Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Back to the future | 24 July 2010

Charles Moore on how to renew and maintain life in the deserted villages of rural Romania To understand this story, one must go back nearly 25 years. As Soviet Communism moved towards collapse in the late 1980s, people were in danger of forgetting Romania. Because of Romania’s relative independence from Moscow, the West played down the insane policies of its despot, Nikolai Ceausescu. The Spectator, I am glad to say, did not. We sent in journalists under cover, and started a scheme, paid for by kind readers, to send free copies of the magazine, much sought after by print-starved intellectuals. The world finally took notice of Ceausescu’s horrors when he

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Queens of camp

Homosexuals are tired of being portrayed on television as sexually obsessed, hilariously narcissistic, outrageously dressed queens each carrying a boxed set of Abba CDs – ie, Clary, Norton, Carr and so on. They want a bit more realism, believing that this sort of stereotypical depiction is hardly better than the Black and White Minstrels, or Al Jolson. Well, maybe. But be careful what you wish for. Inaccurate it may well have been, but at least it was an agreeable stereotype which probably advanced the cause of homosexual equality. If we suddenly discover that gay people aren’t always the life and soul of every party, but can be as crushingly dull

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Turn on, tune in, drop out

Don’t knock daytime TV, says Lloyd Evans. It may be mindless and banal, but it is entertainment in its purest form It’s happening right now. I just had a flick-through and it’s all going on. You wouldn’t believe it. A Labrador called Pongo has been squashed by a tractor and is having his broken paw fixed at the vet. A grandmother from Dartford is trying to raise funds for her daughter-in-law’s wedding by auctioning a trunkload of heirlooms. And Mandy and Oona (in the blue), are hoping to make a bigger profit at the car-boot sale than Vaughan and Sanjay (in the red). It’s gripping stuff, take my word for

Andrew Lambirth

Psychological approach

Alice Neel: Painted Truths Whitechapel Gallery, until 17 September Paula Rego: Oratorio Marlborough Fine Art, 6 Albemarle Street, W1, until 20 August The last time I wrote about Alice Neel (1900–84), on the occasion of an exhibition mounted six years ago by the commercial gallery Victoria Miro, a reader wrote in to correct my statement that Neel’s work had not been shown outside her native America. The point I was making was how relatively little known Neel was, particularly in England, though that situation has now changed. At Victoria Miro (until 30 July) a host of international artists pay tribute to Neel’s work, and at the Whitechapel there’s a major

Michael Tanner

Excellence amid the gore

Salome Royal Opera House Die Meistersinger Welsh National Opera on tour, Birmingham Richard Strauss’s Salome is no joke for its director, however much it may be for the audience. When David McVicar mounted it at the Royal Opera in 2008, the production, together with the cluttered designs of Es Devlin, seemed to have as its main object to keep the eye occupied while the mind wondered and probably wandered. Scenes reminiscent of Pasolini’s Salò, not a movie I was happy to be reminded of, and one that has no connection I can see with Strauss (stills from it continue to illustrate the programme), were enacted down below, while at the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Easy listening

The Prisoner of Second Avenue Vaudeville, until 25 September Lingua Franca Finborough, until 7 August Neil Simon has received more nominations from Oscar and Tony than any other dramatist in history, so his comedies ought to be playing constantly in London. But revivals of his plays are rarities. Something of the Simonian essence seems to fall off the plane mid-Atlantic. Perhaps it’s the awareness that we’ve seen his favourite terrain, bourgeois anguish, charted more vividly and tellingly by homegrown talents. Simon’s conception of human character is fundamentally soppy. More trickster than magician, he builds his drama by postulating secure, loving relationships and smothering them in frothy layers of petty bickering.

Deborah Ross

Cooking up a rom-com

The Rebound 15, Nationwide Here is my recipe for making your very own lame rom-com. It is a good recipe and a sound recipe but you will need to follow it to the letter — for example, never ever add fully rounded, believable characters — should you wish to make a film like The Rebound, as well as so many others. This recipe can serve an entire Odeon at one sitting and, astonishingly and depressingly, will probably even make money at the box office, even though the best accompaniments are boredom and ennui.  Ingredients: A woman; a man; a few secondary characters (don’t worry too much about these. Simply buy

Kate Chisholm

Life experience

The Proms are back, hoorah, and along with them the nightly treat on Radio 3 of interval talks: those 20-minute sessions of directed chat, either through an interview or often just one person speaking about an idea, a memory, a transformative experience. It’s the perfect radio format: long enough to have some real content but not too long to permit the invasion of those distracting thoughts that swirl around like angry bluebottles, waiting for the right moment to settle and take over your mind. On TV such few precious minutes would be gone in a flish-flash of camera angles and tricksy music; on radio you can be taken right inside

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Religious conversion

The other week Simon Hoggart had a go at Rev — the new comedy about an inner city vicar played by Tom Hollander (BBC2, Monday) — and I don’t blame him. The other week Simon Hoggart had a go at Rev — the new comedy about an inner city vicar played by Tom Hollander (BBC2, Monday) — and I don’t blame him. We had a similar reaction in our household when we watched about ten minutes of the first episode before deciding it wasn’t for us and switching off. And now it’s our favourite must-watch comedy of the week. What happened? Did James Woods’s scripts suddenly sharpen up? Did the

Saturday

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Silencing the voices

The ‘seriously handsome’ Toby Stephens talks to Mary Wakefield about the magic of acting With some people, their prep school selves seem barely submerged beneath the adult surface. They talk away like grown-ups but one shrug, a grin, and you can see their inner schoolchild. Toby Stephens, sitting opposite me in a boxy room high up on the top deck of the National Theatre, is a good example. He’s 41, seriously handsome with dark red hair and a fine-boned 1940s face; he’s a dab hand at playing cads and attempted world domination as the evil Gustav Graves in Die Another Day (quite outshining that drip Pierce Brosnan). But there’s something

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A bit odd, this

This link was sent to me by my friend Belette. I am not sure if it makes it more or even less appropriate that one of the dancers is a survivor of Auschwitz. More, I suppose. Though I’ll bet it wasn’t his idea. Anyway, apologies if it causes offence; my own view is that it exists in a place sort of beyond the reach of offence, although not in a Nietzschean sense. There’s a burger bar n grill at Auschwitz now, by the way, just on the left as you leave. O tempora o mores, etc.

Andrew Lambirth

Game for a laugh | 17 July 2010

Rude Britannia: British Comic Art Tate Britain, until 5 September If each age gets the art it deserves, it might also be said that each age gets the exhibitions it deserves. The robust tradition of British Comic Art has never looked so unfunny and anaemic as it does in this current overworked examination at Tate Millbank. My visit coincided with some voluble OAPs up from the country, a know-it-all guide manqué and a couple of solemn Americans who were evidently seeking enlightenment as to the strange habits of this island race. There were sighs aplenty but I’d reached Room 3 before I heard a single laugh, and this response was

Marcus Berkmann

End of the road | 17 July 2010

The centuries will pass, civilisations will fall, continents will collide, and still bands will be breaking up because of ‘musical differences’. The centuries will pass, civilisations will fall, continents will collide, and still bands will be breaking up because of ‘musical differences’. The latest to go is Supergrass, cheeky mop-topped perpetrators of ‘Alright’ all those years ago, who leave us after six albums of increasing maturity and range but gradually decreasing sales. I’m not quite sure why, but I always had the impression that Supergrass were one of those very short bands, brought together not just by musical compatibility but also by the fact that you could fit them all

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Pick-and-mix fantasy

Welcome to Thebes Olivier, in rep until 18 August La Bête Comedy, booking to 4 September My mind didn’t just boggle. My whole body did. Every sensory organ joined in the process — ears, eyes, nose, teeth, tongue. All boggled. Even my left shoulder started boggling at one point, although this turned out to be the oscillating snuffles of my neighbour as he dozed serenely against my arm. The source of these disturbances was Moira Buffini’s reconfiguration of Sophocles’ Antigone, which is currently chasing its tail around the Olivier. The setting is a hyper-muddle. We’re in Thebes, a failed third-world state, where kids armed with machine guns strut about the

Michael Tanner

Elusive Mozart

Don Giovanni Glyndebourne, until 27 August Rigoletto Welsh National Opera, on tour Glyndebourne’s new production, by Jonathan Kent, of Don Giovanni is a wretched failure, not gross like its last one, in which the characters waded around in shit and Don Giovanni disembowelled a dead horse to eat its innards, but as irrelevant to the essence of what now seems to be Mozart’s most elusive dramatic work. In 15 years of reviewing I haven’t seen a production which was even approximately adequate, presumably because, while Mozart could perform a miraculous balancing act with his central figure, we no longer can. Gerald Finley, the extremely experienced performer of the title role,

Deborah Ross

Labour of love

Toy Story 3 U, Nationwide The third and final film in a franchise isn’t usually up to much, but not so with Toy Story 3. It may even be cinema’s first must-see sequel to a sequel. It is wondrous and a delight and because those deliriously talented people at Pixar obviously love these characters to death, then so too do we. In fact, it’s the only press screening I’ve ever attended where everyone stayed right to the very end of the final credits, presumably because the characters were still chatting away in a frame to the side, and no one wanted to leave them behind; no one wanted to say

Simon Hoggart

In deep water

What a strange organisation the BBC is! Imagine the meeting at which they discussed the cancellation of Hole in the Wall, the world’s most mindless game show. What a strange organisation the BBC is! Imagine the meeting at which they discussed the cancellation of Hole in the Wall, the world’s most mindless game show. It didn’t have terrible ratings, but was stoned to death by jeering critics and Harry Hill’s mockery. ‘Gentlemen, I am delighted to inform you,’ says HOCMIGS, (head of commissioning, mindless game shows), ‘that we have found a replacement even more mindless, more tooth-furringly, goose-bumpingly dreadful than Hole.’ A rather odd individual at the end of the

Kate Chisholm

Male fix

The hotly tipped new Men’s Hour programme on Radio 5 Live sounds so 21st century. The hotly tipped new Men’s Hour programme on Radio 5 Live sounds so 21st century. Its presenter Tim Samuels promises a potent mix of emotional candour (inspired by Tony Soprano’s sessions on the couch) combined with, and I quote, ‘the intelligence’ of Woman’s Hour. So are women at long last truly going to be credited with thinking power and talent while male idols such as Jamie Cullum and José Mourinho are to provide merely therapeutic gravitas? I wish. Read the prospective programme contents, produced by a team from BBC 6 Music, and the seven-part ‘pilot’

Saturday

Peter Phillips

Going for a song

It’s Proms time again. Peter Phillips is struck by the imbalance between singers and players What with all the talk of cuts, and the Proms being a showcase for the BBC house ensembles, I imagine this year’s season might be a time for each to put their best foot forward. I imagine, in fact, that there must be some talk in rooms that used to be smoke-filled of scrapping one or two of them. In total they are: the BBC Concert Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the BBC Philharmonic, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Singers, the BBC Symphony Chorus, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Between them

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Flash Brindisi

Four minutes of La Traviata at a Philadelphia market. Four minutes of spreading surprise and sweetness and just a little joy too. Splendid: Relatedly: The Sound of Music in Antwerp’s Central Station.