Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

Spreading the word | 30 July 2011

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. Take Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. She wanted ‘to do something nice for the folks in my home county [Tennessee]. I wasn’t thinking on a larger scale,’ she says. But her idea to send a free book every month to every child enrolled in her scheme from the moment of birth right up until the age of five has now taken off and is reaching children across Australia, America and Canada. Four years ago she arrived in the UK to launch it in Rotherham, south Yorkshire, at the invitation of the local council. From sending out just 2,300 books each month when the scheme

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Power and influence

Hold on to your seats, everyone, and grab yourselves a stiff drink. I’ve got a story gleaned from this week’s Dispatches: How Murdoch Ran Britain (Channel 4, Monday) so shocking that it will completely change your views on government, the media, everything. OK, here goes: in 2004 Tony Blair wanted Britain to sign up to an EU constitution. When Rupert Murdoch discovered this, he personally intervened by running a Sun front-page story headlined ‘TRAITOR’. The effect was almost instant. Within days, Tony Blair had offered the people of Britain a referendum on the EU. Yep, sorry about that. What you were doing was waiting for the exciting revelation. And what

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Sublime timelessness

The Fry Art Gallery is housed in a Victorian Gentleman’s Gallery of two main rooms, built in 1856 for the Quaker banker Francis Gibson. The Fry Art Gallery is housed in a Victorian Gentleman’s Gallery of two main rooms, built in 1856 for the Quaker banker Francis Gibson. It was first intended to accommodate his own collection, but was always open to the public, and in 1985 it was taken over by the Fry Art Gallery Society, a charity set up to create the North West Essex Collection, of work by artists of the locality. The focus is primarily on the remarkable group of painters and printmakers who settled in

Jane Feaver

Magical mystery tour

Jane Feaver goes behind the scenes with Kneehigh, a theatre company with an international reach that remains resolutely close to its Cornish roots These days, when Mike Shepherd appears on stage in Cornwall he is greeted as a local hero, the boy in the playground everyone most wants to play with. Some 30 years ago he founded the theatre company Kneehigh, where he remains associate artistic director. Kneehigh began by touring small-scale village-hall productions but has since become international in scope and ambition, collaborating with, among others, the RSC and the National Theatre, retelling mythic tales — Tristan and Yseult (2003), Cymbeline (2006), Don John (2009); reimagining iconic films —

Deborah Ross

Looking for love

Beginners is a romance, sort of, and I thought I would love it, wanted to love it and strived to love it with every fibre of my being bar those that are currently enjoying a mini-break at Champneys — don’t worry, they are paying their own way; my fibres always do. Beginners is a romance, sort of, and I thought I would love it, wanted to love it and strived to love it with every fibre of my being bar those that are currently enjoying a mini-break at Champneys — don’t worry, they are paying their own way; my fibres always do. I even saw all the reasons why I

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Tudor sensibilities

Kafka, I was informed at school, was a genius. Now that I’ve grown up a bit I can see that my teachers were being typically overgenerous in their estimate of moderate abilities. Kafka was a cartoonist. He’s the Magritte of literature. His outlandish surrealism is so potent that it has succeeded in occupying the imaginations of people who’ve never encountered the work in person. Much of his mystique rests on his name. If he were called King, not Kafka, and Stephen, not Franz, he’d attract far less pious adulation. But he’s all right, Kafka, if you fancy an hour or two of Tremulous Significance. His short story, In the Penal

Kate Chisholm

The divine spark

‘You have to live. ‘You have to live. You have to find a way to live,’ a Japanese woman told the 15 elderly people who were trapped on the third floor of a concrete building in one of the small towns worst affected by the natural disaster in March. She had gathered them together after the earthquake, and in fear of a tsunami she kept urging them to struggle up the stairs to the third floor: ‘Move up. Move up.’ Then suddenly she saw that the telegraph poles were ‘popping’ out of the ground and a sea of black water was surging towards them. ‘Am I going to die now?’

Simon Hoggart

Barking mad

The latest series of The Apprentice (BBC1, Sunday) had, I gather, its best ratings ever. God knows why. All those ghastly people! Lord Sugar! His sidekicks! The stupid, infuriating, boring contestants! The last episode in the current series consisted of interviews with the four finalists, all of whom, in their own different ways, were barking. One young man was asked how he answered the criticism that he always talked in clichés. His reply, delivered without obvious irony, was, ‘I am what it says on the tin.’ The winner was a courteous young chap (called a ‘nerd’ in the popular press the next day, but that accusation is made against anyone

George Hull

Keeping the show on the road

Lay Me Down Softly (Tricycle Theatre, until 6 August) is set in Delaney’s Travelling Roadshow, sometime in the 1960s, in the middle of the Irish countryside — even the characters don’t know where. A string of exciting crimes of passion is being committed at the rifle range, in Paddy Hickey’s Mercedes and by the bumper cars. But we only hear about these. Our view is dominated by the boxing ring, which Theo Delaney (Gary Lydon, above) himself admits is a sideshow. We don’t even see the fights, as these take place in the blackouts between scenes in which Roadshow staff pick up chip papers, swap unsparkling banter and talk over

Sunday

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Appreciation – Cy Twombly: the outsider

With the passing of Cy Twombly — who has died of cancer aged 83 — a beacon light of rare civilisation has gone out in the Western world. With the passing of Cy Twombly — who has died of cancer aged 83 — a beacon light of rare civilisation has gone out in the Western world. An elusive artist, with a highly developed faculty of challenge and response, he developed a pattern of investigation into the visual which was part philosophical inquiry and part sensual celebration. Despite close association with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, recognition came late. He remained something of an outsider: an esoteric American artist who settled

Andrew Lambirth

Spiritual solace

The basement galleries of the Sainsbury Wing are darker than ever for this intriguing redisplay of some of the oldest paintings in the National Gallery. The atmosphere attempts to recreate the penumbral gloom of church and chapel in which these paintings were originally to be seen, before impoverished religious foundations flogged them to dealers and collectors. Nearly all these pictures come from the NG’s permanent collection, but it is always revealing to see things exhibited in new ways, and this exhibition is no exception. For a change, it focuses our attention on the nuts and bolts of altarpieces — how they were commissioned, constructed, framed, positioned — and in so

Alasdair Palmer

Paradise regained

Alasdair Palmer marvels at a series of Veronese frescoes at Palladio’s Villa Barbaro It has included repairing the roof and strengthening the walls, as well as redecorating the interior, and it has taken almost as long as it took to build the original structure — but work on Andrea Palladio’s last building, the Tempietto at Maser, is finally complete. And what a glory it is! The building was finished in 1580, the year Palladio died, and he may never have seen it in its final form. It is the only church that he designed which isn’t in Venice. Marcantonio Barbaro, who commissioned it to be the chapel for his villa,

Toby Young Toby Young

By the book

I must confess to being completely unmoved by the Harry Potter phenomenon. The books strike me as derivative and bland, and the film versions are, if anything, even worse — faithful adaptations of schlock. Pulp fiction can be transformed into art, but only if the film-makers treat the source material with a healthy amount of disrespect (see The Godfather). The various writers and directors who’ve worked on the Harry Potter franchise behave like Talmudic scholars adapting the Holy Book. Or, rather, seven Holy Books, God help us. Some grudging acknowledgment is due to David Yates, director of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, the latest film in

Michael Tanner

Stunning Cinderella

Massenet’s late opera Cendrillon brings the Royal Opera’s low-key season to an effervescent if somewhat vapid close. Massenet’s late opera Cendrillon brings the Royal Opera’s low-key season to an effervescent if somewhat vapid close. I doubt whether a better case could be made for it than in this production, imported from Santa Fe. Laurent Pelly, an expert in contriving ingenious and non-stop action, keeps the first two acts, building up to Cinderella’s enforced departure from the ball, bowling along against an appealing background, designed by Barbara de Limburg, of wall-sized pages of Perrault’s tale, which slide away in favour of, usually, scarlet settings. There isn’t a lot of characterisation in

Deborah Ross

Brutal but brilliant

Cell 211 is a brilliantly ingenious Spanish prison drama and I would recommend it even though I didn’t see so much of it. Cell 211 is a brilliantly ingenious Spanish prison drama and I would recommend it even though I didn’t see so much of it. I might even have seen as little as 40 per cent, there are so many head-behind-hands moments. It is packed with Tarantino-style violence, and, I think, even a ear being sliced off — a ear was about to be sliced off and, when I looked up again, it was definitely gone, so I’m pretty sure this is what happened — but the plotting is

Kate Chisholm

Pursuit of excellence | 16 July 2011

Amid all the chattering about hacking it’s a relief to discover that some things don’t change and yet still, surprisingly in these tainted times, proffer sterling quality. Amid all the chattering about hacking it’s a relief to discover that some things don’t change and yet still, surprisingly in these tainted times, proffer sterling quality. Saturday mornings on Radio 3, for instance, which this week gave us a deconstructed version of Bizet’s L’Arlésienne (or The Girl from Arles) on CD Review. I’ve been listening to this staple of the Third’s diet since long before CDs were even invented. Yet on Saturday somehow I heard it afresh and realised just how much

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Artistic rebellion

Vorticism is often referred to as the only British 20th-century art movement of international importance, but the work of the Vorticists — Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, Gaudier-Brzeska and their associates — has up to now not been widely known. Vorticism is often referred to as the only British 20th-century art movement of international importance, but the work of the Vorticists — Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, Gaudier-Brzeska and their associates — has up to now not been widely known. However, the Tate’s show has already been seen in Venice at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, making it the first ever Vorticist exhibition in Italy, stronghold of Futurism (Vorticism’s rival), and in America,

William Cook

An instinct for comedy

William Cook discovers that the clue to Nicholas Parsons’s enduring success lies in his ability to laugh at himself When I was a kid, watching Sale of the Century on my grandma’s colour telly, Nicholas Parsons used to seem like the smartest man in show business. Meeting him half a lifetime later, in a rooftop restaurant in Kensington, I’m pleased to find that he still looks just as dapper. His blue blazer is neatly pressed, his white shirt is crisply ironed and his bright eyes sparkle like a schoolboy’s. You’d never guess he was in his eighties, with more than 60 years in showbiz behind him. He’s worked with Tony

Peter Hoskin

Lampooning the royals

After all the splendiferous photographs of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, how about something more subversive? That is what Kew Palace delivers in its exhibition of George III caricatures from the collection of Lord Baker. This is royalty filtered not through the flattering lenses of the modern photographer, but through the sharp nibs of 18th-century cartoonists such as James Gillray. The results are vicious. Delightfully so. The fashion among Gillray and his co-conspirators was to lampoon the King for his interest in agriculture. ‘Farmer George’ is shown as more mouldy peasant than monarch, with billowing lips and the shoulder-heavy gait of an ox. But this is nothing compared with