Arts Reviews

Of this year’s three musical birthday boys, Wagner has fared, in England, surprisingly well, Verdi inexplicably badly, and Britten, as was to be expected, has received the royal treatment. No one could have predicted, though, that the culmination of the celebrations would be as glorious as it was: a single semi-staged performance at the Barbican of what, in my minority opinion, is his operatic masterpiece, Albert Herring. Surely after attending it, or hearing it on Radio 3, that might become a majority opinion. For what this performance revealed was a work that is inspired throughout, has no longueurs, which are to be found in almost all Britten’s other operas, even

Ben Miller is wolfing down a pizza. I meet the comedian in a Cambridge restaurant where he demolishes a Margherita shortly before racing off to appear on stage in The Duck House, a new farce about corrupt MPs. The show is set in 2009. Miller stars as a Labour backbencher who wants to jump ship and join the Conservatives. But first he has to convince a Tory bigwig that his expenses claims are entirely legitimate. He’s not helped by his dim-witted wife, his corrupt Russian cleaner, and his anarchist son, Seb, who has sublet the family flat in Kensington to a suicidal Goth. The writers Dan Patterson and Colin Swash

Strange actor, Martin Shaw. He’s got all the right equipment for major stardom: a handsome and complicated face, a languid sexiness, a decent physique and a magnificent throbbing voice. He sounds like a lion feeling peckish in mid-afternoon. At top volume, his growl could dislodge chimney pots. And yet he’s just a steady-eddy TV performer who does the odd stint in the West End. Why isn’t he Patrick Stewart or Anthony Hopkins? Perhaps his rhythm is too slow. Certainly, he lacks pep or sparkle, or a sense of mystery. You know what he’s going to do next because he’s just done it. And even then it wasn’t much. Warmth, innocence

The title of the Lisson Gallery’s new show, Nostalgic for the Future, could sum up the gallery’s whole raison d’être. From its inception in 1967, the Lisson has championed the cutting edge, providing a British and European platform for the major conceptual and minimal artists from the States — Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin among them — and following that in the 1980s with its promotion of New British Sculptors such as Anish Kapoor and Tony Cragg. While this generation wittily subverted the material world to question our position within it, their heirs in turn seem more interested in querying the position of art in the world —

One of the more exotic attractions at the 1939–40 World’s Fair in New York was Salvador Dalí’s ‘Dream of Venus Pavilion’, which behind its surreal façade — an architectural marriage between Antoni Gaudí and a coral reef — catered to the public’s aquatic fantasies of spume-born goddesses and topless sirens. Something similar is going on behind the cool modernist exterior of Tate St Ives. Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep is a bottom-trawler of an exhibition that dredges the depths of the human psyche for fishy fantasies. As the show’s catalogue points out, earth’s deepest oceans — the murky regions known, in descending order, as bathypelagic, abyssopelagic and hadal

You wait thirty years for a reunion and the moment one is announced, you wish the idea would shrivel up and die. Purists look away now. I’m not sure you are going to like the Monty Python reunion, announced today for 1 July 2014 at the soulless cavern that is the O2. Opening with an unfunny Boris impersonator, a bad joke about Meryl Streep, and a moderately amusing gag about Qatar winning the bid to host the show, things didn’t get any better. Not even with a cry of ‘nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!’ when the first hack to ask a question ‘just happened’ to be Spanish. The negative body