Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

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

Sarah Drury

The place to be

A display of drawings by 20th-century sculptors is a welcome event, and the multi-levelled, multi-functional Kings Place provides just the right ambience, the building echoing the concept and providing a satisfying mix of enjoyment, surprise and irritation. To stage Sculptors’ Drawings (until 12 October) has been a long-held ambition of Pangolin’s Rungwe Kingdon and he has assembled over 200 works, including Eduardo Paolozzi’s ‘Collage’ (above), plus a scattering of 3D pieces. It sounds straightforward, but this being the art world, and sculpture a broad kirk, no chance to complicate has been foregone. The ‘drawings’ encompass working exercises, recordings, dissections, experimental shape-making and pieces that exist as creations in their own

Giannandrea Poesio

American beauty | 19 September 2012

Tragically, the number of ballet directors who can orchestrate good programmes and good openings is dwindling these days. Helgi Tómasson, of San Francisco Ballet, is one of the few who are still in the know, judging by the terrific bang with which his company opened last week in London.  Divertimento No.15 might not be one of George Balanchine’s greatest works, but it remains a delectable compendium of all the distinctive traits dance-goers love in Balanchine’s composition. Craftily entwined with and within Mozart’s music, the 1956 dance is one of the choreographer’s many tributes to the grand old era of the Imperial Russian Ballet — whence he came. Like any of

Michael Tanner

A time for reflection

As any regular opera-goer knows, next year is uniquely one for three major operatic centenaries, two of them, Verdi’s and Wagner’s, bicentenaries, while Britten was born only 100 years ago, but seems to have been dead for a very long time. So we can expect numerous series — of performances, recordings, broadcast radio and TV features — and probably quite a few biographies and critical studies. Indeed they have already got under way in Wagner’s case, with several new German biographies, while the prominent conductor Christian Thielemann has just given his account of Mein Leben mit Wagner, a book and CD;  Marek Janowski, another of today’s leading Wagner conductors, is

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

A lost illusion at the Last Night of the Proms

It was the last night of the Proms and the first I’ve ever attended. I’ve watched it on TV, of course, and even been to a Last Night of the Proms party, where we all watched the television, swigging sparkling wine and singing along to Rule Britannia. But to be there, actually among the audience at the Royal Albert Hall, would be something special, I thought. And it was. Ever since receiving an invitation to join a friend whose party were occupying a whole box I’d felt excited about it, and I was not disappointed. There’s something about real events — a thrill that has perhaps sharpened in an era

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Underpowered Ibsen

The tone is the thing. Ibsen is among the heaviest of the heavy-going playwrights and his masterpiece, Hedda Gabler, is an unbearably tense psychological thriller that ends with one of the biggest shocks in the theatrical repertoire. The play takes us into a doomed marriage between Hedda, a brilliant and eccentric depressive, and George Tesman, a dull-as cheesecake university lecturer. Director Anna Mackmin has read the Old Vic audience correctly. They’ve spent all day at the office, raising enough funds to buy tickets, and they’re not interested in a three-hour Nordic brain-bruiser. Instead, they want a frothy, offbeat marital comedy with a few sad bits. And that’s what they get.

Deborah Ross

Divine Diana

I don’t care much for fashion — ask anyone; I’ve even lately surrendered to the fleece — and don’t care for fashion magazines at all. They have nothing to say to my life. They’ve never even featured ‘top ten fleeces of the season’, as far as I know. But this isn’t to say I don’t enjoy the odd mischievous trip behind the scenes. I loved The Devil Wears Prada, starring my friend Meryl, with whom I have dined. I loved The September Issue, the fly-on-the-wall about American Vogue and Anna Wintour, although the only thing I can now remember is being fixated with Ms Wintour’s bob which, one day, will

Thursday

Angela Summerfield

Artistic response

Van Gogh to Kandinsky presents a rare and exciting opportunity to see some 60 paintings as examples of landscape symbolism from major international institutions and private collections. The exhibition extends beyond the usual north European definitions of this subject, with the coupling of the emotionally charged graphic-colourist van Gogh with the increasingly reductive and programmatic application of colour-to-form associated with late Kandinsky. It challenges, therefore, conventional categorisations of modern European art. Who would think, moreover, that Lord Leighton, Hammershøi, Monet and Mondrian could share a common thesis, let alone inhabit the same gallery rooms? In lesser hands, such an ambitious project could have descended into chaos and visual incoherence. However,

Andrew Lambirth

Connecting threads

The past few months have been busy for Jock McFadyen. Substantial commercial shows of his work have been held in London and Edinburgh, he has been elected a member of the Royal Academy, and a retrospective of four decades of his painting is currently on view at the Fleming Collection in Berkeley Street, Mayfair (until 17 October). Although Scottish by birth (he was born in 1950 in Paisley and brought up on the outskirts of Glasgow), he has lived most of his life in London. All the men in his family worked in the shipyards, but his father took a job in England when McFadyen was 16, so he came

Laura Gascoigne

A civilised way of death

‘Luxury high-rise duplex: lower floor comprising entrance hall with recessed guard posts, grand reception area, kitchen with crockery store, larders and walk-in fridge, armoury and staff WC; upper floor comprising master bedroom with two en-suite bathrooms, staff accommodation, guard rooms and safe deposit. Property provided with the latest hi-tech security systems and 24-hour manned guarding.’ Apart from the lack of a cinema and a gym, this property sounds just the ticket for the jittery billionaire looking to invest in London real estate. But its location is not the fringes of Hyde Park or the South Bank, it’s the side of a mountain near Xuzhou in northeast China, and its accommodation

William Cook

At home with the Pre-Raphaelites

Andrew Lloyd Webber cried when he first came to Wightwick Manor, and standing in the Great Parlour of this magnificent Victorian villa you can see what moved him to tears of joy. Lloyd Webber loves the Pre-Raphaelites (he’s always had the common touch) and Wightwick is a living monument to the one artistic movement that England can truly call its own. There’s William Morris wallpaper on the walls and Charles Kempe stained glass in the windows — and beneath the minstrels’ gallery is Edward Burne-Jones’s ‘Love Among The Ruins’ (which has this month travelled to London for the biggest Pre-Raphaelite exhibition since the 1980s). Tate Britain’s Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (on