Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Christopher Howse

Landscapes of grief

The caption on the photograph (above) makes a difference: ‘A young boy grieves at the funeral of his father who died of Aids at Ndola, Zambia, 2000.’ There were two million Aids orphans in Zambia alone. ‘I care about not letting this tragedy go unseen,’ Don McCullin said. Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin, at the Imperial War Museum (until 15 April 2012), shows 250 items from the long career of a man best known for his photojournalism, from Vietnam onwards. The boy at Ndola looks straight at the lens, if he is looking outwards and not into the empty future, or back into the life with his father

Simon Hoggart

Aussie rules

The Australians do suburbia well. We seem to be interested in the working classes and the poor (EastEnders, Coronation Street, searing one-off dramas about sink estates), Americans like the rich (Dallas, Dynasty) and well-to-do urban folk (Frasier, Friends). But in Oz they are fascinated by the people who live in medium-size houses in leafy streets — think of Neighbours and the sublime comedy Kath and Kim, which was set in the Melbourne ’burbs. In Britain, a dramatic moment comes when someone rapes their ex-wife. In America, it’s when you manage to steal $10 million of oil shares from your brother-in-law. In Australia, it’s hitting a brat, who’s not your son,

Kate Chisholm

Great expectations | 29 October 2011

‘We chose to believe things that could not be true,’ says Velma Hart, the American finance officer who famously confronted President Obama at a town hall meeting in Washington DC and told him straight that she was tired of constantly having to defend him against his former supporters among the middle classes. She voted for Obama, believing that with him as President real change was possible in America, but since then she has become less sure of his ability to make any difference. Having just lost her job, her fears for the future have been realised. Would she vote for Obama again? Hart was talking to Gary Younge, who reported

Deborah Ross

Anonymous

To see or not to see, that is the question, just as it is always the question with us — I believe our relationship may be caught in what is generally referred to as a ‘rut’ — but I shall answer all the same and my answer is this: Anonymous is a ‘not see’ and I would urge you to not see it at your earliest possible convenience. Shame, as it had looked such a prospect. It’s a big, fat costume drama set during the Elizabethan era which asks what some scholars have been asking for the past century or so: did Shakespeare actually write the works credited to him?

Michael Tanner

Der fliegende Holländer

Compelling, succinct, elemental, The Flying Dutchman, Wagner’s first indisputable masterwork, wouldn’t seem to present any great problems for an opera house, unless his directions about heaving ships are taken too literally — very unlikely — so why does one never see it well produced? The Royal Opera has made especially heavy weather of it, but not in the right sense, for the last quarter-century. Tim Albery’s 2009 production has egregious faults, and few merits: above all, it fails to establish any potent atmosphere, and the singers are left largely to their own devices, with unhelpful scenery to stagger around on. The present revival is nonetheless very worthwhile, thanks to the

Giannandrea Poesio

Birmingham Royal Ballet

Contrary to general belief, there is little glamour in the professional life of a dance critic. What there is, though, is a considerable amount of time spent confronting painfully unsuccessful attempts at making art or, at least, making something worth seeing. What makes one digest those endless stretches of choreographic drabness is the promise — sometimes the mirage — of rare moments of pure bliss. Which is what I experienced last week when, for the first time in years, I struck it lucky and sat through three superb performances in a row. Signs that the Birmingham Royal Ballet’s brief run at Sadler’s Wells was going to be a hit were

Patrick Carnegy

Marat/Sade

Peter Brook’s 1964 staging of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade for the RSC was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life as a young journalist. The magnificently titled Persecution and Assassination of Marat as performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade was a knockout. With Patrick Magee as de Sade, Ian Richardson as the Herald (later as Marat) and Glenda Jackson as Charlotte Corday, the play’s argument between de Sade’s belief only in the warts and all of one’s own self and Marat’s faith in utopian socialist revolution made spellbinding theatre, the dialectics irresistibly packaged with song and dance routines

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Inadmissable Evidence

Fashionable Londoners go to the Donmar Warehouse to engage in shut-eye chic. It’s a weird way to relax. You buy a ticket to John Osborne’s 1964 classic, Inadmissable Evidence, and you sleep through most of its two and a half hours. All around me were seats full of happy dozers. How I envied them. Mind you, I felt bad for the cast because the snoozers were nodding and drooling in full view of the stage. Entertaining the unconscious isn’t what thesps go into showbiz for. Still, they’d read the script so they knew the scale of their enemy. Osborne’s bright idea was to create a self-loathing misanthropist and to watch

Tom Sutcliffe

Going solo in Ireland

Wexford’s remarkable opera house is as good a symbol as any of the Irish financial meltdown. The auditorium is fabulous, and not just acoustically. The building — funded by the Irish government just before the banks collapsed — is now the trump card that has preserved the Wexford Festival as Ireland’s sole surviving operatic gesture. There was a brief fantasy moment when a previous culture minister talked about creating an Irish national company in Dublin, and the Arts Council of Ireland said it would provide over €5 million for the artform. But dream on. Instead, Opera Ireland has been wound up and Opera Theatre Company reduced to a shadow. Wexford

Thursday

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

Thandie Newton dies as the Maiden

When I was a teenager, Death and The Maiden was one of the plays I read when I was discovering that theatre could be angry, obscene and unafraid of speaking truth to power. Ariel Dorfman’s tale introduces us to Paulina, a torture survivor who becomes convinced, but can’t prove, that the urbane neighbour her husband, a civil rights lawyer, has befriended was one of the secret servicemen who imprisoned her during a now-fallen military dictatorship. When the play premiered in 1991, it delivered a shock blow to the culture of compromise and denial emerging as Dorfman’s homeland, Chile, made the transition to democracy, a year after the end of Pinochet’s

Monday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Misplaced outrage

I think my favourite story of the day concerned the theatre-goers at Stratford-upon-Avon who were outraged that the play they had just seen contained considerable amounts of sex, violence and depravity. The play was Marat/Sade. You’d think the “Sade” bit might have given them a bit of a clue, wouldn’t you? It’s a bit like me marching back to Blockbusters with my copy of Lesbian Lavatory Lust complaining that it consisted of little more than ninety minutes of rug munching and a particularly grotesque scene with a toilet duck. It would be too much to expect these theatre goers to have had an awareness of this old warhorse of a

Saturday

Laura Gascoigne

Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer

Photographs of roadworks feature regularly in the Hampstead Village Voice but, even with the postmodern fashion for grungy subjects, no contemporary residents have made paintings of them. Yet that, astonishingly, was what Ford Madox Brown did in the 1850s, lugging his two-metre canvas on to The Mount, off Heath Street, to do it. Brown’s unlikely masterwork ‘Work’ was the first ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ painting bought by Manchester Art Gallery, where it is now the centrepiece of a major exhibition dedicated to the artist. I put ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ in inverted commas because Brown — a prickly individual with a deep distrust of all ‘Bodies, Institutions, Art unions & academies’ — was never strictly a

David Platzer

Fra Angelico and the Masters of Light

Fra Angelico (1395–1455), Il Beato (‘the Blessed One’) to his contemporaries as well as to John Paul II, who beatified him in 1982, is probably best known today for his frescoes in Florence’s San Marco, the Dominican convent where he lived as a monk. Perhaps fearing that some art-lovers will question the wisdom of mounting a Fra Angelico exhibition without the San Marco frescoes, the show’s curators have included a video of them. They need not have worried. Even without the frescoes, the 25 Fra Angelicos at the Musée Jacquemart-André, together with a well-chosen assortment of pictures by the friar’s colleagues working in the same religious vein, are more than

Michael Prodger

Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape

Claude Gellée (c.1600–1682), known as Claude Lorrain, started life as a pastry cook and despite turning his attentions from pies and patisserie to painting he never lost his love for confection. Although he is revered as the father of the landscape tradition and was hailed by Constable as ‘the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw’ there is precious little that is natural in his paintings. Claude instead mixed his pictorial ingredients — a tree, a ruin, a river — just as he had his butter, flour and eggs and whisked up poetry-frosted views that delighted the delicate palates of his noble patrons. Although these patrons included Philip IV

Daniel Grant

The only way is up | 22 October 2011

Homes may continue to lose value, the euro becomes shakier by the day, the unemployed stay unemployed and even the Chinese economy shows signs of overheating, but the international art market seems to know only one direction: up. For the first half of 2011, Christie’s sold $3.2 billion in fine and decorative art (an improvement of 25 per cent on 2010), while its rival Sotheby’s auctioned items worth $3.4 billion (up 38 per cent on the previous year). The bubble appears to be far from bursting, and the autumn sales promise to provide plenty of entertainment for those who like to see big prices on both sides of the Atlantic.

Andrew Lambirth

Set art free

Too often art is subjugated to curators’ theories or interpretations. Let the work speak for itself, says Andrew Lambirth The casual observer of London’s art scene, or even the devoted reader of exhibition listings, might be forgiven for thinking that the range of shows available throughout the conspectus of the nation’s museums was of a healthy vigour and diversity. In fact, it could be effectively argued that there are still too many different blockbusters simultaneously competing for box-office success, with museums forever chasing revenue by putting on displays of tried-and-tested favourites, and not actually serving the public in the best possible way. A museum’s dual responsibility is to its collection

Giannandrea Poesio

The Royal Ballet

In its latest triple bill, the Royal Ballet pays tribute to three dance-makers who have marked distinctive epochs in its performance history. Its centrepiece is Frederick Ashton’s 1963 Marguerite and Armand. Created as a showcase for the now legendary partnership of Fonteyn/Nureyev, this one-acter highlights his unique talent for succinct storytelling, as Alexandre Dumas’ Lady of the Camellias is narrated through a rapid series of salient episodes. Ashton’s dance drama has none of the grandeur traditionally associated with either Verdi’s La traviata, or the cinematic works based on by the same text, such as Garbo’s memorable Camille. Here the story is treated as an intimate drama relived in the memory

Deborah Ross

We Need to Talk About Kevin

We Need to Talk About Kevin was a horrible book and this is the horrible screen adaptation of that horrible book, and whether you will want to see it or not will, I suppose, depend on how much you are prepared to revisit that horror. At this point I’d love to say you needn’t bother, skip it, there is absolutely no reason why you should upset yourself all over again, but this has been so skilfully executed and Tilda Swinton is so superb I don’t know if I can. It may be one of those pesky films that is awful to watch but is worth watching all the same. Oh,

Michael Tanner

Xerxes

English Touring Opera, under the inspiring directorship of James Conway, is the most energetic and enterprising operatic company in the country, not only taking three operas round the country this autumn, and another couple next spring, but also touring sacred works by Buxtehude, Gesualdo and Bach to 15 destinations, mainly ecclesiastical. ETO is working with a new orchestra for its baroque repertoire, a director-free group formed earlier this year calling itself the Old Street Band. On the second night of Handel’s Xerxes, which I went to at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre, it seemed to be a first-rate group, and with Jonathan Peter Kenny conducting incisively, sometimes perhaps

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The Pitmen Painters; Honeypot

At last, it’s reached the West End. Lee Hall’s hit play, The Pitmen Painters, tells the heartening tale of some talented Geordie colliers who won national acclaim as artists during the 1930s. Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot, has done extremely well from a pretty limited set of dramatic techniques. He draws each of his coal miners from a couple of opposed attributes: youthful but jobless; single-minded but foolish; erudite but insensitive; unhealthy but idealistic. His dialogue consists of gentle interrogations and nothing else. It’s like a cop show for kids. Every scene involves a misunderstanding — caused by ignorance, stubbornness or some cultural confusion — which has to be resolved