Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Blood wedding

Theatre people know why America invaded Iraq. To secure the West’s supply of angry plays. Here’s the latest, Baghdad Wedding, which opens with a US pilot mistaking a nuptial party for a column of enemy tanks and — whoopsidaisy — opening fire. Bride and groom are wiped out. Their relatives go into mourning. Then the groom reappears as a ghost in a ripped suit. This isn’t a welcome surprise. Alive, the man was already quite annoying: a tall, dark, handsome, well-connected, womanising alcoholic millionaire who’d just published a critically acclaimed best-selling novel about sodomy. Dead, he’s worse. ‘I’m dead,’ he says at one point, ‘so I can say what I

Kate Chisholm

Blunt edges

I’m not quite sure which of the political weeklies has been the inspiration for His Master’s Voice, the new comedy series on Radio Four (Wednesdays) set in the offices of a true blue magazine, but I can assure you that life at The Blue Touch bears little resemblance to The Spectator. No one at Blue Touch ever seems to do any real work putting the magazine together — there’s no cursing about useless computer systems, no panicky ‘Hold the Front Page’ moments, no heated rows about headlines and cover images, and whether or not it’s OK to be quite so tacky about certain celebrities. The only thing I recognised was

Deborah Ross

Danger, baddie, magic…

Don’t care about Harry Potter. Don’t care about the children who love him. Don’t care about the middle-aged weirdos who read the books on the Tube. (Some muggles are too dumb for shame, even.) Don’t care about J.K. Rowling, although I will ask this about her: why does she always look so miserable? If you were worth £600 million would you look so miserable? Maybe she just pretends to look miserable, so we don’t feel more envious than we already are. Perhaps once she closes her front door behind her she dances down the hall exclaiming, ‘I’m so rich it’s unbelievable; I’m so rich it’s unbelievable’, before snacking on ground-diamond

Michael Tanner

Musical nonsense

My first visit to the made-over Royal Festival Hall was to see a semi-staged production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. It wasn’t an artistic success, as could be judged from the extravagantly genial response of the audience, roaring with laughter that had no trace of nervousness, and applauding one number after another. Sweeney is a failure if it doesn’t alarm you and also lead you to empathise with Sweeney even in the act of slitting throats. At the Festival Hall we had merely another show, and the confused and irritating article in the programme, as to whether it’s an opera or a musical, was rendered redundant by the shallow entertainment it

Laura Gascoigne

Out of this world | 14 July 2007

Masquerade: the work of James Ensor (1860–1949) It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely place for a James Ensor exhibition than the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, the squeaky-clean temple to Edwardian taste in art founded by Viscount Leverhulme on the profits of soap. Among the fragrant creations of Millais, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones, Leighton, Waterhouse and co., the dark imaginings of this Belgian proto-Expressionist look like dirty laundry tipped on to a parlour floor. ‘I feel more English than most of the English artists now slavishly imitating the early Italians,’ Ensor declared in 1900; now here he is holed up with this slavish crew — and to rub

Andrew Lambirth

Serious matters

‘Heath Robinson’s Helpful Solutions’ and ‘Metavisual Tachiste Abstract’ I went with high hopes to the Cartoon Museum. Actually, I think the appellation ‘museum’ rather grand for a couple of rooms off a back street in Bloomsbury, particularly when the real thing — the British Museum — is just round the corner. Still, I can applaud the vision which wants to make a museum for cartoons, even if the reality needs working on. You enter via a cartoon bookshop, i.e., a shop selling funny books, not a funny drawing of a bookshop, and at once humour breaks over you like a wave. Here’s a Donald McGill pen and ink and watercolour

Peter Phillips

More of everything

Peter Phillips on Nicholas Kenyon’s Proms swansong and a lost masterpiece Nicholas Kenyon’s swansong at the Proms this summer is surely the most elaborately complicated, one might say contrapuntally conceived, series of concerts ever staged. Just reading the blurb makes one’s head spin — so many themes, so many anniversaries, so many reasons for paying attention that there comes a point when one might, most ungratefully, just wish that a concert was there because the performers wanted to perform the music they had chosen. But I suppose that if you are to live within the hype of a series this extended (90 concerts and countless fringe activities), you have to

Monday

The Spectator

What matters in the Campbell diaries

If you can’t be bothered ploughing through the Campbell memoirs, BBC2 has done a superb job filleting it. I’ve just had a preview of the three-part documentary starting on Wednesday – complete with his bleeped-out expletives and thoughts on everything from homicide to suicide. Fittingly, it’s from the same production company that did Grumpy Old Men. He reads from his diary, while a narrator and news clips take up the rest of the story. There are lots of shots of Campbell jogging, writing on his desk and staring out the window as if mulling world domination. It’s certainly his side of the story, and doesn’t pretend to be a balanced

Sunday

The Spectator

Nobody does it better

During Terence Stamp’s summing up speech at Live Earth, I very nearly lost the will to live – a self-defeating performance by the actor, given that the whole point of the concert was to rev up our collective instinct for survival. Five minutes in to Terry’s oration, we were longing for a nearby glacier to melt, become a tidal wave and put us out of our misery. How did Michael Caine put up with him as a flatmate for so long? How did they bear it on the set of Superman 2? Just as it seemed that climatic catastrophe could not come too soon, he at last handed over to

Saturday

The Spectator

Live from Live Earth

At Wembley Stadium for Live Earth: host Chris Moyles has just tried to sell a used 4×4 to two billion people watching the great eco-event. The atmosphere is indeed amazing. Uh-oh. Genesis -combined age 380 – have tottered on stage and struck up Turn It On Again. Is this a terrible warning from Al Gore? Unless we cut our carbon emissions at once, all the ancient supergroups will re-form: Yes, ELP, perhaps even (gulp) Jethro Tull. It is a terrifying prospect. Phil Collins is belting out Invisible Touch now. We have a duty to future generations to act.

Simon Hoggart

Insider Dealing

It’s a commonplace these days for satirists and their fans to claim that they have an unnerving ability to know how politicians work behind the scenes. ‘Someone from No. 10 said, “How on earth do you get it spot-on, every time? It’s uncanny.”’ For instance, some years ago Rory Bremner was playing Tony Blair. There was a bowl of fruit on the set, so he picked up an apple and started munching. Apparently Blair (I’m sure you remember him; tall chap, rather unnerving smile) did the same thing in real life, and this convinced the ever paranoid team in Downing Street that there was a mole spying on them. Bremner

Kate Chisholm

Celebrating Stoppard

Strange to think of Tom Stoppard attaining three score years and ten. It seems a mere nanosecond since we were first dazzled by his disturbing take on Shakespeare, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and his plays are still characterised by the tumbling ideas and linguistic foreplay of youthful ingenuity. To celebrate his birthday, BBC Radio has come up with an unusual season of plays that spans the stations from Radio Three to BBC7. This week you could have heard Arcadia and his 15-Minute Hamlet on Radio Four, while on Radio Three the Nightwaves team discussed the extraordinary success of R&G, which was premiered by Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre company at

Charles Spencer

Absolute blast

My computer gave up the ghost last week. I bought it in 1999 and in recent months it has felt a bit like one of those clapped-out spaceships in Dr Who, held together only with wire and willpower as you force it through the space-time continuum. Normally such technical failure would reduce me to fury or tears or both, but I’ve remained eerily calm. I’ve been living on borrowed time for months, and there is a kind of peace about not feeling a constant need to check your emails. I have however missed the web, six words I thought I would never write. But if high tech has died in

Michael Tanner

Hugh Mistake

I thought I was unembarrassable, at any rate with the lights out. ENO’s production of Kismet has proved me wrong. I sat blushing furiously and sweating, when I wasn’t struggling to keep my eyes open and head up. Anyone who thinks — and some people do — that artistic badness is merely a lack of artistic goodness should see this show and admit that they have been decisively refuted. It has every variety of ineptitude, and it isn’t easy to imagine who looked at the script and read the score and still decided it was performable; what is harder still to imagine is how it can ever have been a

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Bourgeoisie bashing

The Pain and the Itch – Royal Court / Small Miracle -Tricycle / The Last Confession -Haymarket The Pain and the Itch Royal Court Small Miracle Tricycle The Last Confession Haymarket Class warfare is at its most vicious and exhilarating when it occurs within classes rather than between them. Just as feminism is a conspiracy by women against women, so liberalism sets different sections of the bourgeoisie against each other. Bruce Norris’s sharp, entertaining and not quite perfect satire The Pain and The Itch dramatises these faultlines. Two couples represent both sides of the divide. Clay and Kelly are likeable, sanctimonious Democrats whose eagerness to treat everyone sensitively is afflicted by

Deborah Ross

Cry Freedom

Edmond 18, Key Cities Edmond Burke (William H. Macy) is middle-aged, middle-American, dully employed, dully married. One evening, on his way home from work, a quasi-mystical whim leads him to consult a fortune-teller who tells him, ‘You are not where you belong.’ The consequences of this are felt later that evening when he says to his wife, ‘I’m going.’ ‘For cigarettes?’ she queries. ‘For ever,’ he replies. He flees. He flees first to a bar where he cries, plaintively, ‘I want to feel like a man.’ Then it’s to Palm Beach where he buys a condo, starts a vegetable garden, plays boules, does yoga, lives happily ever after. Or would

Andrew Lambirth

Gloom and sparkle

As we are constantly reminded, every exhibition in these novelty-obsessed times has to be the first to do something, and the Tate’s rather dreary photo show is no exception. ‘The first major exhibition ever to present a photographic portrait of Britain from the invention of the medium to the present day,’ trumpets the press release. What a rich and varied panoply of images that suggests, and how tawdry and oddly defeated the reality proves to be. Forgive me if I single out only a few photos which seem to express some kind of hope or optimism: the leaden weight of material here is so depressing as to require substantial editing.

Ariane Bankes

The ‘transvestite potter from Essex’

I was intrigued to meet Grayson Perry — who wouldn’t be? I hadn’t known his work before he hit the national headlines in 2003 as one of the artists shortlisted for the Turner Prize, which he subsequently carried off in triumph as his alter ego ‘Claire’, dressed to kill in mauve satin frock with ankle socks and red patent-leather Mary-Jane shoes. Since then, everything I’ve seen or heard indicates a truly original talent, an integrity matched with iconoclastic wit. The ambivalent, often mesmerising beauty of his ceramic vases at Tate Britain was almost upstaged by his extrovert ‘tranny’ persona, and both combined to unsettle the pundits — do pots, even

Monday

The Spectator

Rocking with the Royals

Last night’s Diana concert was ostensibly a tribute to the late princess on what would have been her 46th birthday. But its deeper function was – yet again – to demonstrate the awesome resilience and adaptability of the monarchy. Those who have doubts about Prince Charles need only look at the next generation, the sons Diana left behind, to see that the institution is healthy, porous to new influence and robust in its attitude to the future. In their lack of polish, their honesty and their charm, William and Harry had the crowd at Wembley, and hundreds of millions at home eating out of their hands. Interesting, too, to note

Saturday

The Spectator

Playing modern Britain

I have been trying to work out why the idea of John Simm as the Master in Doctor Who is so compelling. By my calculation, Simm is the eighth actor to play the Doctor’s nemesis, who originally returned to the revived series in the form of Derek Jacobi. Of course, there is innate (not to say topical) appeal in the storyline that concludes in tonight’s season finale: the diabolical Timelord, masquerading as populist Prime Minister Harold Saxon, taking control of the public by manipulating the mobile phone network. But there’s something special about Simm, that was sealed by his performance in the magnificent retro cop drama, Life on Mars. Over