Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Maurice Riordan

The Cuckoo Clock

for Michael Donaghy, 1954-2004 Parking near St Pancras long before light, it wouldn’t spook if you peered from a shop front or popped from a grille — remembering the night we arranged a rendezvous at the Elephant, you like a meerkat in-and-out of the subways on the traffic island, head cocked but hesitant when I called A Mhíchíl through the sodium haze — who already must have felt in your brain a faint alert above the chug of the Riesenrad… I observed the scared look but never imagined you’d be panicked or with a farcical skip be gone: feral, too soft you were, but glad in your heart as you

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

How Roy Lichtenstein became weighed down with superficiality

On both sides of the Atlantic there are still heated debates about who invented Pop Art, the Americans or the British, but it seems much more probable that concurrently each initiated their own brand in response to the zeitgeist of post-war consumerism. Certainly, the American Roy Lichtenstein (1923–97), after near-abstract beginnings, started in 1961 to paint large freehand versions of comic-strip frames, complete with speech bubbles, and exhibited them in New York in the first Pop Art shows. He moved on a bit from comic strips to Disney, advertising and the ordinary objects of the modern environment, and developed a style of measured drawing and stencils that broke up colour

William Cook

The man behind Eric and Ernie

It takes a special sort of talent to turn a good act into a great one, and without John Ammonds, who died last month, aged 88, it’s quite possible that today’s couch potatoes never would have heard of Morecambe & Wise. As their BBC producer, he transformed them from jobbing comics into a national institution. The seven series he made with them still stand as the acme of Light Entertainment television. When Ammonds teamed up with Eric and Ernie, their double act was two-dimensional. Viewers liked them but they didn’t warm to them. Ammonds reconnected them with their theatrical roots, filming them on a raised stage with wings and curtain.

Kate Chisholm

After Saddam

‘The problem is why,’ said the health project officer of a British charity working in the marshlands of southern Iraq close to Basra. ‘No one answers why?’ He was talking to the BBC journalist Hugh Sykes about the state of Iraq, ten years after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He agreed that the Americans and British had done ‘a good job’ in getting rid of the dictator but said that this had changed nothing in Basra, whose economy had been destroyed by Saddam as he drained the marshes, turning a landscape that was vivid green into burnt ochre. We also heard from the farmers who in the hours after Saddam’s

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Bluestone 42: Dad’s Army it isn’t

The thing that always used to bother me about M*A*S*H as a child was the lack of combat. You’d see the realistic film of choppers at the beginning and, obviously, the plotline would quite often include casualties coming in from recent scenes of action. But the exciting stuff always seemed to happen offstage, a bit like in Shakespeare where some character strides on and tells you what a terrible battle there’s just been and you’re going, ‘Wait a second. Did we just skip past the most exciting bit?’ This clearly isn’t going to be a problem, though, with BBC3’s new sitcom about a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan, Bluestone 42

Deborah Ross

Robot & Frank

Robot & Frank is about a robot, and Frank, and I’d like to say it is as charmingly irresistible as you might suppose from the cute posters all around town, but hand on heart?  I cannot. It’s OK, I guess, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough, and, in the end, settles for what I most feared it would settle for: sentimentality. A pity, as the set-up is brilliant, and the questions it throws up — are you still you, once your mind starts to fail?; who is going to look after all our old?  — so worth asking, but it never properly gets to grips

Michael Tanner

Mozart magic

It was some time since I’d been to a performance of Mozart’s greatest though not his deepest opera, Le Nozze di Figaro, one of the works of which I can’t imagine ever tiring. And it is, despite some heavy vocal demands, an opera which normally suits students at the music colleges well. There weren’t any obvious grave shortcomings in the first night’s performance of it at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, but it annoyingly failed to achieve lift-off. Nerves may well have a lot to do with that: the playing of the Overture had enough problems of intonation among the winds, which later played beautifully, to suggest that.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Aversion therapy

It’s been a while, I have to say, but last week I saw a show that thrilled me to the core. Trelawny of the Wells, the Donmar’s latest offering, is a tribute to the theatre written by actor-turned-writer Arthur Wing Pinero. A simple set-up. Gorgeous young luvvie, Rose Trelawny, has forsaken the greasepaint to marry a greaseball called Arthur Gower. He’s loaded. Rosie’s actor chums treat her to a farewell bash complete with antique gags, tuneless ditties, snatches from half-remembered dramas and long-winded orations consisting entirely of in-jokes. (You’ll have spotted that this is not the show that thrilled me to the core.) At one point, a tragedian holds a

Paul Ibell

Transatlantic traffic

There has been a lot of discussion recently, prompted by the start of President Obama’s second term, about the ‘Special Relationship’ between the United Kingdom and the United States. What seems to have been overlooked in the analysis of politics, economics and diplomatic relations is that the strongest and most culturally important link between the two countries is their shared passion for theatre. For all the razzle-dazzle of Broadway, the London of Elizabeth II remains, as it has since the rule of Elizabeth I, the world capital of the stage. Transferring from London to New York is a huge buzz for British actors, but it is a chance to sample

Robin Robertson

Port na h-Abhainne

We walked the cliff of Portnahaven listening to the grey seals sing on Orsay and Eilean Mhic Coinnich across the little harbour. Were they singing for the love of being here in this place, like us, far from griefs — and were they also singing, as we were, to each other?

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

David Inshaw: the great romantic

David Inshaw will celebrate his 70th birthday on 21 March, around the time of the spring equinox. On the eve of this grand climacteric, which will be marked by an exhibition of new and old work at the Fine Art Society, I went down to Devizes to interview him. He has lived for much of his life there, with brief interludes in Bristol, London, Cambridge and Wales. In Devizes he is surrounded by the countryside that has most inspired him — the Marlborough Downs and the open stretches of Salisbury Plain, the trees and hills of his beloved Wiltshire. Inshaw is a landscape and figure painter, known to many as

William Cook

Wandering eye

‘When Matisse dies,’ declared Picasso, ‘Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.’ Wandering around this splendid show you can see exactly what he meant. Chagall never used colour for cheap effect, but to convey meaning and emotion. The effect of seeing so many of his works together is almost overwhelming — a symphony hung upon a wall. But these aren’t the romantic paintings of Chagall’s later years, the visions of young lovers floating over seas of flowers. These are the urgent artworks of his youth, made at a time of immense upheaval. By focusing on these early years, to the virtual exclusion of his

Lucy Vickery

Foundling Hospital tokens

‘Dear Sir, I am the unfortunate woman that lies under sentens of Death in Newgatt…’  So begins a letter of 1757 addressed to the powers that be at the Foundling Hospital in  London’s Bloomsbury. Written in a strong hand, it contains the poignant petition of a woman on death row, Margaret Larney, that her children, who have been admitted to the hospital separately, might ‘know one and other’. Even if the younger child hadn’t died shortly after admission, Margaret’s eloquent plea would certainly have been in vain. When an infant entered the hospital, its former identity was erased and siblings remained ignorant of their blood ties. But now, some 250

Steerpike Steerpike

Could Malcolm Tucker take on Alan Rusbridger?

Sad news has broken. If the online speculation is true, it appears that casting agents for the upcoming Guardian movie have overlooked Daniel Radcliffe for the part of Alan Rusbridger. Given that Harry Potter and AR are dopplegangers, Mr Steerpike reckons that the agents have missed a trick. For those who haven’t heard, the film will chart the paper’s stormy relationship with Wikileaks. Benedict Cumberbatch is already getting to grips with the role of Julian Assange; the question now is, who will play Rusbridger? Incongruous rumours are circulating that the softly spoken editor will be portrayed by Scottish actor Peter Capaldi, aka Malcolm Tucker. The foul mouthed ranter from the BBC’s The Thick

Nicholas Farrell

Beppe Grillo: Italy’s new Mussolini

The stand-up comedian Beppe Grillo, like the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini before him, has a craving to take over the piazza and mesmerise the crowd. Where once young Italians chanted the mantra ‘Du-ce! Du-ce!’ now they chant  ‘Bep-pe! Bep-pe!’. But it is not just a shared need to rant and rave at large numbers of complete strangers that hirsute Beppe and bald Benito have in common. Worryingly, for Italy and also for Europe (where democracy seems incapable of solving the existential crisis), there is a lot more to it than that. Beppe Grillo founded the MoVimento 5 Stelle (M5S) in Milan on 4 October 2009. The capital ‘V’ stands for

Will Gore

First Life of Pi, now Cloud Atlas. Why keep trying to film the unfilmable?

Whenever the possibility of a film version of a difficult or complex book is mooted, speculation mounts about how it will be done. Usually at this point some dull spark will pipe up that some novels are simply ‘unfilmable’ (though such reservations are sometimes shared by the authors of the novels in question: David Mitchell himself never believed that his novel Cloud Atlas could be turned into a movie: ‘My only film-related thought when I was writing the book was what a shame that no one would ever, ever film this,’ he said. ‘I was quite convinced it would never happen’). But the myth of the unfilmable novel has been

Kate Chisholm

Nick Robinson’s Battle for the Airwaves

Deep within the BBC’s inquiry into the Newsnight and Jimmy Savile affair is a comment by Jeremy Paxman so inflammatory as to demand its own investigation (lasting months and costing squillions). The trouble, he said, with BBC News is that it has become dominated by ‘radio people’. This was not, it seems, intended as a compliment. It’s as if, in Paxman’s view, the whole dreadful, dreary, demeaning muddle was the fault of those ‘radio people’, because according to Paxman they ‘belong to a different kind of culture’. You might think it’s of little importance that Paxman thinks himself cast from a different mould to, say, John Humphrys or Eddie Mair.

Olivia Glazebrook

ITV’s Food Glorious Food is under the curse of Simon Cowell

I sometimes worry that ITV — the middle child — doesn’t get enough of my attention and so this week I have decided to redress the balance: I devoted myself to episode one of Food Glorious Food (Wednesday, ITV). It’s a nine-part quest, hosted by Carol Vorderman, which aims to discover ‘Britain’s best-loved recipe’. O jubilate deo! This is how it goes: treasured family recipes are cooked up at regional events and tasted by one of four judges who choose a favourite and submit it to be tasted by the other three. The judges are Loyd Grossman (smooth), Anne Harrison (stern), Stacie Stewart (bubbly) or Tom Parker Bowles (apologetic). One

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Losing the plot | 28 February 2013

Who got the most out of the credit crunch? Security guards, repossession firms, bailed-out banks and, of course, playwrights. Anders Lustgarten is the latest to cash in on five years of global misery with If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep. The play, like the title, is effortful, disjointed and cumbersome. In the first half, a gang of fatcat bankers sets up a new financial instrument, Unity Bonds, which will generate profits from socially useful behaviour. This intriguing idea is sidelined in the second half. The action moves to a squatter camp where the banking system is about to be put on trial. Lustgarten assumes, no

Michael Tanner

Le Nozze di Figaro

I went to two of the most familiar operas in the repertoire this week, one in HD from the New York Met, the other at the Royal Opera. Both were given in decent if not, with some exceptions, outstanding performances. The experiences led me to think again about the differences between seeing an opera onstage in a theatre and seeing one ‘live’ in the cinema. Our intermission hostess, Renée Fleming, repeated the usual formula about how there is no substitute for actually being present in the theatre where the opera is taking place, but I wonder what she would say if challenged on that point. There is a question of