Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Zilch to care about

So, The Three Musketeers, and one for all, and all for one, but I wish it were every man for himself, and they’d all decided to call it a day and go their separate ways. This is a film of no charm whatsoever and I’d advise you to steer clear, walk the other way, keep your money in your pocket, and do something else. Do your VAT return or change all the duvet covers or scour the grill pan that’s been ‘soaking’ for days and I promise you, not only will you have more fun, but one hour and 50 minutes will pass much more quickly, too. This is expensively

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

False expectations

Here’s an idea from the heyday of radio comedy. A soap star about to get the chop improvises an unscripted deathbed recovery during a live broadcast in order to save his career. I think it was Tony Hancock who starred in that sketch. To expand it into a full-length play would be quite a challenge. And in the 1960s Frank Marcus, a showbiz journalist, took on the job. And he struck gold. The Killing of Sister George triumphed in London and on Broadway. Now it’s back with a cast of starry comediennes. Sister George, a district nurse, is the leading character in a popular Radio 4 soap opera. One day,

Kate Chisholm

Care in the community

‘We all need to rendezvous every week. It keeps us all as a community,’ said Jane Copsey on the In Touch anniversary programme (produced by Cheryl Gabriel). The Radio 4 magazine for the blind and partially sighted has been around for 50 years dispensing advice and encouragement, hope and cheer. Nowadays it’s been cut to just 20 minutes, but at least it’s still in its Tuesday-evening slot, where it’s been scheduled for decades. Copsey was arguing for the survival of the programme, even though there’s now an online equivalent, called Ouch! Podcasts, downloads, internet chatrooms can all replicate radio but not the experience of listening in as a community, the

Simon Hoggart

Critics’ choice

I caught an intriguing session at the Cheltenham literary festival, titled ‘Secrets of the TV Critics’. As it happened, the main secret seemed to be that some of them liked a drink while they watched the box. In the distant days before advance DVDs and internet previews, one critic of the Daily Express used to sit in front of an entire evening’s television with a bottle of whisky. At 10.45 he would phone the copytakers and dictate what he thought. At least he was duplicating the experience of most viewers, which is more than we critics do now. Kate Harwood, the BBC’s ‘drama head of series and serials’, revealed what

George Hull

Get that girl

L.A. The Eighties. Hard rock is alive and well. Two smalltown hopefuls, Drew and Sherrie, arrive on Sunset Strip, as a German property developer is threatening to flatten it. Both find work in the same bar, and Drew has just plucked up the courage to tell Sherrie, ‘I think you’re really rad,’ when jaded rock star Stacee Jax (Shayne Ward) comes between them — just because he can. Waitresses in bodice and suspenders pelvic-thrust to rock classics, oblivious. Rock of Ages (Shaftesbury Theatre) has more layers than your average musical. There are some witty Family Guy-style cutaways, and parts of Simon Lipkin’s versatile narration seem on the point of founding

Friday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Exclusive: Michael Boyd to quit the RSC

The theatre world is abuzz with rumours that Michael Boyd, director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, has quit this afternoon. He was appointed in July 2002 and was expected to complete at least a decade in charge. His colleague Vikki Heywood is also expected to resign. Boyd will probably be best remembered for overseeing the enormous refit of the main theatre in Stratford. The renovated space, with its thrust stage, opened its doors in November 2010 and has been judged a huge success. Boyd has also shown himself adept at the do-gooding jargon of top public officials. He talks of the Bard’s new home in Stratford as if it were

Tuesday

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

Ground zero, part 2

This is the second half of Kate Maltby’s essay on the representation of September 11th in art. You can read the first here. Decade succeeds in humanizing moral failings: fear, shame, doubt. In the simplest and most intimate scene, we hear a blokish, British New Yorker talk through the guilt of swapping his day off for 9/11, his creeping frustrations with the official investigation, his confusion at finding his public criticisms picked up by conspiracy theorists. It’s a devastating performance by Tobias Menzies, pared down, humble. And Menzies isn’t the only talented performer here: Kevin Harvey is fierce and firm as the Marine ordered to shoot Bin Laden, as well

Monday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Here’s how the Beeb might save some cash

Good point made by Charlie Brooker in today’s Guardian. If the BBC wishes to save a bit of money without affecting quality of output —indeed, by improving it — the corporation should stop making vastly expensive trailers for its forthcoming programmes. Brooker says it “turns him silver with rage” when he sees these specially shot montages: “It’s like watching the BBC shit money into a big glittery bin.” Quite right. If I were a better journalist I’d have added up the number of minutes per hour which the BBC gives over to advertising itself and compare it with the figure from 10, 20 and 30 years ago. I am absolutely

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

Ground zero, Part 1

Kate Maltby’s essay on artists’ responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11th will appear here in two halves. This is the first. There’s a moment in Rupert Goold’s latest production, Decade, in which a gaunt widow (Charlotte Randle) stares up and into the empty space just left of where the North Tower used to stand at Ground Zero, New York. Each day, she tells her listeners, she is staring not at the space where the tower used to be, but trying to find the patch of air through which her husband might have tumbled, voluntary but unwilling, to his death. She doesn’t have to describe exactly what she sees

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Pictorial intelligence

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was born into a banking family, always knew he wanted to be a painter and was fortunate enough to be encouraged in his enthusiasm by his parents. After a classical training he began to paint portraits and history subjects, before seeing the relevance of real life and developing ways in which to depict it. Influenced by Manet and allied to the Impressionists, he was nevertheless not a committed member of the group and was impatient at its definition of painting. He remained classical in his approach to picture-making but fused this with a keen interest in colour and texture, and an awareness of how photography and Japanese

William Cook

Northern lights | 8 October 2011

Those BBC refuseniks will rue the day they passed up the chance to relocate to Salford, England’s new cultural capital, says William Cook Standing on the roof of Daniel Libeskind’s Imperial War Museum North, staring at the shiny new buildings down below, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Hamburg or Berlin. There’s the same futuristic skyline, the same glint of glass and metal. There’s even a sleek modern tram, snaking between the shops and cafés along the quay. But this isn’t a continental conurbation — this is Salford. The improbable renaissance of this unloved city sums up England’s biggest schism, not between black and white or rich

The Spectator

Barometer | 8 October 2011

Late winners The Nobel Prize is not usually given posthumously; but an exception was made this week for Ralph Steinman, a cancer scientist who, unknown to the Nobel committee, had died three days before being awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine. He is in good company in being honoured posthumously. Peter Finch, George Gershwin and Heath Ledger all won Academy Awards after their deaths. Alexander McQueen last year won an ‘outstanding achievement award’ following his suicide. Unlike in Britain, where elections are suspended if a candidate dies, US politicians are occasionally elected after their deaths. In 2000 Mel Carnahan of Missouri won election to the US Senate after dying in

Michael Tanner

Beguiled by Weill

  Street Scene may well be Kurt Weill’s most successful work from his American period, but seeing it in as good a production as the Opera Group’s at the Young Vic was cause for both enjoyment and reservations. In the next couple of weeks it will be touring to Basingstoke, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Hull, so plenty of people will have and should take the chance of seeing it. I’d go again if I were nearer one of those places, for Weill is always at least interesting, though not always quite in the way that he wanted to be — he intended, like Brecht, that we should be filled with indignation

Deborah Ross

Dare to care

Tyrannosaur is very much in the British working-class miserablist tradition in the sense that it is full of masculine fury and the women who take the brunt of it, and if this does not sound an attractive proposition, it’s because it isn’t, and never is, but, as far as these unattractive propositions go, this is powerfully affecting. I would also add that if, in the upcoming months, the actress Olivia Colman does not win every award going for her performance as a nice Christian lady with something to hide, I will be surprised, stunned, amazed, astonished and incredulous. I will also be dumbfounded, and flabbergasted, and will eat my hat,

Alan Powers

House rules | 8 October 2011

Britain needs more houses, and the government’s highly unpopular draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) at least asks how to get them — the right question even if it gives the wrong answer. Anyone who deals with the planning system knows how overblown it has become, and that the cost and effort can exhaust a developer, to the extent that the good intentions of a scheme drain away at the crucial moment of building. The existing planning system may be imperfect but, if it is to be simplified, it needs to be better at eliminating bad designs, not the reverse. Prodigious amounts of brain power and energy have been devoted

Kate Chisholm

Smart operator

Back in the Fifties, it was possible for a single TV sitcom to capture 92 per cent of the small-screen audience; 92 per cent? It sounds astonishing to us now. The idea of so many people watching the very same comic gags at the very same time. Those fabled water-cooler, coffee-machine chats about what was ‘on’ last night no longer happen. Offices have lost their communal buzz, and are often as dead quiet now as a funeral parlour. No more telephone calls, as everyone is texting. No need to talk to anyone, you just email. Nothing to talk about, because we’re all listening, watching, playing something different. No wonder we

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Nice Mr Fry

Whenever I find myself dreaming about how awful things would be under a red/green dictatorship — increasingly often, these days — the one person who gives me a glimmer of hope that I might get out of the hell alive is Stephen Fry. He’s a leftie, of course — but, like Frank Field and Kate Hoey, he’s the right kind of leftie. Even when appointed Minister for Culture in the new regime, as he inevitably would be, you just know that he wouldn’t indulge in either the gloating triumphalism or bullying sadism of his fellow Nomenklatura. It would be more a case of: ‘Yes, my dear, dear chap. How perfectly

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Unfit for purpose

In recent months, two new museums have opened to much acclaim: The Hepworth in Wakefield and Turner Contemporary in Margate. Now Colchester is receiving the dubious benison of a new building. What is this assertive new generation of museums in England supposed to be about? Leisure, business or art? There’s precious little of the last in the much delayed Firstsite gallery in Colchester, a long pavilion by Rafael Viñoly Architects clad in gold-coloured metal which looks wonderfully out of place in the Roman city of Camulodunum (the name also chosen for its inaugural exhibition). Don’t get me wrong: I live in East Anglia and would welcome a great new museum

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Down to earth

Lloyd Evans talks to the warm, vibrant, vegetable-growing actor, teacher and director Caroline Quentin Terminal fear. Rising nausea. And possibly vomiting. That’s what Caroline Quentin expects to go through on the opening night of her new play, Terrible Advice, at the Menier Chocolate Factory. ‘I’m really pretending it’s not happening at the moment,’ she tells me when we meet in the theatre bar. With two weeks to go before the first performance, she confesses, ‘I get dry-mouth at the very bloody thought of it. Mind you, I’m always like this halfway through rehearsals, I think, agh! I can’t bear it, perhaps I can run away. Or feign injury. Or I

Michael Tanner

Chance encounter

Is it possible to write a great opera, or a great work of art of any kind, about Auschwitz? One thing is clear: it would have to be truly great. The very idea of a fairly good work, or for that matter a fairly bad one, with such a subject is absurd. And not only absurd, but also revolting. Take Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader, which was published to much acclaim 14 years ago, but which was soon seen to be a meretricious concoction by discerning readers, just on account of its attempting to illuminate the Holocaust by relating it to subsequent events and ‘relationships’. The most moving and powerful