Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Losing streak

Prokofiev’s opera The Gambler adapts Dostoevsky’s novella of the same name, an audacious enterprise. Prokofiev’s opera The Gambler adapts Dostoevsky’s novella of the same name, an audacious enterprise. Unfortunately, it fails, as I think all the composer’s operas do, apart perhaps from The Love for Three Oranges, and mainly because he gives no evidence of interest in individual human beings, and hence of the musical means which he might develop to express their individuality. War and Peace is Prokofiev’s most spectacular failure in that respect, but the war scenes do something to salvage it. There are no compensations in The Gambler, so what is quite a short opera, a bit

Peter Phillips

Hints of the numinous

There is something about the music of Arvo Pärt which does not sit well with Italian fascist architecture. There is something about the music of Arvo Pärt which does not sit well with Italian fascist architecture. Perhaps I am oversensitive, but vast stone lions and super-size friezes depicting epic battles conflict with Holy Minimalism in its most refined flights. Certainly Pärt’s music has its own grandeur and impressive spaciousness, but in the end it is a miniature artform, which cannot be said of much to do with Mussolini, certainly not of the Aula Magna in La Sapienza University of Rome. It is not that I am squeamish. We have performed

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Pale imitation

11 and 12 Barbican, until 27 February A Life In Three Acts: Bette Bourne and Mark Ravenhill Soho, until 27 February Peter Brook, the world’s most maddening theatre director, returns to London with an adaptation of a novel set in the French colony of Mali in west Africa. Brook is never as bad as his critics hope nor as good as his fans dream. So he always disappoints somebody. 11 and 12 tells of a schism within an oppressed Muslim sect. Some worshippers recite 11 verses of a certain prayer, others 12. The tiff intensifies and the French authorities order a crackdown. This dispute neatly encapsulates the seismic pettiness of

Kate Chisholm

Death in the afternoon

After weeks of waiting, it was all over in a matter of seconds. Weeks in which I’ve listened to every episode, just in case. Weeks of enduring night after night the awe-inspiringly-dull Annette and Helen saga. Weeks of wondering how The Archers’ scriptwriters would cope with the death last October of Norman Painting, the actor described as ‘the lynchpin’ of the longest-running radio soap. Would they try to replace him, or simply do away with his character, Phil Archer? Then, when it came, we were given so much advance warning it was as if Health & Safety had visited BH and told the Controller: there’s to be nothing sudden, or

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Missing Maggie

The closer we get to the Great Disappointment — aka the forthcoming Heath administration — the more I miss Margaret Thatcher. The closer we get to the Great Disappointment — aka the forthcoming Heath administration — the more I miss Margaret Thatcher. Just how much I was reminded by Michael Cockerell’s new series The Great Offices of State (BBC4, Thursday). This particular episode was about Surrender Monkey Central — aka the Foreign Office — and featured Maggie in her pomp, eyes ablaze, holding forth on the only way to deal with jumped-up foreigners like Galtieri. ‘I’m not in the business of appeasement. It is not part of my psyche!’ she

Robin Oakley

Cruising along

Taxi touts outside greeted me with a hopeful ‘Bula’. Mynah birds squabbled in the jacarandas and teenagers on the nearby parkland were throwing long passes with a rugby ball. Not quite your average UK betting-shop setting, but this was the Fiji branch of Grants Waterhouse. I had stepped in seeking a little inspiration for the talk I was to deliver the next day to the Cunard liner Queen Victoria’s passengers on the joys of horse-racing. (It’s a tough assignment, but somebody has to do it.) And, given Mrs Oakley’s developing taste on board for Pina Coladas and White Ladies, a little profit would have done no harm. The heavy-duty grilles

Saturday

Marianne Gray

The Russian connection

Marianne Gray talks to Helen Mirren about her latest film, for which she’s had an Oscar nomination The first time I met Helen Mirren was at the Berlin Film Festival in 1985 when she was playing a Russian cosmonaut called Tanya Kirbuk in Peter Hyams’s space epic 2010. She laughed about having to learn Russian phonetically so she could say ‘roll the condensers’ and ‘send up the pod’ with an authentic Moscow accent. ‘Sadly, those who could have helped me with my accent, people like my grandmother and my Auntie Olga, have died off,’ she lamented, showing me her passport with her real name, Ilyena Mironov, daughter of Vasiliy Mironov

Neil Clark

An actor from the age of elegance

I don’t think I have ever been so nervous before a telephone call. I had written to Ian Carmichael, via his agent, to ask if I could interview him for an article I was writing on the late Dennis Price, who had played Jeeves to Carmichael’s Bertie Wooster in the 1960s BBC series The World of Wooster. Carmichael had written back to say that he’d ‘try to oblige’ if I telephoned him at his North Yorkshire home. ‘I don’t think I’ll be very much help,’ he added. ‘Dennis was a very private man.’ Hardly encouraging. I was nervous because Carmichael, like Price, was a hero of mine. I had been

Andrew Lambirth

Feasts of colour

Gillian Ayres at 80 Alan Cristea Gallery, 31 & 34 Cork Street, W1, until 13 March Claude Monet Helly Nahmad Gallery, 2 Cork Street, W1, until 26 February Birthday greetings are in order for Gillian Ayres, who has just celebrated her 80th with an exhibition of new work of undiminished vigour, inventiveness and sheer uplift. One of our leading abstract artists, Ayres manages to keep on surprising us with large-scale paintings of superabundant vitality despite her own poor health, and with images of pronounced joy. However, her work is not all high spirits. The celebration of colour which distinguishes it is made with the full and certain knowledge of personal

Marcus Berkmann

Good year for the obsessive

This may seem a little late to be talking about albums of the year. You might even ask, which year? and with reason. (I have already read three times that beloved cliché of January album reviews: ‘early contender for album of the year’.) But everything is so cheap at the moment, and Amazon knows we cannot resist its blandishments for long, having emailed me twice with special offers since I started writing this piece. Happily, it has been another good year for the music obsessive: there is just so much out there that begs your attention. As always, this is a strictly subjective selection, limited by my budget and very

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Losing the plot

Really Old, Like Forty-Five Cottesloe, in rep until 20 April Stage Fright Canal Café, until 20 February This is what the National is for. A little-known writer Tamsin Oglesby has been given a chance to shine on the Cottesloe stage. Her Alzheimer’s play sets out to give the age-old issue of old age a brisk shake-up. We’re in the near-future. A sinister new health trust, The Ark, has been set up to grapple with the problem of granny-management. Ruthless bureaucrats discuss hardline policies. Motorway-style lanes should be imposed on pavements to allow athletic pedestrians to speed past dawdling wrinklies. A new wonder-drug has been discovered whose hidden side effect is

Michael Tanner

Family values | 13 February 2010

Lucia di Lammermoor English National Opera, in rep until 26 February When David Alden’s production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor was first staged by ENO two years ago it was so beset by cast illnesses that it was difficult to tell to what extent the director’s intentions were executed. Even so, the musical side of things, under Paul Daniel, was admirable. But in this first revival it was clear from the start that both musically and dramatically everything had been prepared with great care, and that, however one might react to the peculiar interpretation which Alden has imposed on it, there would be no doubt that we were seeing a

Simon Hoggart

Past perfect

Last week I had the pleasure of lunching with Michael Medwin, who is the only surviving member of the cast of The Army Game (ITV, 1957–61). Last week I had the pleasure of lunching with Michael Medwin, who is the only surviving member of the cast of The Army Game (ITV, 1957–61). He is 86 now, but amazingly sharp and chipper, still an active and successful impresario. He is anxious that the show is not forgotten, because in its day — shortly after the start of ITV — it was the most popular programme on television. But it has inevitably faded from memory; the first few series were broadcast live,

Alan Judd

Caveat emptor

A weekly airdrop of Exchange & Mart was the luxury I used to think I’d choose when the producers of Desert Island Discs realised who they’d been missing all these years. A weekly airdrop of Exchange & Mart was the luxury I used to think I’d choose when the producers of Desert Island Discs realised who they’d been missing all these years. But now, I fear, it would be access to eBay, that wonderful source of 24-hour auto-porn, plus everything else. Just to browse — I’d have nothing to bid with, of course, though that needn’t stop me. Wonderful though eBay is, it should be negotiated with care. Not only

Saturday

Ariane Bankes

‘If he couldn’t paint, he couldn’t live’

Ariane Bankes talks to the widow of Arshile Gorky, whose retrospective is about to open at Tate Mougouch Fielding opens the door to me looking a little gaunt but as beautiful as ever, though I have not seen her for a couple of years. She is in her late eighties, but no less stylish now than when we knew her as children; we were mesmerised by her chic, her gravelly voice with its hint of an American accent, her sense of fun and the faint whiff of excitement that enveloped her. When she was about 17, my father, then working in China, helped her ashore from a capsized sailing dinghy

Deborah Ross

Game without frontiers

Invictus, 12A Nationwide Gosh, Clint Eastwood will keep thinking of new ways to impress us, the cheeky little monkey. First it was the Dirty Harry and the spaghetti western characters and then he shifted to the director’s chair and ever since it’s been one different thing after another: Unforgiven; Mystic River; Million Dollar Baby; Flags of Our Fathers; Letters from Iwo Jima; Changeling and now Invictus, which tells the story of South Africa coming together for the 1995 rugby world cup. This is not a nuanced film, or even a sophisticated one. It has a story to tell and unapologetically tells it, often quite cheesily, Richard Attenborough-style. But it is

Andrew Lambirth

Island inspiration

Chris Ofili Tate Britain, until 16 May There’s always something temporary-looking about an installation of Chris Ofili’s early paintings. These works are not hanging on the wall, but lean against it, propped up on feet of elephant dung — the best-known ingredient of this Turner Prize-winning artist’s work. As a consequence, the exhibition looks as if it’s still in the process of being hung, and these elaborately decorated and largely trivial paintings have yet to be hoisted on to the gallery walls. But, no, what you see is what you get: glitter, paint, resin, map pins, collaged magazine images, all dexterously arranged in what the Tate publicity department is pleased

Michael Tanner

Distorted account

Così fan tutte Royal Opera Phaedra Barbican When Jonathan Miller’s production of Così fan tutte was first mounted at the Royal Opera in 1995, it was the Armani clothes which received the most attention. Over the years there have been many modifications, and it now bears little relationship, certainly in the direction of the singers, to its original conception. In this latest revival, under Daniel Dooner, a quite new and I found quite distorting account of Mozart’s most ambivalent masterwork of opera is offered, in which the subjects of Don Alfonso’s experiment are presented as self-conscious poseurs, whereas the source of all the insight and pain in Così is surely

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Blunt instrument

Enron Noël Coward Fool for Love Riverside With Enron, the playwright Lucy Prebble has picked an almighty task. The Texas fuel giant collapsed in 2000 with $30 billion worth of debt, which at the time was the largest bankruptcy in the history of money. The firm’s bosses flipped through the almanac of bent accountancy and lighted on a hoary old swindle. A shadow company was created to buy up their loss-making assets thus boosting profit margins and forcing the stock price skywards. To get the auditors to sign off the paperwork Enron simply bribed them. Anyone hoping to find any ingenuity or sophisticated elegance in the fraud will be disappointed.

Charles Spencer

Anything goes | 6 February 2010

God and the editor willing, next month’s column will be the 100th ‘Olden but golden’. God and the editor willing, next month’s column will be the 100th ‘Olden but golden’. For those who write in The Spectator every week, this would doubtless seem small beer. For a monthly column it feels like a landmark and one I sometimes doubted I would reach. And of course I may not…. As any journalist will tell you, every piece you write has the potential to be your last. ‘Olden but golden’ began in October 2001, and I was pleased as Punch to be allowed to do it. Pop music has been a big