Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

Shiver down the backbone

‘Just relax your fingers. Stick them on the fingerboard around the seventh fret. Bang!’ Jimi Hendrix comes to Radio Three. Even though the stations are slowly morphing into each other, with Michael Morpurgo being read on Radio Two (rather well by Robson Green, apart from his ascent into comically high falsetto every time he has to take on the voice of a woman) and Charles Hazlewood playing Britten alongside Curtis Mayfield also on Two, it’s still a bit of a shock on a Saturday night on Three to stumble across that unmistakable blaze of sound. Had I swapped stations by mistake? But there it is again. Dong, dong chang dong,

Simon Hoggart

True lies

You cannot trust a single frame of any reality television show. I don’t mean they are deliberately mendacious, though some are, but nobody behaves normally when a camera is on them. Take those spontaneous conversations on speakerphone as someone bowls along in the car. You’re talking, you’re wondering if your hair is right, the poor cameraman is scrunched up in the footwell, and you’re trying to drive. It’s as artificial as rhinestone. Also, there’s the menace of the narrative. Television people love narratives; a programme has to tell a story. But most people’s lives aren’t stories at all. One thing happens, then another, and at the end of one month

Friday

The Spectator

Weekend viewing

You can listen to this week’s Spectator / Intelligence Squared debate on whether Britain needs Trident via this link—speakers include Baroness Helena Kennedy and Sir Malcolm Rifkind. We also have video of the Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards, click here if you would like to the watch the ceremony.

Monday

Liz Anderson

There is nothing like a pair of Dames

A pair of dames made last night’s new television adaptation of Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford. Dame Judi and Dame Eileen played the two sisters Matty and Deborah Jenkyns in this terrific 19th-century drama. Eileen Atkins had some wonderful one-liners: ‘Speculation is the enemy of calm’; and ‘Clearly they are not carriage people’, as she saw a family new to the town step down from a hired coach. The rest of the starry cast includes Michael Gambon (yet to be seen), Francesca Annis, Julia McKenzie and Jim Carter and will run on BBC1 for the next four weeks. The period detail, the witty dialogue, the costumes and the sets, plus the top-class

Saturday

Alan Powers

Lines of beauty | 17 November 2007

The date of George Frederick Bodley’s death (1907) offers a partial explanation for a commemorative exhibition, but ‘comes the hour, comes the man’ also applies, and in this case the man is Michael Hall, the editor of Apollo magazine, who for some years has studied Bodley’s work and succeeded in presenting it as a key to understanding many aspects of the late-Victorian mind, rather than simply as the oeuvre of a skilled but possibly rather conventional designer whose successors followed him into a dead end of style. He is the instigator and curator of this small exhibition in the V&A + RIBA Architecture gallery at the V&A. There is a

Michael Tanner

Inspired and not-so-inspired

Reinhard Keiser is not a name that triggers many associations in most opera lovers’ minds, even the most frenzied devotees of the Baroque. He was a big figure in his time, though, and there have been odd recordings of his works, so he ranks with Traetta and Cimarosa from later in the 18th century as someone to arouse curiosity. With each of these composers, as with many others, I have had the experience of turning on the radio and hearing a stretch of their works without knowing what the music was, and finding I had to listen to the end because what I was hearing was impressive enough for me

Michael Henderson

A Buddhist bows out

One of the most gilded careers in our post-war musical life ends next week when Robert Tear sings in public for the last time. At least he thinks it will be the last time. ‘There’s nothing in the diary,’ he says. ‘But I’m not disappointed. After 50 years it is wonderful to be relieved of fear. It has made me believe that life could have been like this for ever!’ Tear is singing the Blind Judge in a concert performance of Erich Korngold’s little-known 1927 opera, Das Wunder der Heliane, at the Royal Festival Hall, and he is clearly enjoying the discovery. ‘Korngold came at the end of a generation,

Matthew Dancona

Pistols pack a punch

‘Anyone in the building under 40?’ asks Johnny Rotten. Yes, I am (just): and, by the looks of things, about 20 others among 3,000-odd punters at the Brixton Academy, come to see the Sex Pistols in their middle-aged prime. Punk isn’t dead. It just drives a people-carrier these days. But age cannot wither these amazing 30-year old songs. The set opens with the sonic attack of ‘Pretty Vacant’–the best pop record ever, in my book–as Steve Jones’s ferocious guitar forms the wall of sound upon which Rotten’s words are sprayed like seething graffiti. It is five years since I last saw the Pistols, and it appears that Jones has been

Deborah Ross

A small jewel

Well, it’s not as good as Monica Ali’s book. I’m not convinced it does the book justice. I didn’t think it captures the book. Is it true to the book? And blah-de-blah-de-blah, but if you want my advice, which you should, as I am very good at advice: ditch the book. This is a film and should be judged as only that: a film. A film adapted from a book is no longer the book, just as milk made into cheese is no longer milk. It’s become something else, in and of itself. So there is really only one question and that question is this: is Brick Lane a good

Charles Spencer

Sweet sounds of the Seventies

Is there a more irritating figure in British public life than Richard Branson? The beard, the cuddly sweaters, the toothy grin, the self-advertisement, the torments of the damned involved in travelling on one of his trains or planes. No news story in recent weeks has cheered me up as much as the one about Branson injuring himself while jumping off the roof of a Las Vegas hotel in yet another of his ridiculous publicity stunts. His wounds weren’t serious but were enough to hurt his pride: the perfect result. I travelled to New York and back with Virgin Atlantic last week. The food was disgusting, the service inattentive and the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Hopeless propaganda

The Arsonists, Royal Court; The Giant, Hampstead; The Bicycle, MenKing’s Head   Strange happenings in theatreland. Three London playhouses have taken it into their heads to mount a sustained attack on the avant garde. Result â” carnage! Careers are in tatters. Reputations have been shredded. Some of these playwrights will never be seen again. In August the Donmar cruelly demonstrated that N.F. Simpson was unworthy of adult attention by staging two of his silliest playlets alongside a slice of tedious cleverness by Michael Frayn. Last month the Royal Court embarrassed Ionesco by putting on his dated sci-fi fantasy, Rhinoceros. Next the Almeida started knocking lumps out of Caryl Churchill

Patrick Carnegy

Conquests and coffins

One of the few certainties about Henry V is that every performance is a political act, or will certainly be read as such. On BBC2’s Newsnight Review the other day, Michael Gove wondered whether there’d been a single production since Olivier’s triumphalist film of 1944 that hadn’t been anti-war, anti-patriotic and anti-heroic. Although that isn’t totally true (see Emma Smith’s superb 2002 CUP edition of the play), it’s near the mark. Famously, or perhaps infamously, Michael Bogdanov’s 1980s version had the English soldiers embark for France under a banner inscribed ‘F**k the Frogs’ and singing ‘’Ere we go, ’ere we go, ’ere we go again’. Henry (Michael Pennington) was a

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Blown away by Napoleon

For much of the summer my brother Dick spends his weekends either as a skirmisher with the Voltigeurs in Napoleon’s Grande Armée or depending on which side needs the extras as a redcoat of the 9th Regiment of Foot. He has frozen his balls off at the battle of Jena. He is fluent in complex early-19th-century musket drill. He even alters his facial hair configurations according to whether or not the soldier he’s playing would or wouldn’t be allowed a beard. Some people think re-enactors are silly. My friends Robert Hardman and Andrew Roberts like to put on a sort of E.L. Wisty voice and tease them thus: ‘By day

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The 42nd’s latest triumph

For once the hype proved accurate. Black Watch, which closed its New York run yesterday, is every bit as good as the reviews, advertising and word of mouth had suggested. It goes to Sydney and Wellington next before returning to the US and Toronto next year (I think the next US venue is Norfolk, Virginia). If you’re in –  or near – any of those cities, you’re in for a treat.

Saturday

Clemency Burtonhill

Clemency Suggests

Books Letters of Ted Hughes – ed. Christopher Reid/Faber Finally! Moving, passionate, angry, funny, striking, brilliant and beautiful beyond belief, the collected letters of one of our greatest poets have now taken pride of place on my bedside table, and may, I suspect, be a permanent addition to the pile. They are extraordinary. For too long Hughes – who is also revealed here as an impassioned pioneer of the environmentalist movement – has suffered under the prying, accusatory eyes of those who would blame him for the successive suicides of Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill; a prime example of what happens when biographical speculation gets in the way of objective

Paul Johnson

A magic moment in the gruesome history of portrait sculpture

The relationship between a great artist and his sitters is a poignant one. But what they say to each other during the long periods of concentrated stillness, on the one hand, and frenzied search for a likeness, on the other, is seldom recorded. We do not know what Leonardo said to the Mona Lisa to evoke her Giaconda Smile. Or what Vermeer, a shadowy figure at all times, told the girl with the pearl earring, to fix her mood of heart-catching, pensive beauty. One feels that Vermeer was as gentle as the touch of his brush, and spoke in barely audible whispers. He was, I think, nervous and easily upset

Andrew Lambirth

Round the galleries

The autumn brings a fine crop of new exhibitions, some of them even full of ‘mellow fruitfulness’. I have been watching the development of Julian Perry’s work over the past ten years with considerable pleasure, but his new show is his best yet. Perry has an eye for the details of suburban living and recreation, for south coast holiday homes, caravan parks and tower blocks. His last show, at Guildhall in 2004, focused on the arboreal delights of Epping Forest. In his new one, A Common Treasury: The Sheds Lost to the Olympiad (Austin/Desmond, Pied Bull Yard, 68/69 Great Russell Street, WC1, until 16 November), Perry turns his attention to

Roderick Conway-Morris

Saints on the move

In August 1766, the printmakers of Augsburg brought a case of plagiarism against the Veneto publishers and printmakers Remondini. One of the witnesses they summoned was Giuseppe Fietta, an itinerant pedlar, who was then doing the rounds of Bavaria selling Remondini’s Santi, or prints of saints. They were very popular with country-folk, Fietta explained, because they were not only cheaper than other prints, but also highly coloured and even decorated with silver and gold. Fietta was one of hundreds of pedlars working for the Remondini, an extraordinarily enterprising workforce that was a cornerstone of the company’s enormous success. The Remondini family began their operation in 1657 in Bassano del Grappa

Michael Tanner

An absence of intimacy

‘Transformed into a lavish pleasure-dome in the heart of Birmingham this dazzling event, with a spectacular design from Vick’s regular collaborator, Paul Brown, will make the auditorium shimmer with all the opulence and decadence of celebrity excess. The timeless story of call-girl Violetta is one of passion, money, sex and death. Having clawed her way out of the gutter, can she maintain her place in the celebrity fast lane with her health wrecked by excess and risky sex?’ That is how Birmingham Opera Company advertised its latest venture, La Traviata, in the gigantic National Interior Arena. Central and lavish the NIA may be, but for a stranger trying to walk

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The road to Auschwitz

Theatre: Lotte’s Journey, Cloud Nine, Joe Guy Beware of plays that open on trains trundling through Europe in the 1940s. You know where they’re heading. The strength of Candida Cave’s new work, Lotte’s Journey, is that it evades cliché by telling the passengers’ stories in reverse. In particular we focus on Charlotte Saloman, a brilliant Jewish artist haunted by the suicide of her mother and grandmother. The script is technically ambitious and takes us from Berlin to Rome and Nice, and covers Saloman’s life from the age of eight when her father explained the cause of her mother’s death as influenza. These large transitions are skilfully handled by Ninon Jerome’s