Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Unholy alliance

The British Museum has collaborated with the Royal Shakespeare Company on this exhibition, in order to make links between the rich array of BM treasures and Shakespeare’s plays. I’ve never been very convinced about the intermingling of video screens and art: people almost always gravitate to the moving image, particularly if words are involved and people featured. Clips of actors rolling out Shakespeare’s lines with every appearance of enjoyment are bound to capture the attention of the audience at the expense of artefacts, which simply don’t have the same drama or human interest. ‘Oh look, there’s Siân Phillips — or is it Harriet Walter?’ is a much more likely cry

Save our soap

It’s no good. We’ve been putting up with weird character changes, laughably unconvincing plotlines, calculating theatricals for a while now. But life in Ambridge has now plunged into the danger zone. If we don’t rise up in protest, The Archers is doomed, destined for broadcasting oblivion, killed off by a flash flood of OTT dramatics. There were warning signs as soon as Ambridge Extra was launched on Radio 4 Extra with a mission to update life in the Borsetshire village, make it more appealing to younger listeners, provide a hinterland for all those minor characters whose names we knew but from whom we never heard — Freda, Ryan, Sabrina. Things

Lloyd Evans

Touch of evil

Richard III is seriously bad for your health. Any actor will tell you that the part of the ‘bunch-backed toad’ is so physically punishing that the chap in the title role usually ends up being injected with painkillers by the local quack before each show. Or he finds himself in hospital when he should be on stage. Mark Rylance has heeded these warnings. His Richard — an astonishing feat of creative originality — is very nearly able-bodied. He has no crutches, no twisted limbs, no bandy legs, no hump weighing him down like a medicine ball. He walks with a faint limp. He carries a withered arm discreetly under his

Spirit of the Fringe

In the beginning was the Edinburgh International Festival, a carefully curated exhibition of high culture. Then came the Fringe, in which every pub and church hall in the city became a venue for everything from student theatre to experimental dance. Now, it is mutating again — and for the better. The real arts story of Edinburgh this year is emerging from what used to be the Royal Veterinary School. It has been renamed Summerhall, transformed inside into a world of fresh wood and glass doors and offered as a strikingly ambitious, multifaceted arts venue. Bankrolled by the financial consultant and sometime Downing Street adviser Robert McDowell, the 2.5-acre site incorporates

Scattergun speed-dating

OK, let’s get this over with quickly so we can all hurry back to watching the Olympics. I’m obsessed by the Olympics (Go, Mo, go!; Yes, Jess, yes!) and all our gold medals. It’s like we can’t stop being showered with them. In fact, I went to the corner shop just now and came back with four, after a standing ovation! So is 360 worth tearing yourself away from, say,  the synchronised swimming — or ‘designer drowning’, as it is known in our house — for or not? It certainly has magnificent credentials. It is directed by Fernando Meirelles, who also directed The Constant Gardener and City of God, one

Dorset cream

My first visit to Dorset Opera, last year, left me very impressed. If anything this year was even better, though I found one of the three operas dull. In last year’s programme, I seem to remember, we were promised an Olympically themed opera, Jesse Owens, but that didn’t materialise, nor was there any mention of it.  As usual, after ten intensive days of rehearsal, with all concerned living in Bryanston School, Dorset Opera puts on one opera the first night, another one (this year two) the second, the first on the third, and on the last day the first is a matinée. This year’s mainstay was Il Trovatore, an opera

Steerpike

Robert Hughes RIP

It has been a bad week for men of letters, with the loss of Gore Vidal a few days ago and Robert Hughes today. Gore was famous for his feuds, but Hughes, a Spectator contributor, had a softer side, unless your art was phony: ‘The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is given to the less talented as a consolation prize.’ And the man once dubbed the ‘greatest art critic in the world’ was certainly sure of himself. Bret Easton Ellis recalls: ‘The only time I came in contact with Robert Hughes was in 1991 when he threatened to leave Random House if they published American Psycho.’

Lloyd Evans

Northern lights | 4 August 2012

No one knows quite why we go. It’s not for the whisky (which is like drinking liquefied peppercorns), or for the shortbread (like eating undercooked biscuit-mix), or for the weather (like walking through a car-wash). Nor does the moaning falsetto of the bagpipes draw us north. But every year, without fail, the London media colony sets off for the Scottish capital to watch a gang of wackos and wannabes (mostly from the London media colony) making a bid for fame and glory. This is my tenth visit and here are my tips for maximising the fun. Big question first. How to avoid being engulfed in an avalanche of pretentious tripe

Brown study

Stage hypnotists need the trust of their audience, but also a whiff of danger. So Derren Brown calls his show Svengali, though he is not really an evil puppetmaster but a gentle, coaxing, mostly ethical puppetmaster. That show, which opened for its first run at the end of 2010, is back for a short time at the Novello theatre (until 11 August). It’s fun watching the audience drift through the doors and wondering who will end up on stage dancing naked or eating raw onions or whatnot. A thousand potential victims. There are quite a lot of children given that Derren can be a bit sweary on stage — but

Lloyd Evans

In health and hypocrisy

George Bernard Shaw argued passionately that Britain should create a public health service. And he lived long enough (1856–1950) to become one of its earliest victims. This play from 1906 shows the very best and the very worst of his creative abilities. He had a plan: to strip bare the iniquities of private medicine and stick the knife in deep. We open in Harley Street where a gang of slick and prosperous doctors are bantering away, like tipsy clubmen, about their patients. I cured this one. I killed that one. Each quack has his preferred treatment. One thinks all disease is caused by blood poisoning. Another that surgery cures every

Striking gold

If I said what I really thought about Götterdämmerung at the Longborough Festival, of which I saw the last of four performances, anyone who wasn’t there would think I was madly exaggerating; but anyone who was there would agree — I have run into several people who were at one or another of the performances, and they were all breathless with excitement and admiration for this astounding achievement. Raving doesn’t make for enjoyable reading, I realise, so I’ll try to be a bit more specific. In the first place it was a tremendous team effort with, at its centre, the fanatical dedication and experience of the conductor, Anthony Negus, colleague

Druggy bear

The greatest compliment I can pay Seth MacFarlane’s Ted is that although this is essentially one of those slacker, stoner comedies, and such comedies aren’t really my thing — too old, too tired, only once had a joint and it made me feel sick then my knees went  all funny — this did make me laugh quite a bit. It’s about a teddy bear that comes alive to fulfil the dream and friendship needs of a lonely little boy. Years later, the two are still living together, in a state of extended adolescence, although it is Ted who is the bad influence. Ted has a potty-mouth. Ted has a dirty

James Delingpole

Danny’s super sop

Almost the best thing about Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony was the running Twitter commentary. From Marcus Stead: ‘Ah, here we go, NHS worship. One of the most overrated things about Britain. Expensive, unreliable, regularly lets patients down.’ From Miss Annesley: ‘I think “Voldemort runs the NHS” is the moral of this story.’ And from Mr Ranty: ‘Stafford Hospital is second from the left, the one with 450 dead patients.’ Not getting into the spirit of things is something we British do well. It’s instilled in us from an early age — usually during our first visit to the pantomime where the nasty, scary bully man on stage insists we

Steerpike

Sam Taylor Wood’s toy-boy takes her name

After tying the knot with her toyboy lover Aaron Johnson, 22,  in June, it seems the artist-turned-movie director Sam Taylor Wood, 45, is doing little to dispel the dominant old woman image. The cast list for the upcoming adaptation Anna Karenina with Keira Knightley has a new name on it: ‘Aaron Taylor Johnson’. It seems that 23-year age gap has got Taylor Johnson firmly under the thumb…

This troubled throne of kings

The jewel in the crown of Sir Michael Boyd’s decade as director of the Royal Shakespeare Company was his 2007–8 staging of the major Shakespeare Histories from Richard II, through Henry IV, V and VI, to Richard III. For a short, alas too short, period, the entire sequence of eight plays could be seen over a few days at Stratford. Fortunate indeed were those who were there, and I count it one of my greatest theatrical experiences. Boyd’s Histories would have enthralled only the tiniest fraction of the population. But with television it’s a different story. BBC2’s four Histories films, packaged as The Hollow Crown and broadcast on consecutive Saturday

Beyond the expected

Thomas Heatherwick (born 1970) is one of our most exciting and inventive designers, so it is somewhat unfortunate that he is much associated in the public mind with a project that failed, the memorably named ‘B of the Bang’. This was a sculpture commissioned to commemorate the 2002 Commonwealth Games held in Manchester, and the idea was to create a sunburst of tubes and poles to symbolise an explosion of energy. It was a good idea and a formidable undertaking. Erected in 2005, it was plagued with technical problems and bits even fell off. It was taken down in 2009, and only the documentation remains. As I said, an unfortunate

Critical meltdown

If the River of Music put you in the mood for stimulating sounds on the banks of the Thames, next week’s Meltdown at the Southbank Centre, also part of the London 2012 Festival, is well-timed. Meltdown’s later-than-usual slot should earn it a little reflected Olympic glory, though it’s hard to imagine anyone less suggestive of healthful outdoor pursuits than this year’s curator, surname-free singer and visual artist Antony (above), who looks as if he has spent his life shunning daylight in some windowless New York dive. Antony has put together a line-up of radical musicians and performance artists, wanting, he says, ‘to create a kind of paradise’ in which his

Olympian challenge

Who would have thought 15 years ago that not only would the BBC still be spending money on radio coverage of the London Olympics but that there’d also be a dedicated digital station? High definition TV, with its crystal-clear images of every pimple, tattoo and six-pack, should by rights have seen off its poor sound-only relation, with only words, words, words on offer, no pictures, no flashbacks, no sweaty post-triumph interviews. But on Wednesday, Radio 5 Live Olympics Extra came on air (and online), broadcasting to the world nothing but coverage of the Games, throughout the day but also on catch-up all night long. Radio 5 Live’s controller, Adrian Van