Its first episode in years

Hugo Shirley

WNO’s production of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron is an overwhelming experience – but make sure you close your eyes

On paper, Moses und Aron might seem intractable and abstract: a 12-tone score setting a libretto that meditates on God, faith, the essential inadequacy of language to express the ineffable, and a great deal more. Put it in the theatre, as Welsh National Opera has done as the first part of its ‘Faith’ mini-season, and it’s an overwhelming experience, compelling because of, rather than in spite of, its subject matter and musical methods. And just over 80 years after Schoenberg stopped work on it (he left it incomplete, having written only a fragmentary text for the third act), its themes are as pertinent as ever. Political parallels with a people

Kate Chisholm

What’s happened to children’s radio?

Much praise has been lavished on Radio 2’s 500 Words short-story competition, the winners to be announced on Friday’s Chris Evans show, live from the Hay Festival. Quite right, too. It’s a brilliant way to encourage children aged 13 and under to explore their potential by inviting them to write stories. But you’d think that since it’s a competition organised by a radio station the prizes might have something to do with listening, the making of programmes, the sheer magic of radio. Not so. The winners will receive a huge pile of books for themselves, and another pile for their school library. But there’s nothing to celebrate the connection between

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Joan Littlewood has a lot to answer for – but Fings Ain’t With They Used T’Be’ makes up for it

Joan Littlewood’s greatest disservice to the theatre was to champion ‘the right to fail’, which encouraged writers and directors to inflict a thousand shades of bilge on play-goers for many decades. But she deserves a place in the pantheon for an inspired decision taken in 1959. Offered a new play about Soho’s underworld, written by the ex-con Frank Norman, she invited a young pop composer to turn it into a larky musical. Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be opened at Littlewood’s East End lair and transferred to the Garrick where it ran for nearly 900 performances. The young composer was Lionel Bart. Reborn at its original venue, this fantastic production

Lucy Vickery

When Van Gogh lived in London

Eighty-seven Hackford Road, SW9, is unremarkable but for a blue plaque telling the world that Vincent van Gogh once lived there. The building has been empty since 2012 but now the Dutch artist Saskia Olde Wolbers has filled it with voices. ‘Yes, these Eyes are the Windows’ (until 22 June) is an Artangel-commissioned installation that explores the line between fact and fiction by telling the story of this terraced house from when a 19-year-old van Gogh was a tenant there in the 1870s to the present day. As a visitor, you enter a dimly lit hallway. You are held there for what can be only a few minutes but feels

Matthew Sweeney

Original Sin

When first they ushered me into that hall To take my place on a cheap fold-out seat, My eyes clamped shut, and so missed all The conjured stillness of the school: young feet Unshuffled, heads dropped down in donned respect, And teachers, too — attendant, cramped in rows Of less observant hush. A time to reflect On whispers, echoed hymns, light-cold windows. In truth, I pitied most the ones on-stage: for though I felt secure behind my teen- Devout, dismissive, atheistic rage, I couldn’t quite pretend I hadn’t seen the way they thumbed the book — unsure of it, The prayer, the weary Morning, all. Please sit.

Sunday

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies: ‘a major theatrical event – don’t settle for one, see both’

In Hilary Mantel’s Tudor England, it never stops raining. As she writes in her evocative programme note for the RSC stage adaptation of  Wolf Hall, she first envisaged the life of Henry VIII’s political fixer, Thomas Cromwell, as ‘a room: the smell of wood smoke, ink, wet dogs and wet wool, and the steady patter of rain’. I’d heard, correctly, that Jeremy Herrin’s production was every bit as close and claustrophobic as Mantel’s novel. So as I set off, it seemed a disadvantageous prospect to spend a day of blazing summer sunshine cooped up with six hours of theatre, reviewing the double bill of Wolf Hall, and its sequel, Bring Up The Bodies.

Friday

William Cook

I can’t recall a time when the destruction of a structure made so many people so distressed

It really is rotten luck, and also cruelly ironic. Just as Glasgow was done debating how best to demolish its hideous Red Road flats, its most beautiful building, Glasgow School of Art, goes up in smoke. No one hurt, apparently, which is a relief, but an awful lot of artwork lost, a unique archive and a precious library. However it’s the actual building which everyone seems most upset about. Indeed, I can’t recall a time when the destruction of a single structure made so many people so distressed. It shows we can love or hate a building, like a person. It shows architecture really matters. So why does Charles Rennie

Benjamin Wolf

Expecting opera critics to be uniformly kind to singers defeats the point of their existence

Should fat be an issue in opera? Are our opera critics overgrown schoolboys with a body fixation? To judge from reports and editorials in print and online over the last two days, you can answer ‘no’ and ‘yes’ respectively. Simple? No, not really. On Monday morning, the critics of various national newspapers published reviews of Glyndebourne’s new production of Der Rosenkavalier. These reviews included comments about the physical appearance of Tara Erraught, the young mezzo-soprano cast as Octavian. These comments have been widely disparaged and taken as evidence of ‘body shaming’ on the part of ‘male, middle-aged critics’. My first inkling of this debate came when many of my Facebook friends (mostly the opera singers) recommended an open letter by Alice Coote (on Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped

Matthew Walther

P.J. O’Rourke interview: ‘Telling jokes and lying about politicians – what’s the difference?’

P.J. O’Rourke’s chickens are giving him trouble. ‘Two of them aren’t laying eggs right now,’ he explains. But he doesn’t know which ones. ‘I’m not sure who’s the guilty party.’ We’re driving to the field where his trees are harvested for timber and where he and his father-in-law have built a one-hole golf course. ‘How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink’ this isn’t. In his famous 1979 essay of that title the Daily Beast columnist and former editor of the National Lampoon made the case for being sozzled on the freeway: ‘It’s important to be drunk because being drunk keeps your body all loose, and