Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Simple minds

This film is described on the posters as ‘a powerful and gripping story that digs behind the news, the politics and a nation divided to explore the human consequences of a complicated war’. Should you encounter this poster and should you have a marker pen upon you, you may wish to add graffiti beneath: ‘You wish.’ Is this vandalism? I would not consider it so. I would consider it only fair that the British cinema-going public is warned in this way. And while you are there, you may even wish to add: ‘This is tedious and insulting and barely even a story.’ Perhaps it was made more with an American

Kate Chisholm

Czech mates

Solo behind the Iron Curtain (Radio Four), International Radio Playwriting Competition (BBC World Service)  ‘I was pretty sure I was being followed,’ he said in that unforgettably sleek drawl. We are in Prague at the height of the Cold War in 1968 and Robert Vaughn, aka Mr Napoleon Solo, is under surveillance. Cue blazing trumpets and a Hammer organ. The man from U.N.C.L.E. (there was a time when every teenager in the land could have told you immediately what those initials stood for) is making a second world war film in the Czech capital with his pals from Hollywood, George Segal and Ben Gazzara, just as Dubcek is being told

Simon Hoggart

Dreaming with Stephen

Joe’s Palace (BBC1),  A Room with a View (ITV), River Cottage: Gone Fishing (Channel 4) The word ‘dream’ has different meanings, as in the greetings card: ‘May all your dreams come true, except the one about the giant hairy spiders’. Martin Luther King never said, ‘Brothers and sisters, I have a dream, and in this dream I am shipwrecked with my wife’s sister, with 2,000 tins of spinach, and for some reason Doris Day is there as well…’ ‘Dream’ meaning ‘longed-for desire’ is, I suppose, short for day-dream, in which you are in control of the fantasy. Most real dreams consist only of bizarre and surreal situations, meaningless juxtapositions. Sometimes,

Saturday

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Glutton for punishment

Act one, scene one The curtain opens on the offices of The Spectator magazine, London SW1, where a woman stands, stage left, staring at a telephone. A clock on the wall says 7.15. Something about the woman’s demeanour suggests it to be p.m. How long can she look at a phone? Just as the audience is beginning to wonder, the woman sighs, picks up a sheaf of papers from the desk and starts to read out loud: Me: Tom Hollander, actor, born 1967. Read English at Cambridge. TV and film credits include: Absolutely Fabulous, Martha, Meet Daniel and Laurence, Gosford Park, The Lost Prince and Pride and Prejudice…Pirates of the

Andrew Lambirth

Glowing in the dark

The latest exhibition in the grim dungeon of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing actually looks rather splendid. After a slow start, this tribute to later Renaissance Siena blossoms forth — despite the dim lighting — into real magnificence. It brings together more than a hundred exhibits, mostly paintings and drawings, but including sculpture, ceramics and manuscripts, in a well-designed and skilfully installed display which focuses on the Sienese achievement from 1460 to 1530. I suppose if people think of Sienese painters, they think of Duccio, the Lorenzetti brothers, Simone Martini and Sassetta, all of whom were dead before the period covered by this exhibition begins. Renaissance art history is dominated

Jane Rye

How others see us

Exhibitions 2: British Vision: Observation and Imagination in British Art 1750–1950 This stunning, and constantly surprising, exhibition is the brainchild, or love child even, of the Flemish art historian Robert Hoozee, author of the first Constable catalogue raisonné and director of the Museum of Fine Art in Ghent. He regrets that ‘British art is still a well-kept secret on the European mainland’ — or as Timothy Hyman (with John Gage one of two specialist British advisers) puts it, ‘the least explored wing of the European treasure house’. It begins in the mid-18th century when, generally speaking, we stopped importing art and artists from the continent and began to develop an

Michael Tanner

New order

Opera: Siegfried; Götterdämmerung, Royal Opera Siegfried is in some ways the most complex of the Ring dramas, showing us alternately, and then simultaneously, the old order recognising or/and resisting its need of replacement, and the new order beginning to emerge, but with no consciousness of what its purpose is — for Wagner much of the allure of Siegfried is his total lack of self-awareness. The old order, in the figures of the Wanderer/Wotan, Alberich, Fafner and Mime, is awarded music that makes one sorely regret its passing; we are familiar with it from the previous two dramas, but in Siegfried this music undergoes new and fascinating transformations and combinations, as

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Losing the plot

Theatre: The Country Wife, Haymarket; Rent, Duke of York’s A rarity at the Haymarket. A new production of a straight play. Such is the despair over the creeping musicalisation of the West End that this feels less like a review and more like a life-and-death prognosis on a stricken prince whose wellbeing has become an obsessive hobby among theatre critics and other intellectual pseuds. First the bad news. William Wycherley’s 332-year-old sex romp is about as entertaining as I would be if I were 332. The plot is dazzlingly crass. Horner, a self-adoring womaniser, returns home from a spell in France and spreads the rumour that he has lost his

Peter Phillips

Do it yourself

Vanity publishing is all the rage these days. Not long ago the idea of putting out something by yourself under an independent label, owned by yourself or one of your many dependents, was considered to be rather shoddy. There was really no replacement for winning a contract (important words) with one of the ‘majors’, whether record label or publishing house. The acumen of the people who ran these monolithic enterprises was held to be beyond reproach, whose glory reflected back on to the artists and writers they invited to join them. These ‘majors’ are no longer held in such high respect. Everyone knows that the classical record labels who used

Deborah Ross

Poor Cate

Already, the word is out that Elizabeth: The Golden Age isn’t up to much, and it isn’t. It may even be a dog’s dinner although, I should stress, not our dog’s dinner. Our dog, Woofie, likes sushi, which he eats tidily with chopsticks before cracking the top of his crème brûlée with a teaspoon. You’ve never met a dog more particular. But I would certainly use ‘dog’s dinner’ in the way it is generally meant, as in such a mess. Now, the question is: where to start? OK, how about the paralysing banality of the supposedly romantic scenes? How about the Queen inspecting her face in the mirror and berating

Marcus Berkmann

Pause for thought

With ever longer gaps between albums, it’s becoming difficult to identify which rock stars are just having a quick lie-down, and which are actually missing in action. Retirement: now that is a bold career move. There must be a few old rockers currently eyeing the example of Joni Mitchell, who retired very noisily some years ago, saying she’d had it up to here with the music business, and is now back with a new album, a ballet, a new range of Joni action figures and maybe a fragrance or two to follow. It’s probably more sensible just to ease quietly out of the picture, which at least gives you the

Giannandrea Poesio

Blinking marvellous

According to Tom Roden, one half of New Art Club’s dynamic duo, ‘audience participation is s**t’. I could not agree more, especially since public involvement has become the trite last resort many performance-makers turn to when short of ideas. Yet, if it is well handled, it can still work marvels, as the New Art Club’s The Visible Men demonstrated last Saturday. The work, non-stop comedy pyrotechnics and cutting-edge dancing, relies on a disarmingly simple though effective idea: viewers are told to open and close their eyes. In this way, the actions performed on stage by the two artists appear as frames of a movie which develops in a madcap sort

Kate Chisholm

Conversation pieces | 3 November 2007

There’s an endless amount of ‘chat’ on radio and TV, but how much ‘conversation’? A recent book by an American, Stephen Miller, reminds us of the difference between them, and how much we have lost by our obsession with argument, obfuscation, self-revelation, or should I say self-deception. Conversation, argues Miller in his thought-provoking book on the subject (published by Yale), used to be regarded as one of the arts. It should be an intellectual adventure, a chance to extend your experience of life, experiment with ideas, flex your wits, improve your understanding, as well as a source of pleasure and delight. It once was. ‘Honest conversation,’ says Dr Johnson, prevents

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Young Muslim Britain

Peter Kosminsky’s Britz (Channel 4, Wednesday and Thursday) was heavily flagged beforehand as a drama that was going to annoy a lot of people. Naturally, I assumed that one of those people would be me. It came in two parts, the first telling the story of Sohail, a young Bradford Muslim recruited by MI5, the second about his sister, Nasima, who, would you credit it, becomes a suicide bomber. At the end, everyone dies. Kosminsky based it on interviews with British Muslims in ‘Leeds, Bradford, the Midlands and London’, though not, I suspect, with many people from MI5. Which is to say that the first episode felt more like Spooks

Thursday

Henrietta Bredin

Edmund Tracey RIP

Memorial services. Difficult to get right but potentially celebratory, contemplative, comforting and spiritually sustaining. Earlier today, St Paul’s Covent Garden saw a gathering that was all of those things, in memory of Edmund Tracey, a wise, witty and gloriously cultivated man, Literary Manager for many years at Sadler’s Wells, then at English National Opera. He worked in happier times for that beleaguered company and a splendid assembly of singers, conductors, directors and numerous others came together to celebrate him. I can think of fewer more thrilling experiences than adding one’s own piping tones in ‘Immortal invisible’ to the soaring notes of Dames Josephine Barstow and Anne Evans, backed up by

Henrietta Bredin

Deserved applause

Has there been enough about Wagner in the Spec lately? Well, just one tiny snippet more. Last night at the Royal Opera House saw what was possibly John Tomlinson’s farewell performance in the role of Wotan/the Wanderer in Siegfried, the third opera in the Ring cycle. Taking the place of Bryn Terfel he has proved himself resoundingly and thrillingly to be, as he has been for some years now, the great Wotan of our day. And I shouldn’t be at all surprised if he doesn’t relinquish that role quite yet. The reception he received from the audience at the end of the performance made the hairs on the back of

Wednesday

Matthew Dancona

Unmissable drama

I was lucky enough to see Shadowlands at the Wyndham’s Theatre this week and, if you haven’t been, you really should.  William Nicholson’s play, originally a TV drama now best known for the movie version starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, is powerful stuff, a demanding distillation of C.S. Lewis’s personal battle with the problem of theodicy: why does a supposedly loving God allow suffering? Charles Dance and Janie Dee are great as Lewis and Joy Gresham, the American divorcee with whom the ultimate Oxford bachelor found himself hopelessly in love and whom he nursed as she died from cancer. There are also fabulous performances from John Standing as Professor

Saturday

Matthew Dancona

Rats to product placement

The magic of Pixar films – especially the Toy Story duet and The Incredibles – is that they appeal to adults as well as the children at whom they are primarily aimed. The latest creation of the CGI giant, Ratatouille, is arguably the best so far, and I certainly enjoyed it as much as my two young sons. No surprise then to read in today’s Indy that there is a run on rats in the nation’s pet stores. Product placement works at every level, it seems. I am just glad that we already have two gerbils.

Matthew Dancona

Matt Suggests

BOOK Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power by Robert Dallek: The double biography is a genre that, in the hands of a master, can shed fresh light on the most familiar materials. Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin is the example nonpareil and, more recently, Andrew Roberts has produced splendid volumes on (for example) Napoleon and Wellington. Funnily enough, I attended a lunch in Kissinger’s honour at Andrew’s house recently, as I was ploughing my way through Dallek’s majestic book which shows how the lives of these two very different men were interwoven and shaped the destiny of America in the second half of the twentieth century. Reading of Nixon’s hatred

Andrew Lambirth

A well-kept secret

One of the great things about having an area of specialism is the discovery of a new aspect to it. Since my teens, I have developed a particular interest in 20th-century British art, encouraged initially by a brilliant art teacher and by the writings of Sir John Rothenstein, quondam director of the Tate Gallery. Well, it’s a big area to cover, so for me new things are emerging all the time as my knowledge extends and my tastes change and develop. Charles Mahoney (1903–68) is one of those artists who had somehow slipped through the net of connections and cross-references I have gradually built up over 30 years of reading