Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Unholy alliance | 4 November 2009

Damien Hirst: the Blue Paintings The Wallace Collection, until 24 January 2010 John Walker: Incoming Tide Offer Waterman & Co, 11 Langton Street, SW10, until 14 November Weeks ago, when the review schedules were first plotted, I had thought to include here a feature on Damien Hirst. Although I find his work unremittingly thin, I thought I would give it another chance. After all, he is showing new paintings he’s made himself rather than instructed a studio to produce. But the results are so feeble and insignificant that detailed execration (however enjoyable) is more than they’re worth. Hirst’s product thrives on publicity, and his new show has generated so many

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Street culture

What Fatima Did… Hampstead Mrs Klein Almeida What Fatima Did… is billed as a play. Really, it’s a fugue, a variation on a theme, a crude and boisterous tone poem. The plot is deliberately small-scale. A gang of fun-loving inner-city sixth-formers are shocked to learn that one of their pals, Fatima, has forsaken Western values and adopted the nijab. Her boyfriend George is hit hardest by her betrayal, and he retaliates by showing up at a costume party dressed as a medieval crusader. This gesture doesn’t quite work now that the flag of St George has been reinvented as a multicultural symbol. To freak Fatima out properly he’d have to

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Near flawless

A few months ago my wife said something to me so awful and shocking I contemplated divorce. ‘I don’t want to watch any more war programmes with you,’ she said. ‘It’s like watching paint dry.’ Imagine, then, my secret joy when, right near the end of Into the Storm (BBC2, Monday), I detected beside me on the sofa the hint of a promising snuffle. It was VE Day. The King was on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, beckoning Winston Churchill to come and join him. As soon as he did, the crowd erupted with joy and gratitude. I glanced sideways just in time to catch the wife sneakily wiping a

Alan Judd

Dependable or exotica?

Two visitors this month. One, the latest iteration of the VW Polo, now in its fifth generation and with ten million Polo ancestors. The other, a 1968 Bristol 410 whose ancestors can probably be numbered in the hundreds and siblings in scores, maybe dozens. The first was for a week, courtesy of VW, the second is for a few months, courtesy of a friend who wants to sell but wants it used while he’s away. Think Polo and you think smaller Golf, runabout, district nurses, retired primary- school teachers, reliable, sensible choice for modest budgets. That’s still largely true, except that, as Golfs have grown and put on weight, the

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 31 October 2009

Watch what you say. There may be people around who haven’t really been listening ‘Say what you like about servicemen amputees,’ said the comedian Jimmy Carr on stage last week, ‘but we’re going to have a f–—g good paralympic team in 2012.’ Odd to see Patrick Mercer, of all people, calling on him to resign. From what, though? From leaving the house? Maybe Mercer thought this self-employed stand-up comedian was somebody else. Some sort of junior minister for Agriculture and Fisheries, perhaps. Scottish, obviously, with a name like Jimmy. Maybe one of those fat ones who used to hang around with Michael Martin, who all have faces like sanctimonious haemorrhoids.

Patrick Carnegy

Lovers in the Levant

Twelfth Night Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon It’s a welcome refreshment after the RSC’s recent dramatisations of hard drinking and mass starvation in Russia to be landed on the sun-soaked coast of Mediterranean Illyria, and especially so in the company of a new and exquisitely beguiling Viola. Director Gregory Doran has been to much scholarly trouble in updating Shakespeare’s pirate-infested Illyria to Byron’s Albania. There, when visiting the court of a notorious warlord, Byron rhapsodised ‘The Turk, the Greek, the Albanian and the Moor/ Here mingled in their many-hued array’. Doubtless there were atrocities enough around the corner, but Doran has always been strong on devising exotic Mediterranean settings for Shakespeare’s comedies.

Tom Sutcliffe

Troubled Wexford

The new Wexford Opera House has certainly raised the profile of opera in Ireland. You cannot argue with a prize-winning building that is one of just four large purpose-built opera auditoriums in these islands, alongside Glyndebourne, Covent Garden and the Wales Millennium Centre. Built with Irish taxpayers’ money, it would be a sick Irish joke to mothball the place within a year of its grand successful opening. Yet the Wexford Festival’s obsession with traditional dress-code (black tie, long frocks) adds to the feeling that opera belongs to a class with alien tastes. Meanwhile, even the Abbey Theatre — which scoffs the lion’s share of Irish performing-arts subsidy — has no

Simon Hoggart

Pillow talk

Wonderland: The British in Bed (BBC2, Thursday) consists of long periods of boredom interrupted by moments of extreme embarrassment. The notion is to get couples — old, young, black, Sikh, gay — to sit up in bed next to each other, in nighties and jimjams, and talk about their lives as partners. Presumably, the notion is that in these relaxed circumstances, even with a camera crew at the foot of the bed, they will be inclined to tell us all. But they don’t. For a start, they hardly talk about sex, except in the most general way. The fact that they’re in bed, accompanied only by a cameraman, a soundman,

Wednesday

Marianne Gray

In love with Hamlet, Dylan, Keats . . .

Ben Whishaw sits unrecognised, wearing a black T-shirt and drinking red wine in a dark corner of the Royal Court’s café. He has just come off stage from rehearsing Mike Bartlett’s new play Cock — in which he plays a chap who takes a break from his boyfriend and accidentally meets the girl of his dreams — and he’s still all buzzed up. I had been warned that giving interviews isn’t Whishaw’s favourite occupation. But it certainly doesn’t show here. There’s no sulkiness or distractedness on his part. Perhaps his recent jaunt around the US, to promote his hotly tipped performance as John Keats in the film Bright Star, has

Andrew Lambirth

Spiritual awakening

The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting & Sculpture 1600–1700 National Gallery, until 24 January 2010 If Spanish 17th-century painting and sculpture don’t immediately appeal to you, be prepared to try the new show at the National Gallery — it’s a revelation. I was brought up in the Church of England and used rather to look down on the bleeding hearts of Roman Catholic iconography. Of course, some of the sculpture you see in Catholic churches can be crude or even vulgar — just as some of the stuff that passes for modern art in English churches is misjudged and misplaced — but the polychrome religious sculpture of 17th-century Spain is

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Starry night

The Rise and Fall of Little Voice Vaudeville Life is a Dream Donmar Midnight in a northern slum. The pubs have closed and a boozy, blousy, past-it single mum is trying to seduce a handsome young talent scout. He deters her advances until he hears her teenage daughter, alone in her bedroom, singing jazz classics. The girl is an undiscovered star who can impersonate all the great 20th-century divas, Ella, Edith, Shirley, Dusty, Lulu. The talent scout decides to launch her career and prise her from the clutches of her bullying, drunken mother. Jim Cartwright’s 1992 play is an ingenious comic update of Cinderella. From the producer’s point of view

Deborah Ross

Innocence betrayed

An Education 12A, Nationwide An Education is based on the memoir by the journalist and interviewer Lynn Barber, with a screenplay by Nick Hornby, and, although the word from all the various festivals has been that it is wonderful, I know you will not believe it unless you hear it from me so here you are: it is wonderful. I am even hoping that now we’ve had the book and the film it isn’t the end of Ms Barber spin-offs, and that there may be a dedicated theme park or, failing that, at least an action doll. I don’t know what form it would take exactly, but would expect it

Robin Holloway

Always a Luddite

I have just inherited my College’s collection of long-playing records, now redundant, with permission to retain, give away, otherwise dispose of if and as possible. I have just inherited my College’s collection of long-playing records, now redundant, with permission to retain, give away, otherwise dispose of if and as possible. The cumbrous piles, gradually easing into categories, have littered my rooms all summer; their dispersal is piecemeal and slow. Put together with love and knowledge from the late-Sixties on, the collection eventually totalled some 300 records. But are they so redundant? Though the universal triumph of the CD has swept away the LP as surely as the LP superseded the

Kate Chisholm

Children in need

‘I want people to feel quite shocked,’ said Professor Tanya Byron in her opening lecture for Radio Three’s annual Free Thinking festival. ‘I want people to feel quite shocked,’ said Professor Tanya Byron in her opening lecture for Radio Three’s annual Free Thinking festival. This year’s theme is the 21st-century family and Byron, the clinical psychologist and presenter of the television series The House of Tiny Tearaways, was addressing an audience in Gateshead where this year’s festival is based. The purpose of ‘free thinking’ is to focus on a subject and take it to its extremes, in the hope that some creative ideas might emerge. Professor Byron’s ‘take’ on the

Saturday

Laura Gascoigne

Museological capriccio

There are not many palazzi in Florence still occupied by their original families. There are not many palazzi in Florence still occupied by their original families. Some, like the Medici, Pitti and Corsi-Horne, have become museums, while others, like the Ciofi-Giacometti — now the five-star Relais Santa Croce — have become hotels. ‘Make do and mend’ is a basic Florentine motto: why build a museum when you can convert an old palazzo, town hall (Palazzo Vecchio), magistrates offices (Uffizi), police station (Bargello) or granary (Orsanmichele)? Another guiding principle of the Florentine museum is do the absolute minimum to a building even if it means, as at Orsanmichele, that sole access

Deborah Ross

Animal caper

Fantastic Mr Fox PG, Nationwide Fantastic Mr Fox is actually no more than So-So Mr Fox, if that, and I was pretty bored right from the get-go. The animation is beautiful, the attention to detail is a thing of wonder — with enough mise-en-scènes to keep even the most fanatical mise-en-scène-ists happy — but the story is a mess, the script is banal and, as visually stunning as it all is, it just doesn’t seem to have any kind of soul. I don’t know what Roald Dahl, who wrote the original story, would say, but I’m betting it’s something along the lines of, ‘Clear off. I’m busy. Don’t come back.’

Giannandrea Poesio

Shock and awe | 24 October 2009

In the Spirit of Diaghilev Sadler’s Wells Inbal Pinto & Avshalom Pollak Dance Company: Hydra Queen Elizabeth Hall In a dance world asphyxiated by a lack of inventiveness, it is refreshing to be confronted by creations that can still provoke, shock and amuse. This is the case with Javier De Frutos’s Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez, premièred last week at Sadler’s Wells amid audible and visible signs of disapproval and approval. Regarded by some as a gratuitously offensive publicity-seeking stunt, the work is more than a mere succès de scandale. The graphic sex, the near-blasphemous use of religious motifs, the phallic-centered iconography of Katrina Lindsay’s sets, and the in-your-face

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Crime watch

Oh. My. God. Can it really be, like, 16 years since it was 1993? I very much fear it can and the reason the thought is so bothersome is that I remember thinking, even back then, ‘Blimey, I really am getting on a bit. Can’t do pills nearly as often as I used to. The yawning grave beckons. Etc.’ This all came back to me while watching Murderland (ITV1, Monday) in which Robbie Coltrane plays someone a bit like Fitz from Cracker — only with most of the vices (drinking, chain-smoking, gambling) removed. Coltrane has denied there’s any connection, pointing out that this new character is a detective, not a

Tiffany Jenkins

The case for the defence

The past ten years have been peculiar times for the arts. Under the Labour government pots of money were thrown at culture. But strings came with this funding, requiring art to serve political ends. While there has been cash it has been less for culture and more for schemes promoting social inclusion, community issues and urban renewal. Rather than rebel against these demands the Arts Council has been at the vanguard. As a consequence, artists needing support have had to jump through hoops asking more about their sexual identity than about the art form. This has contributed to high-profile failures, as the purpose of projects became disorientated. These include the

Wednesday

Michael Tanner

Lovelorn masterclass

Werther; The Adventures of Mr Broucek Opera North The Truth about Love Linbury Studio Massenet’s Werther is a tricky opera, in fact may well not be susceptible of more than a production which leaves you feeling that you could easily live with its not very numerous highlights. One of its chief problems is highlighted in Gerald Larner’s incisive notes to the new Opera North production: ‘The problem with a Werther opera is that no libretto, unless it completely traduces Goethe’s original, can compensate for the obvious disadvantage that, because Charlotte is either engaged or married to Albert and is determined to give Werther no encouragement, there can be no mutual