Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Roger Kimball

Splendid isolation | 22 September 2007

It is not surprising that Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is an immensely popular artist. His pleasing deployment of colour and easy-going presentation of the paraphernalia of everyday life give his work an immediate warmth and likeability. His muted palette, careful modulation of hues, and soft-edged precision are a recipe for visual charm. Considered simply as aesthetic objects, Hopper’s pictures make few demands: they are, on the contrary, quietly inveigling, almost seductive in their plain-as-day obviousness. And if we’ve never seen diners or drugstores or city streets exactly like the ones that Hopper paints, we’ve seen ones that remind us of them — or vice versa. Hopper seems to give us the

Michael Tanner

A neglected master

Opera: Iphigénie en Tauride, Royal Opera House; Romeo und Juliet, St John’s Iphigénie en Tauride Royal Opera House Romeo und Juliet St John’s It is astonishing that Gluck achieves such greatness with such limited musical resources. For me he ranks with the top four or five operatic composers, yet he remains a permanently semi-neglected figure. Elaine Padmore, the Royal Opera’s director of opera, begins her welcoming note in the programme, ‘It is all too seldom that Gluck’s operas appear in our schedules’ and then semi-apologetically explains that the new production of Iphigénie en Tauride is being mounted ‘as a preface to our Ring cycles this autumn’, a piece of condescension

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Treasure hunt

No idea why, but the hunt is on for lost 20th-century masterpieces. Michael Attenborough is searching for gold at the Almeida and Matthew Dunster has his pan in the stream at the Young Vic. Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding is an adaption of her 1946 bestselling novel. We’re in the Deep South where romantic tomboy Frankie (energetically played by Flora Spencer-Longhurst) wants to run away from home and begin a new life with her elder brother. Frankie’s character, depending on your point of view, is an adorable free spirit or an irksome little whinger who deserves to be clattered over the head with a horseshoe. The play’s structure

Patrick Carnegy

Making waves

Between the towering majesty of Greene King’s brewery and its bottling plant in Bury St Edmunds nestles the Georgian gem of the Theatre Royal. Built in 1819 by William Wilkins (architect of the National Gallery) and now reopening after a £5 million restoration, its survival is something of a miracle. From 1925 it was effectively swallowed by the brewery when it was used as a barrel store. Reclaimed in 1965, it remains the sole surviving working theatre from the Regency period. The new and brilliantly executed refurbishment strikes an ideal balance between fidelity to Wilkins’s exquisitely proportioned semi-circular auditorium and the modernising provision of 360 comfortable seats (the original theatre

James Delingpole James Delingpole

True grit | 22 September 2007

At the launch of Patrick Bishop’s 3 Para at the Cavalry and Guards Club last week, I met some of the boys who’ve been doing their bit in Helmand. At the launch of Patrick Bishop’s 3 Para at the Cavalry and Guards Club last week, I met some of the boys who’ve been doing their bit in Helmand. God, they looked tough, with a keen, frankly rather unnerving, glint in their eye which set them dramatically apart from all us milksop civvies. One senior NCO told me what a thrill it had been when for the first time in 26 years’ service he’d finally been able to give the command

Saturday

Robert Gorelangton

Old gold

Warren Mitchell is lying on an air mattress in rehearsals. He’s 81 and in constant pain, made worse by a recent operation. Warren Mitchell is lying on an air mattress in rehearsals. He’s 81 and in constant pain, made worse by a recent operation. He looks very tired, very old and I wondered, hauling him up off the floor by his wrists, whether he’d make it through our interview, let alone a ten-week tour. Why on earth isn’t he at home with his feet up instead of rehearsing all day long? Doesn’t his wife object? He says, slowly and with effort, ‘Yes, my wife does object; she says, “You’re not

Andrew Lambirth

Feat of clay

The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army, British Museum, Sponsored by Morgan Stanley Here’s a show to pull in the public. More than 100,000 advance tickets already sold (Michelangelo’s drawings, though popular, sold only a fifth of that before it opened), and so much media coverage you scarcely need my review. Except, of course, that most of what passes for reporting is ill-informed and simply parrots the party line of press release and salesmanship. In other words, it’s just another form of advertising, which is why the art institutions of our country are desperate to get it — the life-support system of free publicity apparently necessary to the economic survival of

Matthew Dancona

Back to basics | 15 September 2007

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. But not with Sir Elton John, who last week brought the Red Piano Show that has thrilled audiences at Caesar’s Palace for two years to London’s O2 Centre. While not yet etched in legend quite as deeply as Sinatra’s residency at the Sands, or Elvis’s performances at the Las Vegas Hilton, this was still pretty amazing stuff, not least because this particular knight was only performing on this particular night. Sir Elton has made a bit of a thing in recent years of going ‘back to basics’, especially with his excellent 2001 album, Songs from the West Coast, which pared down to its

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Revelatory Richie

Theatre: Lone Star & Pvt. Wars, King’s Head; We The People, Globe; All About My Mother, Old Vic The King’s Head has a deserved hit on its hands with a James McLure double bill about soldiers haunted by Vietnam. Emasculation is the linking theme and the scripts dance nimbly between the opposing poles of pathos and high comedy. James Jagger (handsome boy, highly watchable, famous dad) has a very promising line in wry comedy. But the real revelation here, to me at least, is Shane Richie, whom I last saw hosting game shows on telly. I thought that’s all he did. But what an actor. His two performances are expertly

Deborah Ross

Not great western

3:10 to Yuma has everything you might want from a western apart from anything original or interesting, and as for Russell Crowe, he’s actually pretty crap. Obviously, I can’t say what the director, James Mangold (Walk the Line), who apparently fought hard to make this project, was thinking of. What shopping to get in on his way home? Do we need milk? Cat food? But the result is both dull and deeply unnecessary; a stinker. This is a remake of the 1957 film of the same name (starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin) and while life is too short to get all het up about remakes — there is nothing

Michael Tanner

Musical youth

British Youth Opera celebrates its 21st birthday season with its annual two productions at the Peacock Theatre: this year one is reasonably successful and one a triumph. The moderate success is The Magic Flute, in Jeremy Sams’s sharp translation. Flute is a work which students and young singers go for whenever possible (this is the fourth production BYO has mounted), yet it is extremely taxing, in several ways. At least three of the roles are almost impossible for anyone to sing very well, and the reams of spoken dialogue, in whichever language the opera is being performed in, seem to present a challenge few singers can rise to. The differences

Kate Chisholm

Play school

Catch ’em young makes sense if you’re selling a product, an organisation or a belief system. Catch ’em young makes sense if you’re selling a product, an organisation or a belief system. And the BBC has never lagged behind the commercial broadcasters and their advertisers in this regard. From its inception children’s programming was seen as crucial to its output. Dutifully at five o’clock, just in time for family tea, Children’s Hour began on the Home Service, with a medley of dramas, quiz shows, news bulletins designed to entrance five- to 15-year-olds. (Does anyone else remember the inimitable voice of Derek McCulloch as Larry the Lamb, or the gravelly tones

Simon Hoggart

Raising Reith

Watching television as a critic is an artificial way of watching television. For the most part we see DVDs supplied by the television companies. We start and finish when we like. If the phone rings, we don’t groan and bark ‘yes?’ — we can press pause and settle down for a leisurely chat about our double-glazing needs. If we miss part of a programme, we can catch it again. We are a little like those restaurant reviewers who write: ‘Dinner for two, with a glass of champagne and a bottle of Volnay, came to a very reasonable £165,’ because they aren’t paying. We are privileged. In the same way we

Friday

The Spectator

The pick of the weekend’s films

If you’re planning a visit to the cinema this weekend, I recommend you bypass the  cold, albeit visually impressive, ‘Atonement’, in favour of  Julie Delpy’s first effort as an actor, writer and director, ‘2 Days in Paris’.  The premise is simple: a couple round off a tour Europe by spending two days with the girl’s parents in the ‘city of love’, hoping to inject fresh life into their flagging relationship.  Not everything goes according to plan as the boyfriend, played by the relatively unknown Adam Goldberg grows increasingly troubled by his girlfriend’s past and swelling number of ex-lovers.  It may sound like you’ve seen it all before – fans of

Thursday

Saturday

Henry Sands

How I was saved from Mongolian torture

My 12-year-old sister shouted, ‘Come and watch this TV programme, you’ll love it. It is all about naked men trying to prove how tough they are.’ She was right, I did like it, so much so that at the end, when applicants were invited to apply for the second series, I filled in the online form immediately. The programme was Last Man Standing and involved six contestants travelling the world to live with tribes for two weeks. At the end of each show they fought members of the tribe using the tribes’ traditional form of combat. They had stick fighting with Zulu warriors in South Africa and wrestling with nomads

Henrietta Bredin

The Wagner effect

Henrietta Bredin has put together a series of events to celebrate the Royal Opera House’s Ring cycle It is with considerable trepidation that I venture to write about Richard Wagner in these pages, considering that in doing so I am following a trail well blazed by Bernard Levin — a passionate and lushly articulate devotee — and that no fewer than three highly eminent Wagner scholars are current contributors: Michael Tanner, Patrick Carnegy and Robin Holloway. However, I shall take my courage in both hands as I am in the final throes of a project I was asked to take on by the Royal Opera House just over a year

Andrew Lambirth

Beguiling mix

Exhibitions: Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach’s ‘Adam and Eve’; Work, Rest & Play Amazingly, the Courtauld can claim to have mounted the first exhibition in England devoted to Lucas Cranach the Elder (c.1472–1553). He’s not an artist we know at all well here, though one or two images will be familiar from reproduction, probably elegant, elongated and slightly heraldic full-length portraits, or glimmering erotic nudes. There’s something very individual and instantly recognisable about his images, an aura of self-containment which is based on a decorative unity which looks back to Gothic art. This is balanced by the new naturalism of the German Renaissance. Cranach employed landscape elements (in the wake

Michael Kennedy

Fighting Finn

Where does Sibelius stand today? Twenty years ago, the answer would have been not very high. Today, 50 years after his death, I think it would be ‘on the up’ again, especially as we now know not just the symphonies and tone-poems but also the wonderful songs in performances by Karita Mattila, Soile Isokoski, Anne Sofie von Otter and Jorma Hynninen. In Britain during the first half of the 20th century Sibelius was regarded as the symphonic heir to Beethoven. There was no mention of Mahler and Bruckner in those days, except in very restricted circles. It almost seemed as if Sibelius was an honorary Englishman. The composer had first

Marcus Berkmann

Past perfect | 8 September 2007

I see Squeeze have reformed and are touring again. In fact, there don’t seem to be many bands who haven’t reformed and aren’t touring again. Out there on the road: that’s where the cash is. There seems to be a particular process here. 1. Band splits up in a spirit of mutual enmity and recrimination. 2. Principals embark on solo careers of varying success. 3. World forgets about band. 4. Principals, interviewed in rock press, express undying hatred for each other. 5. Accountant has quiet word in ear. 6. Fifty-date world tour is announced. It’s strange to think that, 20 years or so ago, bands toured to promote the record.