Arts Reviews Archives

Saturday

1 Oct 2011

Unrequited love

It’s a record breaker. The Trafalgar Studio is staging a rare revival of Christopher Hampton’s breakthrough play, written when he was 18, which made him in 1966 the youngest writer ever to have his work staged in the West End. This record has now stood for so long that it could probably do with a lie-down. The plot, meticulously fashionable and youth-orientated, focuses on an unrequited affair between Ian and his flatmate Jimmy. Hampton’s conception of personality is underdeveloped. And overdeveloped, too. Most of his characters are handsome, vague, middle-class numbskulls, posh little tadpoles wriggling around a cosy pond. But the central character, Ian, is a brilliant study of brooding,

Giannandrea Poesio

Triple triumph

There is no better way to kick off a new ballet season than with a choreographic triple whammy. Which is what the Royal Ballet did last week, reopening with a sparkling performance of Jewels, Balanchine’s triptych. The last time I saw the company engage with the same three-part work, I lamented its far too poised and somewhat lacking-in-drive approach to Balanchine’s choreography. Things seem to have improved, though, as last week the dancing stood out for its vibrant attack and attention to detail — paramount qualities for the rendition of a work made up of three choreographically and musically different compositions. In Emeralds both Tamara Rojo’s seamlessly fluid dancing and

Michael Henderson

Great expectations | 1 October 2011

Talent, said Laurence Olivier, was plentiful; skill much rarer. Genius in a performing artist is rarer still, but Olivier had it, and so does Christian Gerhaher, the Bavarian baritone, who presented Schubert’s three song-cycles last week in a series of concerts that brought splendour to Wigmore Hall. This was singing of exceptional quality and, just as important, exceptional intelligence. Expectations were high, yet Gerhaher met them in full. By the time he concluded Schwanengesang, with its terrifying vision of Der Doppelgänger, he had taken the audience on an emotional journey they will hold dear when winter nights draw in, and for many winters to come. Daniel Harding, the English conductor,

Deborah Ross

Mind the gap | 1 October 2011

Ho-hum. Another week, another batch of secret agents, and while I have nothing against secret agents personally — they are generally willing to die for their country, which is nice, although probably quite tiring — The Debt never equals the sum of its parts. It has a blinding cast (Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Ciarán Hinds) and there are some good things to be said for it but it never fully compels or meshes as the emotionally driven, multilayered, grown-up thriller it yearns to be. Plus, it is certainly in the running for my annual, much uncoveted Most Preposterous Third Act Award. The do, if you are interested, is always held

Kate Chisholm

Eastern promise | 1 October 2011

Sad to say that none of the ex-pats who were interviewed in India for Home from Home (Radio 4, Friday) talked about missing the BBC. Their removal to the subcontinent from the UK might have left them with a longing for a pint of Guinness, but not a word about Jazzer and the Grundys, Nicky Campbell or even John Humphrys. It was as if British radio had never touched their lives, in spite of growing up here. Hardeep Singh Kohli, the turban-wearing broadcaster with a broad Glasgow accent whose taste for highly spiced food derives from his family ancestry in the Punjab, went in search of British Indians who have

Simon Hoggart

Tale of the unexpected | 1 October 2011

I imagine there is software that helps you write biopics for television. First you pick the childhood from a drop-down menu, selecting [poor but respectable] [very poor] [so poor that all your belongings will fit into a single wheelbarrow which your mother pushes from a grim slum to the nearby hell-hole]. Father deserts family [yes] [no]. Star is determined to make it big but [is sent from one agent to another with mocking laughter in their ears] [meets an impresario who is sceptical at first then turns incredulously to accompanist and says, ‘My God, she’s got something!’]. Then there are the other staples which must be included by law. The

Tuesday

27 Sep 2011

Kate Maltby

A quick journey into nightmare

As our television screens luxuriate again with images of Downton Abbey, one of its cast members is starring in an altogether grittier production in the heart of West London. Last time we saw Kevin Doyle, he was pleading a lung condition to escape being sent to the Battle of the Somme. Here he starts off as another lugubrious chauffer, awakening in an even more chaotic world than that of the Somme, before morphing into the charismatic, careworn but chatty interrogator in the torture cells of a faceless, totalitarian state. The occasion is the first professional revival in London of Harold Pinter’s double-bill, Victoria Station and One for the Road since

Saturday

24 Sep 2011

Alasdair Palmer

Medieval frescoes

Rome contains many hidden treasures, but the most remarkable of the lot is concealed on the Caelian Hill, above the Colosseum, in the medieval monastery of Santi Quattro Coronati. It’s a cycle of frescoes dating from around 1250. It is extremely rare for painting from this period to survive anywhere, but it’s even rarer in Rome, where the rebuilding of the city by the Counter-Reformation popes destroyed almost all medieval painting. The paintings are in a vast vaulted gothic hall, the walls of which — about 800 square metres of them — were originally completely covered in frescoes. About half the original paintings remain: an earthquake, and the construction of

Susan Moore

Going private

One of the greatest Renaissance paintings remaining in private hands, Hans Holbein the Younger’s ‘The Darmstadt Madonna’, was sold discreetly this summer. It was not offered at auction but sold by private treaty sale — auction-speak for a negotiated private sale rather than a public auction — in a deal brokered by the art consultant and former head of Sotheby’s Germany, Dr Christoph Graf Douglas. This seminal panel painting, begun in 1526, was commissioned by Jakob Meyer zum Hasen, Mayor of Basel, who is portrayed alongside his family praying at the feet of the Virgin and sheltered by her cloak. It is the artist’s first major altarpiece to represent a

Laura Gascoigne

‘An obsolete romantic’

In 1982 Sven Berlin placed a sealed wallet labelled ‘Testament’ on top of a rafter in his studio with instructions for it not to be opened before his 100th birthday on 14 September 2011. Inside was a key to the identities of the characters in his notorious roman à clef about post-war St Ives, The Dark Monarch, published 20 years earlier and immediately withdrawn after four of those characters sued for libel. None of them was a major artistic figure and by today’s standards the libels were laughable, but Berlin’s exposure of the petty politics behind the St Ives idyll — which he later compared to ‘going for a bathe

Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: Bring back the madcaps

I recently watched another one of those delightfully obscure BBC4 archive documentaries. This one was called Bristol on Film. I like archival film footage for what it reveals unintentionally: the incidental details which have nothing to do with the film-maker’s original intent, but which 60 years later reveal how profoundly the world has changed. Like the sign once glimpsed in 1950s Ramsgate: ‘Lift to the seafront 2d — perambulators and wheelchairs 4d’. There was one such moment in the Bristol programme. It was footage of the Queen inspecting the first Concorde prototype at Filton. What astonished me was that it was filmed in black and white. It’s now hard to

Peter Jones

Classic comeback

A new programme to revive Latin and Greek in our schools Some 15 years ago, at the behest of the then editor Charles Moore, I wrote a jovial 20-week QED: Learn Latin column for the Daily Telegraph. It attracted a huge following, and I still have four large box-files full of letters from users. The majority of them expressed one of three sentiments: ‘I learned Latin at school x years ago, loved it and am delighted to renew my acquaintance’; ‘I learned Latin at school, hated it, but now realise what I have missed’; and ‘I never learned Latin at school and have always regretted it’. These responses have stayed

Deborah Ross

I don’t get it

The basic problem with I Don’t Know How She Does It is that we are meant to sympathise with a rich woman who has an absolutely amazing life and great hair and is nannied to the hilt and I Don’t Know How To Do That. How do you do that? Can you take classes? If so, where? Actually, it’s a shame, and disappointing, and I sort of can’t help taking it personally. I had my son in 1992, when I was working on a national newspaper — stick with me; this anecdote almost has a point — and when I told the managing editor I would be requiring maternity leave,

Michael Tanner

Painful triangle

The Royal Opera’s season isn’t awash with new productions, in fact until Christmas only has two thirds of one, but that was what it got under way with: all three short operas of Puccini’s Il Trittico, with Gianni Schicchi revived, and Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica fresh; they are all produced, and mainly very well, by Richard Jones, but each with a different designer. For the gritty naturalism of Il Tabarro (The Cloak), Ultz provides a range of blacks and greys, hardly redolent of the Paris where the opera is set, but adequately lowering to the spirits. Tabarro begins with a swaying Debussy-esque figure, conveying the movement of the river

Lloyd Evans

Losing the plot | 24 September 2011

A world première at the Almeida. My City written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff. Is it any good? Well, let’s see. Plot, first. It’s not that Poliakoff can’t write a plot; he can’t even think one up. Instead he sets himself a high-minded riddle and examines its possibilities. Take an archetype, ‘the kid-fearful-of-the-dark’, turn it inside-out and you get ‘the adult-fearful-of-the-light’. That’ll do for starters. Bung in a few extra brushstrokes and you’re off. An insomniac teacher (Tracey Ullman with too much grey hair) bumps into two former pupils and tells them about her odd little secret. Every night she trudges London’s streets encountering weirdos and listening to their offbeat

Charles Spencer

Mammoth enterprises

Next month it will be five years since the death of my former boss, Peter Hepple, and I still miss the man who saved my career and very possibly my sanity. Peter was for 20 years, from 1972–92, the editor of the Stage newspaper, often affectionately known as the actors’ Bible. But he contributed to it for more than half a century. His first article appeared in 1950, a review of the long-forgotten male impersonator Ella Shields who was topping the bill at the Queen’s Theatre, Poplar. His last, a piece on stage psychics, appeared posthumously in the week of his death. Peter would review almost anything that moved, from

Kate Chisholm

Musical chairs

It’s such a relief to come back from a trip to America, to switch on the first available radio and fall into Francine Stock talking about Nicholas Ray on The Film Programme. Americans have lost the radio habit. You won’t find sets in any, let alone every, room in the house. No one I know there listens to radio except in the car, where all you can find are music stations devoted to just one type of music, country, Cajun or classical, or the terrifying fire-and-brimstone lectures of the evangelist broadcasters. In the run-up to the presidential election, they’ll be joined by a flurry of far-right ear-bashers, dedicated to rustling

James Delingpole

How to behave

‘I don’t suppose the war will leave any of us alone by the time it’s done,’ prophesied one of the characters in the new series of Downton Abbey. Oh, dear, I’m sure she’s right. So I wonder which will be the character who comes back with shellshock, which one with no legs, and which one a hero. For the last, I’m guessing Matthew Crawley, the worthy but slightly dull heir to the worthy but slightly dull Earldom of Grantham. That would be nice: then, after many travails and obstacles, cold, aloof (but really quite hot) Lady Mary will get to realise in the final episode that, yes, of course, he

Saturday

17 Sep 2011

Andrew Lambirth

Battle lines | 17 September 2011

The introductory room to Women War Artists at the Imperial War Museum confronts the visitor with a large canvas of a women’s canteen in 1918 by the little-known Flora Lion. It’s an honest painting, workmanlike but dull. Hanging to its left is Laura Knight’s famous ‘Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring’ (1943), and in between is a monitor playing a wonderful film clip of Dame Laura and Ruby going to see the painting at the Royal Academy. Ruby, overcome by emotion, kisses Dame Laura; Dame Laura bobs about, smoking furiously. Of course, Laura Knight on film and in paint grabs the attention; Flora Lion is inevitably sidelined. And that sets the

James Delingpole

Led Zep’s favourite folkie

Without Roy Harper’s baroque, mellifluous, melancholy folk there would have been no ‘Stairway to Heaven’. James Delingpole meets a neglected genius In 1970, shortly before the release of Led Zeppelin III, guitarist Jimmy Page invited his folk-singing chum Roy Harper up to his Oxford Street offices to have a look at the new album. ‘What do you think?’ asked Page. ‘It’s nice,’ replied Harper, toying with the amusing picture wheel built into the sleeve. ‘Look at it!’ said Page. ‘Yes, it’s nice,’ said Harper. ‘No. Look at it!’ said Page, growing exasperated. And then Harper noticed the title of track five, side two. ‘Oh. Oh! Thanks! I don’t know what