Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Michael Tanner

Keith Warner’s Wozzeck doesn’t make me as angry as it used to

When Keith Warner’s production of Berg’s Wozzeck was first produced at the Royal Opera, nine years ago, it made me more angry than any that I had ever seen. At its first revival in 2006, my response was milder, though still outraged. Now, on its third outing, I mind it even less, partly because the musical performance is so strong. Warner has returned to oversee this revival, which, if memory serves, is little different from the last one, so he still regards Wozzeck as the portrayal of an experiment, with Wozzeck as the guinea pig, and the rest of the cast, with minor exceptions, as his tormenting experimenters. Most of

Clarissa Tan

Come to the Spectator office, Gareth Malone, and hear our ‘Carmina Burana’

They’re now televising proceedings from the Court of Appeal. Great. As if I didn’t have enough to do already, keeping tabs on Strictly Come Dancing and EastEnders, I now have to monitor what’s happening within the hallowed judicial temples of the land. The broadcasting of court cases has been much debated, with people fussing about whether it will influence the meting out of Justice, and the implications for Law and Order once these are exercised in front of the cameras, and other high-minded issues. My own worry is about my job scope. Everything is televised these days, which means everything can be reviewed. There are the main channels such as

Kate Chisholm

You lost Aled Jones and Catherine Bott, Radio Three — but all is forgiven

It’s hard to stay cross with Radio 3 for long. Just when I thought the network had stretched my loyalty too far by not only allowing Aled Jones to decamp to Classic FM but also saying goodbye to the great Catherine Bott, I had a comeback conversion. I’ll explain how that happened later. First, we should bewail the loss of Bott, who made The Early Music Show her own, with her enthusiasm, her practised authority, her ability to convey insights without being ponderous. She drew us in to share her passion for music and composers we’d never even heard of, let alone felt any desire to hear. Without her the

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

How we beat the Boche — at sidecar racing

There’s courage, there’s fearlessness, and then there’s the sort of sublime audacity you need to do something like sidecar racing. Stan Dibben, 87, has it in spades. He won the world sidecar championships in 1953, still whizzes around the racetrack today and is the subject of a beautiful short documentary film by Cabell Hopkins, No Ordinary Passenger. Sidecar racing is terrifying to watch. The passenger — the non-driver — has to hurl himself from one side of the three-wheeled bike to the other as it zooms around corners; his head is often inches from the tarmac. Mistakes are disastrous. Stan Dibben got into this crazy sport after the war. ‘I

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

How I learned to start screaming and love the horror movie

Buddy, you can keep your Christmases and your Easters, your Hanukkahs and your Eids. For someone like me, the annual celebration that really matters is the one that falls on 31 October — Halloween. This isn’t because I’m an inveterate trick-or-treater, out for candy and larks. It isn’t because I own shares in a pumpkin patch. It’s because I am a film fan, grateful for any excuse to indulge in horror movies as night’s dark curtains draw closer. No other time of the year offers such a perfect alignment of occasion and genre. ’Tis, after all, the season to be scared. And this season is shaping up better than most.

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