Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Desmond Shawetaylor

Our island story | 11 February 2012

Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, on a radio programme that tells the history of the monarchy through 50 objects in the Royal Collection A History of the World in 100 Objects managed to squeeze the great paradigm shifts of anthropology into the interval between the roadworks sign and the all-clear, spiriting away traffic cones with remote customs and belief systems. What could follow something so confidently global if not an examination of our own strange customs and belief systems — some introspective anthropology? The Art of Monarchy, though a history told through 50 objects in a single collection, is not intended as another History of the World, but

Michael Henderson

Man about the House

They are lighting the candles at Covent Garden to honour one of the great singers of our age. Thomas Allen (as he was then) first appeared on the stage of the Royal Opera House in 1972, as Donald in Billy Budd, when Benjamin Britten was alive and his opera not nearly so highly thought of as it is today. This month he returns as a long-standing knight of the realm and, so far as our major house is concerned, a monarch to boot. He may have been born a commoner in County Durham 68 years ago but the baritone’s stellar international reputation granted him regal status many moons ago, particularly

Deborah Ross

It’s not easy being green

The Muppet Show was my favourite TV programme when I was growing up, but this film, the first in over a decade? Not so much, even though it is fun in parts. I liked it terrifically at the beginning, and loved seeing Kermit again, and Miss Piggy, with her ‘pork chop’ (‘Hi-yah!’) and Gonzo and Fozzie Bear and Animal, because they are all such distinct personalities, and have such presence, and when I heard the theme tune for the first time in years — ‘It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights, it’s time to meet the Muppets on The Muppet Show tonight…’ — I felt

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Marshmallow drama

An outbreak of heritage theatre at the National. She Stoops to Conquer, written by Oliver Goldsmith in 1773, is the ultimate mistaken-identity caper. A rich suitor woos his bride-to-be while under the impression that the home of his future in-laws is an upmarket inn. Boobs and blunders multiply until love triumphs and harmony is restored. This is marshmallow drama. Nothing is required of the audience but immobility and the occasional polite chortle. Jamie Lloyd’s handsome production gets virtually everything right. The sets by Mark Thompson are five-star stunnahs. The 18th-century drawing room, with a baronial mantelpiece and a fireplace big enough to roast an ox, will please the most avid

Michael Tanner

Great expectations | 11 February 2012

Bellini’s Norma is an opera that I not only adore: it obsesses me, too. Whenever I listen to it, I have to hear it again very soon, and parts of it lodge in my mind, playing over and over again, to an extent that very few other pieces do. It was the work through which I first came to realise Callas’s lonely greatness, and it was through her that I came to see how great Italian opera could be, too, having childishly dismissed it tout court as superficial compared with the great German traditions. I still think that Norma operates on a level different from any other work by Bellini

Giannandrea Poesio

Star turn

At first sight, the new Royal Ballet double bill might come across as an odd coupling: Ashton’s sparkling The Dream on one side, MacMillan’s metaphorically sombre Song of the Earth on the other. Yet the two works are complementary in that they show two distinctive and historically significant facets of 20th-century British dance-making. On the opening night, an impressive roster of stars appeared in MacMillan’s reading of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. The refined artistry of Tamara Rojo, Sarah Lamb, Lauren Cuthbertson, Carlos Acosta and Rupert Pennefather turned the performance into one of the best I have seen. Stars populated The Dream, too. Alina Cojocaru is a splendid Titania

Kate Chisholm

Leave well alone | 11 February 2012

Maybe he was asking for it. Maybe his article in the New Statesman was a subconscious attempt to undermine his brother’s authority. But what was the point of grilling David Miliband about his relationship with his brother Ed on the Today programme (Radio 4) on Monday morning? What we wanted to know was whether Miliband senior had any fresh ideas about how to tackle the grievous problems of our economy, and especially how to remedy our inability to ensure that there are enough jobs for our young people to find gainful employment. Who cares whether he’s still simmering with rage about his brother’s seizure of power? Why, then, did John

Simon Hoggart

Welsh, single and sex mad

There’s lots of comedy about, but it’s not what Americans call ‘water-cooler’ comedy, shows that get people talking at work the next day. No Hancock or Monty Python or Fast Show or The Office. In the old days, pre-video recorders, pre-repeats on freeview, we had to find excuses to stay at home when we were invited out and didn’t want to miss a show. ‘Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry, I see my uncle is to be hanged that night.’ Nowadays we can’t pretend. On the other hand, there is less to enjoy, less to talk about. Do you know anyone at work who is watching Stella (Sky One, Friday)? Ruth

Thursday

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

A treat for Cornish audiences

A wholesome gem from the London Fringe transfers to Cornwall this week, in the form of father and son double act Frankland and Sons. Both Tom Frankland and father John are born performers, and the show is a colourful dance through their family history that feels like a jovial children’s birthday party, with hints of balloon magic, vaudeville and fancy dress.   But what’s refreshing about Frankland and Sons is just how essentially English this snapshot of 20th Century history is. This is Middle England through three generations of wartime stoicism, domestic silences and staunch stiff upper lips. If the twist in the tale isn’t nearly the surprise its creators

Saturday

Radhika Kapila

Casting shadows

Zarina Bhimji is a photographer of ghosts. Her images of deserted buildings (‘Bapa Closed His Heart, It Was Over’, above) and desolate landscapes are empty, but haunted by humanity; her work is, as she puts it, evidence not of ‘actual facts but the echo they create’. The Whitechapel Gallery is currently home to a retrospective of the work of this Turner Prize-nominated artist (until 9 March), and includes a selection of her photographs, installations and short films. Bhimji and her family were forced to leave Uganda when Idi Amin expelled Asians from the country in 1972 and much of her work bears the imprint of this background. Her images of

Andrew Lambirth

Beautiful game

Remarkably, this is the first solo show in the UK of the work of Albert Burri (1915–95) for more than 50 years. Compare the popularity of other Italian postwar artists — Lucio Fontana, for instance, who only had one idea, the slashed or pierced canvas, to recommend him. Burri remains very much an unknown quantity, with a single work in this country’s public collections. A dozen Burris were shown at the Tate in 2005 in a mixed show of modern Italian art, but otherwise nothing. All praise then to the Estorick for mounting this enjoyable and succinct survey of Burri’s career: it introduces the general public to an artist well

Niru Ratnam

Quick flip to success

Having studiously avoided the media for years, Charles Saatchi was stirred enough to write an article for the Guardian last December that opened: ‘Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is sport of the Eurotrashy, hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs.’ He has a point. A new type of collector is taking a close interest in contemporary art and elbowing old hands such as Saatchi out of the way. These new collectors are not interested in watching artists build a career through museum shows over a period of years. They’re not out to spot new movements as Saatchi tried to do with young British

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Royal regret

Here he comes. Royalty’s favourite crackpot is back. Alan Bennett’s trusty drama, The Madness of George III, doesn’t really have a plot, just a pathology. The king is fine, he then goes barmy, he stays barmy for a bit, he gets bashed about by sadistic healers, then he recovers. It’s less a play and more a monologue amplified by a cast of glove puppets. Each supporting character is given, at most, two attributes. William Pitt drinks and keeps his counsel. The queen snorts and whinnies like a German weightlifter. Pious equerries proclaim their loyalty. Various doctors wheedle and pontificate. The Prince of Wales, an overdressed slob, waddles in and out

Patrick Carnegy

All the world’s a bed

While it appears good sense to ask a woman director to grapple with the seemingly misogynistic Taming of the Shrew, there’s a serious snag. For as Gale Edwards remarked apropos her 1995 RSC production, any woman director ‘might as well get a loaded shotgun and put it against her temple’ because half the critics will find your effort insufficiently radical and feminist, while the other half will ‘shoot you down in flames’ because any feminist slant would be untrue to a play that is ‘meant to be about the surrender of love’. This at least lays out the challenge. The good news from Stratford is that the RSC’s latest director,

Michael Tanner

Devoid of ideas

When you see two of the undisputed masterpieces of the repertoire in one week in one of the world’s leading opera houses, competently performed, and remain largely unmoved, you’re bound to ask yourself the question: have I been to these things, and heard them on record, too many times? It is, after all, possible to get tired even of the greatest works if you have experienced them regularly in the same productions, and without any special ‘magic’ ingredients, such as can bring back to life, or sustain, a standard work. It was a question I found myself asking with special poignancy this week, after seeing two of Mozart’s greatest works

Deborah Ross

The parent trap | 4 February 2012

Carnage is Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s hit stage play The God of Carnage, in which two sets of parents get together to discuss an altercation between their 11-year-old sons in the hope that they can figure it out sensibly, and all hell breaks loose. I have my reservations. I’m not convinced the play was exactly begging to be filmed, particularly as Polanski doesn’t open it up and keeps it, more or less, to one suffocating room and hallway, and I’m not convinced it’s particularly deep or insightful, but there is some enjoyment to be had from watching four actors at the top of their game get to where

Kate Chisholm

Audio gongs

No red carpet was rolled out on Sunday night when the first ever Audio Drama Awards were presented to best actor (David Tennant), best actress (Rosie Cavaliero), best drama (The Year My Mother Went Missing)…in a Hollywood-Lite ceremony at Broadcasting House. No tears were shed as the winners sought desperately to find the right words — not too smug, neither too self-immolating. There were no cheesy jokes from a rancid comedian as compère (David Tennant took on the role formerly reserved for Ricky Gervais). But at last, after 89 years of plays on the BBC, the extraordinary fact that at least once a day it’s possible to have a front-row

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Cooked-up tension

Masterchef (BBC1) is a total waste of life — and I should know, because I’m addicted to it. It came to me suddenly and I’m still not sure how it happened. All I know is that one year I was like: ‘Masterchef. Ah, yes, it’s that foodie programme Loyd Grossman presents, which critics always call things like “Moaasterchoif” and “Mxxrgrghstrchrrxff” to show how amusing they can be about the presenter’s pronunciation.’ And the next I was: ‘Noo! Noo! No way was cloudberry coulis on calf’s brain carpaccio an ejection offence! That boy’s got talent. You should have got rid of the woman with her crappy tarte au citron…’ Actually I’ve

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Loudspeaker art

Several people I spoke to when this exhibition was first mentioned thought it would be a Hockney retrospective, considering that he was commandeering all the first-floor galleries at the RA. But actually the retrospective element is very slight, consisting of half a dozen early landscapes and a couple of photo-collages, before we encounter the first of the mainly large-scale landscapes he has been painting since the late 1990s. In fact, the greater part of the exhibition (sponsored by BNP Paribas) consists of work done in Yorkshire since 2004, and Hockney has packed the galleries with hundreds of images (a single work might consist of 36 watercolours, or perhaps 51 iPad

Andrew Lambirth

Wrestling with paint and demons

In his centenary year, the status of Jackson Pollock (1912–56) looks assured: a self-created American hero who is now accorded all the reverence due an Old Master. The most famous of the Abstract Expressionists, nicknamed Jack the Dripper because of his trademark style, his emphasis was on paint and process: the surface of the canvas was an arena in which the artist could externalise his feelings through action. Some have called Pollock the father of Performance Art, but his primary involvement was with pure painting — creating a complex abstract imagery that was intended to engage with Jungian archetypes and thus have access to deep meaning. Of course not everyone