Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

Is Paul Klee really a great modern master?

There is a school of thought that sees Paul Klee (1879–1940) as more of a Swiss watchmaker than an artist, his paintings and drawings too perfect, too contrived. Viewing this new exhibition at Tate Modern, one might add that they are also too mannered and precious. I had been looking forward to this show, but going round it I found myself all too frequently impatient and disappointed. Yet Klee is a great modern master, you say; can he be dismissed so easily? Perhaps it is all in the selection of work, for Klee was prolific even though he died young, with a total output of about 10,000 paintings, drawings and

Sarah Wardle

Finding

(for Aidan Williams) After a difficult week at work, when I was trying too hard on a short fuse, I suddenly knew that all the hurt would have a certain way of being released, Googled stables in the centre of town and telephoned, but not to book a ride, just to have five minutes with any one of the ponies, and as he fed I cried deeply from a well I thought was dry, and while I hugged, breathed fully of his sweat, heard him intently chomping on the hay, told him I loved him and kissed his neck, I knew calm like that with you this afternoon, my head

Patrick Carnegy

David Tennant plays Richard II like a casual hippie

Gregory Doran, now in command at Stratford in succession to Sir Michael Boyd, launches his regime with Richard II, intending to stage the complete Shakespearean canon over the next six years, ‘making every play an event’. What’s really good is that the plays will also be seen on tour, in London, online and ‘live on screen in cinemas and classrooms nationwide’. It’s taken too long for the publically funded RSC to put live ‘streaming’ in place; Richard II, broadcast on 13 November, will be the first play so honoured. With David Tennant in the title role this may already be a sell-out, but encore screenings are already planned in many

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Toffs rule! 

This is a strange one. Simon Paisley Day’s new play feels like a conventional comedy of manners. Three couples pitch up at a Welsh cottage for a relaxing weekend away from the kiddies. Trouble erupts instantly. Keith and Briony bicker over the milk that the swollen-breasted Briony has to express into plastic bottles. Keith secretly craves his wife’s ‘liquid love’ and he tiptoes around the cottage trying to glug it back without being spotted by the others. Ross and Rosy arrive. They’re an achingly smug yuppie twosome. They finish each other’s sentences. They tee up each other’s anecdotes. They stand in the kitchen entwined in each other’s arms and gaze

Deborah Ross

Philomena is Dame Judi’s film

Philomena is based on the true story of an Irish woman searching for the son stolen from her by the Catholic Church 50 years earlier, and although, as a cinematic experience, it could so easily have felt as if you were being repeatedly slapped round the head by a copy of Woman’s Own, it is, thankfully, quite a few notches up from that. Indeed, as directed by Stephen Frears, it is quiet, restrained, unfussy, and has, at its heart, an injustice so grave it will make your blood boil. You will also cry. Seven minutes in, and I was already crying. Not proud, but it is a fact. Dame Judi

Kate Chisholm

Your life is not like a Detroit assembly line — it’s worse

This year’s Free Thinking festival at the Sage in Gateshead has been asking the question,  Who’s in Control?. Oddly, or perhaps presciently, as soon as I typed that last word ‘control’, the power went off in the midst of Monday’s storm. No word processor, no internet connection, no phone line, almost no radio (since the only battery-operated radio I now possess is in the bathroom). A weekend of debates and talks about who’s really in charge of our health, our imagination, our privacy soon becomes a lot of hot air in the face of hurricane-force winds. The most sophisticated technology is useless without power, and yet in spite of this

James Delingpole James Delingpole

James Delingpole: All students need a ‘sense of entitlement’ — ask my fundie friend Rupert 

‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,’ said John Lennon. Quite apposite from a man who — presumably — meant to spend a ripe old age staging increasingly embarrassing art happenings with Yoko Ono, rather than be shot dead by a nutcase. It also applies to the two things that most grabbed me on TV this week: A Very English Education (BBC2, Sunday) and the Red Wedding episode of Game of Thrones (available via Blinkbox). The first, a follow up to Public School — the BBC’s 1979 fly-on-the-wall series about Radley — sought to find out what had become of its various stars. One of

Lucy Vickery

Nick Cave is still raising hell

As Sunday night’s storm clouds gathered, one of rock’s great polymath-storytellers whipped up a tempest of his own on the stage of the Hammersmith Apollo with the help of his six compadres. Sharp-suited and spivvy, Nick Cave howled and crooned his way through songs of death, sex, savagery and deviancy interspersed with love ballads of exquisite tenderness. Almost as mesmerising as the man in black was Warren Ellis, a Bad Seed of long standing, who thrashed the living daylights out of his violin like a demented Rumpelstiltskin. Periods of finely calibrated restraint were punctuated by spasms of all-hell-breaking-loose. Alone among that generation of rock stars who emerged in the early

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Taking on the most dangerous job in journalism

Readers will recall the sad demise of Tatler Alan, the cute pooch who came to a sticky end in a tragic accident involving the doors of Vogue House, where the magazine is based. Well, I am the bearer of happier news this time: the girls in pearls have a new canine recruit, Geoffrey, a puppy that seems just as sweet as his unlucky predecessor. So then. Happiness restored at last and a dark chapter in Bystander’s history closed. Just watch out for those revolving doors, Geoffrey.

Monday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Educating Yorkshire was, for the most part, self-indulgent pap

I don’t know if you’ve seen the documentary series, Educating Yorkshire, which has been as depressing as you might imagine from the title. Some of the teachers in the film were excellent, but the overall feeling one got was of inadequate individuals endlessly indulging their arrogant and stupid charges. As described here, rather brilliantly, in The Daily Mail. The headmaster in particular got my goat. I don’t think heads should address the pupils as ‘mate’ and suck up to them. There was an especially emetic final scene for the end of year address from the headmaster to the year 11 pupils, in which the staff all started crying. This over-emoting

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

Welcome home, Malcolm Morley

The Ashmolean Museum has taken the radical step of embracing contemporary art, and is currently hosting (until 30 March 2014) a mini-retrospective of Malcolm Morley’s work, curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal and borrowed entirely from the prestigious American-based Hall Art Foundation. Morley (born London 1931) was the first winner of the ever-controversial Turner Prize (apparently David Sylvester threatened to resign as a judge if Morley was not awarded the prize), but has lived in America since 1958 and visits these shores rarely. The last time he was here was in 2001, for a full-scale retrospective of his work at the Hayward Gallery. We haven’t seen enough of his art in

Matilda Bathurst

Braque in full flight

Towards the end of his life, Georges Braque described his vision in the following terms: ‘No object can be tied down to any one sort of reality; a stone may be part of a wall, a piece of sculpture, a lethal weapon, a pebble on a beach… Everything is subject to metamorphoses.’ Since then, set ideas of Braque’s oeuvre have crusted over like dry impasto: Braque the cubist, Braque the inventor of the papier-collé, Braque whose blue birds soar on the ceiling of the Louvre. The Grand Palais now hosts the first retrospective of the artist’s work to be held in Paris for 40 years, setting those metamorphoses back in

Ariane Bankes

The big tease

Perhaps the greatest irony of many in this first solo London show of Sarah Lucas is that it is sponsored by Louis Vuitton. ‘Symbolising French elegance and joie de vivre, the Maison LV has always collaborated with the best engineers, decorators and artists,’ it claims. Well, welcome to a new world. Soiled mattresses provocatively pierced by fruit’n’veg, two dessicated hams shoved into a pair of knickers, a mechanical ‘wanking’ machine, a primeval soup of penises — you get the drift. It is of course vintage Lucas, a retrospective of work drawn from two decades of artistic confrontation, and the site she has chosen for this engagement is the human body.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The Light Princess badly needs a mission

There are many pleasures in The Light Princess, a new musical by Tori Amos. George MacDonald’s fairy story introduces us to a beautiful red-haired royal, Althea (Rosalie Craig), who has a mysterious resistance to gravity. After various tribulations she abandons life on dry land and becomes a mermaid. The show meets these technical challenges with some brilliance. Althea seems to float mysteriously across the stage in midair while being supported on the limbs of black-clad gymnasts. Later she moves to a lake, which is suggested by intricate layers of shimmering blue cloth. But despite the sumptuous and ingenious special effects, the show hasn’t a powerful enough storyline or sufficient character

Giannandrea Poesio

A rich, colourful romp

Bold decisions are at the core of great artistic directorship. And Tamara Rojo, the ballet star leading English National Ballet, knows that well. Le Corsaire is not the usual ballet classic one craves to see. Yet it makes a splendid addition to the already vast and multifaceted repertoire of ENB. Created in 1856, this work has stood the test of time. Thanks to endless revivals, it has become one of the most manipulated and interpolated choreographic texts. Its current popularity, however, stems from the now legendary revival that the Kirov ballet presented in the West in 1989. Glitzy and star-studded, that staging paved the way for many others, which led

Stephen Bayley

Dear Simon Jenkins, please stop moaning about developers

When architectural preservationists meet at the tedious conferences and grim councils of despair that feed oxygen to their nihilistic and unventilated ‘heritage’ world-view, the word ‘developer’ is spat out with contempt. It is as though they are speaking of Satan and his diabolical agents, who used to appear in the horror novels of Dennis Wheatley that I so enjoyed in my youth. To hear Simon Jenkins, for example, refer to a ‘developer’ is to appreciate the impressive range over which the human voice can express contempt. To Jenkins, a ‘developer’ is a loathsome thing bent on profaning all that is sacred. ‘Developers’ despoil the countryside and debauch the city. They

Michael Tanner

I hope you spotted the epic ‘existential struggle’ in Les vêpres siciliennes — I didn’t

Verdi’s Les vêpres siciliennes is his least performed mature opera, even in its more familiar version as I vespri siciliani. So mounting it with a top-ranking cast and an interesting production is just what the Royal Opera should do in a so far seriously under-celebrated Verdi bicentenary year. What has actually happened is that we have a first-rate musical performance and a dismally confusing, cluttered, pretentious and conspicuously consuming production by the most fashionable of Continental directors, Stefan Herheim, abetted by the set designs of Philipp Fürhofer and the ideas of his regular dramaturg Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach. The action of Vêpres, which is set in 1282, only makes sense, insofar as

Deborah Ross

Deborah Ross: The Selfish Giant is not fresh, but it’s superbly performed

The Selfish Giant is a British social-realism film in the tradition of all such films from Kes onwards, so it never feels particularly fresh, but it does feel real and true, is superbly performed, and it does pack quite an emotional punch. I had to gather myself afterwards, and I’m still gathering myself, and may be gathering myself for some time to come. So it’s good at what it does, even though what it does has been done before. At least I think that’s what I’m trying to say. I’m never really that sure. This is the second feature from Clio Barnard, whose first, The Arbor, was a portrait  of

Clarissa Tan

Will the women of The X Factor stop perving?

Will the women on ITV’s The X Factor (Saturday) stop perving? I suppose there are two ways to tackle the issue of gender equality — one is to dictate that nobody mention sexuality at all; the other is to make females slobber over the males the way men purportedly slobber over women all the time. The women judges of The X Factor are lurching towards the latter. ‘I’ve got my eye on you,’ Sharon Osbourne winked at a contestant, Nicholas McDonald. He is 15. She made him repeat the words ‘nearly sixteen’, because he pronounced it ‘sex-teen’. Young Nicholas is being sexualised before our eyes. ‘Tonight’s the first night I

Kate Chisholm

Grayson Perry is an inspired choice for the Reith Lectures

You’ve probably already read or heard somewhere that the inspiration for Grayson Perry’s current series of Reith Lectures on Radio 4 was none other than Lynda Snell. (I wonder if she knows.) What a coup for the establishment network, the home service, the epitome of right thinking and professional excellence. Here’s a cross-dressing potter from Essex, who revels in outrageous outfits and shockingly frank, message-ridden pots and tapestries about sex abuse and class warfare, daring to admit not just that he listens to The Archers but that he also takes his cue from Lynda’s determination to have someone (or something) from Ambridge installed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.