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Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Michael Henderson

Blitz Requiem première in St Paul’s

Of all folk memories the Blitz remains one of the most enduring. In the autumn of 1940 the Luftwaffe strafed London on 57 consecutive nights, leaving (if that is the word) 20,000 dead and whole streets pounded to rubble. ‘You do your worst,’ Churchill told the Hun, ‘and we shall do our best.’ Noël Coward put it another way: ‘Every blitz, your resistance toughening, from the Ritz to the Anchor and Crown. Nothing ever could override the pride of London town.’ London prevailed, and the spirit of the capital was captured in the memorable image of St Paul’s Cathedral standing proudly untouched amid the smoke and fire of a city

Michael Bayley

Poker

To Dad You wonder if it’s worth the gamble getting up out of your armchair onto your bad leg, to stoke a little life back into the fire.

Thursday

Robert Gorelangton

Gregory Doran interview: ‘I wanted some big hitters,’ says the RSC’s new supremo

Gregory Doran has famously long glossy locks and is widely known to be a nice guy and an incurable Shakespeare nut. He has now taken over the reins at the Royal Shakespeare Company, with which he’s been associated for 26 years, working on both sides of the footlights, first as an actor and then a director. If you think he’s in the wrong job, blame Eileen Atkins. He first went to Stratford as a schoolboy to see her in As You Like It. ‘I went dancing out of the theatre and as we went back up the M6 in my mum’s beige Mini, apparently I turned to her and said,

Andrew Lambirth

Under the Greenwood Tree – an exhibition worth travelling for

A mixed exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints devoted to the subject of the tree might sound an unexciting event, filled with what Johnny Cash memorably described as ‘hopeful stars of flickering magnitude’, but actually in this case the reverse is true. The show has been divided into two halves, the first of which deals with a historical survey of the tree in past art, the section which is herewith under review. The sequel, focusing on the tree in contemporary art, will be at the museum from 12 October – 23 November. Readers who have to travel any distance, and may thus be limited to a single visit, should choose

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Charles Moore’s notes: The corruption of the BBC – and what was in my GQ goodie bag

‘Corruption’ is a subtle word, because it describes a process rather than an event. It does not merely mean bad behaviour: it means behaviour that becomes rotten out of something which was once good. That is why it often afflicts high-minded organisations more than ordinary businesses. People who think they are collectively moral are more self-deceiving than the average market trader. Hence the current embarrassments of the BBC about huge pay-offs. The reason that the Trust and executives are now publicly blaming each other over the issue is not because one side was in the wrong and the other in the right, but because, at the time, no one involved

Candy Neubert

tennis

I have preferred the practice wall and not the netted court a decent racquet and a ball the steady thump of steady thought and no one else at all

Peter Hoskin

Another Self-Portrait isn’t just for the Bobsessives

So, there’s this guy called Bob Dylan and, across just seven years in the 1960s, he’d released nine albums that were already legendary. The Times They Are a-Changin’, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde… yeah, you know them all. But then, at the start of the 1970s, came his Self Portrait. With a title like that, it promised to be mythic and definitive, except it wasn’t. It was a pick ‘n’ mix of country standards, concert snippets and Simon & Garfunkel covers. Dylan subsequently distanced himself from this weird confection. But, through these hindsight goggles I’m wearing, Self Portrait doesn’t look half so bad now. We’ve grown used to seeing

Kate Chisholm

Immigrant songs: Radio 2’s My Country, My Music

Five women, five very different stories of arriving in the UK, often unwillingly and always alone. How did they cope with the loneliness, the poverty, the loss of everything they once knew? What do they now think of the country that has become their adopted home? Jeremy Vine talks to them next week in a new lunchtime series on Radio 2. In My Country, My Music (produced by Chris Walsh-Heron) Vine and his five guests try to work out which country they now belong to, not through work, beliefs, hobbies or family but through the music they listen to. By putting music centre-stage, as the focus, the heart of the

Clarissa Tan

The Wipers Times – 100 years on, this newspaper still lives

Funny what rises from the rubble. In 1916 British army officer Captain Fred Roberts was searching the bombed-out remains of Ypres. Among the ruins was a printing press. Soon words and sentences were flying from the old machine — cheeky, irreverent, bold. It was brazen of Roberts to start a satirical newspaper right on the front line, whose writers would be his men, soldiers who could not pronounce the name of the Belgian town they were in. (They called it ‘Wipers’.) Thus The Wipers Times was born. ‘Has your boy a mechanical turn of mind?’ ran a front-page headline of an early issue. ‘Then buy him a Flammenwerfer.’ A century

Peter Hoskin

White House Down is Roland Emmerich’s Hedda Gabler

Just do it, quoth the Nike advert — and these men just did it. Grass, asphalt, fear, pain, doubt and limitation; all surpassed in the pursuit of human excellence. The racing driver James Hunt and the baseball player Jackie Robinson may have practised different sports, but they were both champions. And, with Rush and 42, they both have fine-looking films dedicated to them this week. Cinemagoers who want to tread the contours of greatness, and understand its peaks and troughs, need look no further. Hollywood has it covered. But for those of you who just want to see some stuff blow up and some bad guys capped, then how about

Michael Tanner

Did the Proms’ Billy Budd turn a mystery into a mess?

The many opera performances at the Proms this year have all been so successful, especially the Wagner series, that I hope it doesn’t require a centenary to include them in future seasons. One of the things that has made them so vivid to the audiences in the Albert Hall has been the immediacy of the contact between singers and public, despite the hall’s vast spaces. It would be nice, but vain, to think that the present breed of directors, with their concepts and conceits, might learn that the simpler the productions they mount, the more their audiences are likely to respond to the works; but the tendency in opera houses

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Theatre review: Fleabag’s scandalous success

Suddenly they’re all at it. Actors, that is, writing plays. David Haig, Rory Kinnear and Simon Paisley Day are all poised to offer new dramas to the public. But someone else has got there first. You may have spotted Phoebe Waller-Bridge playing a secretarial cameo in The Iron Lady. She’s a rangy Home Countries brunette with rosy lips, large inviting eyes and an angular, forthright face that suggests intelligence, amusement and a hint of subversive sexual power. Her immaculate skin is as white as a snowdrop. All in all, she’s perfectly set up for a steady career in frocks and pearls playing Downton gold-diggers and hyperventilating Jane Austen virgins. But

Thursday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

A world-class orchestra in the heart of São Paulo’s Crackland

São Paulo has a concert hall that London’s orchestras would kill for. It was originally a railway station, a mighty space bounded by Corinthian pilasters in the style of a French palace, built by Brazilian coffee barons. Now the tracks are buried beneath 800 seats on the main floor, plus another 700 on the balconies and mid-air boxes facing the stage. But it’s the ceiling that produces gasps, or, in the case of a children’s concert I attended, earsplitting squeals of wonder. You’d think Superman had arrived. You see, the ceiling is made up of 15 huge, lavishly decorated panels that match the walnut floor. And they move! Up and

Andrew Lambirth

Laura Knight was an artist skilled in the ways of the world

The popular conception of Dame Laura Knight is of an energetic woman piling on the paint in the back of a huge and antiquated Rolls-Royce at Epsom Derby, the door propped open to the view, or charging off in pursuit of gypsies, clowns or ballerinas. A widely popular and successful artist, she painted people in action in a robust, realistic style, and was able to compete with men on their own terms, managing to get herself elected to that hitherto almost entirely masculine preserve, the Royal Academy. But wasn’t there something slightly mannish about her? Her pal Alf Munnings made a joke about that, and certainly you see her kissing

Steerpike Steerpike

Blue blood on blue blood

The People’s Princess is back in the papers, thanks to the latest film about her life, and one minor royal couldn’t resist re-opening old wounds. According the New York Post, Lady Pamela Hicks, Prince Philip’s cousin, began gently: ‘[Diana] had enormous charisma, she was beautiful, [and] she was very good at empathy with the general crowd.’  But, Lady Pamela said, ‘she had no feeling at all for her husband or his family.’ And there was more: ‘She was really spiteful, really unkind to him — and, my God, he’s a man who needs support and encouragement. [The marriage] absolutely destroyed him. He looked grey and ghost-like. Now of course he’s

Seamus Heaney

Mid-term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home. In the porch I met my father crying — He had always taken funerals in his stride — And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow. The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I came in, and I was embarrassed By old men standing up to shake my hand And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble,’ Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, Away at school, as my mother held my hand In hers and coughed out angry tearless

Fred Johnston

Circular

We went about in circles one hand on the next man’s shoulders something out of Gogol or Great War blind: we ate chicken soup, which gave one old man stomach cramps: he was taken away, snotting. A trustee, if such a thing is imaginable in a lunatic asylum, clicked around as part of a service-trolley, selling cigarettes and bars of chocolate but never newspapers; no telling what bad news could do to the mind. My wife arrived to say she had custody of our children; we wept dutifully and she left, a slim woman keying expertly the buttons on the door’s security pad — some, receiving similar news, screamed. Others

James Delingpole James Delingpole

After watching Bad Education, Big School is as embarrassing as watching your dad trying to DJ

You know you’re getting old when TV starts getting nostalgic about eras during which you were already feeling old and nostalgic. Take Pogs, the subject of one of those ‘Whatever happened to them, eh?’ moments in Badults (BBC3, Tuesday), an amiable sitcom about twentysomething flatmates. Pogs were these collectable discs originally made from fruit-juice bottle caps (passion fruit, orange and guava) that were a massive fad in the mid-Nineties. Tragically, though, the reason I know this is not that I played with them myself but that my stepson Jim the Rat did. How depressing is that? What it means is that even the generation below me, Jim’s, is already beginning

Kate Chisholm

Farewell to a natural born broadcaster

‘He was a natural broadcaster,’ said Nick Higham, after the death last week of the rugby player and sports broadcaster Cliff Morgan. I wondered what he meant. ‘Natural’ as in born to the task? Or ‘natural’ as in his ability to communicate as if chatting directly to you, and only you, with no pretension or affectation, just a desire to tell a good story, to convey his enthusiasm? I still miss Morgan on Saturday mornings. He had such a warm voice, and something more: a real and genuine interest in the stories behind the athletes, tennis stars, rugby players, basketball champions, wrestlers, rowers, cyclists, swimmers, gymnasts, equestrians he chatted to

Andrew Petrie

At home with President Nixon

The most paranoid of presidents, Richard Nixon must have been feeling unwell when he allowed three of his closest aides to shoot personal Super 8 footage of their time in the White House. Bob Haldeman, John Erlichman and Dwight Chapin — all of whom later went to prison for their involvement in the Watergate affair — together shot more than 200 rolls of film between 1969 and 1973, the highlights of which form the backbone of a new documentary Our Nixon, and show us a team of go-getting young Republicans you wouldn’t recognise from Oliver Stone’s murky biopic. As the director Penny Lane says: ‘There aren’t any bad guys in