Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

Crime and punishment

Just a snippet on an edition of Today last spring taken from the programme that had just won an esteemed Sony Gold radio award was enough to create an impact. Ray and Violet Donovan were talking about the murder of their son, Chris, on a feature made by the Prison Radio Association. The programme was part of an innovative Restorative Justice scheme, using the power of listening to help victims, heal prisoners, and of taking that one further step by then broadcasting their conversations throughout the prison network. It was one of those moments when you just had to stop whatever you were doing. There was something in the voice,

Patrick Carnegy

John Bull versus Hiawatha

Written soon after Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida is by a long chalk Shakespeare’s most unpleasant play. With a pox-ridden Pandarus and the filthy-minded nihilist Thersites as our guides to one of the least savoury episodes in the Trojan war, Shakespeare probes the cesspit of human nature. It’s an exploration of a farthest frontier from which Shakespeare might never have returned, only to do so magnificently in the works of his final period. To grapple with this play is to increase one’s awestruck understanding of Iago’s dedication to evil and the sagacity of the Fool in Lear. Stratford’s outrageous new co-production is a madcap transatlantic gamble. An RSC ensemble directed by

Michael Tanner

Four play

Going to the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith for the annual season of Tête à Tête is a chancy affair, though one can be sure of a very high standard of performance, both vocally and instrumentally. It helps, of course, that none of the studios is large, so the singers can produce their voices at conversational level, though many of them choose not to. As always, there is a big range of operas to choose from, so the choice of the pair I shall be discussing was based on no principle other than that the subject of one of them intrigued me, and while I was about it I saw another.

Radhika Kapila

Working men’s clubs

Where better to explore the history of the city than at its very heart? Guildhall Art Gallery, nestled between St Paul’s Cathedral and the Bank of England, is currently home (until 23 September) to Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker, a collection of artefacts from London’s Livery Companies, or guilds — an historic part of London’s identity. Dating from the Roman period, these 108 companies operated as trade associations, regulating and cultivating their industries. From illuminated medieval manuscripts to ornate tobacco jars and clothing (Master Carpenter’s Crown, 1561, above), visitors are provided with a rare insight into the codes and traditions of the guilds. Detailed hall plans demonstrate how important London Livery-owned

Peter Robins

The great wall of Peckham

The Peckham Peace Wall began life as a window: a long pane of shop glass in the front of Rye Lane’s newly refurbished branch of Poundland. During the riots last summer, the glass went, along with some of Poundland’s stock. The next morning, after the damage had been boarded up, a local theatre group covered the MDF with multicoloured Post-It notes, asking passers-by to fill them in with messages about why they loved Peckham. They called it, with impeccable logic, ‘The “Why We Love Peckham” Wall’. The notes filled to overflowing with affection and wounded civic pride. And they attracted reporters, who gave the display a more resonant name. For

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Edinburgh snippets

I saw a few car crashes at Edinburgh but I’ll mention only one. Hells Bells (Pleasance, Courtyard) by the excellent Lynne Truss is a peculiar experiment. Truss sets her play in a TV studio and she spends the first 40 minutes explaining the storyline. The show lasts 45 minutes. So when we finally learn what the action is about, the action is about to cease. The nub of the drama concerns a TV show that was cancelled suddenly in 1995. So the play’s conflicts are rooted in the distant past and involve characters who aren’t on stage. The play culminates, weirdly, in a fight involving the destruction of some elaborately

Andrew Gimson

Conduct becoming

Every so often a programme appears which can be recommended even to people who hate television. Parade’s End (Friday, BBC1) is such a work. The awkward — one might think impossible — problem of shortening Ford Madox Ford’s 800-page masterpiece into five hours of television, without violating the spirit of the book or seeming to cram a quart into a pint pot, has been solved by getting Tom Stoppard to write the script. Stoppard’s less is not exactly more, but there is a certain liberation in being able to leave things out. Ford’s wit, penetration and eloquence are distilled into the five acts of a play, and some of his

Deborah Ross

No laughing matter | 25 August 2012

It’s a brave soul who buys a cinema ticket at this time of year, when all the studios try to bury their rubbish, and it’s a brave soul who buys a ticket to The Watch. This is a comedy starring Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill and Richard Ayoade as four suburban men who take on an alien invasion in their neighbourhood. Actually, there are some good things about this film, which I will list here: * It does end, eventually. * …nope, that’s it. And the bad things: * I did not laugh the once. I do not believe I even smiled, mildly. * This wants to be (I

Saturday

Alan Judd

Downton for adults

For five weeks from 24 August BBC2 is doing a brave thing: serialising Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford’s quartet of first world war novels. Arguably the first great modernist English novel and, according to Graham Greene, the greatest novel in English to come out of that war, this £12-million project is a brave thing to do for three reasons: it is the world of Downton but not Downton. It is not what we expect of war novels. And it was written by Ford Madox Ford. Ford Madox who? is the response that anyone writing about Ford has come to expect. He’s often confused with the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown,

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Double vision | 18 August 2012

If you were to condense everything that was most quintessentially English about quintessential Englishness — from the green man and morris dancing to Vaughan Williams and The Whitsun Weddings — feed it into a liquidiser, have it remixed by an electronica DJ, and then transformed into the soundtrack of some trendy arthouse film premièred at a festival in Brighton, what you might end up with is something like the work of Grasscut. I hope that doesn’t sound offputting. It’s quite possible that I’ve completely misrepresented them. For a more accurate assessment, I did try asking one of their two members Marcus O’Dair — who spends his spare time as a

Andrew Lambirth

Slow art

With the death of the critic and historian Robert Hughes, a great beacon has gone out in the art world of the West. I take his absence personally, not because I knew the man (I met him only once), but because he was such an invigorating and perceptive guide to excellence. Of course I didn’t agree with everything he said, but he wrote like an angel (possibly a fallen one) and he certainly made you think and even revise your opinions. Although I was aware that he’d been unwell for a long time, I was unprepared for his death at the age of 74, and feel robbed of the books

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Follow that dream

‘Our fate lies within ourselves. We just have to be brave enough to see it,’ says Princess Merida, the winsome, feisty heroine of Disney-Pixar’s latest animated romp Brave (PG, nationwide). ‘Why shouldn’t we choose our own fate?’ asks another character, chafing at the constraints imposed by family, duty and tradition. Why not, indeed? As Brave is set in Scotland — albeit an imagined Caledonia owing more to Ossian than history — the politics of the movie are inescapable. If you’re burdened with being Scottish, that is. The rest of the world can, and presumably will, enjoy this caper unburdened by such dreary contemplation. Nevertheless one can see why Alex Salmond

Michael Tanner

Brief encounter

Glyndebourne’s last offering this season is one of the most stylish things it has done for a very long time, Ravel’s two brief operas directed by Laurent Pelly, who was responsible for its brilliant Hänsel und Gretel in 2008. It may seem odd that Ravel’s pair — though they were conceived quite separately, and years apart — don’t get done more often, but they both demand elaborate sets, and would just be boring if not unintelligible without them. Actually, I find L’heure espagnole, first performed in 1911, boring anyway, but that seems to be a minority view. The plot — a venerable one of an unsatisfied wife who looks forward

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Faustian pact

When my kids grow up, I want them to go to university and read chemistry. That way they will have the skills to manufacture high-class crystal meth (or similar), make lots and lots of money and keep their father in the style to which of late he has become unaccustomed. I got the idea for this, some of you will have guessed, from Breaking Bad — probably the most brilliant series to come out of the US (or anywhere else) since The Sopranos. Its hero is Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a middle-aged high school chemistry teacher from Albuquerque, New Mexico who realises — as we all do eventually — that

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Walk on the wild side

A good title works wonders at the Edinburgh Fringe. Oliver Reed: Wild Thing (Gilded Balloon) has a simple and succinct name that promises excitement, drama and celebrity gossip. And it delivers. Mike Davis and Bob Crouch’s exhilarating monologue races through the chief highlights of Oliver Reed’s career. Showmanship ran in his veins. On his father’s side, he was the grandson of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the founder of Rada. But the connection was illegitimate. Reed’s grandmother had six children with Tree although they never married. Her surname, she claimed, was a facetious comment on the relationship. ‘I’m a frail Reed in the shadow of a mighty Tree.’ Young Ollie was packed

Peter Hoskin

Bourne again | 18 August 2012

Seriously, what has Hollywood got against wolves at the moment? First there was last year’s The Grey, which saw a bearded Liam Neeson stalked across Alaska by a pack of the beasts before using his survival skills — and some broken bottles — to smash them on to the endangered species list. Now we have The Bourne Legacy, which starts with a bearded Jeremy Renner being stalked across Alaska by a pack of the beasts before using his survival skills to, etc., etc. It’s very similar, except Renner doesn’t have broken bottles at his disposal. He has military drones. It would be wrong to dwell on this lupicide, however. This

Saturday

Jack Wakefield

Eastern promise | 11 August 2012

The Olympic Legacy List has less to do with the Olympics than its name suggests. True, it is responsible for the long-term cultural programme in the 618-acre Olympic Park but, as one insider put it, the real work begins when the circus leaves town. The word on every Olympic panjandrum’s or British politician’s lips is legacy. There’s a lot that’s disingenuous about this. If regenerating the East End were all that mattered, a direct investment of £9 billion into infrastructure would have done very nicely, thank you. Still, just because the money could have gone further if it had been invested differently doesn’t mean that we have to gnash our

Andrew Lambirth

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

Olivia Glazebrook

Please release me

I am writing this at teatime on Sunday — day nine of the Olympics. So far: 34 medals, we’ve all gone completely bananas, and the Great British mood has improved by what commentators call 110 per cent. Andy Murray has just won gold, beating Roger Federer in straight sets, and by the time I finish writing he may have won another gold in the mixed doubles’ final. To write about this week’s television and not mention the Olympics would be peculiar, but to write about nothing but the Olympics would be foolish because what I write today will be old hat by the time you read it. Today the Games

Kate Chisholm

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