Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Ben West

Space invaders | 14 August 2010

Ben West investigates the growth in unusual exhibition venues — from brothel to butcher’s shop The economic downturn has forced many of us to rethink how we operate. This is especially so in the arts, an area that has always struggled for funding, and where cuts are inevitably huge considering all the hospitals and schools we need to keep afloat — not to mention a sparkling new Olympic village to complete. Last month the government announced that it wishes to make cuts to the arts of 25 per cent over the next four years. However, in many areas, until now at least, tightened budgets have not been overly discernible: for

Andrew Lambirth

Picasso magic

Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (1945–61) Gagosian Gallery, 6–24 Britannia Street, WC1, until 28 August The Gagosian Gallery has been remodelled for this exhibition by the architect Annabelle Selldorf, who has translated the normally looming white spaces into a succession of more sympathetic but nonetheless dramatic rooms. The expectant visitor enters via a black door to be confronted by a large but standard earthenware vase that Picasso has transformed by painting it with a brief yellow bikini. Vase becomes woman, as Picasso reinvigorates the old cliché of womanly hips looking like a vase, and effortlessly renews the metaphor. The humour and playfulness that characterise his work are at once in evidence,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Rural targets

The Great British Country Fête Bush, until 14 August The Great Game: Afghanistan, Part 1 Tricycle, until 29 August Russell Kane, a rising star of stand-up, has penned a musical satire with an inflammatory theme. His play opens in a Suffolk village where the locals have risen up against Tesco’s attempts to blight the community with a thumping new shopping hub. Excellent subject! Rabid, thoughtless expansionism by supermarkets inspires rage in every corner of the country (apart from London, which couldn’t care less). After this superb set-up, the show goes wrong immediately and stumbles off in search of easy targets, facile rustic caricatures — the randy vicar, the gay farmer’s

Michael Tanner

Rare outing

Francesca da Rimini La forza del destino Opera Holland Park, in rep until 14 August Tristan und Isolde Act II Royal Albert Hall Opera Holland Park makes a speciality of reviving Italian operas of the early 20th century, often absurdly and lazily dubbed ‘verismo’. Its latest, and possibly most courageous effort on this front, is Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini, which, far from conforming to the aesthetic brilliantly outlined in the sung Prologue to I Pagliacci, takes a subject very far removed from quotidian life, and decked out in the almost fatally pretentious language of D’Annunzio. The story is taken from Canto V of Dante’s Inferno, with the adulterers, a wholly

Giannandrea Poesio

Long voyage

Le Corsaire, Don Quixote Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Opera House For many years in the West, Le Corsaire was just a pas de deux, a dazzling bravura number historically associated with male ballet legends such as Rudolph Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Then, in the mid-Eighties, the Kirov Ballet, now Marijinsky Ballet, came along with a fast-paced, colourful and highly entertaining complete version, loosely based on the much-interpolated 19th-century original. Since then, a few more versions have cropped up here and there, including the 2007 one signed by Alexei Ratmansky and Yuri Burlaka, respectively the former and current artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet. Entertaining as it might be, Le Corsaire is

Marcus Berkmann

Missing link | 14 August 2010

I had a crafty look at my neighbour’s CD collection the other day. I was supposed to be watering his plants, and obviously I fulfilled that task with my characteristic attention to detail, miraculously failing to kill any of them in the ten days he was away. I had a crafty look at my neighbour’s CD collection the other day. I was supposed to be watering his plants, and obviously I fulfilled that task with my characteristic attention to detail, miraculously failing to kill any of them in the ten days he was away. But I was drawn to the music shelves as a wasp is to jam. He receives

Robin Holloway

Touched by Schumann

Schumann is probably the most lovable of the great German masters, simply because his music is inextricably involved in first impressions: many children learning the piano will encounter early the pretty little pieces from his Album for the Young, moving on with enhanced delight to the easier numbers in Scenes from Childhood. Then, after headier teenage intoxications, the taste recoils to discover his two greatest contributions to the world hoard — the body of solo piano works with which he began, and the body of songs that overlapped then wholly took over. The 24 piano works present a cavalcade of dancing, dreaming fantasy, peopled by lovers real or imagined, heroes

Kate Chisholm

Unsung talent

So why are we all becoming radio addicts, listening to an ever-greater variety of stations for more minutes each day? Could it be a yearning for something simpler, more direct, less tricksy than the constant visual stimuli that persist in assaulting us wherever we are, via the internet, TV, DVD and cinema? It’s the immediacy and the fact that you don’t have to wait those endless seconds while the wretched machine boots itself up, ready to perform, which make radio so much more appealing. With a soon-to-be-abandoned analogue set (though not, alas, my smart new digital boxes) all you have to do is press your preset button and be taken

Simon Hoggart

Facts and fantasy

The Unforgettable Bob Monkhouse (ITV1) might be thought a slightly coat-trailing title, though not perhaps as much as its follow-up, The Unforgettable Jeremy Beadle. Still, I don’t suppose we’ll ever be treated to the unforgettable Jim Davidson. Or the all-too-forgettable Freddie Starr, or Whoever Remembers Bobby Davro? Monkhouse had this highly veneered gloss, and symbolised for a lot of people all that was wrong with commercial television. Smooth, unfazed, just condescending enough to the public to make your teeth feel furry. If you can fake insincerity, you can fake anything. Privately, he had a pretty miserable time, losing one son to cystic fibrosis, another — already estranged — to drugs.

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Hackwatch

Tom Scott – who I’m pretty sure I saw taking part in BBC4’s spiffing quiz show Only Connect – has been waging a mini-guerilla war against mediocre journalism. He explains his mission here and this is the kind of sticker he’s taken to leaving in copies of spare newspapers he finds on the Tube… Plenty more here. You might need an entire sheet just for a single edition of some of our magnificent papers…

Saturday

William Cook

The new alternatives

William Cook goes to Skegness and watches Cannon & Ball attract an adoring audience It’s August and Edinburgh is full of fashionable young comedians, but here in Skegness the Festival Fringe seems a million miles away. With its amusement arcades and fish and chip shops, this unpretentious place feels forgotten by the metropolitan arts establishment. There are no TV producers on the windswept promenade, no theatre critics in the bingo halls. Yet Skegness boasts a theatrical heritage far older than the Edinburgh Festival — traditional seaside entertainment. And this summer it’s playing host to Britain’s most seasoned seaside entertainers, Cannon & Ball. Throughout the 1980s Cannon & Ball were one

Andrew Lambirth

Damp squib

Sargent and the Sea Royal Academy, until 26 September John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) is an artist whose name arouses hopes of dazzling technical virtuosity even when his subjects are fairly run-of-the-mill. Famed as a portrait painter, his art (at its finest) has great glamour and stylishness, backed up by exuberant brushwork which can be truly exhilarating. So a summer-themed exhibition of Sargent and the Sea sounds a treat for all: seductive at the very least, and possibly rising to great heights, with all the explosive splendour of Franz Hals crossed with the Impressionists. Sadly, there is little of such pyrotechnics visible in the Academy’s damp squib of a show. The

Michael Tanner

It’s a knockout

Die Walküre Longborough Not having been to Longborough and its opera festival before, I was bowled over by it in all respects. The much-referred-to extended garage is an extremely comfortable theatre, with more than 400 seats, and with plenty of space in the foyer to make intervals a far more agreeable affair than they are in London’s two major opera houses. The setting is, of course, enchanting, the trimmings slightly playful, no hint of pretentiousness such as one finds in several other country-house operatic establishments, and no lengthy hectoring before the performance gets under way. However, none of that would count for anything if the performances weren’t well worth the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

German challenge

The Prince of Homburg Donmar, until 4 September Danton’s Death Olivier, in rep until 14 October Welcome to London. This month we’re hosting the world’s very first, but probably not its last, Useless German Playwright Festival. Here’s a scribbler you may not have heard of. Heinrich von Kleist, born in 1777, angered his Prussian family by quitting the army and setting up as a dramatist. After an energetic start he decided he had better things to do with his life and killed himself. His final play, The Prince of Homburg, shows that he still had much to learn before his premature exit. It takes him an hour to tell us

Charles Spencer

My all-time Top Ten

Regular readers may have noticed an embarrassing lacuna in this column. Having urged you to come up with your top ten albums of all time, to which you responded in such numbers, and with such entertaining and illuminating results, the sadist who set you the task has so far failed to deliver a selection of his own. This isn’t a matter of cowardice or mere idleness on my part, I promise. For months now I have been cogitating on it, agonising about it, tearing up the list and starting all over again. But it’s been fun, too, listening to much-loved albums that had somehow been allowed to gather dust on

Giannandrea Poesio

Looking back

Bolshoi Ballet Royal Opera House, until 8 August At the beginning of the second week of its new London season, the Bolshoi Ballet presented the classic Giselle, a ballet which, not unlike other 19th-century works, underwent myriad changes, cuts and choreographic adaptations. It was only after Mary Skeaping attempted to restore the original text in the 1970s that most ballet companies adopted what has today become a sort of standard text. Interestingly, this is not entirely the case with the 1987 Bolshoi production, in which historical originality does not play such a central role. Although the production follows strictly the scene order prescribed by the ballet’s original musical and choreographic

Kate Chisholm

Impossible questions

‘I wish I knew,’ said the doctor in a rare moment of candour when asked, ‘What do you do with children who don’t want to take the tablets? ‘I wish I knew,’ said the doctor in a rare moment of candour when asked, ‘What do you do with children who don’t want to take the tablets?’ He was talking about Tanya, an HIV-positive teenager who was refusing to take the life-giving anti-viral drugs he had recommended. She’d been born with HIV, her mother had died of Aids when she was still a baby, and she’d been raised by an aunt in ignorance of why she was always falling ill with

Saturday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

‘A totally irresponsible art’

Nina Conti appears convinced that her puppets are real. Freddy Gray investigates Isn’t Nina Conti too good-looking to be a ventriloquist? One thinks of blokes in working-men’s clubs with frazzled hair, not Nina with her smiling face and big brown eyes. It’s hard not to look at her, which must be a professional disadvantage: isn’t the audience meant to watch the puppet? I want to put this technical question to Nina, but worry that it might sound creepy. Instead, feebly, I ask if she believes reports that ventriloquism is making a comeback. ‘I’m not sure I really buy into that,’ she says, with a kind and apologetic shrug. But the

Andrew Lambirth

Summer round-up | 31 July 2010

Cornwall is looking beautiful under summer sun and outdoor pursuits beckon, but St Ives provides the perfect alternative when the beach palls or rain threatens. Besides the Tate, there are a number of commercial galleries, and chief among them is Wills Lane, which offers a stimulating variety of fine and applied art. For the summer period I have selected a Critic’s Choice for the gallery (until 5 September); of 14 artists, some better-known than others: Maggi Hambling, David Inshaw and Colin Self rubbing shoulders with Tyrel Broadbent, Roland Collins and Nigel Ellis. Landscape is one theme, the sea another. Ceramic fish by Marcia Blakenham flee the marauding black-headed gulls evocatively

Michael Tanner

Great expectations

La Traviata Royal Opera House Jette Parker Young Artists Summer Performance Royal Opera House The Royal Opera ended its season with yet another revival of Richard Eyre’s production of La Traviata, and the Jette Parker Young Artists Summer Performance, the latter a most interesting affair, but without much of a critical presence, presumably because it was at 1 p.m. on a Saturday. The distinctive feature of the Traviata revival was that Angela Gheorghiu returned to sing the role of Violetta, in which she had her first great international success, and which she has not sung at Covent Garden since 1996. I attended the third performance (First Capital Connect had thwarted