Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Michael Tanner

North star

Das Rheingold used to have the reputation of being a difficult opera, in that it not only lasts for two and a half hours without a break, but also involves a considerable amount of discussion, immense quantities of plot, and lacks stretches of lyricism, with a few obvious exceptions. It is one of the operas that have shot up in popularity and esteem thanks to surtitles. Now that it is possible to follow every movement of the drama, audiences find it to be an enthralling, extremely anti-romantic study of some fundamental human urges, and a great deal more complex than the usual ‘love versus power’ formula that it used to

Kate Chisholm

Novel experiment

Having argued last week that it takes time (maybe a couple of generations) before fiction can be appropriately applied to traumatic historical events along comes a Radio 4 season celebrating the work of the Russian writer and ‘heroic war journalist’ Vasily Grossman, who wasted no time in translating his bitter experiences into a series of novels. Grossman witnessed the struggle for Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–3 as the war correspondent of the Red Star newspaper. He followed the Nazis’ retreat from Russian soil, and was one of the first reporters to enter and then write about the extermination camps at Treblinka and Auschwitz. But as Stalin’s iron grip on

Simon Hoggart

Out of sight

There are some things television can do which no other medium can manage. Take one of those little-noticed programmes, Hidden Paintings on BBC4. It’s presented by Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, the chap with the King Charles spaniel hair, who used to do Changing Rooms, in which people found parts of their house redecorated while they were away, causing them to fly into a rage. The theme is fine works of art which for various reasons aren’t on public view. This week LLB considered David Inshaw, still with us, whose two best-known paintings are both hidden. One, ‘Our Days Were a Joy’, shows an enigmatic young woman in a graveyard. The technique is

Kate Chisholm

Conversation piece | 17 September 2011

Dr Johnson would be thrilled. His name up there in lights in the West End. He craved theatrical fame, and was cruelly disappointed that his only play, an exotic tragedy set in Constantinople, had just nine performances in 1749. But here at the Arts Theatre on Great Newport Street (London WC2, until 24 September) he is brought to vivid dramatic life by Ian Redford. In A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson, the rough-mannered and ill-figured dictionary-maker also finds himself on stage with a glamorous woman, Trudie Styler, who as Hester Thrale even pecks his cheek. Did they ever kiss? Who knows? Their friendship has puzzled scholars for 200 years.

Saturday

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Killing comedy

There is a ban on comedy flyering in Leicester Square. Westminster Council has decided that flyers are litter and that the flyerers — usually anxious baby comedians – ‘harass’ the tourists. This is ridiculous. Most comedians would scream at their own reflection in a pint. Even so, if the council finds any flyers it will remove the venue’s licence. As if comedians did not have enough woes — manic depression, calm depression, depression that is not really depression but suppressed rage, poor rates of pay, joke theft, Frankie Boyle — their solitary reason for living, which is attention, is now at threat. And this from a council that lets Hollywood

Andrew Lambirth

Spirit of place | 10 September 2011

In the Weston Rooms of the Royal Academy’s main suite of galleries is the third of a series of exhibitions designed to show the processes by which artists arrive at their work. In the Weston Rooms of the Royal Academy’s main suite of galleries is the third of a series of exhibitions designed to show the processes by which artists arrive at their work. Nigel Hall (born 1943) is an internationally celebrated abstract sculptor, known for his restrained purist forms, exquisitely balanced combinations of cone, ellipse, circle and wedge, executed in bronze, steel or polished wood. He also exhibits tautly rhythmic charcoal and gouache drawings of twisting ribands or other

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Out of this world | 10 September 2011

Lloyd Evans meets Tara FitzGerald and is struck by her uncanny beauty and her desire to hear what he thinks Tara FitzGerald’s beauty is fabulous. Literally, there’s something unworldly about the surfaces and contours of her face. It’s as if the codes of her biology had been transmitted to earth from a higher realm, from alien beings. The wide cheekbones are angular yet softly curvaceous. Her eyes have a luminous purity, a revelatory greenness. Her dark hair glows, and her immaculate skin is invitation-card white. She speaks in a low, smokily textured voice that occasionally surges into a throaty giggle. I meet her at the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn where

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

In the face of terror, Britain has surrendered to men in yellow fluorescent jerkins

Had your fill of 9/11 porn yet? I guarantee if you turn on the TV at this moment on some channel there’ll be a plane crashing into a building and a nutter from the Midwest telling you it was organised by the Jews via the offices of the Zionist Occupation Government, the towers packed with thermite, the Pentagon hit not by an aircraft but by a missile, Rumsfeld an alien lizard creature, Charlie Sheen or some other madman asking why They keep lying to us. Or one of the more upmarket programmes — same shot of the planes crashing in and people jumping out of the windows, but done in

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Divine punishment

Once or twice a season Shakespeare gets booted out of the Globe. In his place a modern author is given a chance to shine. The Scottish writer Chris Hannan’s new play, The God of Soho, opens with a frolicsome nod to classicism. We are in heaven where two demotic deities, Mr and Mrs God, engage in caustic marital banter. Mrs God wears a colostomy bag and her affliction triggers many a harrumphing sound of flatulence from an on-stage tuba. This is hilarious, of course, and even more hilarious if you happen to be six years old. Hannan’s carping immortals turn out to be very hard to engage with. Perhaps he

Michael Tanner

But is it any good?

Writing to his friend and fellow-author William Dean Howells in 1907 about the Prefaces to the New York edition of his novels, Henry James said, ‘They are, in general, a sort of plea for Criticism, for Discrimination, for Appreciation on other than infantile lines — as against the so almost universal Anglo-Saxon absence of these things; which tends so, in our general trade, it seems to me, to break the heart.’ Happily for him, he wasn’t at all interested in music, or specifically in opera, otherwise his heart might have broken a long time before it did. For there isn’t much writing about opera which even pretends to be criticism,

Kate Chisholm

One day

‘History is not a dull subject,’ warned Caryl Phillips, the novelist, at the end of his 9/11 Letter. ‘It’s a vital, contested narrative, peopled with witnesses to events which touch both head and heart. It’s the most important school subject because not remembering is the beginning of madness.’ Perhaps he should have said ‘not remembering correctly’ in this week of commemoration of the events of ten years ago. Phillips’s letter was the most powerful of the five that were specially written for Radio 4’s Book of the Week (and produced by Julian May and Beaty Rubens). Most of them were fuelled by personal memories of being in the city on

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Money for nothing

When future historians sift through the wreckage of Western Civilisation to try to find out where it all went wrong, I do hope they chance upon at least one episode of The World’s Strictest Parents (BBC3) and one of Deal or No Deal (Channel 4). The World’s Strictest Parents is another TV variant on the Lad’s Army/Wife Swap theme. Unruly, selfish, vile teenagers are sent from their grotesquely overindulging middle-class British homes to far-flungplaces, there to spend two weeks under the kind of old-fashioned parenting regimes where they still uphold traditions like family meals, respect, discipline and a strict moratorium on dope, booze and the wearing of nipple rings. They

Wednesday

Justin Marozzi

Black gold: the key to Libya’s future

Tripoli The Roman theatre in Sabratha simmers in the afternoon sun, glowing a warm terracotta. It is a magnificent site as we head west from Tripoli to the Mellitah Oil and Gas Complex. Dating back to the irrepressibly commercial Phoenicians, who founded a trading post here sometime between the fourth and seventh centuries BC, Sabratha is essentially a Roman creation, built in the late second century AD at the outset of the Severan dynasty. Septimius Severus was Africa’s first Roman emperor and he liked to build big. The word imperial scarcely does justice to his finest creation, Leptis Magna, east of Tripoli towards the wreckage of Misratha. Enough pink and

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Something old, something new

Very last chance to see the inaugural exhibition at the magnificently revamped Holburne Museum — a selection from the collections of Peter Blake, together with some of his own work. If, as Geoffrey Grigson suggested, the mind is an anthology, and the museum case or exhibition is a map of that mind, then what a remarkably diverse but ordered person Mr Blake must be. The new temporary exhibition gallery at the top of the Holburne’s new wing is filled with images of fantasy, dream and even nightmare, but everything is calmly laid out with great clarity and precision. The result is obsessional but intriguing. The museum reopened in May, its

William Cook

Blackpool’s ups and downs

The town’s first visitors were daytripping mill workers; now it’s a place for hen and stag parties. William Cook charts its changing fortunes, as a photographic exhibition reveals Think of Blackpool and fine art probably isn’t the first thing that springs to mind, but Britain’s biggest, brashest seaside resort is the unlikely home to one of Britain’s loveliest little galleries. Hidden behind the grey seafront, a drunken stumble from the North Pier, the Grundy Art Gallery was founded in 1911 by two brothers — local philanthropists and art lovers — and this summer it celebrates its centenary with a photographic exhibition that spans the past 100 years. No other town

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Don’t wait for One Day

The correct response to the film One Day is, apparently, to cry your eyes out. Me, I couldn’t squeeze a single tear; in fact the sentiment I could barely suppress throughout was rising irritation. If ever two characters needed a slap it’s the hero and heroine of One Day. Let me explain. This is a film based on David Nicholls’s best-selling novel — and I don’t think I’m giving too much away here given the number of spoiler reviews — about a boy and a girl who never quite get it together for years and years, almost until it’s too late. For most of 20 years, in fact, between 1988

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Speech impediment

Anna Christie, an early Eugene O’Neill play, has brought Jude Law to the tiny Donmar Warehouse. Set in New York among migrant longshoremen, the script takes ages to get to the point. Mat Burke, a randy Oirish loon, wants to marry Anna, a winsome worldly blonde, but faces opposition from her narky, knife-wielding dad, Chris. But never mind the drama, listen to the accents. Jarring phonetics dominate the stage. David Hayman’s Chris spits out gnarled Scandinavian curses. ‘I svair to Gott, Anna, I don’t font hear it.’ Ruth Wilson’s Anna has a hard-to-place American accent which harbours many a stowaway syllable. And Law, playing de Oirishman, speaks a dialect that’s

Deborah Ross

There will be blood | 3 September 2011

Fright Night (3D, which we shall just ignore) is a remake of the 1985 vampire movie of the same name and, while it’s not the most fun I’ve ever had, it’s not the least either. Fright Night (3D, which we shall just ignore) is a remake of the 1985 vampire movie of the same name and, while it’s not the most fun I’ve ever had, it’s not the least either. I’ve just come back from a week in a Welsh holiday cottage with an octogenarian, a toddler, a teenager, a dog and lumpy polyester duvets, which isn’t something you ever read about in Condé Nast Traveller, for example. Anyhow, I’m

Michael Tanner

Short and sweet | 3 September 2011

During August the only opera-going possibility used to be a festival, of a fairly grand kind, but in recent years the small, ‘alternative’ opera companies that are proliferating have sensibly taken either to continuing throughout the summer, as the big opera houses don’t, or to having their own festivals. During August the only opera-going possibility used to be a festival, of a fairly grand kind, but in recent years the small, ‘alternative’ opera companies that are proliferating have sensibly taken either to continuing throughout the summer, as the big opera houses don’t, or to having their own festivals. In London in the past couple of weeks there was Tête-à-Tête in

Simon Hoggart

The odd couple | 3 September 2011

Years ago I did some charity gig with Will Self, a sort of Desert Island Books. He had chosen a Raymond Chandler, and I remarked on the similarities between Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse. Both were educated at Dulwich College, both were wonderfully stylish and stylised writers, both were masters of the dazzlingly witty, totally unexpected metaphor. Will Self favoured me with the de haut en bas curled lip familiar from television. There was no comparison, he said. Wodehouse wrote about a discredited imperialist age; Chandler by contrast tackled the gritty reality of life on the mean streets of LA — or words to that effect. He was wrong. Chandler’s world,