Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

William Cook

On the waterfront | 28 April 2012

William Cook says that I.M. Pei’s latest building, Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art, once again captures the spirit of the age Standing outside Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art, in Doha, watching the sun rise over the Persian Gulf, you’re reminded of Mies van der Rohe’s dictum: ‘less is more’. Van der Rohe was a hero of the man who made this building, and I.M. Pei’s new museum sums up that minimalist rule of thumb. Doha’s modern skyline is a panorama of skyscrapers, but they all look trite and transient beside this discreet masterpiece. Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art is only a few years old, but it feels as if it’s

Michael Tanner

Return to mystery

Weber’s Der Freischütz is the finest neglected opera in or hovering on the edge of the canon. It’s not entirely bewildering why it should be, but there are ways of coping with structural defects, which is what it suffers from. Yet I don’t think there has been a UK performance of it since Edinburgh in 2002 (not counting the Berlioz version last year at the Proms), when Jonas Kaufmann sang Max in a concert performance. Perhaps concert performances are the best idea, since the one last week at the Barbican, under Sir Colin Davis, was thrilling and moving. Yet even it wasn’t entirely convincing on the structural problem, which is

Giannandrea Poesio

Magic chemistry

Artifact was the first work that the groundbreaking dance-maker William Forsythe created in 1984 for the legendary Ballet Frankfurt. It is, therefore, pure ‘vintage’ Forsythe, even though it is as aggressively and engagingly provocative today as it was 28 years ago. It therefore comes across as a theatrically vibrant reminder of where it all started. Central are the quirky postmodern challenges that Forsythe first laid down to both the ballet canons and the set rules of traditional theatre-going. Hence the curtain coming down and going up more or less unexpectedly and/or arbitrarily, an idea aimed at questioning the way audiences used to watch — and still do — a ballet,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Bible story

Be still, at last, you clamouring brainboxes. Those who long for more highbrow drama in the West End can thank God for David Edgar’s Written on the Heart. Commissioned by the RSC, this celebratory play tells the story of the King James Bible, which was first published in 1612. Making scripture accessible to the masses represented a huge moral and cultural upheaval. In 1536 William Tyndale had been executed in Flanders for translating the Bible into English, but just eight decades later the king himself ordered a new vernacular version and showered the translators with rewards. Edgar is no slouch when it comes to taking on lumpish, glutinous topics and

Deborah Ross

What a marvel!

As last week I believe I provided the world’s first entirely interrogative film review, I thought that this week I would up the stakes and embroider this review on antimacassars, in mirror writing — this has also never been done before, as far as I know — but time, alas, proved my great enemy, so I’m afraid I have simply written it in verse instead. I hope you will forgive me. Avengers Assemble, my lovelies, is ‘the superhero event of the year’, And if this gets you all excited, you probably have nothing to fear. But if big action so big it’s humongous just isn’t really your thing, You may

Kate Chisholm

Good night out

It would never have worked on TV. Ann Widdecombe going out for a night on the town with a group of young professional women. No self-respecting binge-brunette would have allowed themselves to be seen on camera with a sexagenarian ex-MP who just happened to be off the booze for Lent. But there she was, in the Reggae Music and Soul Food Bar at gone midnight, knocking back her glass of fizzy water while Rebecca, Brooke, Phoebe and Kate sipped their shots and tots of vodka. Widdecombe’s challenge was to look for some ‘real human beings’ behind the screaming headlines about Britain’s binge drinkers, those dolled-up girls in high heels, staggering

Olivia Glazebrook

Under pressure | 28 April 2012

Rest easy on your deckchair, Delingpole, for I come in peace. Your column is safe — from me, at least — because this week I have made an unpleasant discovery: your job is really hard, and I don’t know how to do it. It’s not the watching that’s so hellish, it’s deciding what to watch. It took me two days just to plough through the listings, for Pete’s sake, with a sense of panic rising in my bosom. What sort of locum would I be if I missed the week’s televisual pearl? What if the hours, days and nights I spent in front of the box were wasted on the

Luke Jessop

From street to stage

Breakin’ Convention, now in its ninth year at Sadler’s Wells, offers a feast of hip hop for all-comers, be they newbies or hip hop heads. Hip hop developed in the Bronx in the late 1970s from a mix of Bboying (breakdance), graffiti art, MC-ing and DJ-ing. From street-corner hobby of young Afro and Latin American ghetto teenagers, it exploded into a worldwide phenomenon. The transition from street to stage has been turbulent, provoking fierce debate on the direction of hip hop culture. Only Bboying seems to have maintained its integrity. Bboying’s significant theatre presence is down to strong-minded individuals who understand that the dance form does not have to remain

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Interview of the Year

Since I discovered this interview on Armando Iannucci’s Twitter feed I wondered if it was actually a spoof. But no, it seems Bill Shorten really is an Australian politician and not an Ocker Chris Morris. Anyway, for the time being it is my new favourite political interview…

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Flying colours

If you take the Tube to Colindale on the Northern Line and then hop on a 303 bus or walk for ten minutes, you arrive at the Royal Air Force Museum, open daily from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m., admission free. The place is full of planes, as might be expected, and has a wonderfully relaxed atmosphere (not nearly as frenetic as the Imperial War Museum) and a feeling of spaciousness. The Museum also mounts temporary exhibitions, and the one that drew my attention is of the pastel portraits of Eric Kennington (1888–1960), a war artist in both world wars, and an incomparable draughtsman, interesting painter and tough, inventive sculptor.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Playing with the Games

Once you grasp the essential triviality of the Olympics, the Cultural Olympiad falls perfectly into place, says Lloyd Evans. Even Shakespeare can’t escape Once you grasp the essential triviality of the Olympics, the Cultural Olympiad falls perfectly into place, says Lloyd Evans. Even Shakespeare can’t escape Funny business the Olympics. No one seems to want it. Clearly it doesn’t belong here or anywhere else. So what’s it for? The main athletic competitions — ‘track and field’ — are disciplines devised by Greek hill-farmers during the Iron Age to improve their skills in battle. The field events, like discus and javelin, teach you to throw heavy and/or pointy things at your

Michael Tanner

Role reversal

Considering how close, if mysterious, the links are between being gay and loving opera, it could seem surprising that there are almost no operas explicitly on gay subjects. Many of Britten’s operas heave with homoerotic subtexts, but his only opera to come out is his last, Death in Venice, and that’s paedophiliac. Tippett, always wackier and more courageous, has a gay couple in The Knot Garden, but they’re tangential. There is Harvey Milk, but that is best forgotten. Perhaps it isn’t so surprising, since what seems to appeal most to the gay sensibility is the suffering diva, suffering preferably both in life and art. Hence the uniquely high — and

Deborah Ross

No flies on me

Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, anyone who happens to be passing, I have decided to quiz myself about this week’s film, for no other reason than the idea occurred to me, and I fancied it, so here goes: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, any good? No. That it? OK, if this film teaches us anything, it teaches us how to take a perfectly fine book — Paul Torday’s novel of the same name — and transform it into a mushy, corny, ghastly mess of the most trying kind. How would you describe the viewing experience? Like swimming upstream yourself, but through treacle, and with someone heavy strapped to your

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Written in tears and blood

Great title, Long Day’s Journey into Night. The sombre, majestic words are suffused with auguries of doom. ‘A play of old sorrow written in tears and blood,’ was O’Neill’s description of the script, which is inspired by his personal background. We’re in a beautiful seaside mansion where a prosperous New York family, the Tyrones, are living in great splendour. But beneath the gorgeous surface everything’s going to hell. The oldest son is a washed-up actor who can’t keep away from the local knocking-shop. The younger boy, a preppie drifter, keeps coughing TB spores into his hankie. The mother, still grieving for a lost child, is hooked on morphine. And the

Simon Hoggart

The American way | 21 April 2012

I spent the last week in America, and my hosts had 900-plus channels listed on cable, though some required payment, others were in Spanish, and many featured what can only be called niche programming, such as lacrosse from the high school. My hostess liked Chopped!, which is their version of MasterChef — less hectic though with more repulsive food. But I liked the commercials, which I watched carefully since — even though our advertising industry regards itself as the world’s most influential — American styles will soon cross the Atlantic. One problem advertisers face is how to plug something that nobody hopes they’ll need to buy. Man is driving along

Kate Chisholm

Beware the growlers

It’s the weirdest thing. This obsession with the sinking of the Titanic. Go to the BBC iPlayer website and you’ll find eight programmes you can listen to now, if by chance you missed them first time round. Take Titanic: Minute by Minute on Radio 2, broadcast ‘live’ on the very same night (100 years later) that the luxury ship went down. Billed as ‘experimental’, an ‘adventure’ in radio, this blow-by-blow account of what happened on that fateful night in April 1912 took place in real time in the studio in London, beginning at 11.30 p.m., just before the White Star liner hit the misplaced iceberg, and ending three hours later,

Saturday

Virginia Ironside

Relatively eccentric

My uncle Robin Ironside bewailed the demise, after the scandal of the Wilde trial and the early death of Beardsley, of the imaginative tradition which, he wrote, ‘had been kept flickering in England since the end of the 18th century, sometimes with a wild, always uneasy light, by a succession of gifted eccentrics’. The truth is that he himself was one of those very eccentrics. Born in 1912 of a staunchly upper middle-class background, and after stints at the Courtauld and the Sorbonne, he landed, in 1937, the job of assistant keeper to Sir John Rothenstein at the Tate Gallery. Eventually, becoming frustrated at the boredom of a desk job,

Marcus Berkmann

Adult entertainment

On 19 March, Adele’s 21 overtook Dark Side of the Moon to become the seventh bestselling album in British music history. A day or two later it caught Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms napping, and eased into sixth place. So far 4.15 million copies have been sold. One in six British households has one. Ahead lie Thriller, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, Abba’s Gold, Sgt. Pepper and Queen’s Greatest Hits, still the daddy with 5.86 million registered sales. These five have been the top five for so long that industry experts with sad goatees thought they would never be caught. But records are made to be broken, or at the

Michael Kennedy

The unforgettable Ferrier

On the centenary of her birth, Michael Kennedy pays homage to ‘Klever Kaff’, occasional golfer, and inventor of Rabelaisian limericks Was she as wonderful an artist and woman as legend has it? Yes. Everything is true that has been said or written about the contralto Kathleen Ferrier, the centenary of whose birth is 22 April. She has been dead for 59 years, but through her recordings her voice — rich and always with a vein of melancholy — lives on, and could be mistaken for no one else and no one else for her. Never has a woman singer been so widely loved. The radiance of her personality suffused the

Michael Tanner

Thrills and chills

Lightning struck, after what must surely be one of the most dreary seasons at the Royal Opera, with a revival of Rigoletto. You never know. I haven’t been an admirer of John Eliot Gardiner, either in the pre-classical repertoire in which he made his name, or in his excursions into more recent orchestral and operatic music, for instance Puccini’s Manon Lescaut at Glyndebourne. With the opening bars of Rigoletto, however, it was immediately clear that his tight grip on proceedings was going to have thrilling results, even though the orchestra took a little time to settle. David McVicar’s production of decrepit Mantua is itself looking pretty decrepit by now, and