Arts Reviews Archives

Saturday

19 Jun 2010

The axeman cometh

Maria Stuarda; Rusalka Opera North, in Leeds and on tour until July Carmen Royal Opera House, until 26 June Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda is most celebrated for the apocryphal meeting of Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth, in which Mary descends to some coarse insults, backed up, in Antony McDonald’s new production for Opera North, by the use of a riding whip — Elizabeth has one, too, and the two queens do get quite physical. The drama here is stronger than the music, though, which is as perfunctory as most of the score, and only rises to an impressive level for the long monologues for the central characters, and especially the

Peter Phillips

Lesson from Venezuela

The idea that one can take guns and syringes out of the hands of disaffected youths and replace them with musical instruments, which they then delight to play, is so utopian that most people’s reaction was to laugh it off. The idea that one can take guns and syringes out of the hands of disaffected youths and replace them with musical instruments, which they then delight to play, is so utopian that most people’s reaction was to laugh it off. Yet, as everyone knows, this is exactly what has been happening in Venezuela since 1975, and is still happening. The lives of many young people have been improved by the

Kate Chisholm

Changing minds

‘Do you remember listening to the radio for the very first time?’ asked David Hendy at the beginning of his thought-provoking series of late-night essays on Radio 3 (which you should still be able to catch on Listen Again). ‘Do you remember listening to the radio for the very first time?’ asked David Hendy at the beginning of his thought-provoking series of late-night essays on Radio 3 (which you should still be able to catch on Listen Again). His question was not intended to conjure up memories like my own glimpse back to the draughty kitchen of the vicarage where I grew up when Uncle Mac announced on Children’s Favourites

Simon Hoggart

Game for a laugh

In spite of the hype, I enjoy the World Cup. But I don’t enjoy the omnipresent James Corden, who played the clingy, footie-loving, curry-scoffing, lager-glugging, belly-baring, deeply annoying best friend in Gavin and Stacey. In spite of the hype, I enjoy the World Cup. But I don’t enjoy the omnipresent James Corden, who played the clingy, footie-loving, curry-scoffing, lager-glugging, belly-baring, deeply annoying best friend in Gavin and Stacey. That was funny. Bringing the same persona into his World Cup Live programmes (ITV, too often) is just embarrassing. Corden is from that school of comedians who think that laughing a lot is, in itself, funny. He’s like that table full of

Saturday

12 Jun 2010

Lloyd Evans

‘Take risks and be exciting’

Lloyd Evans talks to Michael Attenborough, whose star at the Almeida is the theatre itself The back office of the Almeida Theatre in Islington could do with a major refit. Dowdy, open-plan and scattered with Free-cycled furniture, it looks like the chill-out room of a student bar or the therapy suite of some underfunded weight-watch clinic. The tin chairs are arranged around elderly coffee-tables. The walls have been painted with the ramshackle expediency of a squat — a blue stretch here, some scarlet columns there, a few purpley flourishes. Beneath the roof eaves a beer gut of damp and crumbly brickwork bulges outwards precariously. I’d give it three months, maybe

Brendan O’Neill

Glastonbury is for middle-aged masochists

Europe’s biggest musical festival is now just a massive authoritarian pigpen, says Brendan O’Neill. No wonder the young are staying away Most people, when they hear the word Glastonbury, think of mud, drugs, drunkenness, moshing, free love, the lighting up of spliffs, and generally harmless experimentation in a field. Well, they’re right about the mud. Yet far from being a site of hippyish self-exploration, the Glastonbury music festival has become a tightly regimented gathering of middle-class masochists who don’t mind being bossed around by nosey cops and kill-joy greens for three long days. Glastonbury now resembles a countercultural concentration camp, complete with CCTV cameras and ‘watchtowers’ (their word, not mine),

Andrew Lambirth

Conversation piece

Another Country: London Painters in Dialogue with Modern Italian Art Estorick Collection, 39a Canonbury Square, London N1, until 20 June In recent years there has been something of a vogue for encouraging contemporary artists to respond to particular works by artists of the past, and to make paintings as part of that response. The prime example of this curatorial trend was Encounters: New Art from Old, staged by the National Gallery in 2000, and including such painters as Balthus, Patrick Caulfield, R.B. Kitaj, Cy Twombly and Euan Uglow. The exhibition featured a number of bizarre pairings (Uglow and Monet was one) and some highly fruitful ones, such as Leon Kossoff

Lloyd Evans

Miller masterpiece

All My Sons Apollo, booking to 2 October Shrunk Cock Tavern, until 12 June It starts softly, in a dream of American contentment. A country house nestles in the lap of its lush and blossoming garden. The sun shines. Birds sing. Green foliage drips with the rain from last night’s storm and Joe Keller, a prosperous manufacturer in his early sixties, potters about the lawn reading the newspaper and cracking jokes with his neighbours. His son Chris has returned home and plans to marry Ann, the girl next door. But there’s a snag. In fact, there are two. Ann was engaged to Chris’s brother, a navy pilot who went missing

Michael Tanner

Mozart magic

Le nozze di Figaro Royal Opera House, in rep until 3 July The Pearl Fishers English National Opera, in rep until 8 July A Midsummer Night’s Dream English Touring Opera, in Cambridge The Marriage of Figaro, in a fine performance, makes an impression different from that of any other opera. Almost all the characters are in a state of anxiety or rage or misery or frustrated lustfulness throughout, and they are vividly portrayed in the round; yet the listener is in a constant state of joy, from the mutinous opening scurryings of the overture onwards. When it is as marvellously conducted as at the Royal Opera, by Colin Davis, what

Marcus Berkmann

Secret admirer

When life becomes slightly too challenging, I’m sure I’m not alone in leaning towards comfort music. When life becomes slightly too challenging, I’m sure I’m not alone in leaning towards comfort music. You don’t want anything too jagged, or awkward, or dissonant, or glum. Nothing that makes the veins in your forehead throb. It needs to be something you know backwards but, ideally, haven’t played for years and years. And it might be something you will only consider playing when everyone is out, curtains are drawn and all covert listening devices have been safely neutralised. We are speaking, obviously, of Dire Straits’ ‘Sultans of Swing’. This is a generational thing,

Kate Chisholm

The need to know

Simon Cowell spent the weekend bemoaning Britain’s lack of talent. Simon Cowell spent the weekend bemoaning Britain’s lack of talent. He obviously doesn’t listen to Radio 4. As Cowell should know, there are other kinds of talent, more useful in these gloomy economic times and more durable, which have no requirement to cake on tubloads of fake tan and sing along to Celine (or Whitney). What about our engineers and R&D cohorts, for example? We also have more than our fair share of extraordinary scientists, thinkers and communicators of big ideas. Just listen to Neil MacGregor for 15 minutes once a day for a week and you’ll acquire not just

James Delingpole

History like it used to be

Because I was taught history properly by my prep-school teacher Mr Bradshaw, my head is full of easily accessible dates which I know I’ll never forget. Because I was taught history properly by my prep-school teacher Mr Bradshaw, my head is full of easily accessible dates which I know I’ll never forget. Obviously, I know Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415), but I also know one or two more obscure ones like those of Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet. This is because of a cunning acronym Brad taught me — a phone number BROM 4689 — which I dare say I remembered mainly because at the time I lived in Bromsgrove.

Saturday

5 Jun 2010

Mary Wakefield

Contrasting characters

Mary Wakefield talks to Roger Allam and discovers that he thinks acting is only a game As I meet Roger Allam’s eye, in the bar area of Shakespeare’s Globe, I feel a lurch of dread. I love Roger Allam. I’ve held a torch for him since the mid-Eighties, when he starred in Les Mis as the original and best Inspector Javert — but the look in his eye today is one of profound boredom. It bodes badly. You must be in the middle of rehearsals [for Henry IV Part 1] I say, brightly. ‘Yes.’ He looks out of the window at the glittering Thames. It must be difficult to do

Andrew Lambirth

Drawing for drawing’s sake

Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings British Museum, until 25 July The latest exhibition in the Round Reading Room is an awe-inspiring collection of Italian Renaissance drawings, the kind of display likely to be seen only once in a lifetime. It is a large show of relatively small things, offering 100 examples of the finest drawings made between 1400 and 1510, entirely selected from two collections: the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi in Florence, and the British Museum itself. Here we see the birth of drawing as an independent art form, and not simply as a preliminary study for a painting. During this period, drawings began to be

Michael Tanner

A blow for fidelity

Così fan tutte In rep until 17 July Billy Budd In rep until 27 June Glyndebourne Glyndebourne has opened this year with two troubling operas, but ones which disturb in quite different ways. Così fan tutte is described by Max Loppert, in an excellent essay in the programme, as ‘the cruellest and most disturbing opera ever written’, and, though I can think of a couple of others that might equally lay claim to that title, there is no doubt that Così is a harrowing work, ever more so the more one knows it: which is not at all to deny that it is a comedy — that is what makes

Charles Spencer

Hippie dream

By and large, I try to keep the night job out of this column. I love musicals, and even derive a gruesome gallows pleasure from the really bad ones but, since I review them for the Telegraph, it feels wrong to write about them here. And I don’t often listen to cast recordings of great shows at home either. If I want to hear numbers from the great American songbook — and I often do — I prefer the interpretations of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Fred Astaire, the last a man who sang as well as he danced, and always served the song rather than his own

Lloyd Evans

Reality deficit

Ingredient X Royal Court, until 19 June Canary Hampstead, until 12 June In the old days the Royal Court knew that the best way to entertain local millionaires was to stage plays that wallowed in distress and squalor and featured four crack addicts in a squat stabbing each other to death with infected needles. Things changed under Dominic Cooke, who introduced a lighter touch and brought wit, intelligence and a sense of fun to the theatre. But nostalgia is back. The Court has revived its crack-house quartet formula in Nick Grosso’s new play, Ingredient X. The setting is a London high-rise. There’s no plot. The action concerts the attempts of

Kate Chisholm

Camp Bastion takeover

It’s the details that resonate. Grass seed and weedkiller’ have been added to the shopping lists of operational managers based in Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. It’s the details that resonate. ‘Grass seed and weedkiller’ have been added to the shopping lists of operational managers based in Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. The grass seed is for the memorial sites planted on the actual places where soldiers (and their support teams) have been killed on active duty (the number has now risen to 289). The weedkiller is to kill off the intrusive summer weeds that are making life more difficult for those trying to seek out the Taleban. Bank Holiday Monday on

Simon Hoggart

Shakespeare in school

I really wanted to like When Romeo Met Juliet (BBC2, Friday). Television loves new clichés, and since the success of Gareth Malone in The Choir it has decided that getting a bunch of people who wouldn’t know art from a hole in the ground and persuading them to do something artistic makes for great viewing. Up to a point. It also proves that people will do almost anything — even learn to sing, or memorise a script — if they might get on to television. This remains true, even though there are now something like 90 channels. As a friend of mine put it, rates on some of these are

Saturday

29 May 2010

Peter Hoskin

Hollywood’s introspective icon

As Clint Eastwood celebrates his 80th birthday, Peter Hoskin salutes his artistic legacy My life at the movies began with Clint Eastwood about a decade ago. Channel 4 was screening A Fistful of Dollars (1964) one night, and my brother insisted that we stay up and tune in. I didn’t know beforehand that it was a western, let alone one directed by the great Sergio Leone. But, from the opening scene, I knew everything I needed to know about Clint: the poncho, the cheroot, those eyes burning with cathode ray intensity. This, I realised, is what people meant when they talked about cinema. And I was hooked. Fast forward to