Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

The new vision

Framing Modernism: Architecture and Photography in Italy 1926-65 Estorick Collection, until 21 June Adrian Berg: Panoramic Watercolours Friends Room, Royal Academy, until 11 June Architecture exhibitions, as I’ve had occasion to note before, are not always the most visually exciting of events, principally because the experience of a building can only really be conveyed in front of it or inside it. Architectural models can be aesthetically pleasing quasi-sculptures, and plans or elevations can be beautiful drawings in their own right, but they are no substitute for the actual thing. The great stand-by in architectural exhibitions is the photograph, often a cunning shot of an interesting detail blown up to gigantic

Ariane Bankes

We will remember

Art and Memory: New perspectives on memorial art West Dean, Nr Chichester, until 1 November There are those who haunt ancient churchyards in search of elegant epigraphs or curious carvings on lichened gravestones, but many focus only on what makes a good memorial when forced to do so by bereavement, and the desire to commemorate justly someone we loved. A few years ago we might have been forgiven for thinking that the fine art of letter-cutting was moribund, polished off by the dead hand of Church officialdom with its rules and regulations and its mania for neat, ‘easy to maintain’ burial plots, devoid of all interest and idiosyncracy. Then along

Laura Gascoigne

Saying sorry in Seville

There’s been a lot of muttering lately about the word ‘sorry’ and the reluctance of politicians and bankers to say it — an unrealistic expectation, given that the logical follow-up is resignation. There’s been a lot of muttering lately about the word ‘sorry’ and the reluctance of politicians and bankers to say it — an unrealistic expectation, given that the logical follow-up is resignation. In Seville, they have a more sensible approach: instead of demanding personal apologies, they muck in for a mass penitence lasting a week. Before attending my first Semana Santa this year, I’d imagined it to be a punishing affair involving penitents shuffling on their knees. As

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Poetic despair

Waiting for Godot Theatre Royal Haymarket Monsters Arcola Godot is one of the most undramatic pieces of theatre ever written and it contains a conundrum I’ve never seen satisfactorily resolved. As a playwright you aim to communicate emotion. If you can make the spectators feel what the characters are feeling, you have a success. However, if what the characters are feeling, and what the spectators are feeling, is suicidal boredom you have sabotage. Beckett takes a sado-masochistic pleasure in elasticating his play with tedious longeurs so that viewers don’t just watch the boredom, they share in it, live it, breathe it, die of it. Much as you try to counsel

Kate Chisholm

Turn of phrase

In his Point of View this week (Radio Four, Sunday), Clive James wove together a subtle threnody on the virtues of having a Poet Laureate. He remarked on how good poets have the ability to conjure up ‘the phrase that makes your mind stand on end’, showing that it’s a quality shared by many prose writers too. The very existence of the Poet Laureate, argued James, is an acknowledgement by the state that there is something out there that the state cannot control — the national memory — and the national memory ‘travels’ in the language, which in turn is preserved, above all, by the poets. It was such a

Saturday

Henrietta Bredin

Alone in the wilderness

Henrietta Bredin finds out what it is that draws actors to the gruelling one-man show Judi Dench says she’d never do it, Roy Dotrice didn’t do it for 40 years but started again in 2008, Joanna Lumley says that managing to do it while looking at her own reflection in a mirror made her feel afterwards as if she could handle pretty much anything. Let’s do it, it’s the one-man, or one-woman, show. Stepping on to a stage or in front of the camera to perform requires a particular brand of courage but how much more focused and intense is that experience if you undergo it entirely on your own?

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Writer’s block

The Last Cigarette Trafalgar Studio Rookery Nook Menier Simon Gray’s twilight diaries may well be a prose masterpiece. That the stage adaptation hasn’t done them justice is a fact few want to admit. The ‘much-loved’ fallacy has descended over this production for understandable reasons. Gray was a darling of the theatre, and the cast — Felicity Kendal, Jasper Britton, Nicholas Le Prevost — are twinkly-eyed favourites from the national treasure trove. But even buckletloads of affection can’t disguise the mismatch between a meandering first-person narrative and the focused concision of the stage. Gray, a talented playwright, sidestepped the theatre and chose good old prose for his last testament. Strong hint

Patrick Carnegy

Jesting in earnest

As You Like It; The Winter’s Tale Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Back in the rehearsal room for the first time since his triumphant Histories cycle, the RSC’s artistic director Michael Boyd whisks As You Like It far away from the Forest of Arden. Not a tree in sight, and does anyone give a twig? Yes, the play’s in part a satire on the Elizabethans’ taste for awful pastoral verse, but Boyd wisely sets it on a clinically bare stage, asking us to respond firstly to its Mozartean games on the universal joys and terrible deceptions of human passion. The courtly costumes (puritanical black with white ruffs) could be 17th-century Dutch, while

Peter Phillips

Out of harmony

The current exhibition at Tate Modern (Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism, until 17 May) is rich in cultural reference, apart from any reference to music. Here we have Popova collaborating with theatrical producers and designers, Rodchenko working alongside film-makers and poets (especially Mayakovsky), and everyone in a headlong dash away from easel work towards sculpture, and even architecture. It was a time of quite glorious redefinition of life and culture, taking in anything and everything. Why is music kept apart? It wasn’t that the musicians themselves were silent. The new Soviet authorities had a liking for opera, hoping that such an obvious art form would appeal to the masses. Well-known

Michael Tanner

Wagner’s secret

Lohengrin Royal Opera House Nietzsche said of the prelude to Act I of Lohengrin that it was the first piece of hypnosis by music, and listening to the Royal Opera orchestra’s performance of it under Semyon Bychkov tended to confirm his claim, at any rate until the climax, where Bychkov pulled out a few stops too many, and made the piece sound almost vulgar. The opening, however, was exquisite, entrancing, the divided violins playing with such piercing sweetness that Wagner’s phenomenal feat of evoking the mystical by sensuous, even sensual means was as potent as I have ever heard it. This prelude, which has no predecessor in any work, retains

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

A place to linger

Isa Genzken: Open, Sesame! Whitechapel Gallery, until 21 June Passports: Great Early Buys from the British Council Collection Whitechapel Gallery, until 14 June The Whitechapel has just re-opened after a major renovation and expansion, increasing gallery space by 78 per cent, incorporating and transforming the old library next door as part of a Heritage Lottery Fund assisted project. The results are spectacular: the original exhibition spaces which have beguiled generations of gallery-goers are still there, looking better than ever, with the addition of several new areas to discover. As a result, the Whitechapel can offer a range of exhibitions at any one time and will no longer need to be

Saturday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

How we laughed

Lloyd Evans charts the death of political satire and looks to where comedy is heading next Live comedy ought to be extinct. For five years the internet has been waving an eviction order in its face, but despite the YouTube menace, and its threat of death-by-a-thousand-clips, live stand-up is blossoming. You’ll have noticed this if you read newspaper adverts. Eighteen months ago they were full of barmy invitations to take out a loan for 10 times the value of your house, or to ‘buy’ (that is rent in advance for 99 years) a room in a boutique hotel in Prague or a glass-box-with-a-view in Abu Dhabi. These schemes have been

Marcus Berkmann

Swan songs

Some say that pop music has nowhere else to go, but they are wrong: there is still extreme old age to negotiate. This week the American singer-songwriter, activist and folk evangelist Pete Seeger is 90 years old. Fifteen years ago, when he was 75, I’m not sure anyone was paying much attention. Folk music had drifted so far away from the cultural mainstream that search parties had given up for the night and helicopters had been recalled to base. Now, of course, everyone is a folk singer and Seeger is a revered elder statesman, with the satisfaction of having survived long enough to witness the revival of his own folk

Alan Judd

Reasons to be cheerful

I’m no sharpshooter but molehills aren’t mountains, and at 100 yards over open sights, when you’re standing unsupported, a slither of white plastic stuck into one looks vanishingly small along the barrel of a Winchester 30-30. I’m no sharpshooter but molehills aren’t mountains, and at 100 yards over open sights, when you’re standing unsupported, a slither of white plastic stuck into one looks vanishingly small along the barrel of a Winchester 30-30. That’s the sort of rifle — almost a carbine — you might have seen John Wayne twiddling around his finger in ancient westerns, though I wouldn’t fancy firing with one hand. The advantage of molehills is that the

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Foreign Policy Film Festival

Stephen Walt and Dan Drezner each list ten films they think merit inclusion in a Foreign Policy Film Festival since they shed some light, one way or another, upon international relations. Well, that’s a parlour game everyone can play. No need to hold tenure! Professor Walt suggests that war movies, spy capers and propaganda films ought to be excluded so, playing only moderately fast and loose with his criteria, here’s another list: The Man Who Would Be King (1975): You must have an Afghanistan movie these days and this is the best there is. Kipling’s tale of imperial adventure, folly, ambition, lunacy and greed is also a great buddy movie

Simon Hoggart

Best and the worst of times

Best: His Mother’s Son (BBC 2, Sunday) was, for those of us from a certain place and time, almost unbearably poignant. Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris — such a charming soubriquet — was a defender with Chelsea in the 1960s. He tells the story of his manager, Tommy Docherty, briefing him before a match against Manchester United. ‘They’ve got this new player called Best. Apparently he’s good. I want you to take him out.’ Harris pointed out that if he was too rough, he might get himself sent off. ‘Put it this way, son,’ said Docherty. ‘They’ll miss him more than we’ll miss you.’ And it is still true today. We miss

Andrew Lambirth

State of transition

Mark Wallinger Curates the Russian Linesman Hayward Gallery, until 4 May Annette Messager: The Messengers Hayward Gallery, until 25 May For many people, Mark Wallinger (born 1959) is the man who likes horses. He is the artist with a passionate interest in racing and thoroughbreds, the successful competitor for the Ebbsfleet Landmark commission, in which he will place a vast sculpture of a horse in the heartlands of Kent to greet visitors to our green and pleasant racing stable. Now he has been invited to curate an exhibition for the upper floor of the Hayward Gallery. Its odd title will be familiar to football fans, referring to an infamous and

Saturday

Petroc Trelawny

Playing Bach to hippopotamuses

Michael Bullivant tells Petroc Trelawny how he became Bulawayo’s chief musical impresario For an extraordinary month in 1953, Bulawayo became the epicentre of culture in the southern hemisphere. In celebration of the centenary of the colonialist and diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes, the Royal Opera House and Sadlers Wells Ballet took up residence. Sir John Gielgud staged and starred in a production of Richard II. The musical programme was left to the Hallé Orchestra, who flew in from Manchester with their music director Sir John Barbirolli and gave 14 concerts. A corrugated-iron aircraft hanger was temporarily named ‘The Theatre Royal’; it even boasted a royal box from where the Queen Mother

Andrew Lambirth

Style and opulence

Baroque 1620-1800: Style in the Age of Magnificence V&A, until 19 July The Baroque is a style of drama, movement and opulence. Until the 19th century it was a term for the grotesque or absurd; then it was taken over by those who sought to categorise the mainstream developments of European culture. As an adjective, Baroque still means florid or overblown, but if the age it adorned was devoted to spectacle, it was also dedicated to unity and balance, unlike the sensationalism of today. I had misgivings about this exhibition. As the V&A’s director, Mark Jones, proudly points out in the foreword to the catalogue (a vast and lavish doorstop

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Barefaced brilliance

Calendar Girls Noël Coward Only When I Laugh Arcola Ooh dear, the critics have been terribly sniffy about Calendar Girls. This dazzlingly funny, shamelessly sentimental and utterly captivating tale of middle-aged women posing naked to raise cash for charity should have won five-star plaudits all round. But the reviews have thrown a veil over its brilliance. Why? Well, we critics dislike these schmaltzy populist confections because they deprive us of the chance to flex our intellect in public and serve up a perspicacious and polysyllabic exegesis. Ironically, though, my colleagues have not only shortchanged the show they’ve also missed the opportunity to do their brainy show-off bit — like this.