Arts Reviews Archives

Thursday

6 Dec 2012

Field Marks

The bulk of what I retain I learnt through him, from that trek to Flanders Moss in the hope of seeing a grey shrike on a blackened tree-fork, to a pair of hen harriers whose upward glide made him beam with pleasure. His first ringing-trap dismantled (it attracted vermin), he designed and built one that bears his name on the Isle of May; while in the cottage we shared, coffee-mugs and cigarette-butts cleared, and like as not whisky glasses from chess the night before, he’d set up his carousel of colour-slides to display the field marks of various species — pointing out such features as eye-stripes and wing-bars, nesting habits

Melanie McDonagh

Don’t watch The Hobbit

Once, I met Priscilla Tolkien, the daughter of J.R.R. Tolkien. It was at the Oxford Catholic chaplaincy, and she was giving a talk about her father. She was charming, something of a hobbit herself with her neat figure, and an engaging talker. But she seemed taken aback by some of her audience. It was divided into two distinct parts. Some were the ordinary Tolkien admirers, the normal, slightly shabby young people you get at chaplaincy talks, and the others were, well, a bit scary. They almost all had black T-shirts, pale faces and intense expressions, and there was a weird sort of obsessiveness about their questions. They read all sorts

Francesca Steele

Selling secrecy

In the ‘psychotherapy ward’ of a secret venue somewhere in east London, watercolour portraits of troubled male faces line the wall. Nearby in the ‘court-room’ a sound installation broadcasts an ominous tick-tock into the airy acoustics of a large hall, while the ‘Warden’s Office’ below is furnished by quilts handmade by inmates. This is Secret Gallery, the latest venture from the company behind Secret Cinema, which stages immersive screenings of celluloid classics (kept secret until the screening itself) that have so far included Blade Runner, The Red Shoes and now The Shawshank Redemption, Frank Darabont’s cult tale of prison injustice. The sell-out Secret Cinema season has finished (although you can

Kate Chisholm

Sounds in silence

Two really scary programmes this week, and not a vampire or psychopath to be heard. Both gave personal accounts of catastrophic hearing loss. Not something you’d expect to work on radio, the aural medium. How can you explain what it’s like to stop hearing when there’s no pictures, no other way to explain the absence of sound except through sound? But that’s what made them both such terrifying programmes. All the time I was listening, I kept on thinking: what would it be like if I suddenly couldn’t hear these voices, that piece of music they’re playing, this discussion of ideas. Hearing loss doesn’t mean, of course, that you actually

James Delingpole

I love Michel Roux Jr

For the past month I have been glued to the BBC’s Why Poverty? season — ‘part of an unprecedented collaboration between public service media in which 37 EBU members have been dedicating multiplatform programming on the theme of poverty’. No, I jest. What I’ve actually been watching is MasterChef. Served with a MasterChef reduction, a smear of MasterChef purée, MasterChef shavings, MasterChef pickles and MasterChef tapenade and pommes, style Masterchef. With more MasterChef for pud, obviously. Does this make me a bad person? Well, possibly. But it also makes me a normal person. I didn’t watch any of the Poverty stuff because, frankly, the very last thing I need after

Lloyd Evans

Battle of the sexes | 6 December 2012

Tough play, The Taming of the Shrew. Uniquely among Shakespeare’s comedies, it moves audiences to pity and fear. It’s a video-nasty in the garb of a marital farce, an uncomfortable romance whose closing reconciliation scene invariably draws lusty hisses from female play-goers as Kate renounces her autonomy and bows to the will of her brutal husband, Petruchio. Directors prefer to approach this squirm-inducing parade of sexual violence through the comforting distortions of a veil. Single-gender productions are popular. In a Gujurati version, Kate is portrayed as an immigrant and the title had been coyly changed to A Foolish Foreign Woman Comes to Her Senses. Cole Porter goes for the vegetarian

Peter Hoskin

Grape expectations

Five minutes into You Will Be My Son (or Tu seras mon fils in its original French), I expected a very different film from the one that eventually emerged. The first scene takes place in a crematorium, as a coffin and its occupant are cooked to ashes. A relative of the deceased picks at a flower, and asks whether the ashes of the man and of the wood will mix. At which the funeral attendant leans over like a great crow to say, ‘It’s all just carbon.’ The whole thing seems very poised, quite refined and a little bit clever. But then the film turns into something else entirely. Its

Michael Tanner

Scandal at court

The way the director James Conway sees it, Monteverdi’s last opera L’incoronazione di Poppea is about that most delicate of subjects, adult abuse by youngsters. That isn’t what he says in his programme note for his production at the Royal College of Music, where he claims that the opera is about power, ‘love, yes, but love’s power’. That is tendentious: you might as well say that Otello is about the power of jealousy, which is true, but that doesn’t make it ‘really’ about power; or that Wozzeck is about the power of powerlessness, etc. Poppea is about several things, power among them, but also love, jealousy, ambition, ruthlessness, the abuse

Rhian Edwards

Fourth Floor

I reason with the crown of the tree. Surely from this fourth floor window, we are equals now. I calculate the trajectory, whether it would catch me if I threw myself at it. I comb for clues from the uneasy rocking of the branches, the slow swimming of its fingers stirring the air. There must be something in the moth flutterings of the mylar balloon trapped between the twigs; a pincered ghost, failing to tear itself away even with the wind as an ally. You can’t blame the Poplar for wanting to hoard it, the only fruit it has ever held onto or is capable of bearing.

Thursday

29 Nov 2012

Will Gore

Declaration of independence

Taking a break doesn’t come naturally to Michael Grandage. His decade-long run as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse came to an end less than a year ago, but his latest big adventure is already set to begin. ‘The idea that I’d leave the Donmar and cruise for a bit would have been such a waste,’ he tells me, between mouthfuls of soup and crusty bread. Not even lunchtime can stop him. He is chatting to me during a break in rehearsals for Privates on Parade, the first show in a debut West End season for his new venture, the Michael Grandage Company. Four more productions will follow, all at

Andrew Lambirth

Friends reunited | 29 November 2012

Christopher Wood (1901–30), billed as the great white hope of British Modernism, who perished by his own hand before his full potential could be explored. Friend of Ben Nicholson, with whom he supposedly ‘discovered’ the naïve painter Alfred Wallis in 1928, he was a Europeanised sophisticate who knew Picasso and Cocteau and dabbled in Cubism and Surrealism. He was a talented painter with a penchant for harbour scenes, but, as this fascinating exhibition suggests, his gifts have been exaggerated (no doubt because of his romantic life story), while the achievement of his older contemporary Cedric Morris (1889–1982) has been marginalised and largely ignored. Morris is pigeonholed as a charming if

Micheal Mott

Missing

What is so noticeably lacking in Mathew Brady’s interviews with the dead are the smells; likewise in Ambrose Bierce’s corpses their faces gnawed 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.

Sebastian Payne

Review: The Rolling Stones at the O2 Arena

‘How’re you doing in the cheap seats? They’re not that cheap, though, that’s the problem,’ said Mick Jagger as he launched into the first of the Rolling Stones’ 50th anniversary concerts. Still, the electrifying combination of swagger, swing and blues transformed the O2 Arena into a raucous celebration of the self-proclaimed ‘greatest rock-and-roll band in the world’. The Stones were last on stage in 2007, and the intervening years have done little to diminish the band’s sprightliness. Jagger remained the archetypal front man, while 71-year-old drummer Charlie Watts kept up the momentum. The gnarly fingers of guitarist Keith Richards did, however, sometimes fail to find the notes, his languid playing

Kate Chisholm

Value for money | 29 November 2012

It’s been challenged as ‘elitist’ and at times in its more than 60-year history it’s been threatened with deletion from the schedule. But CD Review, with its specialist ‘Building a Library’ slot, has been around since I was old enough to listen. Radio 3’s keynote Saturday-morning show is probably the programme I miss most when I’m away. You know exactly what the format is going to be, recognise most of the voices behind the mikes, yet you’re never quite sure what you might hear, what you could discover. Its survival, in a format virtually unchanged as far back as I can remember, always strikes me as extraordinary in this age

Olivia Glazebrook

Fame and fortune

Having planned to devote every one of this week’s 800 words to Sir David Attenborough’s 60 Years in the Wild (Friday, BBC2), I was distracted by fame, fortune and the politics of influence: Give Us the Money (Sunday, BBC4) and Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream (Tuesday, BBC4). Both these programmes I watched with interest but absolutely no enjoyment whatsoever; their combined effect was a feeling of overall grubbiness, as if I had sat too close to a wrestling match on a wet afternoon in a swamp. ‘Give us the money!’ was the instruction given by Bob Geldof to the public at Live Aid in 1985. The public

Lloyd Evans

Comic clockwork

Pinero’s comedy The Magistrate is a marvellous confection of shameful secrets and multiplying concealments. Agatha, a beautiful widow of 36, has trimmed five years from her age in order to bag her second husband, Aeneas Posket, an agreeably pompous magistrate. Her subterfuge is imperilled by her 19-year-old son who must pretend to be 14 in order to make the maths work. To please his mother, the young buck behaves like a child at home. But elsewhere he pleases himself. He keeps a private room at the racy Hotel des Princes in town. One evening, he persuades his weakling stepfather to accompany him for a night of drunken antics. The police

Peter Hoskin

Caravan killers

Here’s a fun diversion for all the family: how many ‘high-concept’ film ideas can you think of in a single minute? These are the films with premises that can be summed up — and pitched to expectant, impatient Hollywood producers — in only a few words. ‘Jaws in Space’, say, or ‘Arnie versus Hitler’. Get started now, and you could soon have the studios drooling a path to your door, eager to turn your aphorisms into easily marketable products. Red carpets and golden paycheques await. I mention this because, at first glance, it seems as if Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers is the result of a similar game. Its plot concerns a

Michael Tanner

Decline and fall

Some operas become, thanks partly to the frequency with which they are produced, victims of their own popularity. The most obvious sufferer is Carmen, which is a no-winner for singers and directors alike. As soon as the curtain rises and you see lemon trees and swaying hips, your heart sinks and you spend the interval agreeing with everyone that it’s just another tired old cliché; while if the scene is a mortuary or a garage you complain — and fairly — that it’s wholly inappropriate for the drama and the music that gives it substance. Last time it was produced at ENO, in 2007, it failed on all scores and

William Wootten

The Ladies’ Man

The ladies that he spoke to, soft and sure, Believed in dresses longing to be made Of no material but that very shade Of fabric he laid out. So his demure Debs’ fingers would dip gracefully to azure Yards of silk, and his housewives’ eyes, displayed A deep vermillion with a silver braid, Would find themselves seduced by its allure. On flipping round the CLOSED sign for the day, Before easing his scissors on their hook, The pleasant-suited draper paused a while At his tall mirror, practising his smile, Trying to figure quite how he might look Now all his many ladies were away.

Thursday

22 Nov 2012

Andrew Lambirth

Lonely Lakelander

Five years ago I had never heard of Percy Kelly (1918–93). I knew the work of some Cumbria artists, and much admired the dark and moody landscapes of Sheila Fell (1931–79), for instance, but Percy Kelly had not then registered on my radar. He was already highly regarded in the Lake District, but it was not until after his death that his work was really exhibited and promoted. He was one of those artists who believe in their own value, and want others to share their high opinion, but are not prepared to sell their work to achieve this. Time and again Kelly was offered exhibitions and sabotaged them, while