Arts Reviews Archives

Thursday

21 Feb 2013

Only disconnect

Cloud Atlas is part-sci-fi, part-thriller, part-romance, part-comedy, part-action flick, part-this, part-that and it all adds up to? A whole lot of not very much. Based on David Mitchell’s novel, this strains, laboriously, to capture that novel’s scope and complexity, but gets nowhere near, and takes three hours to get nowhere near. (If you are going to take three hours, you can’t get somewhere, at least? Is that too much to ask?) Its problem isn’t lack of ambition. This cost $100 million, had three directors and stars multiple A-listers in multiple roles in multiple storylines. These A-listers include Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw and

Michael Tanner

Spurned women

I saw three operas this week, all centrally concerned with spurned women. That’s not surprising, given the general subject matter of the art form, but it sometimes makes me wonder why we prefer to see, and more importantly to hear, love-tormented women more than men. The only major exception to spring to mind is Wagner’s Ring, which gets under way with a dwarf teased and rejected by three mermaids. But even Alberich spends much more time elaborating on his plans for world domination than on lamenting lost love; the Ring is quite a big exception, but one still wonders why it is female suffering from despised love rather than the

Giannandrea Poesio

Mixed blessings | 21 February 2013

Last week, Sergei Polunin’s powerful entrance in Marguerite and Armand was saluted with a wave of electrically charged silence: not a cough, not a sound, all eyes glued to the stage. Whether viewers held their breath because they were waiting to see if the star who stormed out of the Royal Ballet still had it, or because they were genuinely impressed, is difficult to say. Personally, I was struck by that first appearance, as it confirmed that since leaving the company amid accusations, allegations and gossip Polunin has refined his already exceptional interpretative and technical skills. His charismatic Armand is the perfect reading of the role for today. This passionate

William Cook

The Good Life – how a 70s sitcom became a Conservative lodestar

When the writers John Esmonde and Bob Larbey came up with the idea for The Good Life, they were looking for a vehicle for Richard Briers, who’d just turned 40. He was well established but not quite famous — the other three actors even less so. Felicity Kendal and Penelope Keith were cast on the strength of their performances in an Ayckbourn play. Paul Eddington was a ‘first eleven light-comedy actor’ (as Briers put it) but he was hardly a household name. In the opening credits, Briers’s name was above the title, the other three were below it. Briers’s Tom Good was the lead; Kendal was ensured a decent role as

Patrick Carnegy

Moving heaven and earth

Although I’ve some doubt — and this would be applauded by Galileo — whether in everyday life it matters very much to know whether the sun goes round the earth or vice versa, I don’t for one minute doubt that the great physicist’s conflict with Mother Church mattered profoundly and resonates to this day. To Brecht, writing Das Leben des Galilei in exile in 1938, shortly after the disastrous Chamberlain appeasement, his play asserted unprejudiced scientific inquiry not just against religious dogma but also the controls that fascism and profiteering have ever sought to impose upon it. He gets to this issue way ahead of Michael Frayn’s treatment in Copenhagen

Lloyd Evans

Sheer torture

Ever been to a ‘promenade performance’? Barmy, really. The audience is conducted through a makeshift theatre space — often a disused ironworks — where the show is performed in disjointed snatches amid atmospheric clutter. Invariably hopeless as drama, promenade shows can be revealing as social anthropology. They lay bare a secret that lies at the heart of theatrical life: actors loathe play-goers. Without a paying audience, all theatre is simply am-dram. And actors have a morbid fear of slipping into the underclass of voluntary performance. So they covertly resent ticket-buying audiences who alone have the power to convert an unpaid show-off into a self-regarding thesp, with his agent and his

Micheal Mott

Missing | 21 February 2013

What are so noticeably lacking in Mathew Brady’s interviews with the dead are the smells; likewise in Ambrose Bierce’s corpses their faces gnawed away by hogs near the Greenbrier, Cheat, Gauley; or the wounded roasted in gullies a foot deep in leaves at Shiloh, Spotsylvania; and you, reader, cannot supply what is left out. So how much more eludes us? . . . the scent in the rain.

Thursday

14 Feb 2013

Andrew Lambirth

Ice Age art at the British Museum: Geniuses of 40,000BC

The best way to approach any exhibition is with a clear and uncluttered mind, without expectations or prejudices. Of course this is often impossible, for all sorts of reasons, particularly when we have some familiarity with the subject on view. Inevitably we are besieged by images and opinions before we enter an exhibition of Manet or Picasso, but with Ice Age Art I was able to approach without any troubling preconceptions. I arrived at the British Museum in a state of pleasant anticipation, and within minutes I was entirely won over. The curator, Jill Cook, has given us an extraordinary glimpse of a long-distant age which yet feels incredibly fresh

Niru Ratnam

The new seekers | 14 February 2013

Over the past year or so, art world insiders have queued up to denounce the current state of the contemporary art world. Charles Saatchi started the ball rolling with a column at the end of 2011 in the Guardian. Breaking his self-imposed ban on interviews or writing, he launched a withering attack on an art world that, according to him, had descended to ‘the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard’. Around the same time, the American collector Adam Lindemann wrote an article in the New York Observer about why he would not be attending Art Basel

Kate Chisholm

The comfort of strangers

Blink and you would have missed it, but Wednesday was World Radio Day, devoted to celebrating radio ‘as a medium’. You might think the BBC would welcome this Unesco initiative ‘to promote freedom of expression over the airwaves’ and ‘improve international co-operation between broadcasters’, but there’s nothing in Radio Times about it, and nothing on the various network websites. It’s as if radio has become such an established part of British life there’s no need to give it special treatment, to celebrate its existence as a way of ensuring its survival. Only on the World Service, buried in the schedule, could you find on Wednesday a special edition of World

Christina Dunhill

The Scarf

I saw Christine Lagarde outside The Wellcome Trust with a trolley case. She was wearing my scarf — the scarf I had when I was thirty two: a scarf with white dots on royal blue, or should I say French navy? — the very essence of what a scarf should be, which, in red, would be the scarf of the swagman or children’s book burglar but in blue remains jolly while suggesting tradition. Now, I admire Christine Lagarde and I support her policies. I believe the life of Christine Lagarde is something worth aiming for. I admire Christine Lagarde, but that is no reason to confer on her my scarf

Lucy Vickery

Kraftwerk at Tate Modern

Quite what it was that was so spellbinding about a quartet of middle-aged German blokes in skintight bodysuits standing at neon-lit consoles is difficult to articulate. They didn’t even seem to be doing very much up there on stage. But the audience of 1,000 for round two of Kraftwerk’s eight-night retrospective in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall were mesmerised for two hours solid. The high priests of electronica, whose bittersweet retro-futurism sowed so many of the seeds of modern pop music, performed their 1975 album Radio-Activity against a backdrop of 3D visuals (specs provided) that were always engaging and occasionally jaw-dropping. Live, the sound lacked the authentic crackle and fuzz of

Olivia Glazebrook

Schoenberg in shorts

For anyone who missed The Sound and the Fury (Tuesday, BBC4) here is a reason — one of many — to catch it on your iPlayer: footage of a fierce, frowning and elderly Stravinsky, sitting in the empty stalls of the Théâtre des Champs Elysées and recalling the ‘near-riot’ which greeted the first performance of The Rite of Spring in 1913. ‘It was full — ’ (he gestured crossly around him) ‘ — of very noisy public. Very ’ostile public. I went up — when I heard all this noise — and I said, “Go to hell! Excuse me, Messieurs et Dames, and goodbye!”’ The Sound and the Fury: A

Michael Tanner

Double vision | 14 February 2013

This week has featured new productions at the Royal Opera and English National Opera of staples of the repertoire, both subjected to drastic rethinking. Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is the first production at the Royal Opera of the new Director of Opera, Kasper Holten, and on this showing I very much hope it will be the last. It has been reviewed coolly on the whole, but I haven’t read anyone being sufficiently abusive — adequately, that is, to the experience of sitting through a flawed but moving masterpiece that is systematically, though I’m sure involuntarily, slaughtered from the opening moments to the wretched close. This is an opera that Holten loves,

Lloyd Evans

Fatal flaw | 14 February 2013

A new play about the banking crisis at the Bush. Writer, Clare Duffy, has spent a year or two badgering financiers and economists with questions about ‘the fundamentals’. ‘What is the value of money?’ she asks. ‘What do we want and need money to be?’ Her play has lots of zing and energy, and opens as a TV game show. The audience is divided into teams and individuals are hauled out of their seats and asked to engage in sporting contests with a big stash of 10,000 pound coins that gleam in coppery piles on the stage. Then the show becomes a drama. We’re in 2007. Two bankers, Queenie and

Peter Hoskin

Mid-life crisis | 14 February 2013

This is 40. Or perhaps I should say, is this 40? I haven’t yet reached that rounded age myself, so don’t have much of a frame of reference. But a quick spin around Wikipedia reveals that the film’s writer-director Judd Apatow (45) and its two stars, Leslie Mann (40) and Paul Rudd (43), all have the requisite number of years on them. They must know what they’re talking about, mustn’t they? Mann and Rudd play Debbie and Pete, a married couple who first appeared in one of the best comedies of the last decade, Apatow’s Knocked Up (2007). And their relationship is summed up by the film’s poster: Pete squats

Connie Bensley

Painting the Fence

For the first coat she started at the house end, he at the garden gate. They worked towards each other meeting fondly in the middle. For the second coat they began in the middle and worked outwards; he abstracted, murmuring, tweaking his phone with a painty forefinger. By the shrubbery he put down his brush and the garden gate groaned, clicked shut. Now the tin offers her its tedious advice For a perfect finish, apply a third coat. The days pass. The paint hardens.

Thursday

7 Feb 2013

Alasdair Palmer

Medieval mystery

Medieval castles are generally dark and forbidding places that look as if they were built to prove the proposition that ‘form follows function’: the function was to be impregnable, and their high walls, crenelated and machicolated battlements, and slits for firing arrows instead of windows suggest that everything was subordinated to that dour defensive purpose. Castles are gloomy, intimidating buildings that sink the spirits. They were meant to intimidate and depress the population, and they succeeded. They still do. But we may have the wrong idea about castles. Recent research suggests that, in Italy at least, far from being solidly monochrome blocks, they may have been a riot of colour.

Andrew Lambirth

Finding beauty in junk

Although Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) did not invent the technique or theory of collage, he was one of the greatest practitioners of it, raising it in his work to the level of an independent art form. The Cubists may have made art out of collage first, but for them it was intricately allied with painting, whereas Schwitters made collages for their own sake. They are some of the finest things in this rich and varied exhibition, which focuses on his years in Britain (1940–8), though the full range of his work, including a fascinating selection of paintings and sculptures, is also indicated in this typically large Tate display. Viewing it is

Erica Mcalpine

Peonies

On an impulse, you could eat these flowers up the way they’re floating, stemlessly, side by side like scoops of ice cream in a crystal cup. White and softly drizzled with syrup (almost creeping down from the top) and shyly turning inward still, each closed bud leaks red along the seams and gleams like a hot sundae. What puzzles is how quickly these petals fan out, brown, flip, and fray along the edges. If only they’d stay put — if you could just keep peonies shut. Open, they frazzle.