Arts Reviews Archives

Saturday

16 Jun 2012

Friends, Romans, Africans

There’s an honourable track record of versions of Shakespeare’s play presenting Julius Caesar as a dictatorial monster of modern times. In 1937 Orson Welles (playing Brutus) cast Caesar as Mussolini and staged many scenes like Nazi rallies. Despite a curmudgeonly critic dismissing the conspirators as looking like ‘a committee from a taxi-driver’s union’, the show was a huge hit and set in motion a train of similar readings. In Miami in 1986 audiences applauded the murderous disposal of Fidel Castro. At the RSC the following year Terry Hands directed a nakedly fascist Caesar, while in London in 1993 Caesar was played by a woman, thus supposedly representing the political assassination

Kate Chisholm

Borsetshire blues

Will and Nic’s canoodling in the woods. Adam’s bashed-in head. Amy’s makeover from wholesome midwife to foul-mouthed stepdaughter. Ambridge, home to the Archers, the Grundys and of course Lynda Snell, has been transformed from a sleepy village in the heart of Middle England into a crime-ridden soap, fuelled not by the everyday happenings of ordinary folk but the high-octane antics of a new crew of emotion-hugging soap stars. Joe and Eddie Grundy have all but disappeared from the scene, as have Peggy, Jill and Clarrie. Now we know why. There’s been a TV takeover and the daily soap is now under the editorial control of John Yorke, who used to

Lloyd Evans

Time travelling

When should you set Antigone? Apparently not in the time of Antigone. The greatest classics these days seem to be aimed at the stupidest ticket-holders. And these hapless wretches can’t possibly be expected to understand anything outside their immediate experience. Polly Findlay’s version of Sophocles’ tragedy doesn’t even get modernity right. Her slightly out-of-date set design includes antique reel-to-reel tape machines and hefty old photocopiers the size of freezers. She’s taken Thebes and transplanted it to the studio of Crimewatch UK in about 1994. Very odd. The usual justification for these fast-forwardings is that they add relevance. They also close down curiosity and exempt directors from conducting the sort of

Rafael Todes

Culture notes: Pest control

As an occasional user of Queensway Tube station, I have noticed that on exiting the lift I am met with the extraordinary and beguiling sounds of Mozart symphonies and piano concerti — well-chosen, beautifully played and blasted over the Tannoy system. There is something transporting about this post-underground experience, something I don’t expect after the humdrum of a packed commute. The other day, a TfL official was standing around and I had a few minutes to kill while waiting for the lift, so I asked her about this bizarre but welcome phenomenon. She explained that this was part of a controlled experiment in crowd management. Sensing my puzzlement, she explained

Simon Hoggart

Setting the tone

The BBC has been heavily criticised for its coverage of the Jubilee flotilla, and the tone was incredibly annoying. All those smiley celebrities pretending to enjoy themselves! The tabloids, those for whom the Beeb can never do anything right, would have been just as mean if the treatment had been sombre and serious. ‘And we see a boat, followed by a barge, and next to that, another boat. And Her Majesty is waving, now to the crowds on the embankment, now to the next boat…’ The queue of vessels was a feeble idea, the rain made it worse and there was nothing anyone could have done. Bagehot himself would have

Michael Tanner

Disturbing relationships

It struck me for the first time at the latest revival of David McVicar’s production of Richard Strauss’s Salome that this opera, Strauss’s first to maintain a place in the repertory, and its successor Elektra are, for all their differences, companion pieces. Even before reading the late Patrick O’Connor’s excellent article ‘Happy Families’, the best and least pretentious in the programme book, I’d been reflecting on how the two operas deal with the classic issue of the powerful and disturbing relationship between father and daughter: in the case of Salome, it is a stepfather in love with his stepdaughter, but that hardly alters the point; while in Elektra it is

Dylan Jones

Hay Notebook

The first Saturday of the Hay Festival is always a bit like the first day of term — bumping into people you’ve haven’t seen in months, sometimes for a whole year. Then there are the people down from London, dressed in mufti, sporting inappropriate sunglasses and crumpled linen jackets that haven’t been out of the wardrobe since the previous Hay Festival. I like to pick up my tickets, hang out in the green room and generally reacquaint myself with what is undoubtedly the greatest literary festival in the world. ••• I had planned to watch Hilary Mantel, Boris Johnson and Harry Belafonte, but a bout of food poisoning probably caused

Deborah Ross

Dangerous liaisons

A Royal Affair is a beautifully mounted historical drama which goes right where so many films of this type go wrong: it doesn’t get distracted by carriages and candlelight and pretty frocks and balls and sumptuous feasts, but keeps its eye firmly and surely on character and story and, my, what a fascinating story it is. Set in late-18th-century Denmark, it is the account of a love triangle between a German doctor, the Queen of Denmark and her imbecilic husband, the King, which sounds preposterous, but is actually based on a true event that not only led to scandal but also ultimately transformed the country. Although, at times, this is

Thursday

7 Jun 2012

Rod Liddle

In praise of Ray Bradbury

Sad to hear of the death of Ray Bradbury, although he enjoyed a good long life. He was a wonderful writer. Rather better, I think, than the more fashionable Philip K. Dick — certainly Bradbury was the superior story teller, and his fiction was as much about what it is to be human as the mildly sci-fi weirdnesses which I suppose gave him his early fame. Between the ages of 15 and 18, when I was besotted with US literature, he was one of my three favourites — along with Updike and Sinclair Lewis. An odd threesome, I suppose. Oddly, it wasn’t Bradbury’s acclaimed masterpiece, Fahrenheit 451, which captivated me;

Sunday

3 Jun 2012

Fraser Nelson

Rain and royalty

This picture, to me, sums up today’s Jubilee flotilla: drenched Royal College of Music students cheerfully singing Land of Hope and Glory at the end of a spectacle attended by over a million people. The rain, far from ruining the event, made it even more memorable and didn’t seem to deter the crowds. As the choir’s conductor put it: ‘freezing cold, wind, and rain but euphoric and unforgettable’. Sky News captured the spirit by covering its real source: the onlookers. ‘Even on the train down, people were talking to each other,’ a member of the public said. ‘It’s been amazing seeing the princess and the queen, I loved it,’ said

Saturday

2 Jun 2012

Roderick Conway-Morris

Changing tack

Gustav Klimt first came to Venice in the spring of 1899, in pursuit of Alma Schindler, the young stepdaughter of his friend and fellow artist Carl Moll. The nascent love affair between the artist, who was then in his late thirties, and the 19-year-old Alma was brought to an abrupt end when the girl’s mother read her diary and Klimt was asked to leave. Three years later she married Mahler. But before Klimt departed from Venice, Klimt and Alma had visited San Marco where, as Alma recorded, the Basilica’s mosaics, glittering in the half-light, made a profound impression on him. Although he had experimented with gold-painted highlights in his ‘Pallas

Ariane Bankes

Sculptural conundrums

2012 is proving something of an annus mirabilis for Anthony Caro OM CBE RA, now 88, with no fewer than three exhibitions of his work on view around the country. And he continues to beaver away daily in his studio in Camden Town, London, with the strength of a man much younger than himself, one who has been manhandling heavy, often intractable materials throughout the course of his creative life. We know him best for his great steel constructions — 15 of which are currently arranged around Chatsworth’s Canal Pond in its first show dedicated to a single artist — but a few years ago I was delighted by the

Andrew Lambirth

The art of monarchy

Andrew Lambirth reflects on the images that help shape our perception of the Queen Her Majesty the Queen has been a global celebrity for 60 years, and she carries her status with a naturalness and dignity that many of the more tearaway celebs would do well to emulate. She graduated from being a young and glamorous queen to a happy and fulfilled mother, but then had to settle for pausing in that most difficult of categories — middle age — for rather a long time, owing to the wondrous longevity of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. As the Queen now celebrates her Diamond Jubilee, in her own distinguished old age,

Amander Baillieu

New build

The Bauhaus was a sort of university of design, whose progressive ideas eventually fell foul of the Nazis. But as the exhibition Bauhaus: Art as Life is keen to impress, it was also a lifestyle, a modernist utopia, where staff and students were encouraged to mix freely, which they did with gusto. This, just as much as its reputation as a nerve centre for a new aesthetic, made it a magnet for the central European avant-garde. Among its teachers were some of the greatest artists and designers of the 20th century: Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee taught art; Marcel Breuer was responsible for furniture; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy for product design; Oskar

Giannandrea Poesio

Unconditional love

Not many dance-makers have had their art celebrated in major, award-winning feature films. Pina Bausch has. Wim Wenders’s 2011 Pina and Rainer Hoffmann’s/Anna Linsel’s 2010 Dancing Dreams offered unique insights into her creative genius, facilitating the posthumous popularisation of a dance-specific phenomenon. Yet no film, no documentary and certainly none of the countless writings that popped up after the choreographer’s untimely death has managed to draw an exhaustive picture of Bausch or dispel the vagueness that surrounds what her Tanztheater was and still is about. Three years after her demise, Bausch and her work remain shrouded in mystery, resisting and eluding scholarly labelling or convenient pigeonholing. Central to such elusiveness

Lloyd Evans

Problem play

It’s all Kenneth Halliwell’s fault. By bashing in Joe Orton’s head with a hammer, he brought the playwright’s career to a premature halt when Orton was still experimenting with brittle and anarchic farces. Had Orton lived beyond 34, he’d have developed his technique and become a richer, truer and more rounded artist. And What the Butler Saw would now be a minor work by a major playwright. Instead it’s a major work by a minor playwright. Uneven in tone, lumpish in detail, unsure of its creative purpose, this is a problem play that doesn’t merit its status as a classic. Orton dashed it off in a few weeks and the

Michael Tanner

Star quality | 2 June 2012

English Touring Opera ended its spring tour in Cambridge this year with three performances of The Barber of Seville and two of Eugene Onegin, both in English translation, the former done without surtitles, the latter with. Neither of them really needed them, since the Arts Theatre is small and most of the singers enunciated with a clarity one hopes they retain in the careers one hopes some of them go on to have. Barber was moderately successful, Onegin almost wholly so. Comedy is much harder to pull off than tragedy, as everyone knows, but singers don’t necessarily remember and act on that when they come to perform, and too much

Deborah Ross

Whisky galore

Ken Loach’s The Angels’ Share, which has just won the Jury Prize at Cannes, is part social realism, part comedy caper, and so good-natured, warm and affectionate it’s rather a joy, even though it doesn’t exactly add up; even though its climax is implausible, its tonal shifts are sometimes jarring, and it feels so familiar. It’s quite Bill Forsythian (with particular reference to his first ever feature, That Sinking Feeling, since you didn’t ask, but should have) via Whisky Galore! and The Full Monty. Our hero is also familiar, as he’s one of those young men caught in a destructive cycle of violence, criminality and long-term unemployment rather than, say,

Simon Hoggart

Royal watch

This is the week we almost drowned in Jubilee programmes. Sadly, many of these were unavailable to reviewers, possibly because to criticise such a programme would itself amount to lèse-majesté, or perhaps they just hadn’t finished the edit. But I doubt we’ve missed much. This weekend BBC1 (Friday) was running A Jubilee Tribute to the Queen, presented by Prince Charles. Maybe he’s said that it’s all very well banging on about her sense of duty, but it didn’t do much for family life, and he still can’t get over how, after six months touring the Commonwealth, she famously didn’t kiss her little boy but shook his hand. I doubt it.

Kate Chisholm

Time to reflect

It was my first Jubilee moment — Judi Dench on Radio 4’s Today programme suddenly launching into Shakespeare mid-glam (incredibly glam) party. She was talking to Jim Naughtie at the Queen’s gala for the arts at the Royal Academy and bewailing the decline in the teaching of Shakespeare in schools. Mid-sentence, she breaks into Cleopatra’s lament: ‘I dream’d there was an Emperor Antony/O! such another sleep, that I might see/ But such another man.’ It was so natural, so heartfelt, so extraordinary that she could remember the speech line-for-line and give it to us, just like that, with no preparation, no sense of performance or theatrical delivery. I just had