Arts Reviews

Dean Spanley U, Nationwide  Dean Spanley is a family film and a sweet film and a kindly film with the most delicious cast (Peter O’Toole, Jeremy Northam, Sam Neill, Judy Parfitt) but it is also a slow film — the first hour is almost unbearably uneventful — which could do with a bit of a rocket up its backside, not that I am volunteering to do it. Hell’s bells, it’s nearly Christmas! I don’t have time for rockets and backsides! As it is, I’m waking nightly at 4 a.m. thinking, ‘Brandy butter; what’s all that about, then?’ Rockets and backsides! You do it, if it means so much to you,

Riders to the Sea Coliseum Ascanio in Alba King’s Place Vaughan Williams’s short opera Riders to the Sea was to have been conducted by Richard Hickox, but in the sad event it was played as a tribute to him, and conducted by Edward Gardner. It had a kind of appropriateness, but my own abiding memory of Hickox will be his wonderful, inspired conducting of the same composer’s The Pilgrim’s Progress at Sadler’s Wells a few months ago, which was revelatory for many of us. This setting of Synge’s grim little play is austere to a degree, but not as austere as it became at ENO. I came home rather bored

In a Dark Dark House Almeida I Found My Horn Tristan Bates Maria Friedman: Re-Arranged Trafalgar Studios What, already? Another Neil LaBute play? Here we go again then. This time his close-knit group of eloquent and stylishly tormented yuppies (he doesn’t do other types) are haunted by the aftermath of a child abuse episode. As kid brothers, Terry and Drew were interfered with by a friend of the family and now, years later, Drew has been charged with drunkenly crashing his car. He persuades Terry to appear in court as a character witness and to mention the abuse in order to soften up the judges before sentencing. The ruse works,

Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art Islamic art is a fast growing subject of study. Too many countries are involved for it to be categorised like French or Japanese art. In New York and London Islamic art tends to be confined to a section of an institution such as the Met, the British Museum or the V&A. Similarly, in the capital of United Arab Emirates, the Louvre Abu Dhabi will show art from all eras and regions, including Islamic art, when it opens in 2012. Meanwhile in Qatar, the peninsular state further up the gulf to the west and north of UAE, a more specialised institution has just opened its doors

The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions Metropolitan Museum, until 1 February 2009 Philippe de Montebello retires from the position of Director at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, after 31 years of service, at the end of this year. A forum of curators has organised an exhibition of around 300 great works of art and artefacts (chosen from over 84,000) acquired under his watch, to honour his contribution. The Philippe de Montebello Years is the result. It is an exhilarating and eclectic display that crosses the centuries from ancient prehistory to the present. Spanning the globe from Europe to Asia, Africa and Latin

It all started earlier this year, when my friend Chris managed to get four tickets for the first Leonard Cohen concerts at the O2. ‘There’s one for you if you want it,’ he said. Well, obviously I wanted it, but cash was a little short at the time — in fact, not so much short as entirely absent, avoiding me as though I’d said the wrong thing. And I do have an ongoing tinnitus problem, the result of reviewing too many awful Tin Machine gigs for a certain crazed mass-market newspaper in the early 1990s. Earlier this year I went to a friend’s book launch held in a seedy West