Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Seasonal shortcomings

Sorry, you’re not getting your Christmas present this year. Yes, I know what you want: one of those columns where I avoid TV altogether and just rant madly about myself for 800 words. Well, tough. It’s been one of the crappest, most hateful years of my life and, though I’m not holding you all totally responsible, I do think you must bear your share of the blame. You have not adored me enough. You have not showered me with sufficient — indeed, any — gifts. You have not bought nearly enough copies of Coward on the Beach or How to Be Right as perfect Christmas presents for all your friends.

Saturday

The Skimmer

The Bash Britain Corporation

The BBC’s version of the Nativity this Christmas will depict Mary and Joseph as asylum seekers rejected by brutal Britain. Yes, once again the Beeb plays fast and loose with history so that we can all think the worst of our country. So let’s remember some facts. First, this country’s record in giving genuine asylum seekers refuge is second to none, a matter for pride rather than disparagement. Second, Mary and Joseph were not in any sense asylum seekers, nor were they dirt poor. They were a Middle Judean family who had gone to Bethlehem to participate in a census (primarily for tax purposes) but arrived so late all the

Ariane Bankes

All points East

Serendipity is the best aspect of travel — the chance encounter, the unexpected discovery — and a journey overland to China by rail can throw up all sorts of surprises. In Moscow we bumped into the countertenor Michael Chance, who was there for the first of a series of recitals with the Soloists of Catherine the Great, and who whisked us off to their rehearsal in the city’s Catholic cathedral. This celebrated ensemble was founded in 2001 by Andrey Reshetin, a former violinist in a radical, agitprop Russian rock band, but classically trained and now dedicated to the authentic performance of baroque music. In the course of scouring the archives

Andrew Lambirth

Drawing on experience

Theatres of Life: Drawings from the Rothschild Collection, The Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, London W1, until 27 January 2008 Pop Art Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, until 20 January 2008, Sponsored by Lehman Brothers Waddesdon Manor, the stately home of the Rothschilds near Aylesbury now managed by the National Trust, is lending for the first time a group of master drawings for outside exhibition. London’s Wallace Collection is the fortunate recipient, and some 75 high-quality drawings (mostly French 18th-century) are currently on display in the basement galleries of Hertford House in Manchester Square. Here is yet another example of the current fetish for subterranean galleries devoid of natural light. Revealingly, it’s

Laura Gascoigne

Marital tensions

Bauhaus 1919–1933, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, until 17 February With all the ‘boundary-blurring’ going on in contemporary art, the old distinction between art and craft ought to be history. But snobbism is apparently so hard-wired into our aesthetic psyche that the distinction has managed to survive by appealing to the Wildean doctrine, ‘All art is quite useless.’ If something has a use, the theory seems to go, it isn’t art: if it’s useless, it’s in with a chance. The new Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art — mima for short — set out with a mission to show arts and crafts under the same roof. Its reasons are historic: its

Deborah Ross

Insight denied

Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon on 8 December 1980 as he returned to his New York home after a recording session. As Lennon entered his apartment building, Chapman drew a pistol, called out to Lennon, then shot him several times. This film, based on Chapman’s own journals as well as various transcripts, is told almost entirely in Chapman’s own words, beginning with an opening, raspy voiceover that goes: ‘There was no emotion in my blood, there was no anger, there was nothing. It was dead silence in my brain; dead cold quiet. He looked at me, he looked past me. And then I heard a voice in my head.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Bitter sweets

Happy Christmas, New End The Seagull; King Lear, New London A blast of seasonal cheer at the New End Theatre. Paul Birtill’s bitter and hilarious family satire, Happy Christmas, starts like a subversive salute to The Homecoming. Upwardly mobile John introduces his posh fiancée Mary to his dysfunctional all-male family. The script is crammed with offbeat gags. ‘Strange taxi-driver,’ giggles Mary as she enters; ‘do you really think his granddad was on the Titanic?’ She refuses to be cowed by John’s ghastly brothers. Kenny is a workshy alcoholic — ‘There’s an art to being on the dole’ — who immediately bums a tenner off her and later rifles through her

Giannandrea Poesio

Rubies to the rescue

George Balanchine’s Jewels is an ideal acquisition for the Royal Ballet, for the evening-long work provides the artists with a stimulating stylistic and technical challenge. Created in 1967, this triptych of independent dance episodes was inspired by the choreographer’s visit to the New York showrooms of Van Cleef & Arpels. Hence the idea of translating the magic of precious stones such as emeralds, rubies and diamonds into what could easily be regarded as a choreographic compendium of Balanchine’s most distinctive traits. In Emeralds, Fauré’s subdued music underscores a choreographic layout that, though never dynamically explosive, stands out for a visually engaging game of contrasts between angular, staccato movements and smoother

Charles Spencer

Sound and fury

I went out on the razzle with a bunch of reformed drunks last weekend. God, it was fun. The aim was a serious walk, eleven and a half miles, kicking off from Eastbourne, walking over Beachy Head and the Seven Sisters, before doing a sharp right for the final slog to the village of Alfriston and supper. As I motored down to Eastbourne, listening to dear old Brian Matthew’s delightful Sounds of the Sixties on Radio Two, the sun was shining, the sky was an eggshell blue, God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. We met up at Eastbourne station, eight of us in all,

Michael Tanner

Breaking hearts

The Rake’s Progress, Royal College of Music; The Turn of the Screw, English National Opera The Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre is the ideal size for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, indeed the ideal size for almost every opera I can think of until the first third of the 19th century. What must make it appealing for young singers is that they can sing without straining, that every word can be heard, and that their expressions are visible to everyone in the audience — but of course that deprives them of excuses, too. Not that there was much need of excuses for the second cast of the Rake. First, I

Kate Chisholm

Prepare and reflect

The onset of Advent in the last days of November is supposed to be the herald of great joy at the jollities to come, but for most of us who have left childhood behind it seems to have become a season of dread. How to get through all that shopping and scribbling of cards with the same old time-worn message, ‘Another year gone and still nothing done’? Worse still, all those dreadful parties, fuelled by gassy champagne and greasy snacks. All I want to do, as soon as the leaves fall and the nights draw in, is to go into hibernation, and it requires a superhuman effort to venture out

Simon Hoggart

Dark doings in the suburbs

No doubt one reason why British people like Kath & Kim (often on BBC2, now on Living, Thursday) is that it takes the mick out of Australian suburban life. That makes those of us who lead British suburban lives feel superior. But it’s more than that. It’s very funny. It’s worth watching just for the strangulated, aspirational accents (‘pul-oyse’, ‘luck at moy’), which are a source of delight to Australians, too, as you’ll see on their website, kathandkim.com. On the surface it’s just another family sitcom, but it’s more subtle than the norm, and at times rather dark. Kath is a bubble-haired but not bubble-headed divorcee, recently remarried to Kel

Wednesday

Henrietta Bredin

The Suffolk Way

I spent last weekend at the Aldeburgh Documentary Festival and it’s an event I can thoroughly recommend. It’s been going for 13 years now, with a programme devised by Craig Brown, and the roll-call of speakers it attracts is hugely impressive. On a blowy wet Suffolk day it’s extraordinary to be able to take refuge in the Aldeburgh Cinema and find, up on the stage in front of you, behind a slightly rickety round table, lit by a standard lamp with a dusty pleated shade that looks as if it came from the sitting-room of someone’s great-aunt (and probably did), Libby Purves and Max Hastings, talking about the challenges of

Saturday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Conquests and coffins

On Tuesday Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor take on Othello at the Donmar. If the show hasn’t sold out already, it soon will. Doubtless the starry cast will help shift a lot of tickets but so will the play’s peculiar ‘self-rationing’ effect. Of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies, Othello is the least often revived. The play has always been particularly problematic, not because it’s bad — though in parts it is — but because it’s so outstandingly good. The final act is perhaps the finest piece of pure theatre ever written, a sublime blend of nail-biting suspense, heartbreaking pathos and triple-fortissimo lyrical effects. That parade of virtues more than compensates for

Andrew Lambirth

Sex with no appeal

What has come to be known as the Sex Show at the Barbican has received mixed reports. Some people dismiss it out of hand (and unseen) while others profess to enjoy it immensely. One painter I know loved it, but then he is a voyeur both by profession and inclination. I approached it with an open mind, ready to be seduced (if need be, and strictly for the sake of my readers) but found myself all too soon turning judgmental, as critics tend to do. I also found myself thirsting for an oasis of subtlety among the deserts of brashness: thankfully, there are real works of art here interrupting the

John McEwen

Blast from the past

Percy Wyndham Lewis 1882–1957, Design Centre, Rugby School, until 8 December In the 1915 Vorticist Manifesto, published in the movement’s magazine Blast, Wyndham Lewis (he dropped Percy) wrote: Lewis is one of them, as this first-rate exhibition at his alma mater — he was a pupil for two years from 1897 — amply demonstrates. It is the sole commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of this artist writer, who is comparable only with that other double-yolked exception to the rules, William Blake, one of his heroes, born 250 years ago this 28 November. Lewis will forever be associated with Vorticism, an artistic rebellion intended to wake England from

Harry Mount

Last farewells

Just outside Florence’s city walls, marooned in the middle of a huge great ring road, lies a foreign field that is for ever England. Well, it’s really for ever Switzerland. The English Cemetery of Florence is owned by the Swiss Reformed Evangelical Church and is officially called the Protestant Cemetery of Florence. But, because the English presence looms so large in Florence, the Florentines call it the Cimitero degli Inglesi. Certainly, most of the 1,700 dead interred since the cemetery’s foundation in 1827 are British, with many fewer Swiss, Americans, Russians and Protestant Italians. There are still 70 x 70 cm plots for urns available, now open to anyone of

Raffaella Barker

Shine on you crazy diamond

The ambulance creeps to a halt outside the Brixton Academy at 9.15 on the evening of Amy Winehouse’s second London gig on Friday and is greeted with a ripple of excitement by the crowd. ‘She’s arrived’ is the whisper through the queue. And whether by this means or another, Amy does indeed arrive, beetling on to the stage in drainpipe jeans and a T-shirt, her embonpoint fabulous, her hair leaning crazily like an exotic fruit somewhat behind the rest of her. She pats her chest, perhaps for comfort or to see if it is still there, takes a swig of a big drink, and her smoky sexy treacle-dark voice vaults

Deborah Ross

Traditional fare

As the holiday season is all but upon us, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on Christmas movies of the past and the standards that have been set. There was one called Jingle All the Way that I liked very much indeed. It was about a man of foreign heritage who spoke in a heavy accent and had to go shopping for a Turbo Man toy for his son. This man was most amusing as he kept falling over into a fountain and even dropped a pile of packages on to a lady’s head and broke her hat. There was also a postman in the film who

Michael Tanner

Good humour, bad taste

L’Elisir d’amore; Das Wunder del Heliane After not seeing Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore for years, I went to two new productions of it in five days. The Glyndebourne one, which I reported on last week, is admirable, but the Royal Opera production is in some ways better still. That surprised me, because the director is Laurent Pelly, who also designs the costumes, with Donate Marchand, and the sets are by Chantal Thomas. That was the team responsible for La fille du régiment, the enormous success at the beginning of the year which I found so irritating, though almost everyone else left holding their ribs from an evening of unmitigated hilarity. In