Arts Reviews Archives

Saturday

1 Dec 2007

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

Lloyd Evans

Lunatics at large

The Dysfunckshonalz!; Some Kind of Bliss; William Blake’s Divine Humanity The spirit of punk and its exhilarating lunacies are brilliantly captured in a new show at the Bush. Mike Packer’s affectionate satire tells the story of The Dysfunckshonalz, a major punk band of 1977, who 30 years on are approached by an American bank eager to use their best-known song to promote a new credit card. Bribed with a mountain of cash, the middle-aged stars fly to America to reprise their act. But at the debut gig their singer, Billy Abortion, reverts to his punk roots and sabotages the show by stabbing himself on stage and collapsing in a pool

Kate Chisholm

Radical prophet

It’s not what you think, we were warned by Jenny Uglow, the far-seeing biographer of Hogarth and Elizabeth Gaskell. Those ‘dark Satanic mills’ and ‘mountains green’ of William Blake’s epic poem were never intended as an anthem in praise of England’s democratic virtues. Blake was neither a conservative, nor nostalgic for an imaginary golden past. On the contrary, he was a republican and a dissenter; an ardent believer in the necessity for personal, social and sexual liberty. In the verses that have become known as ‘Jerusalem’ he was provoking his readers, warning them that the England of their time was anything but a pleasant land for the vast majority of

James Delingpole

Royal treatment | 1 December 2007

On the very night that Monarch: The Royal Family at Work (BBC1, Monday) was being broadcast whom should I bump into at the Pen International quiz at the Café Royal in the queue for the coats but Stephen Lambert. Lambert, you may remember, was the head of the independent production company RDF who personally edited that dodgy reel preview which seemed to show the Queen walking out in a huff from a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz, when in real life she hadn’t. As a result, he had to step down at RDF, while Peter Fincham lost his job as controller of the BBC, and dark things were muttered about

Tuesday

27 Nov 2007

Henrietta Bredin

Quiz night

The competitive spirit never ceases to amaze me and it was flamboyantly evident last night at a gathering in Hammersmith Town Hall to raise funds for RAPT, the Rehabilitation for Addicted Prisoners Trust. In what has now become a popular and lucrative annual event, people buy seats at tables named after different prisons – we were on HMP Parkhurst – and compete fiercely in a quiz with questions set by Judith Keppel of Who Wants to be a Millionaire fame and chaired urbanely, and occasionally quite strictly, by Trevor McDonald. Rivalry between tables was pretty fierce but frustration flared within teams as well, when people who were convinced they had

Saturday

24 Nov 2007

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Screen saver

Igor Toronyi-Lalic on the important role opera played in the early days of cinema In 1978, the Swiss impresario Rolf Liebermann picked the veteran American director Joseph Losey to direct a film adaptation of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. At that point they hadn’t yet met or spoken but Liebermann, having passed over Franco Zeffirelli and Patrice Chéreau, must have felt pretty confidant that Losey was the right man for the job. When they finally came together, Liebermann was horrified. Losey had never heard Don Giovanni and considered Verdi and Wagner boring. To prove to him it wasn’t, Liebermann dragged Losey to the Paris Opéra where he was director. Before the

Andrew Lambirth

Domestic harmony

Home and Garden: Domestic Spaces in Paintings 1960–2004; Geffrye Museum, Kingsland Road, E2, until 4 February 2008 The final part of a quartet of exhibitions devoted to the subject of Home and Garden, competently supported by a useful catalogue, is currently enlivening the Geffrye Museum in London’s East End. It’s a pleasure to visit: the Geffrye’s permanent display of period rooms is always worth looking at, there’s a garden and restaurant, and downstairs is the still newish space for temporary exhibitions. The visitor is greeted by a pair of paintings at the gallery entrance: on the right, one of the best paintings in the show, Jean Cooke’s striking psychological portrait

Laura Gascoigne

Multiple choice | 24 November 2007

Lynn Painter-Stainers PrizePainters’ Hall, until 1 December Art competitions suffer from a basic problem: how to apply a first-past-the-post system designed for racing to art. In some cases, contestants don’t even qualify for the same event — this year’s Turner Prize, typically, pits film and photography against installation. To avoid this sort of stupidity, the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize — now holding its third exhibition at Painters’ Hall — confines itself to ‘creative representational painting’ displaying ‘the skill of draughtsmanship’. But even this allows for invidious differences of subject, medium and approach. How is it judged? As one of this year’s selectors I happen to know, and without doing a Lynn

Angela Summerfield

Elemental forces

Len Tabner Messum’s, 8 Cork Street, London W1, until 1 December For those of us who live in the British Isles there are two unassailable facts. We are island dwellers who live surrounded by turbulent seas. Our emotional lives, in other words how we experience our existence and express ourselves, often have recourse to rich literary and visual traditions centred on two subjects: the land and the sea. The progenitors of a visual sensibility were Constable and Turner. Both artists pushed the boundaries in terms of how art materials could be handled, and how subject matter, such as farmland, mountains, beaches and the sea, and the intrinsic four elements (air,

Robert Gorelangton

Snowy and friends

Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin is at the Playhouse Theatre, London, 6 December to 12 January; 0870 060 6631. The first time I saw Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin on stage it starred a West Highland white called Chester, playing Snowy. The dog’s is a walk-on part only; he’s rapidly substituted for a talking actor with a shock of white hair. But talk about canine ego-trips! He belonged to the show’s musical director, who told me that Chester soon started to ‘autograph’ the scenery every night before making a stage-door appearance where kids would queue up to stroke him. Chester lapped it up. He was not, it is true, a fox terrier

Lloyd Evans

Musical misfit

Demand for new musicals has reached the point where investors are ready to sink funds into a whole new method of production — the we-can’t-write-a-musical-so-let’s-write-a-musical school of musicals. In the latest effort the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan has been crossbred with the songs of Blondie. A terrible ugliness is born. The songs don’t fit the film and the film doesn’t fit the theatre. Bored housewife, Roberta, mooches around New York looking for romantic kicks while her cold, philandering husband half-heartedly tries to find her. Feeble aims, ghastly people. Susan, the pivotal figure, is an attitude rather than a character, a random parasite whose gimme-all-you-got-and-get-lost outlook is hard to warm

Deborah Ross

Botched job

Tell me, what hope is there left in the world when Harold Pinter, Michael Caine, Kenneth Branagh — and maybe Jude Law, should you wish to count him in — can come together and make a film as sterile, mindless, pointless and wearisome as this? I’d like to bang their heads together. I’d like to know just what they were thinking of. I suppose it looked good on paper, but even so. Once I’d gone beyond gasping at how anything could be this fatally amateurish, even my boredom got bored. Boredom, some say, is the greatest critic of all, although I wouldn’t go that far. Kenneth Tynan was very good,

Michael Tanner

Dual control

Le Nozze di FigaroThe Royal Academy of MusicL’elisir d’amore; Albert Herring Glyndebourne on Tour in Norwich It seems that every opera company that thought it might be a bit naff to stage Le Nozze di Figaro last year has decided that it would be smart to put it on this year, so that I have never seen any opera so often as Figaro during the past ten months — and, if there is any that it’s a good idea to see that often, this is surely the one. The scurry of those opening bars of the overture lifts the spirits as surely as the grandeur of the first bars of

Giannandrea Poesio

Playing safe

Rambert Dance Company, Sadler’s Wells I am more and more convinced that getting easily bored is symptomatic of growing old. Twenty years ago, when I was 24, I stopped being a ballet boy and devoted myself to writing about dance; I seldom suffered from boredom, even when watching delectable rubbish. Nowadays, as soon as I realise that things are not exactly exciting, I plunge into a disheartened state. Indeed, what I consider to be a symptom of age, others might regard as ‘experience’. And, in the end, ‘experience’ is something one acquires only by growing old. We all know that critics are supposed to be cantankerous creatures by default, but