Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Tuesday

Andrew Lambirth

Canter through Dada

Duchamp, Man Ray, Picarbia Tate Modern, until 26 May Juan Muñoz Tate Modern, until 27 April  The recent Tate habit of serving up in threes major figures from art history is not to be encouraged. It almost worked in 2005 with Turner Whistler Monet, but as the old saying goes, ‘two’s company but three’s a crowd’, and one of the artists usually suffers. In the Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec show (2005–6), it was Lautrec who suffered. In the current offering, it is Picabia, the least familiar of the three and the one needing most introduction to the public, thus warranting a better showing than he gets here, having to compete

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Courting humour

Legal Fictions Savoy Baby Girl; The Miracle Cottesloe Edward Fox is having the time of his life. The creepy but compelling Jackal has evolved, late in his career, into a specialist light comedian. He’s seriously funny playing the lead roles in a double bill of John Mortimer plays, one from the 1980s, one from the 1950s, which have proved surprisingly resistant to the passage of time. The Dock Brief still functions beautifully even though its premise now requires explanation. Before legal aid was introduced, barristers were selected at random to represent defendants who lacked funds for lawyers. An alleged wife-murderer, Fowle, is ready to plead guilty but his fastidious last-minute

Deborah Ross

Living doll

Lars and the Real Girl 12A, Nationwide Lars and the Real Girl is a comedy which tells the story of an introverted, emotionally backward loner (Ryan Gosling, in bad knitwear and anorak) who believes a sex doll is real and introduces her to the local community as his girlfriend. It all sounds gorgeous, as if it is going to be wonderfully distasteful — how could it not be? — but, disappointingly, it just isn’t nearly distasteful enough. This is a shame, particularly if you have been waiting a long time for a decent film featuring bad knitwear and a sex doll, as I have. It is set in some unnamed

Kate Chisholm

Death of television

It all began with a short story by Peter Ackroyd, telling of an extraordinary visitation by the Virgin Mary that was promised to occur sometime soon at St Mildred’s Church in Bread Street in the heart of London. Her reappearance would signify a great outpouring of religious fervour. Pilgrims from across the land would converge on the capital in the hope of seeing the Virgin, touching the hem of her garment and receiving her blessing. Virgin Day was born. And so was the idea of ‘A Film for Radio’. Six short plays were commissioned for broadcast on Radio Four inspired by Ackroyd’s story and just in time for Easter, that

James Delingpole James Delingpole

’Arold’s tragedy

Rather deftly, I managed to avoid all but ten minutes of the 3,742 hours of programming dedicated this week to the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war. I’ve no doubt that some of it was very well done — Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha (C4), say; Ronan Bennett’s 10 Days to War (BBC1), which I caught ten gripping minutes of before the preview DVD I’d been sent went mysteriously blank — but my heart wasn’t in it. Yes, I’m sure there were many bad, misguided things about the Iraq invasion and many even worse things — as I ranted the other week — about the post-war ‘strategy’. But I’m with

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Wherever the Green is Worn

The ten worst Irish accents in cinema history? Check ’em out here. Amazingly, Tom Cruise doesn’t take the top spot… So, yeah, Happy St Patrick’s Day. Time then, to dust off this unnecessarily dyspeptic take from a few years ago: When I was a student in Dublin we scoffed at the American celebration of St. Patrick, finding something preposterous in the green beer, the search for any connection, no matter how tenuous, to Ireland, the misty sentiment of it all that seemed so at odds with the Ireland we knew and actually lived in. Who were these people dressed as Leprechauns and why were they dressed that way? This Hibernian

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Shrewd survivor

Falstaff WNO Paradise Moscow Royal Academy of Music Verdi’s last opera Falstaff is also for many people his greatest. I went to see it in Cardiff this week, having heard Radio Three’s broadcast of his previous opera Otello from the New York Met a couple of evenings before. Otello I found, as I always do in a good performance, and that was, thanks to Semyon Bychkov’s conducting, an outstanding one, a work which puts me into a greater state of agony about the limitless human capacity for self-torment than almost any other. Falstaff, also admirably performed, left me, as again it nearly always does, impressed by its brilliance but otherwise

Deborah Ross

Teenage pain

Water Lilies 15, Curzon Soho and key cities I did consider seeing this week’s big high-concept film, Disney’s Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert in 3D — but just couldn’t face it. Based on a popular American pre-teen TV series, I felt I couldn’t be certain I’d like Hannah in any dimension. So, instead, I opted for the French film, Water Lilies, which is not big or high-concept and not in 3D. As it is, in French films you’re lucky to get a boy on a bicycle. It may even be just the boy and you’ll have to wait for the sequel to get the bicycle.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Coward’s way

The Vortex Apollo Plague Over England Finborough Major Barbara Olivier Like a footballer’s wife on a shopping binge at Harrods. That’s how Felicity Kendal lashes into the fabulous role of Florence Lancaster in The Vortex. Every fold, every tassle, every rippling golden pleat of this part is sifted and ransacked for its emotional possibilities. Florence is an unstable fading beauty whose young lovers collide jealously with her adoring son, Nicky. Noël Coward’s breakthrough play evokes the ache of despair beneath the hedonist glitz of the 1920s, and this near-flawless production, directed by Peter Hall, is marred only by its rather schematic sets. Aside from Kendal — and she gives the

Simon Hoggart

Making history

Rivers of Blood (BBC2); Delia (BBC2); The Most Annoying Pop Moments …  We Hate To Love (BBC3)  It was a fine week for nostalgic people of a certain age, like me. Rivers of Blood (BBC2, Saturday) was an excellent, and not entirely unsympathetic, filleting of Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech. Historical events shuttle back and forth in our minds: who remembers that it came two weeks after Martin Luther King was murdered? Only a few months earlier the Beatles had sung ‘All You Need Is Love’ to a worldwide audience — who must have been fairly bored since it is one of their dullest songs, its message both trite and inaccurate, as Enoch’s speech

Kate Chisholm

Reality bites | 15 March 2008

Has anyone else begun to suspect that The Archers’ scriptwriters have been taken off Prozac? Maybe it’s something to do with the recent bad publicity about the drug, or perhaps the Pebble Mill Health Trust has been given new guidelines on pill dispensation. Whatever the reason, harsh reality has taken over from ‘everyday life’ in the fictional world of Ambridge, and we were confronted with not one but two disturbing storylines that have now begun to unravel with the heart-lurching inevitability of real life. Not once, but twice on successive evenings last week I found myself weeping over a bubbling saucepan. At Willow Farm, Mike Tucker worried away about his

Friday

Liz Anderson

Weekend art

The Chinese are coming — or, rather, they’ve come. China Design Now at the V&A is the latest arrival in the China Now Festival — a nationwide celebration of all things Chinese, leading up to the Olympic Games.  It kicks off tomorrow – and runs until 13 July – but I was lucky enough to go to a special preview yesterday.  The show, sponsored by HSBC, explores China’s ‘creative landscape’, focusing on three cities: Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.  Posters, photographs, architectural models (including one of the new airport in Beijing), clothes and other design-oriented items can be seen in the stylishly arranged rooms at the V&A (the shop has some

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Too Late It Should Be, Too Late

I’m indebted to an old college buddy for alerting me to this description of David Irving’s recent appearance on Irish TV’s venerable The Late, Late Show. As the programme’s website put it (emphasis added): In 2006 David Irving was jailed for denying the holocaust ever happened. Despite being branded an anti-semitic, active holocaust denier in a court of law Irving continues to offer his own unique perspective on history, particularly the history of the Second World War. Well, yes, particularly the Second World War indeed. I can understand why undergraduate debating societies would – mistakenly in my view – chase public attention by inviting Irving to appear, but why should

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Crossing continents | 12 March 2008

Perhaps it’s greed. Or is it greed laced with betrayal? Certainly it’s unseemly. As their careers draw to a close, British authors have developed a habit of stuffing their collected notebooks into a rucksack, hopping to America on Virgin and flogging their life’s jottings to the highest bidder. In 2006 Salman Rushdie accepted an undisclosed sum from Emory University in Atlanta for a collection of papers said to include two unpublished novels and the ‘Fatwa Diaries’ written during his decade on the run from Islamic executioners. The same university handed over $600,000 for a collection of Ted Hughes’s papers in 2003. The University of Texas has done deals with Arnold

Andrew Lambirth

Face value

Pompeo Batoni 1708–1787 National Gallery, until 18 May The first impression offered by the Batoni exhibition in the Sainsbury Wing is one of dullness. I tend to do a quick reconnaissance of any show before starting the serious work of looking in detail, in order to gauge its range and extent, and my initial response was not optimistic. Why Batoni? was an early and abiding thought. I had already mentioned to an acquaintance on the way in that I had never before seen a Batoni exhibition, and a passer-by overhearing this, who happened to be leaving the gallery, remarked direly, ‘You’ll see why you’ve never seen one when you get

Charles Spencer

Parisian heights

Mrs Spencer had to spend five days in Paris during half-term observing ballet classes, so my son Edward and I tagged along too, on the strict understanding that watching dance lessons was absolutely not on the agenda as far as we were concerned. It came as a jolt to realise that my first visit to Paris had been 45 years earlier when my parents took me there at the age of eight. I can’t remember much about it except the pungent smells from the drains, buying a much loved penknife and the evening when my mother was taken ill in a restaurant while tackling a particularly glutinous bowl of onion

Peter Phillips

Death by laptop

Touring the more rural college campuses in the United States with Victoria’s Requiem is a very modern challenge. To be sure, the inmates of these Young People’s Homes have little experience of performers and performances which do not actively sell themselves, so I can imagine that the reality of 11 people standing more or less motionless on a stage, singing one of the most contemplative pieces of music ever written for 45 minutes, might come over as a bit novel. In fact it must count as the polar opposite of literally everything the television stations serve them up. Mindful of the difficulty, I recently introduced a performance of this Requiem

Giannandrea Poesio

Street life

Insane in the Brain Bounce, Peacock Theatre An upbeat, street-dance version of Romeo and Juliet, presented by Rumble, was one of the hottest tickets at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival. Some critics did dislike it as yet another example of modern-day cultural and artistic madness, but others welcomed its innovative approach to the creation of both dance and theatre art, and its attempt to find new choreographic idioms and ideas. As such, it has led the way for a proliferation of similar performances within the all-too-often exclusive world of theatre dance. Bounce, the Swedish-based street-dance company, for instance, has just arrived in London with a dazzling adaptation of One Flew Over

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

You’d be mad to miss it

If you haven’t seen Mad Men—the drama set in a Madison Avenue advertising agency in 1960—already, I’d thoroughly recommend watching it. (You can catch up on the first episode here.) It is the best drama that there has been on TV in quite a while.  As James Delingpole says in the magazine this week, it is “utterly brilliant.” It does, though, beg the question of why all the best TV these days seems to be American—quite a turn around from a few years back, when British shows were the best thing on American TV and the worst things on our screens had been shipped in from across the pond. Now,

Saturday

Giannandrea Poesio

Games worth playing

The Royal Ballet Royal Opera House It is a well-known fact that ballet lives, thrives and survives in a world of its own. By the time the ‘new’ ideas developed in other artistic contexts have seeped through its thick artistic, technical, cultural and social barriers, the other arts have already moved on. Luckily, such a time warp is visible only to those who are keeping an eye on what goes on in the performing world, and not to those die-hard balletomanes who prefer to ignore whatever happens outside the boundaries of their point-shoed dream-world. It is not surprising, therefore, that when ideas from other artistic fields are successfully transplanted into