Arts Reviews Archives

Thursday

18 Jul 2013

Opera review: Longborough’s tiny stage takes on the Ring – and wins

There are no two ways about it: Wagner’s Ring cycle, the biggest challenge that any opera company can face, has been mounted with triumphant success in Longborough, and now presumably has been laid to rest. Nine years ago, at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, I saw the first attempt to stage it, in Jonathan Dove’s drastically cut version, and with skeletonic orchestration, and though there was some decent singing, on the whole I was unimpressed. I couldn’t believe that during the course of the following decade Martin and Lizzie Graham would succeed in turning a large chicken shed in Gloucestershire into a comfortable theatre, seating more than 400 spectators, and with

Andrew Lambirth

A Crisis of Brilliance makes the trek to Dulwich worthwhile

This exhibition was dreamt up by David Boyd Haycock, a freelance writer and curator, following the success of a book he published with a similar title in 2009. The Crisis of Brilliance book focused on the early career of five Slade-trained artists and their relationship with the first world war. When I reviewed it at the time, I felt that Dr Haycock was simply retreading rather familiar ground, however agreeable his text, as all of the artists he chose to highlight had already been extensively written about. To the five artists of the book a sixth has been added for the exhibition: David Bomberg. This enables the show to include

Lloyd Evans

A cast of celebs fails to bring any oomph to The Ladykillers

The Ladykillers is back. Sean Foley’s adaptation of the classic Ealing comedy introduces us to a crew of villains who stage a train heist while lodging in the house of a sweet old lady. She discovers their crime and when they try to bump her off she proves indestructible. The 1955 movie makes a huge effort to manage the plot’s credibility. The audience is never quite sure if this is a criminal gang in a comic predicament or comic gang in a criminal one. Sean Foley abjures such nuances and gives us a bunch of clowns in a two-hour slapstick routine. This approach deprives the tale of all its subtlety

Michael Prodger

When a smartphone gallery is better than the real thing

The best way to view some of the world’s greatest works of art is to go nowhere near them. Like other celebrities, the most famous paintings are hard to get close to and there are few less spiritual experiences than being cattle-prodded as part of a crowd through an overpacked exhibition. You may visit in the hope of communing with legendary art but, as often as not, gallery-going is anti-contemplative. While there is no way of replicating the experience of standing in front of a masterpiece, technology can at least allow you your personal space. Take Google Art Project, for example, a collaboration between the omnivorous internet search company and

John Whitworth

Outplacements

He said, it’s a structural workforce imbalance and I thought where’s the scope for a man of your talents? He said, it’s retargeting personal goals and I thought yet all human resources have souls. He said, it’s a preplanned executive cull and I thought you’ve a horrible shape to your skull. He said, it’s a labour pool surplus reduction and I thought I could pop out your eyeballs by suction. He said, it’s transitioned vocational severance and I thought that’s my cods in the mincer, your reverence. He said, it’s downsizing, dehiring, decruiting and I thought also strangling and stabbing and shooting. He said, you’re redundant, you’re done for, you’re

Kate Chisholm

Radio review: At last! A proper Book at Bedtime

It had begun to look as if Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime had been taken over by the zealous publicity-hungry PRs of publishing. For the past few months we’ve had nothing but the latest John le Carré, Neil Gaiman, Mohsin Hamid and Jami Attenberg. Books that would sit better in the morning Radio 4 slot as Book of the Week have been foisted upon us at 10.45 p.m., just when we want to start winding down from the hectic day, to escape from the traffic and fumes of the internet-bound life into which most of us have sunk. What we need post washing-up, dog walk, news, last texts, tweets and

Daniel Hardisty

Siempre

After Neruda Facing you I am not jealous. If you arrived with a man on your back, or a hundred men hanging in the rigging of your hair, or a thousand men sleeping on the soft mound of your belly, if you were a river filled with drowned men met by the furious sea foaming at its mouth, by eternal weather — if you arrived with them all where I wait for you, I would not be jealous. We will always be alone. We will always be, you and I, alone on this earth to begin life.

Sunday

14 Jul 2013

Camilla Swift

The View from 22 debate special: too much immigration, too little integration?

This May, David Goodhart’s latest book, The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration, earned him the title of ‘too hot for Hay’ when he was ‘shunned’ by the literary festival. The festival director, Peter Florence, went on to describe the book as ‘sensationalist’ and ‘not very good’. But all was not lost. As event chair Andrew Neil put it: ‘What the Hay festival missed, The Spectator brought to you’, with a special panel on immigration last Tuesday, 9 July. Goodhart was joined on the panel by the Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens, former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission Trevor

Saturday

13 Jul 2013

Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 13 July 2013

Deborah Ross reviews two films for us this week. The first is Pacific Rim, a ‘giant monsters v. giant robots’ film, and to be perfectly honest, that’s about all she has to say on the matter. If you do want to find out more, here’s the trailer: Her second film this week is ‘The Moo Man’, which is almost the opposite of Pacific Rim. ‘Instead of being a big, noisy film with nothing to say, it’s a small, quiet film with quite a lot to say’. A documentary following a dairy farmer around his East Sussex farm, it is ‘beautifully and lovingly and discreetly filmed’, it says everything it has

Thursday

11 Jul 2013

Daniel Grant

Are rugs becoming the new must-have art objects?

Tapestries once had a place of honour in fine art, but that was during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Oil paintings, for a time, were viewed as the poor man’s tapestry. Now, that equation may be turning round. ‘Tapestries serve a lot of purposes,’ said Donald Farnsworth, president of Magnolia Editions, which has produced tapestries for artists such as Chuck Close, April Gornik, Alex Katz, Ed Moses, Gerhard Richter, Kiki Smith, William Wiley and others. ‘They absorb sound and add warmth to a room.’ But can they also be taken seriously as works of art? They are certainly priced like them. Five large-scale tapestries by Chuck Close were exhibited

Kate Chisholm

Radio review: Malcolm Gladwell’s masterclass on listening

Out and about in Surrey on Sunday I happened upon a scene that could have been played out 77 years ago. It was mid-afternoon on that glorious sunshiny day. Lunch just about over. The pub had a large garden with tables neatly shaded by leafy pergolas. A family group had finished their meal but were still huddled round the table, on which in pride of place, amid the empty plates and half-filled glasses, sat a green-and-cream Roberts, aerial aloft. They’d taken the chance (the village pub had no TV) that from words and sound alone they’d not miss a forehand slice or backhand volley. They were confident that the Radio

James Delingpole

Brainwashed from birth: the cult of the BBC

Last week I was on holiday with my family on the Algarve. The good news was that, thanks to the BBC’s widespread availability in Portugal, we didn’t miss out on Murray at Wimbledon. The bad news was that, for the same reason, we couldn’t escape The Apprentice. But this isn’t an anti-Apprentice column. It’s an anti-BBC column prompted in part by something annoying somebody said to me on Twitter the other day. I’d written, not for the first time, that I considered the BBC ‘a total waste of money’. And the tweeter replied primly, ‘The BBC is a total waste of money or actually you quite like Today, Proms, Glasto,

Lloyd Evans

Private Lives at the Gielgud: Spot the sexual tension between Anna Chancellor and Toby Stephens

It’s always a problem with Macbeth: what accents to use? The Globe is applying the traditional remedy. Lord and Lady Macbeth come from Epsom. Everyone else comes from Glasgow. This is a highly entertaining production — one of the best at the Globe in recent years — but it’s not entirely perfect. Joseph Millson has pretty much everything you need to play Macbeth, good looks, physical stature, a soldierly bearing and a dash of melancholy. But he has something you don’t need at all. A gift for laughter. He’s such an instinctive comedian that he sends the audience into fits, without noticing it, by accident almost. And in the oddest

James Yorke

Exhibition: What really goes on in a royal bedchamber

What exactly are the ‘secrets of the royal bedchamber’? That the actual bed was seldom if ever slept in let alone used for romping sex (the latter took place in private bedchambers, often barred off by an ingenious system of locks). But the royal bedchamber was, as the organisers of this exhibition state, ‘the equivalent of the modern-day boardroom’, where government decisions were made and private access to the monarch gained. Those who controlled that access were the most important members of the court. They may have been awarded earldoms, but they vied for jobs that involved serving the monarch at the most intimate (and demeaning) level. The point of

Andrew Lambirth

Exhibitions: Why can’t the critical fraternity make up its mind?

As more time elapses since the regrettable fracas over Kitaj’s 1994 Tate exhibition and his tragic suicide in 2007, he comes more and more into his own as a great but still underrated artist. When I last wrote about him in this column, back in April, I had not yet seen the portion of his Berlin-originated retrospective which was shown at Pallant House in Chichester. Happily I managed to get there before it closed and was once again deeply impressed by the range and painterly intelligence of this extraordinary artist. Now another couple of shows pay justified tribute to his genius, this time as manifested through his printed work. After

Deborah Ross

Yes, ‘The Moo Man’ is a film about cows. But it is absolutely amazing

Pacific Rim is a giant monsters v. giant robots film and although written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, who made Pan’s Labyrinth, which was sublime, it’s still just a giant monsters v. giant robots film, and now we have dealt with that, we can move on to The Moo Man. The Moo Man is not like Pacific Rim. There are no giant monsters seeking to destroy the world, and no giant robots seeking to protect it. There is no CGI, no 3D, no battle scenes, no violently thumping soundtrack, no action — bar a day trip to Eastbourne — and no token woman who is feisty, as is the

Michael Tanner

Opera review: Verdi should be as controversial as Wagner

I’m not the first person to remark that Verdi is getting oddly little attention in this his bicentenary year, especially when compared with his contemporary Wagner who, despite the usually much greater demands his works make in almost all respects, is not only receiving plenty of performances, but is also the subject of even more books than usual, not all of them about his alleged faults of character. Yet Verdi shouldn’t be less controversial a figure than Wagner; it’s just that Wagner stimulates people to react in such intense ways, while they placidly accept Verdi as an energising tunesmith and a decent patriot, ardent for the unification of Italy in

Lloyd Evans

Wanted: a producer for Peter Nichols’s four new plays

Gosh. I wouldn’t mind being Peter Nichols. Eighty-six this month and still enjoying the easy domesticity and professional stimulation he’s benefited from since the 1960s when he was propelled to stardom by his play about raising a disabled daughter, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. He lives in a penthouse flat in north Oxford on the verge of cow-dappled meadows, tufty footpaths and a low grey canal full of quacky coots and ducklings. He’s fit, sharp-witted and fun to be around. (After our interview he and his wife called a cab and went off to Corpus Christi to knock back champagne at a summer party.) He dismisses his

John Greening

Wind

Invisible hand that jangles the lantern over the porch and tells the leaves on the pond to imagine they are clippers and wrenches the shed door , and makes leylandii lurch, unnerving the cat, wobbling the elderly; that viciously clobbers pedestrians at the corner, then snatches up bills and payslips put out for recycling and juggles with them; that gibbers and squeaks through gaps in your sealed units; that laughs as it swipes her portfolio of art, the pantechnicon of his life’s work, in fits when a cone skedaddles like a clown or turning Dalek wipes the smile off its fierceness and swivels a death-ray that hits your moped, your

Giannandrea Poesio

Gusto galore from Boston Ballet

Those who lament sluggishness in contemporary stagings of Balanchine’s ballets — and those who are responsible for it — should have seen and learnt from Boston Ballet last week. Forget the funereal tempi we, in the old world, are forced to accept because of the killjoy aesthetics favoured by artistically challenged ballet directors and teachers. Boston Ballet’s Serenade had all one would wish for: quick, sparkling tempi, a splendid use of the space, majestic flow and gusto galore. It’s true that precision might have gone astray now and then, but never in a major way; besides, real artistry has always had little to do with precision. What I particularly enjoyed