Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Susan Moore

The hard sell

For all the billion-dollar turnovers and glamorous, high-profile sales in New York, London, Hong Kong and Paris, the top level of fine-art auctioneering is a notoriously high-overhead, low-profit business. At times, it is even a no-profit business (Sotheby’s made a loss last year). How the Big Two auction houses have grappled to respond to this uncomfortable fact has shaped recent saleroom history. First came collusion and price-fixing, which resulted in damaging — in every sense of the word — antitrust litigation in the US, and then brave but initially unsuccessful attempts to harness the internet revolution, with sothebys.com. Most recently, the duopoly’s response to the profit problem has been to

Robin Holloway

Corrective to a fault

Glenn Gould called it ‘the greatest song cycle ever written’, entitling his notes on the two versions of Paul Hindemith’s masterpiece ‘A Tale of Two Marienlebens’. Glenn Gould called it ‘the greatest song cycle ever written’, entitling his notes on the two versions of Paul Hindemith’s masterpiece ‘A Tale of Two Marienlebens’. Stravinsky had already insinuated ‘Last Year at Marienleben’. And my pupils recently produced a better wordplay: asked what the name meant, they shyly volunteered ‘Married Life…?’ Copies of both versions have been lying about my rooms over the past few weeks, as I’ve tried to come to terms with what must surely be the most extreme instance of

Deborah Ross

Sentimental journey

The Blind Side 12A, Nationwide The Blind Side — or ‘The Blahnd Sahd’, as they would say in Tennessee — is so ghastly and annoying and creepy I implore you to steer well clear. I know, I know, it’s based on a true story, Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for her performance, and it’s already made $265 million at the US box office, so why should you listen to me? No reason. No reason at all. Mostly, I don’t listen to me and I am me! But I do think you should know this: beneath the swelling music and push-button, Hallmark-style sentimentality, this film is basically about a rich, white,

Michael Tanner

Missing spark

Katya Kabanova ENO, in rep until 27 March Katya Kabanova is Janacek’s grimmest opera, perhaps the grimmest opera ever written, but it is flooded with radiant music, which is decisively stamped out in the last few moments. With Katya having drowned herself, and the happy young lovers Kudrjas and Varvara having taken their most unChekhovian leave for Moscow, what hope is there for this community, whose senior figure, the Kabanicha, sees Katya’s suicide as the vindication of her moral stance? Her son Tikhon is a pathetic wretch, Katya’s lover Boris feels he had better leave her to her fate and clears off, and his uncle Dikoy is a superstitious lout

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Losing the plot

The Sanctuary Lamp Arcola, until 3 April Eigengrau Bush, until 10 April Furore fever still obsesses Irish playwrights. In Edwardian times there was nothing like a good old riot at the Abbey Theatre to get a new work established as a classic. Luvvie lore is replete with tales of mass walkouts and punch-ups at Dublin premières where the fisticuffs invariably end with the house being stormed by Sinn Fein while W.B. Yeats leaps on to the stage to appeal for calm and the Polish ambassador gets stabbed with a hat pin. Tom Murphy’s 1975 drama, The Sanctuary Lamp, seeks the rowdy affirmation of this tradition. Murphy has read deeply and

Simon Hoggart

Sweet and sour

Lewis Carroll invented the word ‘mimsy’, probably soldering it from ‘miserable’ and ‘flimsy’. Lewis Carroll invented the word ‘mimsy’, probably soldering it from ‘miserable’ and ‘flimsy’. Since then mimsy has taken on a separate life. Chambers defines it as ‘prim, demure, prudish’ and Oxford as ‘feeble and prim’, though I think modern usage would imply a certain self-conscious prettiness, like sprigged pillowcases, tiny pens with floral designs and anything by Cath Kidston. Anyhow, The Delicious Miss Dahl (BBC2, Tuesday) was mimsy from the opening credits — all spindly drawings in pastel colours. It was nominally a cookery show, and a lot of cookery went on, but it was principally meant

Kate Chisholm

Straight talking

I had to rush into the house from the car so as not to miss a word. Two virologists were talking with Sue MacGregor about their favourite books on last week’s A Good Read (Tuesday, Radio 4), and came up with such unusual choices and spoke with such matter-of-fact appreciation, so different from the usual literary fare, that it made me want to read all their choices immediately. It was an inspired decision by Sue and her producer (Jolyon Jenkins) to invite not just one but two science professors on to the programme in the same week; like giving an Alka-Seltzer to an old favourite after it’s ingested just one

Ursula Buchan

Digging the dirt

News that the government is setting up a ‘land bank’ of brownfield sites, consisting of bits and pieces of spare or disused land, and encouraging councils and private landowners to lease these out to local groups as allotments, underscores the impression of a national appetite for ‘growing your own’. News that the government is setting up a ‘land bank’ of brownfield sites, consisting of bits and pieces of spare or disused land, and encouraging councils and private landowners to lease these out to local groups as allotments, underscores the impression of a national appetite for ‘growing your own’. Certainly, according to the National Society of Allotments and Leisure Gardeners, there

Saturday

Ben West

A diet of unrelenting mush

Ben West on the decline in quality of regional theatre; he fears it can only get worse We may have been languishing for months in the worst recession for decades, but theatre appears to be booming. West End theatres enjoyed a record £500 million in ticket sales in 2009, with audience figures exceeding 14 million for the first time. Attendance for straight plays was up 26 per cent on 2008, at 3.6 million. The many hits have included Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart’s Waiting for Godot, the National Theatre’s War Horse, and Enron and Jerusalem, which both transferred from the Royal Court to the West End. Quality theatre is supposedly

Michael Tanner

Celebrating freedom

Albert Herring Royal Academy of Music La bohème The Cock Tavern, Kilburn Whenever there is a new production of Britten’s great comedy Albert Herring I go to it and then carry on at some length about how wonderful the opera is, and this particular production, whichever it may be. And it is always true. For several obvious reasons, Herring is an opera that producers mess around with very little — mild and harmless updatings are just about all that it is subject to; and, though it would be catastrophic to impose a radically new interpretation on it, it would be no worse than what is visited on many other stage

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Gothic caricatures

Love Never Dies Adelphi, booking to October The Fever Chart Trafalgar Studio 2, booking to 3 April Love Never Dies has been bugging Andrew Lloyd Webber since 1990. He felt that the Phantom of the Opera needed a sequel and he’s been working on it for roughly three times as long as it took Tolstoy to write War and Peace. The script assumes no knowledge of the earlier show. Christine, an unhappily married French diva, is offered a singing contract by a mysterious maestro who runs a theatre in Coney Island. She arrives with her husband and son and discovers that the maestro is none other than the obsessed Phantom

Peter Phillips

Prize lottery

News that the archivist of the Booker Prize, Peter Straus, has discovered that in 1970 the prize was not awarded for technical reasons set me thinking about annual music prizes. This thinking was in no way discouraged by an aside, made by Matt Damon at the recent Oscar ceremony, to the effect that it would be a good thing if the only films which were in contention for prizes were those that had been made at least ten years ago. He, of course, would still star — and might be less keen if the wait was 40 years — but that was not the point. He thought that, if these

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Making a difference

Many years ago, when I decided to ‘become’ a novelist, I shipped myself off to a village in south-west France called St Jean de Fos for three months, banned myself from reading any novels in English (lest they corrupt my style) and became an obsessive maker of French dishes like cassoulet because my first book was about a restaurant critic and I wanted to make it perfectly authentic. Many years ago, when I decided to ‘become’ a novelist, I shipped myself off to a village in south-west France called St Jean de Fos for three months, banned myself from reading any novels in English (lest they corrupt my style) and

Kate Chisholm

The long and short

It’s such an important book, the first great psychological novel, yet few people can with honesty claim to have read it, and even fewer to have read it all the way through, past the violent rape scene that takes place halfway through volume five. It’s such an important book, the first great psychological novel, yet few people can with honesty claim to have read it, and even fewer to have read it all the way through, past the violent rape scene that takes place halfway through volume five. Clarissa; or the history of a young lady is Samuel Richardson’s most prolix novel (at just about a million words, and eight

Robin Oakley

The trouble with Cheltenham

By the time you read this, I will either be taking Mrs Oakley out for a well-deserved dinner at Le Caprice or I will be carrying a sack of stones and a pair of leg-irons, looking for a deep river. The Cheltenham Festival will have come and gone, probably taking with it most of my betting money for the year. This column had to be submitted before the Festival but if by the time you see it Khyber Kim has been placed in the Champion Hurdle, Baby Run has won the Foxhunters, Mourad the Coral Cup and Enterprise Park the Albert Bartlett Novices’ Hurdle the unseemly struggle over whether the

Andrew Lambirth

Interpreting history

Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey National Gallery, until 23 May Just up the road from where I write is the dramatic ruin of Framlingham Castle, the historical seat of the Howard family and the Dukes of Norfolk. The castle was granted to Princess Mary by her half-brother King Edward VI, and she took refuge there when on Edward’s death his second cousin Lady Jane Grey was named as his successor, rather than she herself. The country was in the grip of its worst period of internal religious strife, which Protestant Edward had tried to avoid by commending devoutly Protestant Jane to the crown. But the Catholics would have

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Blarney Festival Arrives Again

Faith and begorrah it’s that time of year again. Time, that is, for the kind of “virulent eruptions of Paddyism” that, in the words of Ireland’s greatest newspaper columnist, is another form of “the claptrap that has made fortunes for cute professional Irishmen in America.” Yes it’s St Patrick’s Day and Myles na Gopaleen’s withering verdict on the nonsense of professional Irishism remains about the best there is. These days, mind you, it’s gone so far that you can no longer easily determine what’s pastiche and what’s become parody. In a curious way, the celebrations in New York, Chicago and Boston are the real deal and it’s the attempts to

Saturday

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

A woman of substance

Felicity Kendal tells a surprised Mary Wakefield of her admiration for Mrs Warren From the moment Mrs Warren bustles in halfway through Act I of Mrs Warren’s Profession, she’s clearly an excellent sort. ‘A genial and presentable old blackguard of a woman,’ says George Bernard Shaw fondly of his heroine. And she is a heroine, though she’s also a brothel-keeper as compromised as St Joan is righteous. I’ve only read the play, not seen it, but I’m also very fond of Mrs Warren, and, as I walk to the Comedy Theatre to meet Felicity Kendal, I begin to worry. Kendal playing Mrs Warren in the West End? The more I

Andrew Gilligan

Why does the BBC air Islamist propaganda?

Down at that self-proclaimed centre of ‘tolerance and harmony’, the East London Mosque, they’ve been holding some pretty tolerant and harmonious meetings lately. On 9 July last year, for instance, there was the half-day conference on ‘social ills’. One of the ‘social ills’ — with an entire session to itself — was ‘music’, described by one of the speakers, Haitham al-Haddad, as a ‘prohibited and fake message of love and peace’. Then there was the talk, on 26 June, by a certain Bilal Philips — named by the US government as an ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And if that particular outrage was a little too

Andrew Lambirth

Talking point

Michelangelo’s Dream Courtauld, until 16 May This is one of the series of exhibitions built around a single masterpiece from the Courtauld’s collection — in this case Michelangelo’s remarkable presentation drawing ‘The Dream’ — placed in an informative context of closely related loans. The Courtauld does it superbly: quietly stated, rigorously researched, laid out with clarity and authority. It is accompanied by a hefty but handsome catalogue (published by Paul Holberton, £30 in paperback), packed with scholarly exegesis, with particularly useful notes on individual exhibits. The show consists of a group of Michelangelo drawings, original letters and poems by the artist, and certain works by his contemporaries. I’m not entirely