Arts Reviews Archives

Saturday

26 Nov 2011

Historical knockabout

It’s a palace drama with all the trimmings. Trevor Nunn’s new production, The Lion in Winter, plunges us into the court of Henry II and his spurned wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, as they struggle to decide which of their three sons should inherit the throne. Eleanor, held prisoner in a deluxe royal fortress, has been granted leave to join the family at Christmas. ‘Thanks for letting me out,’ she says, on their first meeting. ‘It’s only for the holidays,’ jokes Henry. Clearly a king who locks his wife in the broom cupboard won’t pay much heed to her views on the succession. So there’s an emotional and dramatic illogicality here

Deborah Ross

Choppy waters

As there were no invites this week from Hollywood movie stars — I thought Nicole Kidman might ask me over for a girls’ night in, to do face packs and nails and stuff, but not a squeak — I have to get back to the business of reviewing, and so here we are with The Deep Blue Sea. This is Terence Davies’s take on the Terence Rattigan play of the same name, and it’s awfully, awfully good — superb acting; superb sweeping crane shots; a superb evocation of postwar London in the Fifties — but it somehow fails properly to come to life. A new Davies film is, of course,

Charles Spencer

A night at the opera

Thanks to the generosity of friends, Mrs Spencer and I went to the opera the other week, an exceptionally rare event. Having grown up with the rougher edges of pop and rock music, the trained voices of opera singers always strike me as being artificial and overblown. And there is something about the snooty splendour of Covent Garden that brings out a chippy adolescent resentment in me, though on most matters these days I am soundly right-wing and usually enjoy a spot of luxury. The evening didn’t begin well. Our taxi got stuck in a traffic jam and we had barely travelled 100 yards before the meter hit ten quid

Friday

25 Nov 2011

Alex Massie

Let the Telegraph be the Telegraph

Few things on Fleet Street are as reliably embarrassing as the Daily Telegraph’s efforts to appeal to the Yoof market. Experience is a tough dominie however and, unabashed, the paper still strives to attract a younger, hipper type of reader even though said types of reader should sensibly be banned form purchasing the Telegraph. It is all very silly. We want the Telegraph to be the Telegraph. Three cheers then for Rev Dr Peter Mullen, Rector of St Michael, Cornhill and St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in the City of London, who has written this splendid, trencant piece asking, with good reason, Why is every BBC programme invested with a blast of pop

Saturday

19 Nov 2011

Andrew Lambirth

Perfect harmony

Andrew Lambirth finds paintings at the National Gallery’s Leonardo exhibition of such a singular and pure beauty as to take the breath away The great world is humming with an event of international importance at the National Gallery: the largest number of Leonardo da Vinci’s surviving paintings ever gathered together. To see anything by this extraordinary Renaissance genius is worth turning aside for, but in recent years there have been a fair few exhibitions, principally at the V&A in 2006, at the Royal Collection in 2003, and a provincial touring show in 2002. Admittedly, these displays have consisted of Leonardo’s drawings, but the prospective visitor should be aware that this

Lucy Vickery

Back to the future | 19 November 2011

High Arctic, the inaugural exhibition in the newly opened Sammy Ofer wing at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (until 13 January), brings a thoroughly 21st-century, technology-driven museum experience to this historic site. It’s an exhibition, Jim, but not as we know it. In 2010 Matt Clark, creative director of the art and design practice UVA, joined an expedition of artists and scientists to the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. High Arctic, which he describes as ‘a monument to an Arctic past set 100 years into the future’, is a response to this trip; an attempt to address, in a non-preachy way, the issue of man’s impact on the environment. Housed in

James Delingpole

A girdle too far

Fact: in 1963, air travel was so new and exciting that the awed gasps of the passengers as the plane took flight frequently drowned out the noise of the jet engines. Fact: in 1963, air travel was so comfortable that passengers emerged from long-haul flights even more refreshed, relaxed and cheerful than when they boarded the plane. Instead of taking their suits to the dry cleaners, canny travellers of the day would often just take a plane journey instead, knowing that their clothes would emerge at the end more pressed and immaculate than before. Fact: in 1963, every woman looked and dressed like Jackie Kennedy, especially air stewardesses, all of

Kate Chisholm

History lesson | 19 November 2011

When I was a student of history, the first book we were asked to read was E.H. Carr’s What Is History? I never understood Carr’s question. Or the answers that his book gave. If history is not about people and events, but causes and ideas, then I could see no sense in bothering to study it because for most people causes and ideas are irrelevant. They have to find ways of surviving whatever history, circumstance, events inflict upon them. I was of course born after the two world wars; Carr was born in 1892, as Victoria’s empire began to wane. On Radio 3 this week a group of historians and

Michael Tanner

Continuous fun

The time of year is approaching when Nutcrackers take over from opera, and then a further round of Traviatas gets under way. But that does at least mean that it’s also the time when the schools of music put on their end-of-term operas, and this season is unusually promising. Next week Sir Colin Davis is conducting Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict at the Royal Academy of Music, and the week after the Royal College of Music is staging two equally rare Bizet operas, Djamileh and Le Docteur Miracle. I doubt whether either of them will give me more, or as much, pleasure as the Guildhall School’s production of Nicolai’s Die lustigen

Patrick Carnegy

Bishops and ploughboys

The delectable drama student who served dinner beforehand in the Rooftop Restaurant told us she’d much enjoyed Written on the Heart but that it was a bit intellectual. As David Edgar’s new play is about the making of the King James Bible, this wasn’t altogether surprising. How do you make a play about the deliberations of some 54 bishops and scholars who fine-tuned William Tyndale’s English translation of c.1525–34 into the KJB of 1611? One place to start is to have the scholars haggle over ‘delectable’ or ‘very pleasant’ as alternatives for Na’ ameta li meod in II Samuel 1: 26, not that they’d glimpsed our waitress in the restaurant.

Lloyd Evans

Sheer madness

‘I’m off to see a play about a man who kills his dad,’ I told my five-year-old as I left the house. ‘Because he didn’t give him any ice-cream?’ he said. Mmm, I wondered, it’s possible that Hamlet harboured some childhood grudge against Claudius over a Mr Whippy refusal episode. But such meta-textual speculation is extremely perilous. And when I reached the Young Vic I realised just how grave the danger can be. Ian Rickson’s bumptious show sets the play in a loony bin. Banana yellow walls. Tannoy announcements. Leering staff wearing canvas security uniforms. Claudius, in a three-piece suit, setting chairs in a semi-circle for Hamlet, Gertrude and the

Deborah Ross

My dinner with Meryl

Justice is a plodding and uninteresting revenge thriller starring Nicolas Cage and January Jones, and as I don’t have much else to say about it I’m going to fill the rest of the space by telling you about my dinner with Meryl Streep, who stars as Margaret Thatcher in the forthcoming The Iron Lady. This is all true, mad as it seems. And as I outstayed my welcome, as I always do — you can rely on it — I even caught Ms Streep washing up. ‘Meryl Streep washing up!’ I exclaimed. ‘Next, it’ll be Tom Cruise putting the bins out.’ She smiled graciously as she rinsed out a mug.

Saturday

12 Nov 2011

James Delingpole

The invisible man | 12 November 2011

Besides being one of the most exquisitely melodious, sensitive singer-songwriters you’re ever likely to hear, John Grant is also one of the most beautiful men you could ever hope to meet. I’m not the only married man to feel this way about the tortured gay pop star. As he tells me over lunch on London’s South Bank, male fans are constantly gushing after his shows about how utterly they worship and adore him. ‘Then they’ll go and ruin it by saying, “Oh, and by the way, may I introduce my wife?”’ And it’s not that the Michigan-born 42-year-old is excessively handsome or exquisitely ephebic or anything like that. In fact,

Andrew Lambirth

Intelligent design | 12 November 2011

In 1935, Paul Nash observed that Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954) was responsible for the change in attitude towards commercial art in this country. An American, Kauffer arrived in England in 1914 during a period of European study. He liked it and decided to stay, enabled to do so by his remarkable ability to design posters. In 1915 Frank Pick commissioned him to produce the first of what became a remarkable stream of some 140 posters for London Transport. Hugely impressed by Vorticism, Kauffer became a friend and ally of Wyndham Lewis and introduced the Modernist sensibility into commercial art. Paul Nash commented, ‘It was the courage and aesthetic integrity shown

Andrew Lambirth

Bird watching | 12 November 2011

The setting is appropriate: Rochelle School is on Arnold Circus in Shoreditch, at the end of Club Row, once famous for its pet market, where, until it was closed down in 1983, you could buy caged birds from around the world. Now the school is hosting an exhibition entitled Ghosts of Gone Birds (till 23 November), a wide-ranging and stylistically eclectic show with a single emotive theme: extinct birds. More than 100 artists, musicians and writers, including Peter Blake, Margaret Atwood and Ralph Steadman, have made work in aid of BirdLife International’s Preventing Extinction scheme. Steadman did one picture and then found himself gripped by the theme, and went on

Simon Hoggart

Ritual humiliation

Ricky Gervais’s latest sitcom, Life’s Too Short (BBC2, Thursday), is really a series of sketches on his favourite themes — failure, rejection, self-delusion and humiliation. I gather from friends of friends that at UCL he was often teased, not always pleasantly, for not fitting in with the right gang. Exclusion of one kind or another and the desperate need to fit in is another constant topic. You may remember the scene in Extras in which he and his friends are turfed out of the VIP area in a club to make way for David Bowie, who then makes things more horrible by improvising a song about what a pathetic and

Kate Chisholm

Democracy on trial

At the debate on parliamentary democracy recorded last week in Portcullis House for The Forum (broadcast on Sunday on the World Service) as part of Parliament Week, we in the audience were asked whether we thought democratic values were universal or whether they applied differently in different places. Most people voted for them being universal but I found myself in a dilemma. What does the question mean? Human rights must surely be everywhere the same. But does this mean that democracy should be the same wherever you are around the world? Do villagers living deep within the Swat Valley have the same democratic needs as shoppers on the Ku’Damm in

Giannandrea Poesio

High hopes

For more than 40 years, Scottish Ballet has been one of the most vibrant and interesting companies on the UK dance scene. It is a ballet company born of a well considered vision and the desire to prove that there can be good ballet without grandiose spectacle. Indeed, for many years it has been notable for its almost ‘chamber’-like choreographic repertoire, which has included intelligent adaptations of the great classics. Now a new chapter is about to start, as Christopher Hampson takes over the company’s artistic directorship, succeeding Ashley Page and an impressively illustrious roster of equally enlightened directors. Like many in the dance business, I have long admired the

Lloyd Evans

Blood-stained humour

I take no pleasure in saying this but the director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, appears to have lost his sense of propriety. Or possibly the balance of his mind. He’s asked John Hodge (author of the Trainspotting screenplay) to write a sitcom about the Great Terror. And, rather than bunging it in the nearest skip, Mr Hytner has decided to direct it at the Cottesloe. The blood-stained gag-fest begins in 1938 when a secret policeman orders Russia’s leading satirist, Mikhail Bulgakov, to write a play about Stalin’s early life. Bulgakov meets the Great Leader and Teacher and finds him keen to assume personal control of the scriptwriting. So

Deborah Ross

Bleak and bold

As a major admirer of all writer/director Andrea Arnold’s previous work — Wasp, Red Road, Fish Tank — I was looking forward to her version of Wuthering Heights more than I can say, and? Wow! Or, at least, mostly ‘wow!’ It is a ‘wow’ with a few reservations. It is two thirds of a ‘wow’, so perhaps a ‘wo!’? Wo! It is impressively bold. And brave. And brutish. It will rile the purists, which is always good, as riling purists is a particular hobby of mine, and I like to set aside at least half a day a week to do just that. (I favour putting them in a cage,