Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Radio: Today; The Reunion

You could say that Sue MacGregor has done as much for women on radio as Margaret Thatcher did for women at Westminster. You might, though, want to add that MacGregor survived for 18 years as the only woman presenter on Today, Radio 4’s chief news and current affairs programme, without finding it necessary to deepen her voice to make it more masculine or worrying about what she should wear. She soon established herself as being as essential to the programme’s character and stature as her colleagues, the late Brian Redhead, Peter Hobday and John Humphrys. MacGregor has always done things her way — by adding a softer, gentler, yet not

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Television: Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary

In Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary (Channel 4, Saturday) — Martin Durkin’s superb tribute to our greatest prime minister — there was some footage of Harold Macmillan giving his ‘selling the family silver’ speech that made me quite sick. What nauseated me first was the sycophantic laughter from his black-tie Tory Reform Group audience oozing entitlement at some smoky St James’s club; and, second, the noisome cultural assumptions behind Mac’s ineffably grand remark. According to Mac’s Weltanschauung, it was not only right that people of his class should always keep hold of their silver, their Canalettos and Rembrandts, but that everyone else, a notch or two below, should also applaud

Deborah Ross

Cinema: Love Is All You Need

Love Is All You Need is a romantic comedy that isn’t romantic or comic or much of anything. It stars Pierce Brosnan as Philip, a widowed, all-work-no-play Englishman working in Denmark whose son is about to get married in Italy. Meanwhile, across town, the mother of the bride, Ida (Trine Dyrholm), a hairdresser who wears a wig because she’s lost all her own hair to chemotherapy, has just discovered her husband is playing away from home with pretty young Thilde from accounts. Films are always full of middle-aged men playing away from home with pretty young Thildes from accounts, but have you ever wandered into a company’s accounts department? If

Michael Tanner

Opera: Der fliegende Holländer and Sunken Garden

Scottish Opera’s new production of The Flying Dutchman, performed in German but advertised in English, is almost a triumph, and very well worth going to see. I reflected, as I travelled by train back from Glasgow to Cambridge, changing only at Edinburgh, York, Peterborough and Ely, that this raw and in some ways crude opera, Wagner’s first to remain in the canon, benefits from the restrictions imposed by a budget as tight as Scottish Opera’s, though I can imagine the participants not entirely agreeing with me. The production, by Harry Fehr with designs by Tom Scutt, is simple and clear. The opera is relocated to Scotland, where Wagner originally set

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Upstairs, downstairs

Never a dull moment at the Jermyn Street Theatre. It’s a titchy venue, the size of a gents’ loo, nestling beneath a cavernous flight of stairs in the nameless hinterland between druggy Soho and tarty Mayfair. The current proprietors, aiming for an air of scholastic amateurism, are on the hunt for ‘unknown and forgotten classics’. The theatre boasts a Resident Academic and an eccentric register of patrons including ‘Victoria Biggs, Euan Borland and the Duchess of Cambridge (pub)’. Currently it’s sifting the 1920s for treasure. Others have prospected here before. Ben Travers’s bourgeois farces no longer entertain us because middle-class morality has changed too much in the past 90 years.

Thursday

James Walton

Why David Bowie is still underrated

Is it just me, or is there quite a lot being written about David Bowie at the moment? Of course, there’s the fact that the V&A’s blockbuster exhibition has coincided with the totally unexpected appearance of his first album for ten years. (While putting the exhibition together, the curators could never have dreamed that on the day it opened, a new Bowie album would be number one in 40 countries.) Yet for some cynics on the internet — never hard to find — the recent outbreak of Bowie mania is a simple question of demographics: the media is now run by people who grew up with him, and apparently never

Andrew Lambirth

Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum

The Reading Room is currently packed with Roman remains and with visitors attempting (or pretending) to look at them. The latest blockbuster at the BM (sponsored by Goldman Sachs) looks set to exceed all other oversubscribed sensationalist exhibitions, with more than 250 objects in a mazy but airy layout. When I first heard about this show, my main concern was how it could possibly compare or compete with the experience of visiting what’s actually left of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in Italy. The principal attraction of this subject for those with some interest in the fine arts must be the famous wall-paintings, and how could these be transported

Liz Anderson

Nicholas Hytner quits as head of National Theatre…in the wake of a Spectator profile

So, Nicholas Hytner is to step down as director of the National Theatre at the end of March 2015. How canny of Lloyd Evans to review his ten-year reign on the South Bank in The Spectator arts pages on 6 April, the week before his official announcement. Lloyd wrote: ‘Artistic freedom has been the hallmark of his ten-year stewardship….No one guessed how bold Hytner would be. He took the presiding spirit of the theatre, as embodied in its ponderous title, and chucked it in the Thames. Instead of running a museum of official art he created a showcase for his personal inclinations. The National Theatre of Hytner. An astonishing risk.

Michael Henderson

The Hagen Quartet: Bracing Beethoven

Established 32 years ago in Salzburg, the Hagen Quartet can fairly be described as venerable. It may be said equally fairly that brothers Lukas and Clemens Hagen, their sister Veronika, and Rainer Schmidt, are playing better than ever. The opening pair of concerts in their Beethoven cycle at Wigmore Hall in January were remarkable for the freshness as well as the beauty of their playing, and their return next week (19 and 20 April) to the world’s greatest hall for chamber music should not be missed. Now that the Alban Berg Quartet is no more, the Hagen, along with the Takács, are the supreme performers of Beethoven. There is a

Clarissa Tan

TV review: The Secrets of Britain’s Sharia Courts; The Sex Clinic

Sometimes a television programme raises far bigger questions than it actually gives a platform for, which is the case with Panorama’s The Secrets of Britain’s Sharia Courts (BBC1, Monday). Wedged in this half-hour slot are explosive issues such as the sovereignty of British law, the role of religion in arbitrating on marital disputes, and the place of women in Islam. The show adopts a feisty, no-holds-barred approach in this piece of investigative journalism presented by Jane Corbin, yet has strange ellipses at certain points that leave huge questions dangling. At one juncture, Corbin says, ‘The previous government gave up on its attempt to investigate sharia councils. They couldn’t get proper

Kate Chisholm

Radio review: Sunflowers Behind a Dirty Fence; The Fisherman

No one writes for radio for the money. Or for the notoriety. You’ll never make mega-bucks or see your name in lights. Yet still they write — because it’s challenging and yet also so much fun. There are no restrictions on the air, no boundaries of time or space, no limits on what a character can do or where they can go, in the space of 30, 45, 60 minutes. The only rules are to speak clearly as the writer, taking your listeners with you, and for the cast to have distinct voices, with immediately identifiable differences in tone and personality. If you have to struggle at any point with

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Theatre review: The Low Road and Quasimodo

A lap of honour at the Royal Court. Bruce Norris has been one of the big discoveries of artistic director Dominic Cooke, who takes his bow by directing The Low Road. Norris’s greatest hit, Clybourne Park, was a savage and illuminating satire about racism. His next trick is to examine the burning issue of the day, unfettered greed. A great start. But he can’t decide whether he’s for or against the profit motive. And he has no idea where to mount his attack. He time-travels to 18th-century America and imagines an unscrupulous spiv, a bit like Barry Lyndon, who climbs from destitution to wealth and whose life touches American history

Deborah Ross

The Place Beyond the Pines – don’t read this review!

The Place Beyond the Pines stars both Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper — you spoil us, ambassador! — and is a generational feud film about fathers and sons and legacy. Can anyone be born clean? How do past events reverberate? How might one act of violence play out, years later? It is written and directed by Derek Cianfrance who made Blue Valentine, a remarkably raw and claustrophobic film about a marriage going down the tubes, also starring Ryan Gosling, but with Michelle Williams, and although this is a more familiar genre, it is still blissfully gripping. Certainly, I was gripped, blissfully, which was nice, as I haven’t been held in

Will Gore

Lara Pulver interview: ‘People in LA were desperate to meet Irene Adler’

Not many actors have made a name for themselves with quite the same force as Lara Pulver. In January last year more than eight million people tuned in to BBC1 and watched her star as Irene Adler in ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’, the opening episode in the second series of Sherlock. I’m not saying that Pulver’s appearance in one of the early scenes wearing nothing more than a pair of high heels (albeit with some clever camera angles preserving her modesty) was the only reason for the vast amount of attention the episode received. It’s surely no coincidence, however, that her name was almost immediately trending on Twitter and that

John Mole

Scan

I shall be radioactive For eight hours afterwards And must be careful To avoid intimate contact. The prospect of this Alarms me, but what now Suddenly comes to mind Is just how alone I felt Standing in Hereford Cathedral October 1962 Beside the Mappa Mundi With Krushchev banging on As nuclear war seemed Unavoidable, that the world Could soon be dust, this sacred Storehouse of humanity And faith be flattened In an instant. Eight hours Or not much more Was all I’d have to hurry home Before our precious intimacy Would vanish in the void And love, left echoing, Become an empty word.

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Newt Gingrich’s Downton downtime

Newt Gingrich has a new love. ‘It’s a great study of plot,’ the failed Presidential runner and former Speaker of the House told Slate magazine. He was not referring to a ’90s sleaze inquiry, or the reasons why he lost to Mitt Romney. The object of his obsession is our very own Downton Abbey. In what could be mistaken for an interview about his once colorful private life, Gingrich went on: ‘It has about 15 subplots plus four or five that come and go. At any given moment you could list these different developments going on with these different personalities. See, you’re never bored.’ Apparently, ITV’s most successful export is

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre: Ten years and a million cheap tickets

‘The house that Ho Chi Minh built.’ That’s how Nicholas Hytner refers to his ample north London home. In 1989, at the age of 34, he was hired by Cameron Mackintosh to direct the musical Miss Saigon. ‘It just felt like a huge lark,’ he said at the time. The show ran for ten years in the West End and on Broadway and the royalties enabled him ‘to do what I wanted to do thereafter. It was a massive stroke of good fortune.’ Artistic freedom has been the hallmark of his ten-year stewardship of the National Theatre. Hytner grew up in a prosperous south Manchester family and his fascination with

Andrew Lambirth

George Bellows; Sydney Lee RA

The American artist George Bellows (1882–1925) is best known for his boxing paintings, but as this surprising exhibition reveals, that was only the half of it. We don’t really know his work in this country, apart from the odd picture in a mixed show, but here is indisputable evidence that we have been missing out. Bellows died from appendicitis aged only 42, so this exhibition inevitably offers us work which varies wildly in style and competence, as he tried his hand at different approaches and different subjects. Nevertheless there are at least half-a-dozen paintings of real worth and presence, in addition to the boxing pictures, which I personally find of

Radhika Kapila

Weeknd’s world

There was something vaguely disappointing about seeing Abel Tesfaye appear on stage at London’s Electric Ballroom. A wide-eyed, puffa-jacket-clad figure isn’t what you expect from his enigmatic alter-ego ‘The Weeknd’ — it seemed incongruous that we should watch this self-styled introvert performing to an audience. At 23 years old, Tesfaye (aka The Weeknd) has released three mixtapes, achieved eight million downloads and, this year, completely sold out his British shows. His reputation is growing as people are drawn in by his distinctive, falsetto tones. The Weeknd’s first online mixtape ‘House of Balloons’ and subsequent albums took the internet by storm. Now, with increasing popularity, his enigmatic internet presence is also

Kate Chisholm

Noise – A Human History

You could say that Neil MacGregor revolutionised radio with his mega-series A History of the World in 100 Objects. In each of those 100 programmes he took us on an extraordinary journey of the mind, to show us what we’ve been up to since the first ‘primitive’ reindeer carvings of the Ice Age. He did this not by the usual route for such grandiose series of going on a whirlwind trip through history, but by looking at the small, often tiny details and drawing from them as much meaning as possible. He also transformed the 15-minute radio slot into a brilliant teaching tool, focusing on the minuscule while at the