Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Michael Tanner

Opera: The Turn of the Screw – review; remembering Sir Colin Davis

The conducting career of Sir Colin Davis, who died a fortnight ago, more than that of most interpretative artists, had the aspect of a personal pilgrimage. Though I had no personal acquaintance with him, and don’t know much more about his life than can be gleaned from Wikipedia, I did attend his operatic performances from 1956 until 2011. In fact I realised recently, to my surprise, that he conducted far more of the operas I have been to than any other person. I first heard him and heard of him in 1956, when I attended a concert performance of Le Nozze di Figaro which he gave in Cambridge’s Guildhall with

N. S.

After War

‘The Firs’, ‘Hillcrest’, ‘Innisfree’ I An aerial view. A brochure maps it out And full possession guaranteed Within the year: time for the prefab plots to sprout Before the moves and backyards turn to seed. II Look, engines pushing upwards, shovels plough Until the hill is taken, then a kerb Whitewashed, colonial style, now caps the brow Once held by rosebay willow herb. III From smoke-black stations, city veterans Ascend and, armed with suitcases, meet packed Possessions dropped by green removal vans To walls in plaster, pale and cracked. IV But after decoration, ground is gained: Slit trenches, dug in by skeletal frames, Hold nothing but the memories retained By

John Greening

Provincials

for Stuart Henson So Petrarch lived here? First saw Laura here, invented the sonnet and began a craze that turned to ‘tyranny’ (your word). These days they’re hardly de rigueur, but there’s the fear that if you can’t balance seven hundred years on fourteen lines and five rhymes, then the Muse will leave for Tony Harrison. There she goes. But you and I have learned by now to steer a steady course up Petrarch’s mountain track or — better metaphor — across the Rhône beside that Pont that keeps on reaching for a rhyme on its far bank. We know the knack of picking a wind, too: not one that’s blown

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Maria Miller tells the luvvies to take their easels off her lawn

Something had to give for Culture Secretary Maria Miller. She’s not had an easy time since the Leveson report and the subsequent battle over state regulation of the press. Harangued by all and sundry, she’s looking to make friends. In a speech at the British Museum this morning, Miller took the novel step of talking to the luvvies of the arts world as if they were grown-ups living in the real world. Her subject was budget cuts: ‘For honesty’s sake we must be clear about the grounds on which this argument must be had and the points that will get traction, not in the press, but with my colleagues –

Friday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: what’s worth watching, listening to or going to this weekend

In a week where the news has been filled with stories about a certain ‘strong woman’, Kate Chisholm has found another strong woman to write about. In this week’s radio column, she argues that the radio presenter Sue MacGregor managed to be the only female presenter on the Today programme without the need to deepen her voice or worry about power dressing or pussy-bow blouses. Like Thatcher however, MacGregor ‘has always done things her way’, and her radio programme The Reunion is a prime example of this. In this week’s episode, MacGregor unites five survivors of the King’s Cross fire; here’s a clip: This week’s television review comes from James

Thursday

Frederic Wake-Walker

The future of opera

‘It’s an occult-mystery film opera.’ This is how Michel van der Aa describes his new opera, which opened last Friday at the Barbican (and is reviewed here). I had similar difficulties in describing the nature of many of the shows that I produced at Mica Moca, a performance and exhibition venue in Berlin. Over the course of five months, we produced more than 350 different shows of every genre you could think of and some I’d never heard of (check out Japanese free noise) and yet, by the end, I felt that what we’d actually produced was one huge opera. We’re living in very interesting and exciting times for the

Andrew Lambirth

Exhibitions: R.B. Kitaj: Obsessions The Art of Identity

Nowadays, R.B. Kitaj (1932–2007) tends to be ignored by the critics in this country — like a bad smell in the corner of the room. It was not always thus: for years he was an admired, if somewhat controversial, presence, but then came his great retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1994. A large proportion of the British critical fraternity united to condemn and vilify him, to ‘take him down a peg or two’, as if he were an unruly schoolboy too big for his boots, too clever for his own good. This chorus of complaint (some of which amounted to abuse) was deeply felt by Kitaj, and when his

Claudia Massie

Champion of the people

Welsh miners, Basque child refugees (above), Tyneside shipbuilders, Paul Robeson: In the Shadow of Tyranny at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (until 16 May) offers a compelling portrait of Britain in the mid-20th century, as seen by an émigrée communist Austrian Jew, who also happened to be a Soviet espionage operative. Edith Tudor-Hart, who had fled her homeland in 1933 after marrying an English doctor, worked with spymaster Arnold Deutsch from 1926 onwards. As a photographer, her political sympathies were evident throughout her career, from early work documenting protest marches of ‘Red Vienna’ and its subsequent Nazification to representations of British inequality and deprivation. These images of outrage and squalor

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