Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Rachel Johnson

Sex and the city

We don’t do burlesque here. We do bawdy, Benny Hill, end-of-pier prurience instead. Montmartre may have the Moulin Rouge, but the closest we get to saucy is John Major not ‘on’ Edwina Currie — titter — but on our tradition of music hall. As a nation we can-cannot do the can-can. So I found it intriguing that impresario Harvey Goldsmith has imported one of Paris’ most distinguished and long-running titty shows, Crazy Horse, to London’s Southbank. I went, to sit in a hot tent in the dark with a lot of mouth breathers, to watch young women without any clothes on, apart from strange pants consisting of large Band-Aids that

Kate Chisholm

No escape

‘They were Jews with guns! Understand that…’ declares Raymond Massey, chillingly, in the final scene of The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto, first heard across America on Sunday, 12 December 1943. Notice that date: 1943. Not 1953, or even 1945. Just six months after the Jews who had been herded into the Polish capital by the Nazis lost their battle to escape certain death, American radio fans heard the rich and unmistakable voice of Massey (Oscar-winning star of a Hollywood biopic on the life of Abraham Lincoln), playing the role not just of a dead man, which was shocking enough, but of a Jewish dead man, a rabbi who had

Olivia Glazebrook

Spy class

Hunted (Thursday, BBC1) made a terrific start, but whether the first episode has set the standard for the next seven is another matter — a thriller, after all, has a duty to overwhelm, seduce and deceive with its opening gambit. This series was not conceived by fluke: anyone with half an eye on Bond, Bourne, Spooks or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo can see its pedigree, but that is no bad thing, and if its look reminds us of last year’s Scandinavian hits then so much the better. The territory is familiar — international espionage — but we never tire of spies, and these are not the double ‘O’

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Passage to India

I’ve just come back from India. At least that’s how it feels after a double attack of subcontinental drama. Tara Arts, in Wandsworth, has relocated Molière’s The Miser to modern India and commissioned a script from the Glaswegian standup, Hardeep Singh Kohli. He brings the two cultures together with the insouciant aplomb of an experimental chef concocting a lobster and peppercorn fruit sundae. The result may not please hardcore Molière fans, who speak in reverential tones of the master’s subtlety and elegance, his satirical adroitness and his talent for intricate and charming narrative constructions. This is a show that confidently abandons all such sophistication. It aims for low-brow burlesque. And

Michael Tanner

Realising Wagner’s power

There is no experience faintly comparable to sitting in an opera house at the opening of Wagner’s Ring cycle, knowing you will be watching and listening to the whole thing in the space of a week. The opening E flat, especially when it emerges as it does at the Royal Opera in total darkness, the pit as well as the auditorium, is thrilling beyond belief, and as the music slowly begins to move the sense of being in at the beginning and not knowing what will happen is overwhelming, however familiar you may be with the Ring. Wagner’s dynamic instructions are very specific — at no point in the prelude

Deborah Ross

Young love

The perks of being a wallflower are few and far between, in my experience, and I’m not even convinced you can be a wallflower if you are as ravishing as, say, Emma Watson, who modelled for Burberry whenever her Harry Potter schedule would allow, which isn’t the way it usually works for wallflowers, but what do I know, really? In fact, this being a teenage coming-of-age drama, I will now hand over to a teenager, although not a willing one, as he is anxious to escape to ‘top field’ to do ‘nothing’ with ‘just people’. Still, I have bribed him with the promise of a tenner and a lifetime supply

Colin Falck

October

October comes: the year resigns. The currents down life’s widening stream run faster now. Like unpaid fines the leaves pile up. Dark evenings seem drawn out and under-loaded: lines from poems that won’t come right: a dream of emptier nights. Encoded signs for endings rather more extreme.

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

Beguiled by bronze

There are nearly 160 bronze sculptures ranged throughout the Royal Academy’s main galleries in Bronze, a glorious exhibition (until 9 December) covering a period of 5,000 years — effectively the entire history of the medium. The progression of this durable and universal art form is laid out at a relaxed pace in an exhibition that spans both grandeur and intimacy. Some people have complained about the installation, finding it difficult to follow or too competitively arranged, but I enjoyed it tremendously. This is a remarkable survey of a fascinating subject and the Academy must be congratulated on entrusting it to the capable hands of David Ekserdjian, Professor of History of

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 27 September 2012

An actor’s life can be quite hazardous. Last week, a day or two after I had seen him perform as Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens at the National Theatre, Simon Russell Beale fell over and dislocated a finger, running off the stage in agony. And last weekend my niece Anna Chancellor showed me some nasty bruises on her leg that she had got while tumbling about with her stage lover during the second act of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. That was after just the first two preview performances, and the play is only now beginning a six-week run at the Chichester Festival Theatre in West Sussex. I had gone there to

Victoria Lane

Incredible string band

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain are performing at the Albert Hall: playing their tiny instruments in a very big space. There must be 5,000 people here, but the orchestra’s friendly jokes, the modesty of the ukulele sound and the familiarity of the audience make the concert seem intimate. The Ukes have been going for 28 years, and in the past half-decade or so they’ve gone mega. Their formula is a mash-up of the ridiculous and the sublime; the players poke fun at their ‘bonsai guitars’, then pluck from them a wildly diverse range of music with virtuosity and irreverence. They kick off with a Marilyn Monroe number, then thump

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Artificial life

I was that desperate for something to watch on TV the other night that I actually sat through half an episode of Outnumbered. This is the highly rated comedy series, now in its umpteenth season, in which children say implausibly clever, sassy things much to the bemusement of their hard-pressed parents. Why do I not share in the general adulation of this comedy? First, to misquote Homer Simpson, it isn’t funny because it isn’t true. I say this with confidence having personally bred and raised two of the most brilliant, witty and incisive children ever created. Maybe once or twice in their entire lives have they said anything as clever

Michael Tanner

Dream on

‘Tell a dream and lose a reader’ was one of Henry James’s most immediately practical if obvious pieces of advice to fellow authors. Dying in 1916, he didn’t have much chance to experience surrealism in its numerous manifestations, and one can’t imagine his responding positively if he had. For the abandonment of memory, of motive, of logic, of any of the categories by which we make sense of experience is gleefully embraced by surrealists — and by no one more thoroughly than Georges Neveux, in his play Juliette, or the key of dreams. It concerns Michel, a man who is so haunted by a song he heard a girl singing

Deborah Ross

What’s it all about?

Holy Motors is so mad, deranged, lunatic, bonkers, cuckoo and away with the fairies that, if you were on a bus, and saw it boarding, you’d pray it didn’t sit next to you, although, knowing your luck, it probably would. That said, maybe you shouldn’t be quite so prissy and stand-offish. This film is a wacky ride, as well as a crazy, insane and off-the-wall one, but it is also peculiarly involving, exhilarating and unforgettable. I am still picking it out of my teeth, as if it were yesterday’s lamb chop, unlike the film I saw last week, whatever it was. (Was it good? Did I like it?) This is

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Weaving an artful web

The Charing Cross Theatre has followed the trends of performance art for more than a century. It used to be a music hall. Then it put in a stint as a cinema. Now it’s a small theatre and it specialises in experimental comedies. The Man on her Mind fits the bill nicely. It opens with Nellie, a sexy young book editor, being seduced in her one-bedroom flat by her handsome lover. There’s a knock on the door. The lover hides in the bathroom. In comes Nellie’s horrible sister, Janet, and she — surprise, surprise — needs the bathroom. She goes in and the lover is discovered. But no. The lover

Harry Mount

Building on the past

London was an industrial city until remarkably recently. It seems extraordinary now, but Bankside Power Station was built in 1947, by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, to burn oil right on the banks of the Thames, opposite St Paul’s. What’s more, Gilbert Scott’s other great power station, Battersea, built in 1929, is less than a mile upstream. In the early 1970s, more than 1.1 million people in the capital — almost a third of the workforce — had manufacturing jobs. Now only 117,000 do — one in 40 workers. Still, the old industrial architecture survives in pleasingly generous quantities. Rotting and ignored for decades, it has lingered into an age when,

Colin Falck

World

when the two-footed Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains The dignity of room, the value of rareness Robinson Jeffers Spengler was wrong: the world has become the West. Japan has bowed out now; in China they buy art, drink wine, play late Rachmaninov, groom themselves for decline in Prada or Bulgari, wonder which limousines are best. Our hard-won vision fades: dead faiths are reborn; circuses rule the airwaves; Darwin makes way. While bearded prophets prognosticate, announce their day, their raw congregations pray and exchange their porn. Time to turn out the lights. Too late to rely on gold, ammunition, canned food; to make plans to revive old

Kathryn Simmonds

Post It Notes

Self-adhesive suns they glow fluorescent on grey monitors wanting for a world ess misremembered. Oh, how biddable! Our paper geisha girls, dancing in an open window breeze, only to die the deaths of petals curling, ips unpeeling from a disappearing love.

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

Downton on the down-turn

Downton Abbey has come crashing down. No, it’s not Lord Grantham’s ruinous investments but rather the uncomfortable fact that the world has finally realised that the show is overhyped tripe. Julian Fellows and, it seemed, anyone who’d ever walked on set donned their tuxedos at last night’s Emmys. Expectations were high with sixteen nominations for ITV Drama’s flagship production; but those hopes were dashed as the Americans made clear what most of us have known for ages: Maggie Smith’s hilarious dowager is the only thing worth watching. She was the sole Downtonite to get a gong. Ironically, she was the only person involved not to show up.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Fright night

Here comes Jane Asher. She swings through the doors of a small Chelsea hotel, chucks her bag on the floor, and sits down with an expectant look. Her voluminous red hair has attractive hints of something blonder on top. Her eyes are pale blue, and extraordinarily intense, and she has a fulsome rack of plump white teeth that hint at large appetites. But her figure is as trim as a teenager’s. We meet a few weeks before she begins rehearsing Charley’s Aunt, the classic Victorian farce in which she plays a Brazilian dowager, Donna Lucia d’Alvadorez. Does she think it’ll be more fun because the script is a bundle of

Andrew Lambirth

Under the skin | 19 September 2012

John Berger (born 1926) is one of the most intriguing and richly controversial figures in British arts and letters. Actually, since he lives full-time in France, he can scarcely be considered English in any meaningful way, and is indeed an international figure, widely regarded outside this country as one of Europe’s greatest intellectuals and quite often as some sort of cultural guru. Here he is thought of as a Marxist art critic, a dangerously potent broadcaster and a writer or novelist who defies categorisation. One suspects he is a bit of an embarrassment to the arts establishment, so he tends to be ignored. His residence abroad makes this easier, but