Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

James Delingpole 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

Wednesday

Steerpike 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…

Saturday

Patrick Carnegy

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

Andrew Lambirth

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

Andrew Petrie

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

Kate Chisholm

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

Sinclair McKay

Trouble ahead

Must we? All of us? This is the perfect storm, the tempest, the ultimate crisis for non-sport fans. But TV, with all its kaleidoscopic variety, was invented for just such an eventuality, surely? And together with some assistance from our faithful old friends, the tinnies in the fridge, the next few weeks might pass quite pleasantly, no? Fssssst. Sip. Hmmm. See? Happily, in terms of drinking and smoking, Patsy and Edina in Absolutely Fabulous (BBC1, Monday) seemed to be in agreement about what we in the East End refer to as ‘The Limpics’. For those of us who have only ever seen this series intermittently, two things remain constant: any

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Death in Damascus

A timely show at the Finborough takes us into the heart of Bashar al-Assad’s terror state. Zoe Lafferty’s verbatim piece gathers evidence from activists and torture victims and flings it straight at us. The result is utterly gruesome and utterly compelling. A fractured, blood-stained snapshot of an ancient monstrosity blundering towards its own funeral. Syria, a Russian sidekick state, still pursues the traditions of Marxist totalitarianism. Every morning, ranks of schoolkids salute their leader. ‘Unity, Freedom, Socialism’ they chant in honour of a regime which traduces all three ideals. The Alawi minority, making up 12 per cent of the population, controls everything. Western music and literature are ruthlessly censored. The

Michael Tanner

Talent show | 28 July 2012

The Royal Opera season concluded, as is now customary, with an evening in which the participants in what used to be the Vilar Young Artists programme, in the light of events renamed the Jette Parker Young Artists, are paraded to show their progress. They make a truly international team, as the slip inside the programme indicated: ‘Ji-Min Park has withdrawn…the role of Il Conte di Libenskof will be sung by Ji Hyun Kim…the role of Zefirino…will now be sung by ZhengZhong Zhou.’ For the first time the programme consisted of a single work; previously it has been made up of excerpts from several. This one was chosen, needless to say,

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