Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Robert Gorelangton

An eccentric part of the landscape

Robert Gore-Langton talks to an irreverent Dominic Dromgoole about the Globe A few months ago I was at a literary festival on a drama panel which featured a senior actress of the stage. She was holding forth about working with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford when I suggested that Shakespeare’s Globe was just as hugely popular but nobody took it half as seriously. ‘Ah, well, you see there’s a feeling in the industry that it’s all a bit twee — you know, a bit heritage Shakespeare,’ she said. ‘Patronising cow,’ I thought at the time, while laughing along sycophantically. But she probably spoke for most of her generation to

Andrew Lambirth

Dancing lines

Leon Kossoff: Unique Prints Art Space Gallery, 84 St Peter’s St, London, N1, until 21 June Paintings of Stockport by Helen Clapcott Stockport Art Gallery, until 28 June Leon Kossoff (born 1926) is best known as a painter of people and buildings, rendered in thickly meshed paint surprisingly full of light. He trained at the Borough Polytechnic under the visionary David Bomberg, from whom he learnt about the conveyance of insight and emotion through the stuff of paint. It’s a form of expressionism by which the world is apprehended through the senses and given back in paint. The subject and the artist’s experience of it become one, and are then

Giannandrea Poesio

Compare and contrast | 24 May 2008

Royal Ballet: Double Bill Royal Opera House Theatre magic has a lot to do with the unpredictability of the performed event. Regardless of the alluring promise of an all-star cast or the doubts raised by daring artistic choices, there is no certain way to forecast what any live performance will be like. Indeed, it is this surprise/disappointment factor that has kept me going for all the years I have spent both on stage and in front of it. Last week I expressed some serious doubts about a Royal Ballet triple bill. The artistic flatness of the performances I saw impinged seriously on my desire to see more from the same

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Déjà vu

The Deep Blue Sea Vaudeville The Birthday Party Lyric Hammersmith Pygmalion Old Vic Osborne crushed Rattigan. Crudely stated, that’s what we’re told happened in 1956 when Osborne’s demotic new voice displaced Rattigan’s classier, cosier manner. Even now Rattigan’s reputation hasn’t fully recovered and The Deep Blue Sea, which premièred in 1952, is the first of his plays I’ve seen in the West End. And guess what? It feels exactly like Look Back in Anger. The setting is identical — a shabby flat. The storyline uses the same torrid love triangle. Two similar outlooks are examined: reckless youth is contrasted with safe, dull conservatism. And both plays have a familiarly rancid

Deborah Ross

Fast and furious

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull 12A, Nationwide After a 19-year break, Indiana Jones, the world’s greatest adventurer and probably the world’s worst ever archaeologist — listen, even I know you can’t go around ripping open ancient mummies whenever you so fancy — is back. He is back because he has to find an ancient crystal skull before the Russians do, because the Russians want to use its knowledge to open a chain of aromatherapy salons or, failing that, to rule the world. Yes, it is our old friend global domination. So off he goes on the hunt, narrowly escaping — phew!; he really had me scared

Simon Hoggart

Srallen’s pain

I used to have one of Alan Sugar’s old Amstrad computers; in fact I wrote two books on it. The great advantage it had over modern computers was its slowness; you could literally make a cup of tea while it saved a page of text, and prepare a three-course meal while it saved a chapter. Modern computers don’t provide that luxury. They’re like dogs after you’ve thrown the first stick; they just sit there panting eagerly, demanding more and more words. Amstrad stood for A.M. Sugar Trading, though these days the company makes nothing except money, being devoted to property deals. The owner has become ‘Sir’ Alan, a fact of

Marianne Macdonald

Very few single girls actually have that much sex

The press launch of the Sex and the City film in the Plaza in New York a few weeks ago took the form of a junket very like the one Hugh Grant blunders into in Notting Hill, made surreal by the fact that Sarah Jessica Parker was ill and cancelled her whole first day of interviews. This meant that some 100 journalists, flown in to hear her thoughts on the movie, had in turn been cancelled. Maddened, they spent two days abusing the PR until, in a furious act of concession, she allocated some of them a far shorter slot with Ms Carrie Bradshaw the following day — seven and

Wednesday

Michael Tanner

Feel the passion

Tosca Royal Opera House Idomeneo Barbican Carmen Bernie Grant Arts Centre The latest revival of Tosca at the Royal Opera, with many changes in production by Stephen Barlow, shows signs of taking the work seriously, though they are contradicted by the corporate- and bar-friendly intervals, of a length to dissipate tension and momentum. Antonio Pappano’s conducting, too, displays a passion for the opera, every orchestral masterstroke being held up as a trophy; while it also moves towards one ponderous pause after another, so that Act II, which when conducted coarsely enough is a terrifying vortex of violence and lust, seemed languorous and torpid. It all gave the excellent cast a

Kate Chisholm

Absolute focus

You can almost hear the whispering through the ether. A whole weekend devoted to Chopin? Whatever was Roger Wright, Radio Three’s controller, thinking of? The Polish-born composer was only 39 when he died of TB in 1849. And he only ever really wrote for the piano. Surely there’s not enough music to fill 24 hours, let alone 48. His Preludes, Etudes, Barcarolles and Mazurkas are performed by every aspiring concert pianist, and rehashed for any promotion that demands a slushy, sentimental underscore. Do we really need a Radio Three Chopin Experience? But Wright’s on a mission. His station is evolving away from a more rigid kind of scheduling to a

Saturday

Martin Gayford

Exhibition suspicion

Martin Gayford questions the point of art shows. Should they educate or give pleasure — or both? Towards the end of June, 1814, Maria Bicknell, the wife-to-be of the painter John Constable, went to an exhibition at the British Institute on Pall Mall. It was the second retrospective exhibition ever held in London. The first, the previous year, was devoted to the work of Joshua Reynolds and had been so popular that special evening viewings by candlelight were announced. The same was done in 1814 for the follow-up, a joint show of work by Hogarth, Gainsborough and Richard Wilson. Maria managed to get a ticket for one of the candlelit

Deborah Ross

Sister act

Caramel PG, Key cities Caramel is a lovely and engaging film and just what we all need right now. You may well ask: how do I know what you need? Have I canvassed your friends? Your family? Of course. And what they all say is: yes, this is just the sort of film you need right now. You may choose to see it, then again you may not — that is ultimately up to you — but after all the canvassing I’ve put in, don’t tell me I don’t know what you need. (You also need to cut down on the cheese, but we can save that for another day.)

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The old problem

King Lear Globe That Face Duke of York’s Beau Jest Hackney Empire Every time I see Lear I discover something old. It must be at least two centuries since somebody first noticed that one of the many factors that make this titanic play unplayable is that the great speeches are delivered by a bearded geriatric in acute distress crawling about on his knees like a stricken bison. This rather affects the actor’s vocal projection. How he must wish, as he sobs his anguish into the boards, that he were playing Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello or Antony and were free to stride about the stage flinging the poetry to the back wall

Giannandrea Poesio

Lyrical lack

Royal Ballet Triple Bill Royal Opera House There was a time when dancers were very often given the means to gain a deep understanding of what they were supposed to be interpreting on stage — the well-known story of Ninette de Valois taking her artists to see William Hogarth’s paintings while creating The Rake’s Progress is but one of many examples. There was also a time — long before ballet-training turned into a money-churning business of marketable diplomas — when the rudiments of artistic interpretation were embedded in the blossoming dancers’ daily routine. Today, little or no significance seems to be bestowed upon the artistic side. Ballet teachers have little

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Faking it | 17 May 2008

As budgets fall and standards slip, it’s inevitable that TV is going to get worse and worse and that the job of the TV critic in trying to shame the bosses into arresting this decline will become more important than ever. But this doesn’t make me feel happy. It just — like so many things in the modern world, from biofuels to ‘best practice’ — makes me want to kill myself. I mean, I’d much rather have wall-to-wall brilliant TV and a near-meaningless job function than rubbish TV and a vital corrective role. After that portentous start, you’re probably expecting me to have found something truly abysmal to review. But

Wednesday

John Spurling

Big space, small space

Liliane Lijn: Stardust Riflemaker, 79 Beak Street, London W1, until 5 July Liliane Lijn has always made ‘far-out’ sculpture, innovative, adventurous and aesthetically exhilarating. Her imagination fires on three cylinders: light, movement and the use of new and untried materials — untried, that’s to say, in art, though already in use for industrial or scientific purposes. Among her early works are the beautiful ‘Liquid Reflections’ (1967, now in the Tate), made of a hollow, revolving acrylic disc containing oil and water, over which roll two transparent plastic balls, and the ‘Poem Machines’ — cones inscribed with poems which, as the cones turn at different speeds, are transformed into purely visual

Laura Gascoigne

Defying definition

In 1888, visitors to Earls Court were treated to the novel sight of an exhibition of avant-garde art from Italy. The show was mounted by the Milanese Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, the art-dealer son of an impoverished Hungarian baron. A follower of the Paris art scene and a convert to the optical theories of Ogden Rood, Grubicy was training up a stable of young artists — most of them graduates of the Brera Academy — in the principles of optical mixing pioneered by the Pointillists. He dubbed his modern art movement Divisionism — not a school, he said, but ‘a technical means for reproducing, with colouring materials, the luminous vibrations

Kate Chisholm

BBC as saviour

While the TV chiefs squirm with embarrassment, exposed for misleading the public in the phone-voting scandals, radio has had a brilliant week. Not just an announcement that 34.22 million listeners have been listening each week to BBC radio (let alone all the commercial radio stations, digital and online) but also endorsements from two people not normally mentioned in the same breath. Pete Doherty, the badly behaved rock star, told reporters on leaving Wormwood Scrubs that he’d spent the last few weeks with ‘a lot of gangsters and Radio Four’. Radio Four? Not Radio One? Or BBC6? What a coup for Mark Damazer, Four’s Controller (and his station’s just won Gold

William Feaver

‘Seeing by doing’

William Feaver explains how his book ‘Pitmen Painters’ inspired a new play at the National ‘It means knaaing what to de.’ This is Jimmy Floyd speaking, his Ashington accent spelt out, his words — more dialect than dialectic — written by Lee ‘Billy Elliot’ Hall. In Hall’s The Pitmen Painters, newly transferred from Live Theatre, Newcastle, to the National Theatre, the ‘Jimmy Floyd’ character is more canny, more droll, than the man I remember from 37 years ago when I first came across the Ashington Group. The actual Jimmy, retired after 60 years down the pit, had a perky air and a slight speech impediment. ‘One time I used to

Andrew Lambirth

Presentation over content

Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book V&A, until 29 June The partnership between the written word and the visual image has a long and distinguished history. Leaving aside the pictographic tradition and the fertile area of calligraphy, the first artists’ books must date from the modern period when artists began to grow ever more independent and self-confident. Although it could never be said that Leonardo or Piero della Francesca lacked self-confidence, it should be remembered that they functioned within a culture which recognised the position of artists primarily as craftsmen who were employed to fulfil a need — mostly in the domain of religious imagery, and increasingly in

Mark Glazebrook

City revival

‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ an inquisitive adult asked during the break for tea at a tennis party given by my parents in the Vale of Clwyd, North Wales, c.1948. ‘A cotton broker,’ I replied, wishing to follow in the ancestral footsteps. Then my father’s head shook from side to side, slowly, silently and solemnly at the head of the table. And so it came to pass that I joined the postwar Liverpool diaspora — to London, in my case — while remaining proud that both my father and grandfather had been presidents of the Liverpool Cotton Association, the latter about 100 years ago when