Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Where is he now

In the late 1960s, a Mexican-American singer-songwriter is signed to a record label after two Motown producers see him performing in a seedy Detroit dive called The Sewer. He delivers two albums, which receive rave reviews (he is compared to Bob Dylan; some say he is better than Bob Dylan), but nobody buys them, so he drops from sight, and would have stayed dropped from sight, but for one remarkable twist: unbeknownst to him, particularly as he never saw any royalties, he had become a massive hit in apartheid-era South Africa, outselling both Elvis and the Rolling Stones. The artist is Sixto Rodriguez and this film, his story, is the

Saturday

Cosmo Landesman

Gloom and doom

A young American documentary film-maker recently said to me, ‘Do you want to know why no British documentary film-maker would ever make a film about something like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations? There was no blood! No violence! No crack babies! No tears! People were happy, and one thing British documentary film-makers hate is happy people and happy endings. If you want to get a doc made and shown in Britain, you gotta go for gloom and doom.’ Of course my American friend was exaggerating — but by how much? Think British documentary and what comes to mind? For me it’s Pete Postlethwaite wagging a finger and making apocalyptic warnings of

Andrew Lambirth

Diana on show

Metamorphosis (sponsored by Credit Suisse) is more than an exhibition, it is wider in its manifestations and implications. The Sainsbury Wing galleries are full of interesting works of art, but the Metamorphosis festival — for that is what it surely is — extends to the Royal Opera House and beyond, through dance and poetry. Unfortunately, there are only limited performances by the Royal Ballet, but these will be filmed and thus available for viewing, and the poetry is published in a handy illustrated paperback (price £8.99), with a learned but accessible introduction by the director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny. The theme of the festival is Titian, and we

Kate Chisholm

In from the cold

When it was announced earlier this week that Aung San Suu Kyi will soon be cast away for Desert Island Discs, it was suggested her choices of music will be ‘really interesting’, because, under house arrest in Burma, she had been forced to live in ‘a time warp, a capsule away from the world’. But will she really be so out of touch with the musical tastes of Radio 4 listeners? Suu Kyi has often mentioned her gratitude to the BBC, and the World Service in particular, for leading her to places, ideas, music and poetry that were located and inspired thousands of miles away from the house where she

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Back to the future

I wonder how the 2012 Olympics will look, when re-imagined by a BBC docu-drama 64 years hence. If it’s anything like next week’s charming but not exactly unclichéd account of the 1948 Men’s Double Scull — Bert & Dickie (BBC1, Wednesday 25 July) — something like this, I expect, with all sorts of imaginary obstacles thrown in the way to make our hero’s struggle more movie-friendly. Int. London Olympic Velodrome. 2012 Men’s Keirin final. An elderly man in brightly coloured skintight gear shuffles with the help of a Zimmer frame towards his shiny, high-tech bicycle. Jaunty Cockney: Bleedin’ ’eck. That old geezer looks like he’d be more comfortable on a

Deborah Ross

Old and bold

Two films this week, one about oldies who play table tennis at an international level and another that is a love story funded by an Oxfordshire village, whose inhabitants feature as bit-part characters and extras. And I’ll be upfront about it: one is rather good whereas, although I’d have liked to like the other, and said it was sweet and charming, it wasn’t, so I can’t. Either way, at least there isn’t a reboot of a rebooted comic book movie that ‘redefines the genre’ — until everyone realises it does not — in sight. You get what I’m saying? Good. Let’s move on. Ping Pong is a documentary about the

Peter Phillips

Culture notes: Chart topper

The iTunes classical chart hasn’t been around very long, but for the time it has been available the number one slot has usually featured Pavarotti singing ‘Nessun dorma’. Nothing wrong with that, except that the chart was invented specifically to encourage the current classical music scene and give an impression of who was doing what within it. Now a piece written 450 years ago — Tallis’s ‘Spem in alium’ — has taken over at the top, in a recording by the Tallis Scholars. Manna sure drops from heaven in unpredictable ways. This posting has come as a result of the success of an erotic novel, Fifty Shades of Grey by

Michael Tanner

Exploiting agony

Verdi’s art reaches its summit in Otello, and in doing so reveals both his greatness and a paradox that seems inseparable from it. The plot is harrowing, more so than any of his other operas, and Verdi exploits its agonising capacities to the full. The glorious love duet which concludes Act I is something to make the most of, for that is the end of happiness, as the act’s final bars suggest. From then on it is a series of dreadful scenes in which the chief characters, deliberately or not, create as much suffering as possible — suffering which, at least at crucial points, the audience is bound to share

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Extreme actions

OK, I was wrong. I’ve said it a million times but I now realise it’s perfectly feasible. Antique dramas can make sense in a modern location. Nicholas Hytner sets Timon of Athens slap bang in the middle of present-day London. The action begins in a mock-up of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury wing, complete with that dull, forbidding grey hue that some miserable nutcase chose for the walls. Ominously, hanging centre-stage, is El Greco’s swirly pink vision of Christ ejecting the moneylenders from the temple. A launch party is in full swing. Champagne flows. A gang of yuppies, toadies, spivs and freeloaders has gathered to toast the opening of the ‘Timon

Saturday

Will Gore

A life less ordinary

‘I know it sounds arrogant but I think it’s undeniable that it has become fixed in the culture like a stately home,’ says Mark Haddon of his book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.   Arrogant or not, he is probably right. Haddon’s novel about an autistic boy’s attempt to solve the mystery of who killed his neighbour’s dog has sold more than two and a half million copies since its publication in 2003 and seems to have been read by everyone. As we chat in the basement of the Ashmolean Museum in his hometown of Oxford, Haddon doesn’t come across as an egomaniac. When he discusses

Kate Chisholm

The power of words

‘Oddly enough,’ declared the actor John Hurt on the Today programme last Friday, ‘radio is closely linked with film.’ This grabbed my attention over tea and porridge. Radio like film? It’s not at first an obvious comparison. Radio deals in images, but surely only those we create in our minds. Hurt went on to explain: ‘Film deals with visual images. Radio deals with linguistic images.’ He was talking to Justin Webb about the plays Tom Stoppard wrote for radio when he set out to establish himself as a dramatist in the early 1960s. Four of them are now available as a five-CD set from the British Library as part of

Olivia Glazebrook

Relaxing with the ignoble

Unless I have slept through another of the year’s once-in-a-lifetime experiences — which is rather more likely than possible — the days since the Wimbledon final have passed without call for bunting, cheering, spangling or any other kind of cross-gartered preparedness. We seem to occupy a lacuna; to have swum into the eye of the 2012 Events’ Cyclone. Here we are invited, until the Games begin, to rest our flag-waving arms, uncross our patriotic fingers and reacquaint our senses with something other than Pride-and-Glory. With immaculate timing — while Centre Court was still being put to bed — Wallander returned to BBC1 (Sunday). I never imagined, quite frankly, that I’d

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Double vision

Michael Frayn is a schizophrenic. His creative personality bestrides the English Channel. When he’s at home he writes traditional West End farces with amusing titles and plenty of jokes. When he sits at his European desk he comes up with dour, static, talk-heavy historical dramas with boring titles and no jokes at all. Democracy, written in 2003, is a classic Euro-bureau production. Frayn invites us to examine Willy Brandt’s stewardship of West Germany in the early 1970s. Willy is referred to throughout as ‘Villy’ which, for some reason, sounds even more silly than just Willy. Chancellor Villy has a couple of problems. He’s an idealist and he wants the free

Francesca Steele

Culture notes: 00 heaven

It took Ian Fleming just eight weeks to write his first James Bond novel but the legacy of his eponymous spy has been far less fleeting. Fifty years after 007 first made it on to the big screen in Dr No (see Sean Connery, above) a Barbican exhibition is celebrating with a stunning display of Bond gadgets, clothes and paraphernalia, such as Jaws’ metal teeth (until 5 September). Designing 007: 50 Years of Bond Style has more than 400 such items, playfully arranged in rooms recalling Bond’s own stomping ground: a casino, M’s office, and so on. There is Ursula Andress’s white bikini, Scaramanga’s golden gun, even an Aston Martin

Deborah Ross

Male order

For those of you who scan speedily to the bottom of reviews to see if a film is worth seeing — don’t worry; I always do it myself — I thought I would do you a favour and put the last paragraph first, as follows: Is Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike worth seeing? Yes. But also ‘no’. But mainly ‘yes’. So it’s a ‘yes’ with some ‘no’ caveats. I can now see this isn’t so helpful. Best scan, I’m afraid. Still, at least you know I’m on your side. Set in the world of male strippers, and written by the actor Channing Tatum, who has said it is loosely based on

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Dirty, ugly things

Sometimes fiction can be more accurate than published facts. Ten years ago a film, Dirty Pretty Things, told about the plight of illegal immigrants into Britain and the least-explored scandals of all: the black market trade in human organs. It was an aspect of Britain’s secret country, the black market occupied by a million-plus souls that produces a tenth of our economic output. Most of these people work illegally, perhaps in criminal endeavour or perhaps honestly, but in fear of immigration police. It is, by definition, an unregulated environment in which all manner of evil can be incubated. It is becoming clear now that one of these evils is the

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Prophet of alienation

Nothing gains headlines for art quite like high prices. A few weeks ago, one of the versions of Munch’s famous image of ‘The Scream’ was sold at auction for £74 million, which couldn’t have been bettered as advance publicity for the Tate’s new show. Admittedly, there is not a single version of that key painting in this exhibition (owners are jittery about loaning them — particularly since one was stolen from Norway’s National Gallery in 2004), but there are plenty of other treats for admirers of this Scandinavian ray of sunshine. Among his favourite subjects were sickness and death, lust and jealousy, fear of sexual disease and even fear of

Giannandrea Poesio

Grim realities

It was somewhat weird that Pina Bausch’s Palermo Palermo opened on the same night as Spain’s victory over Italy in the Euro 2012 final. After all, the Sicilian capital was long dominated by the Spaniards. Yet in Bausch’s Tanztheater vision of Palermo there are no references to such history, bar a few Spanish-looking steps set to the Spanish-influenced Sicilian music in part one’s frenzied finale. What one gets instead are more or less explicit flashes of the city’s more contemporary and often grim realities: from the mafia ritual of kissing the boss’s hands, to garbage piling up in streets, via evocations of Sicilian mourning, immigration and emigration. The evening starts

Kate Chisholm

Hooked by chance

I know we’re all supposed to be taking advantage of the new technologies and listening to whatever we fancy on the radio whenever we like. But I reckon you have to be under 25 to really get the hang of listening by download, podcast and stream rather than at the switch of a button. When, in any case, are we supposed to find the time to download it all and catch up with what we’ve missed? It’s like the conveyor belt in The Generation Game. By the time you realise you’ve missed something vital and/or desirable, the next week’s goodies are on offer. That’s why I’m still a switch-it-on-and-see-what’s-on listener,

Sarah Drury

Culture notes: All shipshape

The museum Titanic Belfast (above) opened recently to commemorate the centenary of one of our best-loved disasters. If you think you know everything there is to know on the subject, or more than you really want to, think again. Hull 401, as she was known to Harland and Wolff, may yet prove to be the making of the city that famously said, ‘She was all right when she left here.’ In a building designed to echo the lines and forms of both ship and iceberg, overlooking the very slipways from which she and her sister ship Olympic were launched, the museum sets up a dialogue with the past in a