Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Taking liberties

Her Naked Skin Olivier Elaine Stritch At Liberty Shaw In 2004 Rebecca Lenkiewicz got the black spot from the Critics’ Circle. Sorry, I mean she was voted ‘most promising playwright’. Less a gong, more a millstone. Praising writers for what they’ve done is fine. Praising them for what they may do in future is like congratulating a pregnant woman on her foetus’s A-levels results. Lenkiewicz’s latest work about the suffragette movement arrives with fresh honours. The programme grandly announces that Her Naked Skin is ‘the first play by a living woman writer on the Olivier stage’. How aristocratic. It demands respect on account of its status at birth. The setting

Deborah Ross

Worshipping perfection

Elegy 15, London and Key Cities Elegy is about an ageing professor (Ben Kingsley) and a beautiful young woman (Penelope Cruz), and it is based on the Philip Roth novel The Dying Animal, which, in turn, takes its title from Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, in which the poet describes his soul as ‘sick with desire/and fastened to a dying animal’. Elegy. Ageing. Roth. Dying. Sick. And yet this movie is such fun! Hats off to the director, Isabel Coixet, for infusing it with candy colours and setting it to a kitsch yet funky Seventies pop soundtrack. OK, only teasing. This is gloomy. In fact, I cannot remember the last time

Charles Spencer

Tortured genius

Mrs Spencer and I are just back from a few days in Tuscany where I was bullied into as punishing a round of culture-vulturing as I have ever endured. The temperature may have been just a degree or two short of 100°F in Florence, but a small matter like heat exhaustion wasn’t going to stop the missus in her tracks. Give her a guidebook, and she becomes a woman obsessed. We were up at dawn to queue for the Uffizi, outside the doors of the Medici chapel before they opened at 8.15 a.m. And in fact, though I grumbled, I must admit I enjoyed it almost as much as she

Saturday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Corruption, celebrity and confidence

Lloyd Evans talks to Matthew Bourne about his new ballet Dorian Gray and co-directing Oliver! Matthew Bourne is a whirlwind. He’s a dynamo, a powerhouse, a force of nature. He has created the busiest ballet company on earth and turned Britain into the world’s leading exporter of dance theatre. His breakthrough came in 1995 with an all-male production of Swan Lake which won awards in London, New York and Los Angeles. Since then he has updated the Nutcracker, re-imagined Carmen as The Car Man, and created a dance version of Edward Scissorhands, which has toured more or less constantly since opening in 2006. But in person the whirlwind is remarkably

Andrew Lambirth

Emperor’s vision

Hadrian: Empire and Conflict The British Museum, until 26 October Sponsored by BP After last week’s Hadrian supplement in The Spectator, readers will be well-informed about this prince of emperors, so I will confine my remarks to a personal response to the exhibition. I must say immediately that it looks very impressive and that Sir Robert Smirke’s round Reading Room is the perfect setting for a display that also focuses on the architecture of the Pantheon. (Smirke based his dome directly on that great classical exemplar.) But this is not another Terracotta Army blockbuster: it is, in effect, an exhibition of busts and architectural models. If you’re interested in the

Giannandrea Poesio

Spectacularly disappointing

Mikhailovsky Ballet London Coliseum It is somewhat refreshing that the 2008 summer ballet season in London is not monopolised by either the Bolshoi or the Kirov/Mariinsky ballet companies as it has been for the past few years. The presence of two rarely seen formations, such as the Mikhailovsky Ballet and the National Ballet of China, has caused a nice stir in the sleepy world of ballet, and flocks of international balletomanes have converged on London. I am not sure that opening the former’s season with a new production of Spartacus was a good idea, though. Spartacus is to Russian ballet what Aida is to 19th-century Italian opera: brassy, spectacular, colossal,

Michael Tanner

Three in the park

La Gioconda; Pulcinella; Iolanta Opera Holland Park On a hot fine evening in London there can’t be anywhere more delightful for an opera-lover than Opera Holland Park, which is now so comfortable, and has such high standards of performance, that to see a rarely performed work there is in all respects at least as enjoyable as it would be anywhere. The admirable policy of mixing conventional fare with rather out-of-the-way things seems to work well, since I get a strong impression that many of the audience go for the experience of being there, rather as one used to go to ‘the pictures’ once or twice a week, and hope something

Deborah Ross

Not for terrestrials

The X-Files: I Want to Believe 15, Nationwide OK, straight to the point, because we are busy people, right? And when we are not busy we are pretending to be busy, right? So, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, worth your time? No. As it is, it’s 104 minutes that I won’t be getting back. Just think: 104 minutes. I could have done a lot of pretending to be busy in that time. I could have done a lot of ‘Not now! I’ve got a deadline!’ while making typing noises with one hand and leafing though the Boden catalogue with the other. Do we like Boden? I don’t know. Sometimes

Marcus Berkmann

Tables have turned

Marcus Berkmann on Travis Elborough’s nostalgia for LP records  There’s a rather wonderful new book out by a man named Travis Elborough, which sounds a bit like one of those dead Dorset villages where every second house is a holiday rental. Mr Elborough’s previous book was a great thundering roar of nostalgia for the Routemaster bus, and The Long-Player Goodbye (Sceptre, £14.99) is a great thundering roar of nostalgia for the LP record, from its origins in the 1940s, through its long heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, to its current rather enfeebled state as a weekly CD giveaway glued to the Mail on Sunday. Mr Elborough feels, as many of

Kate Chisholm

Popular marriage

Early mornings on Four have seen a miraculous appearance in the past fortnight with the emergence of the Evan and Nick Show. Not for years has there been a genuine double act on the Today programme; not since Brian Redhead and John Timpson in the 1980s when the Queen tuned in at ten past seven to hear the cross-talk between the genial, emollient Timpson and his combative northern partner, Redhead. Along the way they were joined at different times by Libby Purves and Sue MacGregor, but the programme’s character was defined by Redhead and Timpson’s repartee. (I guess it’s a sign of those different times that they were never thought

Simon Hoggart

Riotous ride

A three-part series called Expedition Guyana was hurriedly retitled Lost Land of the Jaguar (BBC1, Wednesday) possibly in the hopes that viewers might think it was a spin-off from Top Gear, more likely because a BBC suit suddenly realised that the name ‘Guyana’ wouldn’t pull in viewers. No doubt someone else wanted to call it Lost Land of the Jaguar Celebrity Makeover, but a compromise was reached. Thank goodness, because this really was terrific. At first I suspected it would be just another hectic, ‘Hey, gang, follow me into the jungle!’ BBC documentary in which the mere subject takes second place to the breathless presenters. And it started that way.

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Greece is the place

OK, so I’m back. I can confirm that anyone wishing a delightful week, free of the grimey concerns of everyday life, could do an awful lot worse than spend it aboard a yacht pottering around the Ionian Sea. Blissful. Alas, it could not last. and so here we are: returned to Scotland, wet and grey (though the last week, typically, is said to have been the best of the year). Plenty to catch up on then. But what, dear, gracious readers, would you like me to blog about? Leave your requests in the comments or email me and I’ll tap away at your suggestions…  Photo: Sunrise over the Ionian Sea.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Blogging Orwell

This is really rather splendid: starting next month, George Orwell’s diaries will be published on the web, one day at a time, 70 years after they were written. Harry’s Place has more. [Via, Andrew]

Liz Anderson

A neglected near-masterpiece

Michael Tanner calls it a ‘neglected near-masterpiece’. So what is ‘it’? Answer: Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, a one-act opera about a blind princess, which is now on at Opera Holland Park. I was lucky enough to see it yesterday evening, and was completely enchanted by the entire production. Michael’s review will be on the website tomorrow.  Do check it out.

Saturday

Robert Gorelangton

Moral and political dilemmas

Robert Gore-Langton talks to Ronald Harwood about musical life in Nazi Germany Nazis in the theatre liven things up no end. They provide the hilarity in The Producers, the creepiness in Cabaret. And when you can’t take any more bright copper kettles or warm woollen mittens in The Sound of Music on comes the SS, arguably the best moment in the show. Now there’s a new play about music in Nazi Germany, a sobering reminder of just how seriously the Third Reich took its music and music-makers. Collaboration is about Richard Strauss and his relationship with the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who together wrote an opera in the 1930s while

Robin Holloway

Remembering Mellers

One had confidently anticipated (‘The sex is better than ever!’ he burbled in excited undertone when I last met him a few years ago at a York University concert) that Wilfrid Mellers would make his centenary. His death this May at only 94 doesn’t sadden, however, so much as joyfully recall the wacky life force that invigorated and enhanced writing on music in this country (so often lacklustre) for some six decades. Since his death I’ve reread his half of the co-authored Man and his Music (1962 — even back then Wilfrid would surely wish to instate Woman into this title!). It covers the Classical style, Romantics early middle and

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Top-notch tosh

Zorro Garrick The Tailor and Ansty Old Red Lion Is Zorro any good? Forget the show for a second, look at the marketing. The stars are English, the story is American and the music, by the Gypsy Kings, is French with a strong Spanish flavour. That’s half the Western hemisphere covered. Nice work, everyone. Things start uneasily with a crowd of Romany dancers on stage performing a heel-bashing number that doesn’t do much more than rattle your fillings. Next the show hurtles from California to Barcelona and back, establishing the complex background of the central figure, Diego, a renegade cavalry officer who must wrest the Spanish colony of Los Angeles

Deborah Ross

All about boys

Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging 12A, Nationwide Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging is a teen movie as may be rather obvious from the title — come on, it was hardly going to explore the terrible reality of Bosnia’s post-war traumas; get a grip — and we are all for teen movies, aren’t we? A teen movie may at least get a teen out of the house. The boys are OK. They sleep most of the day and then go on the internet. But the girls! They can’t go anywhere if their hair isn’t right and it’s no good saying, ‘It looks perfectly all right to me,’ because then it’s, ‘What

Michael Tanner

Undiluted pleasure

Hansel und Gretel Glyndebourne La bohème Royal Opera House The two operas I saw last week were premièred just over two years apart, Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel at Christmas 1893, Puccini’s La Bohème in February 1896. Both of them deal with deprivation and poverty and very different life-destroying forces, and ways of coping with them. They each, of course, stand as squarely as possible in their respective national operatic traditions. One wouldn’t want to press parallels or dissimilarities too far, but when I realised how close they are in time yet what utterly different worlds they evoke it gave me pause. Partly it’s a matter of Hansel being so wholly

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Light and shade

Colin Self: Art in the Nuclear Age Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until 12 October David Tress: Chasing Sublime Light Petworth House, West Sussex, until 29 July Colin Self (born 1941) is one of the unsung talents of the English art world, a maverick who made intensely original Pop art in the 1960s and then rusticated himself in Norfolk, where he continues to make all manner of art from the satiric to the pastoral. He is not the easiest of characters, and the last time a major museum exhibition of his work was planned, he cancelled it at the last moment. So Pallant House must be congratulated on achieving such a