Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Making tracks

Richard Long: Heaven and Earth Tate Britain, until 6 September The title of this exhibition may not be exactly modest, but then there is a god-like aspect to all artistic creativity, particularly when it operates in the domain of Land Art. Some practitioners of this genre have literally made the earth move in their excavations and reshapings of nature, others keep their human interventions to a minimum. Richard Long (born 1945) is one of the latter, confining his activities principally to walking and to making tracks in the wild, or leaving behind him cairns of stones. Occasionally he brings back mementoes of his trips to make sculptures or painted installations

Tuesday

Martin Bright

Britain: the Coming Crisis

Do we really have any idea of how serious this is about to become? As I sat watching BBC 2’s recesion drama Freefall tonight I realsied that we are beginning to get an inkling. This was a quick-hit drama intended as an immediate response to the recession and it was very rough at the edges, but it showed how quickly the culture has grasped that this getting very grim indeed. It was a conventional enough story of an aspirational family wanting to move to a new private housing estate, but it sent a chill through these bones. There was a fascinating set of statistics in Nick Cohen’s Observer column this weekend, which should send

Saturday

Henrietta Bredin

‘A sticky, sweaty play’

Henrietta Bredin talks to Ruth Wilson about her role as Stella in the Donmar’s Streetcar If Ruth Wilson doesn’t very soon become a major force to be reckoned with, as an actress, director, producer, screenwriter (probably all four), I’ll eat my entire, quite extensive collection of hats. She is bursting with talent and possesses a gleefully voracious appetite for a challenge. This is probably just as well as she is about to take on the role of Stella at the Donmar Warehouse in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. ‘I love Stella,’ she says, leaning back in her chair and gulping a mug of tea. ‘I think she’s quite an

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Musical mockery

Forbidden Broadway Menier Chocolate Factory Dr Korczak’s Example Arcola High hopes at the Chocolate Factory. The Southbank’s liveliest producing house has a great record for taking shows into the West End. Musicals are a speciality and the latest has just arrived from New York. Forbidden Broadway was created nearly three decades ago by rookie writer Gerard Alessandrini who hoped it might earn him some hackwork as a lyricist. The show ran for 27 years. In this version, spruced up and adapted for London, every aspect of theatre gets a splattering. Costly tickets, tacky souvenir shops, greedy impresarios, the glut of film revivals and the use of video projections instead of

Simon Hoggart

Loss leaders

In Britain we seem to like success but are fascinated by failure. This is reflected in our popular television. We loved a failed manager (The Office), a failed hotelier (Fawlty Towers), failed totters (Steptoe and Son), failed human beings (Hancock’s Half Hour). Admittedly, comedy is about the gap between aspiration and achievement, and that means failure, yet the Americans, who adore success, manage to find humour in largely functional characters. Frasier might have been clownish, but he was an esteemed psychotherapist. Cosby was a thriving doctor, and the various Friends had decent jobs, most of the time. Even Joey, the only idiot among them, starred in a daytime soap. It’s

Alan Judd

Age concerns

Driving means manipulating a dangerous piece of machinery at speeds beyond anything for which evolution has prepared you, reacting to a multitude of visual signals and warnings, calibrating and recalibrating velocity, distance, direction and stability, all the time guessing the intentions and anticipating the possible actions of unnumbered others performing the same tasks in the same places at the same times. And this while talking, listening, daydreaming, trying to work out where you are and where you should be. Yet we know that as we get older we get worse at most things. Surely age affects this too? It does, but the relationship is not as straightforward as it is

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Summer round-up 2

There’s a run of fine shows among the commercial galleries at the moment: perhaps they’re gearing up for the August recess, or simply facing out the recession. There’s a run of fine shows among the commercial galleries at the moment: perhaps they’re gearing up for the August recess, or simply facing out the recession. Whichever, there’s plenty to see, and a good place to start is with Browse & Darby’s 33rd annual exhibition (19 Cork Street, W1, until 24 July), a mixed summer show guaranteed to spring some surprises among the expected masters. There’s always a Degas and a Gwen John (I particularly liked the gouache ‘Flowers and Ferns in

Michael Tanner

Bewitching experience

Rusalka Glyndebourne L’Amour de loin ENO The new production of Dvorak’s Rusalka at Glyndebourne is an unmitigated triumph, a perfect demonstration of all the elements in opera fusing to create a bewitching experience. Any qualifications can only be about the piece itself, not about any of the performers or the direction. I had some anxiety about Melly Still as director when I read that this was her first essay in operatic production, since that is usually a warning that the quite extraordinary difficulties of the genre are going to be overlooked, with results as dire as recent Bayreuth Ring cycles or ENO’s Carmen. By refreshing contrast, Still has clearly made

Charles Spencer

Bruce almighty

The Telegraph sent me to do a piece on Glastonbury the other week. The crush of the crowd, the stink of the burgers, the even worse stench from the lavatories, the fact that most people seemed to be half-drunk or stoned, and the loneliness of wandering around the site, utterly miserable, when everyone else appeared to be having a high old time with friends or loved ones, reminded me of Mephistopheles’s great line in Dr Faustus: ‘Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.’ When the thunder and lightning started, followed by rain so heavy it drenched you in seconds, I felt more miserable than I have in

Kate Chisholm

Wall of sound

What was the very first sound you heard this morning? Have you noticed how many planes have rumbled overhead since the beeping of the alarm penetrated your consciousness? Can you hear birdsong above the din of traffic? The new Save our Sounds campaign launched by the BBC’s World Service is trying to make us more aware of the sonic soundscapes in which we live. We’re all very clued up on visual interference, blots on the landscape, the way buildings look and affect our aesthetic sensibility, but we tend to overlook the sonic soundscape which surrounds us. On Wednesday’s Discovery programme, an acoustician, Professor Trevor Cox, took us on a sound

Ursula Buchan

Glass act

As usual after the end of Chelsea Flower Show, I felt as flat as champagne left out in the sun. I was glad that I had a holiday in Boston (Mass. rather than Lincs.) in prospect. And, as luck would have it, the trip provided me with an unexpected botanical box of delights, exactly where I was not looking for it. That place was the Museum of Natural History at Harvard, where the Ware Collection of Glass Flowers is housed. I don’t know why I had never heard of this — plainly very famous — collection before. But I have now. In the 1880s, the director of the Botanical Museum

Saturday

James Walton

A curate’s cornucopia

Was television in Seventies Britain that good? Is today’s better? James Walton investigates On the weekend of 2–3 December 1978, two ambitious drama projects began on television. One was the BBC Shakespeare — which seven years later had finally carried out its promise to make TV versions of the entire canon. The other took rather less time, but these days is perhaps even harder to imagine. ITV (yes, ITV) gave over the first of six Saturday nights to a series of new and sometimes experimental plays by Alan Bennett. In late 1978, the solid cultural fare didn’t end there. The weekend before, BBC1’s long-running Play of the Month (in the

Michael Tanner

What a jumble

The Abduction from the Seraglio Opera North Un Ballo in Maschera Royal Opera House As I took my seat for Act II of Opera North’s new production of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, the woman sitting next to me — we hadn’t met — said, ‘Have you any idea what’s going on in this opera?’ and I said I hadn’t, at any rate in this production. Everyone agrees that Mozart’s dramatic sense deserted him quite extensively in Seraglio, but it was left to the director Tim Hopkins, who was also responsible for the designs, to remove whatever dramatic impetus the work has and to come up with something that

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

War stories

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme Hampstead Carrie’s War Apollo I want to be nice about this play but I simply can’t. Look at the idiotic title for starters. Frank McGuinness sets his drama in an Ulster barracks where a gang of recruits are preparing to fight the Hun in France. The characters, though competently drawn, are a weeny bit predictable. There’s the Belfast bullyboy, the young priest besieged by doubt, the shy kid whose mother is a closet Catholic and the Brokeback Mountain couple whose manful back-slapping hugs are a trifle more enthusiastic than strict camaraderie requires. The most fully realised character, Kenneth Pyper, is a

Deborah Ross

Hole in the heart

Public Enemies 15, Nationwide  Public Enemies is Michael Mann’s film about the last year in the life of American bank robber John Dillinger (as played by Johnny Depp) and it just kind of drags. I think it may be because unlike other films of this type following outlaws of this type — Bonnie and Clyde, Butch and Sundance, but not Renée and Renato, who have plenty to answer for but are not outlaws of any type, so of no relevance — it doesn’t ask you to take sides; doesn’t invite you to warm to Dillinger and hope he somehow gets away. Look, there is much to admire in this film.

Giannandrea Poesio

Sterile reiteration

Ashes, Les Ballets C de la B Queen Elizabeth Hall The creation of postmodern dance works set to new and somewhat provocative arrangements of Baroque music seems to have become a signature feature of Les Ballets C de la B. In Ashes, dance-maker Koen Augustijnen draws upon a set of Handel’s Italian arias and duets to explore issues of mortality, loss, abandonment and lack of achievement. Both the formula and its ingredients are not that different from those of Pitié!, Alain Platel’s powerful reading of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, which I reviewed so enthusiastically a few months back. Apart from the many similarities, Ashes does not come across as theatrically

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Poor old thing

On the Saturday night of Glastonbury festival I wasn’t off my face in a field listening to some banging techno, but at the Museum of Garden History watching the noted harpsichordist William Christie and two marvellous sopranos perform songs by Purcell. On the Saturday night of Glastonbury festival I wasn’t off my face in a field listening to some banging techno, but at the Museum of Garden History watching the noted harpsichordist William Christie and two marvellous sopranos perform songs by Purcell. My favourite was a beautiful lament for the late Queen Mary, ‘O Dive Custos Auriacae Domus’. So that’s me ****ed, then. I am now officially and incontrovertibly an

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

A splendid lunch with Jimmy McNulty

Dominic West is the actor who plays the homicide cop Jimmy McNulty in the HBO series The Wire and if you don’t watch The Wire you are a big, big dummy, as it has to be the best thing on television ever. And if you do? Then you will know this: while one fully appreciates the programme’s epic exploration of urban decay and dark, difficult socio-political themes, when sexy McNulty takes off his shirt and has his way with a lady on the bonnet of some car, wey-hey! Only kidding. It’s the epic exploration of urban decay and dark, difficult socio-political themes that get me every time. You know that,

Andrew Lambirth

Omega watch

Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of the Omega Workshops 1913–19 Courtauld Institute, until 20 September ‘It is time that the spirit of fun was introduced into furniture and into fabrics,’ proclaimed Roger Fry in 1913. ‘We have suffered too long from the dull and the stupidly serious.’ To this end he led a band of like-minded artists in the hand-production of decorative items for the home, operating from a three-storey townhouse at 33 Fitzroy Square that was both workshop and showroom. Among the clients were H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and W.B. Yeats. Among the artists working for Fry were Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis and Frederick Etchells, Gaudier-Brzeska and

Marcus Berkmann

Brutal truth

Personally, I felt inclined to blame it on the boogie. Sunshine, no. Moonlight, definitely not. Good times, maybe to some extent. But boogie, for certain. On Facebook, my friend Nathan was wondering which tabloid would be the first to use the headline ‘The King of Pop-ped his clogs’. Soon the jokes were flowing. What’s the difference between Sir Alex Ferguson and Michael Jackson? Ferguson would still be playing Giggs in August. Radio Two was playing the modern equivalent of martial music when a royal dies: every time I switched it on, ‘Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough’. Jackson had long since got enough, but couldn’t stop. ‘Can You Feel It?’