Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

A <em>Hamlet</em> to forget

Was I at a different production of Hamlet to that described so rapturously by the critics today? The Donmar’s West End season began with a sublime Ivanov, in which Kenneth Branagh, gave a never-to-be-forgotten performance. Branagh was meant to direct Jude Law in the fourth and final play in the quartet, but pulled out, leaving Michael Grandage to do the honours. Now, I am a huge fan of both Grandage and the Donmar, but I have to say that this Hamlet was, to my eyes at least, nothing short of a stinker. The Prince of Denmark should be frangible and ill at ease, not posturing and poised. You have to

Visual delights

Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur British Museum, until 23 August Part of the Indian Summer season of events sponsored by HSBC I don’t know when I last enjoyed an exhibition more. I had an idea from the publicity material what I might be seeing, but the reality of it is a thousand times lovelier. Many of us are familiar with Indian miniatures, but this exhibition consists mostly of large paintings done between the 17th and 19th centuries. Made for the northern Indian court of Jodhpur (the royal capital of Marwar), none of the 54 paintings on show has ever been seen before in Europe. The large format

Lloyd Evans

Bon appetit

Amongst Friends Hampstead Taking Sides/Collaboration Duchess Who wrote the first ‘dinner party from hell’ drama? Shakespeare had a couple of stabs with Titus Andronicus and the banquet scene in Macbeth where Banquo’s ghost arrives to ruin a perfectly good evening. Ovid told of Procne who killed her son, Itys, and served him up in a pie to her husband Tereus. And it was Aeschylus, as I recall, who originated the genre with Prometheus Vinctus in which the main character is also the main course. The latest attempt, Amongst Friends by April De Angelis, is set in a yuppie dream-home which a tabloid hack and her ex-MP husband are keen to

Loving and dying

Even music isn’t immortal. Even music isn’t immortal. For each of us, a little bit dies every day. I was in the pub with my friend Bob when on the jukebox came ‘Please Please Me’. You couldn’t ignore it: this pub operates its jukebox at full Spinal Tap volume to deter the uncommitted. ‘I love this song,’ Bob said — or, rather, screamed at the very extent of his lung capacity. And I thought, I don’t any more. In fact, almost all early Beatles, the music I grew up with, is dead to me now. I can hear nothing in it I haven’t heard before, and what I have heard

Scare tactics

Drag Me To Hell 15, Nationwide Although there is much I don’t understand about people generally — why do some take so long at the cashpoint, for example? What are they doing? — one of the main things I don’t understand is why anyone enjoys horror films. The last time I actually saw one at the cinema it must have been when I was 13 and bunked into the Golders Green Odeon to see The Exorcist and, even now, I’m still pretty sure the devil is coming to possess me. He’s taken his time, I admit, but who knows what else he has had on his plate? The fact is,

Alex Massie

Ricky Jay & Susan Boyle

Ricky Jay has an op-ed in today’s NYT on the Susan Boyle phenomenon. It’s interesting – there may not be many people alive who know more about the history of freak shows and public oddities than Jay – but it’s really just an excuse to point you towards Mark Singer’s terrific New Yorker profile of Jay. It begins: The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher Taffirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar ofthe Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened: Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was per- forming magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a

Alex Massie

Oprah: The Queen of Snake-Oil

Michael Kinsley has a very entertaining take-down of the “new” Newsweek in this week’s edition of the New Republic*. However, I doubt the “old” Newsweek would have dared publish this very entertaining, even brutal, demolition of Oprah Winfrey. In fact, it’s the sort of piece one might imagine appearing in TNR. So, whatever the merits of Kinsley’s piece and whatever the future may – or more probably does not – hold for Newsweek, anything that exposes Oprah’s weird combination of sappy new age snake-oil and shameless hucksterism is no bad thing. If nothing else, it’s worth being reminded that Oprah peddles the anti-MMR nonsense that, if its supporters have their

When poem meets image

Andrew Lambirth talks to Douglas Dunn and Norman Ackroyd about their latest collaboration Illustrated books are one of the glories of a library. Looking over my own shelves I find assorted delights ranging from The Story of My Heart, the unorthodox vision of the naturalist Richard Jefferies fittingly partnered with woodcuts by Ethelbert White, to David Gascoyne’s poems decorated rather sombrely by Graham Sutherland, and ‘The Traveller’ by Walter de la Mare, accompanied by colourful landscapes by John Piper. The pairings of writer and artist are often intriguing: Wyndham Lewis and Naomi Mitchison, William Beckford and Marion Dorn, Samuel Johnson and Edward Bawden. One of my favourites is an anthology

Chabrier’s treasure

Irresistible, the allure of a snatched weekend in Paris to catch a rare, adored opera, Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui. Irresistible, the allure of a snatched weekend in Paris to catch a rare, adored opera, Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui. This glorious cornucopia of intoxicating invention has ‘enjoyed’ a history of bad luck: the delirious imbecility of the plot — ‘a negative tour de force, to invent such a confusing story with so few characters’ — has occasioned two comprehensive overhauls (most recent the brave rewrite mounted by Opera North in the mid-1990s). Maybe to revert to the original, embrace the absurdities, and enjoy the music for all it’s worth,

Hare on the move

‘Consider the depth of despair,’ suggested the playwright David Hare in his half-hour reflection, Wall, on Monday evening (Radio Four). ‘Consider the depth of despair,’ suggested the playwright David Hare in his half-hour reflection, Wall, on Monday evening (Radio Four). It is extraordinary how Israel’s construction of a 486-mile barrier along its eastern border, at a cost of £2 billion, has been so rarely discussed, let alone acknowledged, by the wider world. Twenty years after the celebrations that greeted the tumbling down of the Berlin Wall, there’s another blot on the earth’s landscape, built so deep, so wide, so high that it can be clearly seen from space and has

Mixed messages

So it could be that ITV is saved not by a cigar-chomping, hot-shot show-biz executive but by a spinster from a Scottish village. The appearance of Susan Boyle in the first semi-final of Britain’s Got Talent (ITV, all week) was greeted with adoration — and audience figures — that would have been apt if Maria Callas had returned from the dead. Miss Boyle looked rapturously happy, and it was impossible not to feel delighted for her. She has had an unsung life of some difficulty; now, thanks to the internet, she is famed and celebrated around the world. Jay Leno, the American late-night talk-show host, sang dressed as her. There

Half measures

Falstaff Glyndebourne There was an interesting, startled article in the Independent a couple of weeks ago in which the writer recorded that, contrary to the expectations of everyone in ‘the media’, as the credit crisis squeezes harder, its victims, instead of turning to ever more feather-brained sources of enjoyment and consolation, are bewilderingly trying an escape into seriousness, with ‘heavy’ plays and operas, long taxing books, etc., being what they are headed for, rather than the jolly irrelevant frolics that they might have been expected to favour. Really that should have come as no surprise, since seriousness or anyway a plausible imitation of it is so much more absorbing, and

Grecian jewel

I am sitting in the town square of Hermoupolis, capital of the Greek island of Syros, when I am approached with great courtesy by a gentleman carrying a bundle of papers, on the top of which I can make out the words Notenbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach. I am sitting in the town square of Hermoupolis, capital of the Greek island of Syros, when I am approached with great courtesy by a gentleman carrying a bundle of papers, on the top of which I can make out the words Notenbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach. It is the island’s Head of Cultural Affairs, Nikos Almpanopoulos, due for his weekly piano lesson

Godot time

Get home from the theatre to find my laptop flashing a notice at me saying: ‘Godot: overdue’. Which indeed he was, patiently, achingly, endlessly waited for in an extraordinary performance by Messrs Stewart, McKellen, Callow and Pickup. Difficult to single out particular moments but possibly the best piece of advice for all of us in these topsy-turvy times is Pozzo’s: ‘Dance first, think later; that’s the natural order of things.’

Alex Massie

Nancy Pelosi is, er, Pussy Galore?

Has anyone at the Republican National Committee actually watched Goldfinger? Apparently not. My friend Garance Franke-Ruta picked up on a web video posted on Youtube by the RNC which compared Nancy Pelosi with Pussy Galore. And this is supposed ot be an attack ad? Sheesh, when did being compared to Honor Blackman become a bad thing? I take no position on the question of whether or not the CIA misled Congress – the ostnesible subject of the ad – but this wilful ignorance of all matters Bondian cannot be allowed to stand. Do these people not realise that Pussy Galore is the movie’s heroine? Granted, her coversion to the cause

Capturing a moment

Stephen Pettitt on how Sir Roger Norrington and others started the debate about ‘authenticity’ In the late 1970s, the conductor Sir Roger Norrington, at the time in charge of the late and lamented Kent Opera, created the London Classical Players. With this act Norrington, who has just turned 75, joined a small group of musicians regarded by the wider profession as, to put none too fine a point on it, rather nutty. They included his British colleagues Christopher Hogwood and Trevor Pinnock, the Dutch harpsichordist Ton Koopman and recorder player Frans Bruggen, the Belgian Sigiswald Kuijken, and, from a slightly older generation, the iconoclastic Austrian conductor and viola da gamba

Alex Massie

Auto-tune the News: Pig Flu Special

It’s hard to be certain of these things but, like Peter Suderman, I rather think that (video after the jump) this is the best edition of Auto-Tuning the News yet. And it comes with a dollop of Ron Paul goodness too! Plus, Hamid Karzai, Hillary Clinton, Dick Cheney and Katie Couric. What more could you ask for? In an odd way this is as good a way as any of ridiculing the fat-headed nonsense that’s offered up by TV news each and every day. Plus, you know, it’s fun… Simply superb.

Shut your eyes and enjoy

Peter Grimes English National Opera L’elisir d’amore Royal Opera House Norma English Touring Opera, in Cambridge ENO’s advertisement for its new production of Peter Grimes under David Alden, and the front of the programme, is of a surly, even aggressive youth with ropes coiled behind him. I wondered whether Alden had decided, in characteristic fashion, that the Apprentice, a silent role, was the malevolent centre of the work, manipulating Grimes and the townspeople into regarding him as a victim. No such luck. The Apprentice we get is considerably older than usual, as tall as anyone on the stage, and certainly sullen, displaying his bruise to Ellen with defiant hostility. Otherwise,

Lloyd Evans

Two’s company

Duet for One Vaudeville Ordinary Dreams Trafalgar Studio Therapy is celebrity by another name. An artificially created audience bears witness to your anguish and joy and enables you to resolve the terrible contradiction that underpins every human being’s world-view. Each of us, in his gut, feels like the star of his life. But in his head he knows he’s just one of billions of forgettable cameos. Celebrity and therapy resolve this conundrum. Therapy lets you believe your little world, and its problems are as significant as the rest of humanity. Celebrity forces the same belief. But while commentators everywhere decry celebrity and its narcissistic ramifications, no one is particularly bothered