Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Lloyd Evans

Peter and Alice

Inspired writer, John Logan. His 2009 play, Red, delved brilliantly into the gloom-ridden, suicidal mind of the misanthropic modernist painter Mark Rothko. The play’s unflinching and sordid honesty earned the author, and his director Michael Grandage, a bagful of gongs on either side of the Atlantic. The pair have reunited for Logan’s new play, Peter and Alice, which opens with a meeting between Alice Liddell (of Wonderland fame) and Peter Llewellyn Davies, who inspired J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Alice and Peter, now grown up, compare notes about the books they featured in, about the writers who used them as models, about childhood, about adulthood, about this, about that. The writers

Grumarí

The leaves  hardly breathe   and snakes  loop round the branches,  soaking up heat   from cars parked  nose to tail outside  the seafood   kiosk by  this savage southern   beach where  the leaves hardly breathe  and snakes   loop round  the branches, soaking up heat  from cars parked   nose to tail  outside the seafood  kiosk by   this savage  southern beach.

Steerpike

Michael Dobbs tight lipped on House of Cards plot

It was a gamble that seems to have paid off. American online entertainment giant Netflix commissioned their first ever original series with a Washington adaptation of Lord Dobbs’s classic, House of Cards. According to its star, Kevin Spacey, the show is today the most watched ever on the service. Season one ended on a cliff hanger that promises to deliver still more viewers. The new House of Cards is sufficiently different from the old to attract a new audience; yet there were enough nods to the original BBC series to keep Westminster loyalists happy. Dobbs, the brains behind Francis Urquhart (who has been renamed Underwood and upgraded from a Tory shireman

Camilla Swift

Introducing Spectator Play: Audio and video for what we’ve reviewed this week

Did you catch Dr Who over the weekend? Clarissa Tan, who wrote our latest TV column, was surprised that the Dr had to contend with ‘something in the wi-fi’. How’s wi-fi for a thoroughly modern enemy? Here’s the prequel to this week’s episode, The Bells of Saint John: Clarissa also watched Rachel Johnson learning to be a Lady. It might sound like a bit of a drag, but ‘what could have turned out to be a rather prissy affair turns out to be a fun watch’. Johnson tries to master riding side-saddle, and ponders why etiquette lessons are becoming more and more popular. Here’s Johnson describing what makes a 21st

Cross examination

As Easter comes upon us in this bitter spring, many of us are drawn to contemplate the mystery of Christ’s passion: his Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension into Heaven. You don’t have to go to church to do this, for reverie or prayer can take place in a quiet landscape or by a cosy fireside, but there are various aids to meditation, and none better than the appropriate visual art. Although we live in an increasingly irreligious age, there have been religious painters of real power in recent years, and perhaps none more so than Craigie Aitchison (1926–2009). Aitchison is an unlikely choice because he himself professed no particular belief, although

The Angel of the Odd: an exhibition that ends with a satisfying shiver

To some extent, all Romanticism has its origins in darkness, coming in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that introduced fear into the age of reason. ‘Reason’s Sleep Produces Monsters’ proclaims the opening drawing in Goya’s series ‘Los Caprichos’ (1797–99), which features in this entertaining exhibition. After all the cruelties that man had inflicted on man at the 18th century’s twilight, it was only natural to turn to ghosts and witches for light relief. The exhibition’s title comes from an Edgar Allan Poe story but Goya’s phrase would be equally appropriate. The exhibition starts not with Goya but with F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), one of those German expressionist films

Caitlin Rose’s The Stand-In: a fantastic album from a fantastic girl

Caitlin Rose, Caitlin Rose, Caitlin Rose. I’d feel awkward admitting that I’m rather obsessed with this Nashville chanteuse, were it not for a mitigating truth: you should be, too. Her debut album Own Side Now, released in 2010, was proof enough of her sweltering talent. And now we have a follow-up, The Stand-In, that’s superior in many regards. Her voice, already aspiring to the heights of Cline and Lynn, has become rounder, more chocolate-y. Her songs, already a stunning catalogue of broken love, sound even more heartfelt. Her… … Oh, I don’t want to embarrass myself, so let’s get down to cold, musical facts. Perhaps the main difference between this

Come together | 28 March 2013

‘That’s the power of ritual,’ said the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, on Thought for the Day last week. He was thinking particularly of the Jewish festival of Passover with its ritual gathering of the family to eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs as a re-enactment of the experience of exile and slavery. ‘It’s an expression of collective memory and shared ideals…an annual reminder of what it felt like to be oppressed.’ His words were striking precisely because ritual is so often regarded with suspicion these days, signifying rigid, backward, inclusive thinking. Yet these simple acts of representation done in unison (whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim) allow us to become acquainted with

Trance: not Danny Boyle’s finest hour

Obviously, we all love Danny Boyle and want to have his babies — I’d like at least two of his babies — but his latest film, Trance, is a horrid mess. A psychological take on the art-heist film, it is miscast, iffily acted, confusing, implausible (to the extent I never fully understood what was happening) and is interspersed with bouts of horrible, ill-judged violence. In one instance, for example, a man gets shot in the penis. This need not be a dealbreaker necessarily but at some point, possibly before we’ve even had the first child, and to prevent such nonsense going any further, I will have to sit him down

Lloyd Evans

The Book of Mormon is toothless, jokeless, plotless and pointless

Impossible, surely. The Book of Mormon could never live up to the accolades lavished on it by America’s critics. ‘Blissfully original, outspoken, irreverent and hilarious,’ was a typical review. The three authors are formidably gifted. Trey Parker and Matt Stone gave us South Park, while Robert Lopez is the co-writer of Avenue Q. As a fan of both shows, I was fearful that Mormon would turn out to be as much fun as underwater paintballing. So, up goes the curtain. A posse of geeky Yanks in crisp white shirts are being dispatched to Mormon missions around the world. We focus on two characters, a big handsome jock and a fat

Lloyd Evans

‘In the beginning was breath’

Declan Donnellan is riding high. His acclaimed production of the burlesque classic Ubu Roi has confirmed his membership of the elite group of British directors who enjoy renown across Continental Europe and beyond. The critics cheered his French-language production of Alfred Jarry’s anarchic satire when it reached Paris earlier this month. The show, created by Donnellan’s company Cheek by Jowl, is currently bunny-hopping between venues on either side of the Channel. It arrives at the Barbican on 10 April where it forms part of the Dancing around Duchamp season. I meet Donellan in a Hampstead café. ‘My local,’ he says as two cappuccinos are clattered down in front us. He’s

search party

the worst night coming the bloody dark covers our traces fanning across the grid worked out in the Ops Room section by section any place my heart is gone any direction beginning in the house and loosed off in mid air in some canal or building site or park the hinterlands behind are coded as we slot together drum and lock and screw over the downy skin of the child still held against the light soft as a miracle daring the stars and torches picking through this one o’clock and two o’clock and three

When Picasso was a boy wonder

Exhibitions are only as good as the loans that can be secured for them, as was seen at the Royal Academy’s Manet exhibition recently. The exhibits at Burlington House were thin on the ground because in some cases promised loans were rescinded, and other items were simply not available. Whatever one thinks of that controversial figure Norman Rosenthal, for so many years exhibitions secretary at the RA, his ability to seek out and obtain loans amounted to genius, backed by two important characteristics: audacity and tenacity. When I first saw the Courtauld’s Picasso show, I immediately thought of a painting of the artist’s friend Casagemas on his deathbed, lit by

Bankers: I like them — somebody has to

I like bankers. They’re an honest lot. All of us like money, but only they are upfront about it. I once witnessed a conversation between three financiers that started with them comparing their cars, then their houses, then their helicopters. None of the shilly-shallying you find at a society cocktail party, where people slyly suss out your income on the basis of your profession, your postcode, your accent and the school you went to — these bankers went straight to unvarnished one-upmanship. Such frankness can be refreshing. I like bankers because, these days, somebody has to. The second episode of Bankers (Wednesday), the BBC2 three-part documentary that’s just ended, started

Sculpture trail

William Turnbull died last year. And if his name is not as familiar as those of his friends Giacometti and Paolozzi, it should be: an exhibition at Chatsworth in Derbyshire may help put this right. Turnbull was born in Dundee in 1922; he left school at 15, and went to work as an illustrator for the comic-book publishers D.C. Thomson, before enlisting in the RAF in 1941. It was his experience when serving in the Far East that gave him a lifelong interest not only in Asian artefacts but also in space and spatial perspective: a pilot’s view of the landscape beneath. Turnbull was both a painter and a sculptor,

James Delingpole

Lost in space | 21 March 2013

On 28 January 1986 the Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after launch, killing all seven crew. What made it worse was that one of the victims, Christa McAuliffe, was a teacher, so of course all the children in her class were watching it live on TV. I remember it well. For the first few seconds after the shuttle blew up, you weren’t quite sure whether or not what you’d just seen was meant to happen: perhaps all those swirls of white vapour were jettisoned boosters or something. Then, you heard the gasps and groans from the crowds standing at the launch site and finally you knew. Up until 9/11 I

Assault on the ears

Does anyone ever listen to Radio 4’s Moral Maze on Saturday nights? It is only the repeat edition (the live discussion happens on Wednesday nights), but even so why broadcast such a deliberately discomfiting programme at almost bedtime on the most mellow night of the week? It’s such an odd mismatch. There you are, winding down, daring to relax as you clear the last bits of washing-up before going to bed, only to find yourself blasted into thoughts you’d rather not have by the testy, tetchy tones of Melanie and Michael debating (with their presumably willing victims) the whys and wherefores of private schools, Nimbys, or gastric-band surgery on the

Lloyd Evans

Juvenile delinquency

Study the greats. That’s the advice to all budding playwrights. And there are few contemporary dramatists more worthy of appreciative scrutiny than Bruce Norris, whose savage and hilarious comedy, Clybourne Park, bagged the Pulitzer Prize in America before transferring to the West End where it stunned audiences with its macabre revelations about bourgeois attitudes to racism. But an apprentice writer analysing such an accomplished work will probably be overawed by its self-confidence and polish. Far more interesting to study Norris in an earlier phase of his development. Purple Heart, from 2003, was the first of his plays to be performed outside the United States. The date is 1972. The setting