Arts Reviews Archives

Saturday

6 Mar 2010

Shape shifter

Henry Moore Tate Britain, until 8 August Even some of the greatest artists go in and out of fashion, though market forces are grimly determined (in the short term) that this should not be so. Death often brings a lull in interest, or conversely a revival. An artist who has been overrated may be for a time forgotten, until someone starts the process of reassessment and perhaps a more balanced appraisal is reached. The reputation of Henry Moore (1898–1986) has had its ups and downs — he was first displaced from critical pre-eminence by his one-time assistants Anthony Caro and Phillip King and the revolution in abstract, coloured sculpture in

Michael Tanner

Meditation on Gandhi’s life

Satyagraha English National Opera, in rep until 26 March When Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha was first put on by ENO in 2007, I found it intolerably tedious, to the point where I felt that if I didn’t leave the theatre I might start to scream. Yet I came across quite a few people, some of them serious non-trendies whose views I share over a wide range of artistic and other matters, who found it compelling, moving, thought-provoking. So I felt that I needed to go back when it was revived last week for seven performances, having been by far the most successful contemporary opera that ENO has mounted. Obviously I

Charles Spencer

Sleep deprivation

My word, you Spectator readers are an education, and a delightfully idiosyncratic bunch to boot. To celebrate this 100th ‘Olden but golden’ column I invited you to send in your all-time top tens, and three dozen entries have arrived so far, some from as far afield as the US and Australia. In 2002, we confined ourselves to rock and pop. This time classical music and jazz and indeed any other musical genres were actively encouraged, and favourite singles as well as albums were permitted as well. I particularly like the bloody-minded independence of Spectator readers. One reader’s idea of an all-time top ten was to send me a photograph of

Lloyd Evans

Inner beauty

Ghosts Duchess, until 15 May Off the Endz Royal Court, until 13 March Ghosts is the most Ibsenite of all Ibsen’s plays. In a sub-Arctic backwater two pairs of lovers pursue doomed romances while outside it drizzles constantly. Oswald can’t marry his mother’s serving-girl because his brain is being attacked by syphilis. Meanwhile, Pastor Manders’s ardour for Mrs Alving is smothered by his inflexible Calvinistic ideals. And outside it’s still drizzling. The external plotting of this great emotional thriller is unusually clumsy. Early on we’re told, in very specific terms, that a brand-new orphanage (made entirely of wood and not covered by buildings insurance) is being overseen by a notoriously

Kate Chisholm

Focusing the mind

You can see how difficult it must be for the powers behind BBC Radio. On the one hand, the Corporation is still pumping out programmes that we could have heard 60 years ago. The list is endless but try The Archers and Desert Island Discs for starters, brought together on Sunday (Radio 4) when June Spencer, who plays Peggy Woolley, was Kirsty Young’s guest. (She’s been in the series since the very first episode 60 years ago, when the broadcasts were live and the scripts changing even while they were on air, the producer tiptoeing up to the microphone, seizing the script and cutting lines with a pencil.) Can you

James Delingpole

Why us?

I have been depressed lately and Why Did You Kill My Dad? (BBC1, Monday) wasn’t what I needed at all. I have been depressed lately and Why Did You Kill My Dad? (BBC1, Monday) wasn’t what I needed at all. In it award-winning film-maker Julian Hendy interviewed the families of some of the 100 innocents who are randomly murdered each year by psychopaths. Hendy’s dad was one of them. It was all so sensitively, movingly done, and the ‘Why us?’ testimonies of the bereaved parents, wives and children were so heartbreaking that it made you want to cry. The villain of the piece was the psychiatric establishment. Throughout the 1980s,

Robin Oakley

Hero or zero

The refusal of Manchester City footballer Wayne Bridge to shake the hand of his former Chelsea team-mate John Terry in a dispute over the favours of a lingerie model received roughly the same attention in the media last Saturday as the outbreak of a new war in the Middle East. Racing hardly got a look-in, even on the sports pages. But the sporting moment I relished was the high five — well, actually, it was more of a low five — as a mud-spattered Paddy Brennan slipped from the saddle of Razor Royale after the Racing Post Chase and slapped his hand into the open palm of an immaculate Carl

Saturday

27 Feb 2010

Andrew Lambirth

Rare magic

Paul Nash: The Elements Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 9 May Paul Nash (1889–1946) is one of those rare artists whose work manages to be British, Modernist and popular at the same time without imploding. It is thus curious that there are not more exhibitions of his beautiful and poignant work. The last general Nash survey in London was at the Tate in 1975. More recently, the Imperial War Museum has shown his war work, and in 2003 there was a good and wide-ranging show at Tate Liverpool. With that exhibition the Tate no doubt felt it had done its duty to Nash, so the current, long-overdue London display was left

Lloyd Evans

Cheapening the currency

Here come the Oscars. Even people who rarely visit the cinema can’t resist the world’s greatest awards ceremony. The collision of extremities makes it compulsive viewing. It’s a sort of morality play where the seven deadly sins, and their contrary virtues, are paraded in dumbshow. Greed, hope, vanity, despair, jubilation, pride, joy, envy and a dozen other maxed-out sentiments are let loose. Moderation is banned. Temperance, decency and any restraining impulse must take the night off so that excess and all its spiritual allies can frolic and cavort. We know what will happen. The winners, clutching the pepper pot-sized statue, will sob their gratitude to the world and claim that

Michael Tanner

Class act | 27 February 2010

Ruddigore Opera North, touring What is wrong with me? I kept asking myself that question as I endured the two hours and 40 minutes of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore in the Grand Theatre, Leeds, while most of the audience rocked with laughter and regularly burst into delighted applause. I hadn’t originally intended to go, but the reviews were so unanimously ecstatic that I finally decided that I’d better make the effort. This show has been compared to Jonathan Miller’s famous Mikado at ENO, and that is something I see whenever I can and enjoy enormously — but the musical merits of that work apart (they are very high), Miller’s production

Giannandrea Poesio

Trial and error

Royal Ballet Triple Bill Royal Opera House The nurturing of home-grown choreographic talent has always played a central role in the history of the Royal Ballet. Undaunted by the possible ups and downs of the experimental approach, Ninette de Valois, the company’s founder, set up a unique platform for budding dance-makers. True, not everything was a success and not everything stood the test of time; but, had it not been for her risk-taking, modern-dance history would have suffered a great deal. Against the pressures and the fashionable trends of today’s ‘artistic globalisation’, which prescribes the import/export of a universally adaptable prêt à porter kind of choreography, the company has long

Robin Holloway

Glorious Gershwin | 27 February 2010

The prospect was so inherently unlikely — Nikolaus Harnoncourt fulfilling in the latter days of his career the dream of a lifetime conducting Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess — that I tuned in to Radio Three with low expectations, though with curiosity on high alert. The prospect was so inherently unlikely — Nikolaus Harnoncourt fulfilling in the latter days of his career the dream of a lifetime conducting Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess — that I tuned in to Radio Three with low expectations, though with curiosity on high alert. Coming to it as a doubter, potentially to mock, I was riveted at once, stayed the course and ended an enthusiast. The

Lloyd Evans

Marital infidelity

Serenading Louie Donmar, until 27 March Measure for Measure Almeida, until 10 April Genius detectors, busy in America, want us to meet the playwright Lanford Wilson. He hasn’t made much impact here possibly because his talent is so vast it can’t be hauled across the Atlantic. His 1970s play Serenading Louie focuses on marital infidelity in the suburbs, and English audiences are entitled to make comparisons with our home-grown chroniclers of bourgeois disenchantment. Wilson doesn’t stand much chance, I’m afraid. His static, pain-strewn narrative has none of the fun or sparkle of English suburban drama. And where Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, Alan Ayckbourn and Mike Leigh could manage one good

Kate Chisholm

Tapping into Robeson

It was really difficult to tell where Paul Robeson ended and Lenny Henry began. The one-time stand-up comic was playing the black singer with the uniquely deep and passionate voice in Sunday night’s Drama on 3. Annie Caulfield’s intense, intimate play, I’m Still the Same Paul, looked at what happened to Robeson (1898–1976) after he came under surveillance because of his outspoken speeches demanding civil rights in America and his dubious enthusiasm for Stalin. ‘Whatever he thought was private in his life, we heard it. We knew it,’ says one of the spies who tailed him. Henry was just brilliant as Robeson; one of the best performances in a radio

Simon Hoggart

Recipe for success

Things you never hear on Masterchef (BBC1, passim). The presenters: ‘Cooking doesn’t get more basic than this.’ The competitors: ‘Winning Masterchef would, frankly, make little difference to my already satisfactory life.’ And the chef in the restaurant kitchen where the contestants have to make lunch: ‘We’ve got very few people in today, so you lot can take it easy.’ What with Masterchef, Come Dine With Me and now Michael Winner’s Dining Stars (ITV1, Friday) it seems that sooner or later every amateur cook in the country is going to be rated. Nobody will just invite friends for supper any more. ‘Hi! Wonder if you’re free on Saturday to come round

Ursula Buchan

Brains and brawn

We have a picture hanging on a wall at home painted by Roger Fry about the time of the first world war and entitled ‘Pruning Trees’. We have a picture hanging on a wall at home painted by Roger Fry about the time of the first world war and entitled ‘Pruning Trees’. He portrays two men, one of whom is cutting off a very large bough from an apple tree, while the other is pulling the bough with a rope. Every winter, before I go out into the orchard to do my own apple pruning, I study it carefully, since I feel I need to remind myself what a highly

Friday

26 Feb 2010

Alex Massie

A New York Day

Take 35,000 photographs, apply some tilt-shift fancyness and time-lapse brilliance and, hey presto, Sam O’Hare has this groovy film of a day in the life of New York City as seen in, well, miniature. Worth a few minutes of your Friday time and best viewed in full-screen mode: The Sandpit from Sam O’Hare on Vimeo. [Thanks to JPM for the tip.]

Rod Liddle

Stop the BBC’s racism

I saw the BBC’s Crimewatch programme last night and was, as ever, sickened by its inherent racism. It has reached a point where something really ought to be done: perhaps, like my colleague Charles Moore, I should withhold my license fee until they get with the programme, as the Americans like to say. As usual they had some dapper copper pointing to a board of miscreants whom the police cannot find, presumably because they are overwhelmed with paperwork or sorting out imaginary hate crimes; the public is requested to dob them in. Of the ten faces on this rogue’s gallery, accused largely of violent crimes, eight were non-white. It is

Saturday

20 Feb 2010

Stephen Pollard

Stick to making your schmaltzy films, Mr Curtis

Richard Curtis’s films — rose-tinted, upper-middle-class parodies of modern Britain — are bad enough, says Stephen Pollard. But his politics are even worse There are few film-makers whose name instantly conjures up a style, an atmosphere, a set of recognisable characters, even a plot. Richard Curtis is one of them. From Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill to Love Actually and Bridget Jones’s Diary, the label ‘Richard Curtis’ on a film tells you straightaway pretty much all you need to know. For myself, I’d rather boil my eyeballs than spend another second of my life being sucked in to his film-making-by-numbers Disney-Britain. Curtisland might be framed as a

Andrew Lambirth

In Arcadia

Last year, within the space of five weeks before Christmas, I lost two friends who had illumined the world for me and made it a more enlivening place. Both were artists, both were in their eighties and both were determined individualists who recognised each other’s work without being in any way close allies. John Craxton was the first to die, in hospital on 17 November after a short illness. Just over a month later, Craigie Aitchison dropped dead of a heart attack. I hope to write about Aitchison when some of his distinctive work on the theme of the Crucifixion is on show. This is a tribute to John Craxton.