Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Tuesday

The Spectator

What to see this Autumn

If you want to know what’s coming up in the arts this autumn a good place to look is today’s G2, where critics have chosen the ‘50 hottest acts’. The film Atonement, based on Ian McEwan’s novel, with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, opens on 7 September (I’ve seen a preview and loved it). Other recommendations include: the Royal Opera House’s Iphigénie en Tauride (with Simon Keenlyside and Susan Graham); lots of Sibelius in Manchester and London; Millais at Tate Britain and Renaissance Siena at the National Gallery; and Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse at the National Theatre.

Saturday

The Spectator

Naipaul on Walcott

V.S. Naipaul’s essay on Derek Walcott, the great St. Lucian poet, in today’s Guardian review is as eloquent and insightful as one would expect. What caught my eye is a point that Naipaul makes about the whole idea of the  Caribbean as an island paradise. As he writes, that idea of the beauty of the islands (beach and sun and coconut trees) was not as easy as the poet thought. It wasn’t always there, a constant. The idea of beach and sun and sunbathing came in the 1920s, with the cruise ships. (Consciously old-fashioned people, like the writer Evelyn Waugh, born in 1903, refused to sunbathe.) So the idea of island

Matthew Dancona

Rock of ages

Forty years after his first drug bust in 1967, Keith Richards is still testing the limits of the law. But, as one would expect of a 63-year-old, the substances in question have changed over the years. So it was that, before an enraptured audience at the O2 Centre on Tuesday night, the pirate-captain of the Rolling Stones smoked a cigarette. Now that’s what I call rock’n’roll. In an unforgiving light, the Stones of 2007 can look like a collision between delivery vans from a wig shop and a latex factory. But that’s not bad for a quartet with a combined age of 253. When the band formed in 1962, Harold

Robin Holloway

Festival spirit

Perhaps unwisely, the museum at Gloucester prominently displays a large aerial photograph of the city, revealing in one what the shocked pedestrian discovers slowly on foot: the huge proportion of the centre flattened for ghastly car parks, more devastating in their seeming permanence than the recent flooding, of which little trace remained on my four-day visit, so rapid and efficient the cleaning-up. By my third day, domestic tap water was declared safe to drink, restaurants and pubs were operating normally, and the millions of plastic bottles had served their purpose. Most efficient of all was the rescue of this year’s Three Choirs Festival, every event in place (with some changed

Giannandrea Poesio

Speed and panache

A few years ago, the director of a London-based ballet company publicly challenged the way ballet is taught in Britain. More recently, additional havoc was caused by an article by an equally prominent journalist who lamented our schools’ apparent inability to produce first-rate stars. In each instance, British ballet teachers and directors of prestigious ballet schools professed themselves outraged, and replied with vitriolic, though often narrow-minded, letters to the editor and lengthy articles. The lesson to be learnt was clear: stay away from commenting on dance-training in this country if you do not want to open the proverbial can of worms and fall into the (again) proverbial snake-pit. Still, considerations

Patrick Carnegy

Blood and dust

Shakespeare, as we all know, served up English history as entertainment and instruction for the Elizabethans. Factual accuracy was subservient to a view of the jungle truths of sovereignty and political ambition that was as uncomfortable and relevant then as it remains today. The eight major Histories from Richard II to Richard III have been well served by the RSC in recent years. Its millennial sequence began with Samuel West in a wonderfully spare Richard II (directed by the much lamented Steven Pimlott) and concluded with the Henry VIs and Richard III, brilliantly directed by Michael Boyd. This latter tetralogy has become the foundation of the new sequence in the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Crossing the divide

TV or not TV, that is the question pondered by Edinburgh every year. An unseen faultline divides the audiences from the performers. Audiences want to get away from TV while performers — especially comedians — want to embrace it. Les Dennis, who has done telly already, transcends the rift in his new hybrid show which combines drama, mime and cabaret in a way that would never work on the box. Certified Male (St George’s West) is the sentimental story of four businessmen on a bonding holiday in the tropics. Laddish humour abounds. ‘Cover that up,’ says Dennis’s mate as he bares his plump belly, ‘before Friends of the Earth push

Andrew Lambirth

Passionate precision

If you feel strong enough to postpone for a while the pleasures of the bookshop and the restaurant (without which it seems no self-respecting art gallery can exist these days), proceed upstairs at Camden Arts Centre into the light and welcoming hall, where the visitor is offered an introduction to the work of Kenneth and Mary Martin, husband and wife team of abstract artists, once deemed radical and avant-garde, but now somewhat out of fashion. Both came to abstraction relatively late, in the third wave, so to speak, after the Vorticists under Wyndham Lewis had initially ploughed the abstract furrow in England in 1914–18. The second wave was in the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Edinburgh street life

At Edinburgh this year I caught a show I usually miss. The festival attracts a shifting underclass of cadgers, dodgers, chancers and scroungers, and each has a tale to tell that’s as fascinating as any of the ‘real’ entertainment. The show is free. All it takes is a little inquisitiveness. There’s a cobbled lane just north of Princes Street full of cafés, shortbread shops and tartan knick-knackeries. Here the tourists throng and the beggars and buskers follow them. Every ten yards there’s someone rattling a pot or throttling a tune. Beside Frederick Street a trio of student violinists are sawing their way through one of Vivaldi’s elevator classics. Opposite them,

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

You watchin’ me?

In the spirit of Not Reading Books, it’s time to move on to Not Watching Movies. Megan kicks matters off by confessing that, despite loving Marlon Brando, she’s never actually seen On the Waterfront. Not a bad contender. For my part, I’ve never actually seen Gone With the Wind. Or, even more oddly, Taxi Driver. What about you? What are the biggest gaps in your movie watching lives?

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

Yesterday’s world

The hunt is on for the missing first edition of Radio Four’s Today programme, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in October. The hunt is on for the missing first edition of Radio Four’s Today programme, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in October. Radio Four has been broadcasting invitations to the on-air party for months already in an endless series of mock ‘commercials’. But as Paddy O’Connell advised us on Broadcasting House on Sunday the party organisers have discovered a great lacuna in the archives. It’s difficult to believe that any readers of The Spectator are old enough to have been around for those first 20 minutes of ‘topical talks’ introduced

Michael Tanner

Could do better

As part of its reopening season the Royal Festival Hall is staging a month-long run of Carmen Jones, the 1943 musical by Oscar Hammerstein II adapted from Bizet’s Carmen. The show is far more successful than the production of Sweeney Todd which preceded it, partly because a fair amount of progress has been made with the amplification system, though not enough. Now almost all the words are intelligible, but there is still the problem of the sound coming from huge speakers suspended above the stage, and therefore de-locating voices. It took me some time to find where the character whispering an intimate line was, among the moderately dense crowd thronging

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Music and mayhem

Tony Blair — the Musical / Gilded Balloon; Tony! The Blair Musical / Chambers St; Yellow Hands / St George’s West; Jihad: the Musical / Chambers St; The Bacchae / King’s Theatre Here’s the formula for satire at the Fringe. Take a scary concept, stick ‘the musical’ after it and you’ve got a catchy title and an audience. Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam, Osama — all been done before. This year it’s Blair. Twice over, in fact. Like we haven’t had enough of him? Tony Blair — the Musical is so toothless it belongs in an old people’s home. The cast are genial but the presentation is slapdash. Tony’s floppy

Toby Young Toby Young

Bourne again

Whatever happened to the good, honest practice of sticking numerals after a sequel’s title to indicate what number it was in the series? I grew up in the days of Jaws 2, Superman III and Police Academy 7 and, whatever the shortcomings of those pictures, at least you knew where you stood. Generally speaking, the higher the number, the worse the film in question was likely to be. You wouldn’t know it from the title, but The Bourne Ultimatum is actually the third outing for Jason Bourne, the Bond-like character played by Matt Damon. The word ‘ultimatum’ is cunningly chosen in that it carries the suggestion that this may be

Roderick Conway-Morris

Lessons from the East

Venice and Islam: 828–1797 Gazing up at the walls of the Sala dello Scrutinio in the Doge’s Palace, at the enormous canvases depicting tumultuous scenes of colliding fleets, flashing armour and swords, flying arrows, broken spars, burning and sinking ships, and waters congested with enemy dead and dying, you could be forgiven for thinking that Venetian history was one long sea-battle, with the Serenissima fighting almost single-handed to stem the Islamic tide. And for that reason this lofty hall is a perfect setting for this exhibition, because so much of what we see in the paintings, art and artefacts on view at floor level (and in the art and architecture

Andrew Lambirth

The power and the glory

Taking the train from Paddington to Bristol can be hazardous if you coincide with an exodus of holidaymakers on summer excursions. I travelled down on a Thursday morning and the Paignton express was not only packed to the gunnels (if trains can rightly be said to have gunnels), but even picked up more passengers en route. But the effort was very definitely worthwhile: in the superb top-lit galleries of the Royal West of England Academy is a glorious show of paintings by the RWA’s president, Derek Balmer (born 1934). Here are paintings of place coursing with rich colour, evocations of foreign travel and the landscapes of home, cities and fields

Robert Gorelangton

Blackpool’s cheap thrills

Whatever happened to poor old Blackpool? The last time I went it was alive, busy and reasonably full of life. The place today is a windswept vision of destitution and bleakness, home to roaming bands of stag and hen weekenders, fat people with limps and aimless geriatrics waiting to be mugged. A town once synonymous with aspiration and elegance struck me as a deeply seedy place, notable for its lovebites and sick. It is, however, cheap. This presumably explains why, despite its dramatic decline, it’s still Britain’s most popular seaside resort. There are legions of beyond-parody hotels where you can stay for £20 a night or less — including all

Saturday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Not-so-fresh viewing

‘I’m sure I’ve read this before,’ said the Fawn, skimming through my review of Heroes in the week-before-last’s Speccie. ‘I’m sure I’ve read this before,’ said the Fawn, skimming through my review of Heroes in the week-before-last’s Speccie. ‘You can’t have done, we were away when it came out,’ I said. ‘Well, it seems very familiar,’ she said. ‘That’ll be because all my pieces start to resemble one another after a time. Same style. Same jokes. Maybe I should just give up now, before anyone else notices.’ But I can’t, obviously. Nor can Michael Wood, Griff Rhys Jones, Tony Robinson, Dan Cruickshank, Simon Schama, Stephen Fry, Lenny Henry, Gordon Ramsay

Kate Chisholm

Voices of protest

It was a bit surprising to find a programme marking the 62nd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Radio Two (Tuesday), not Radio Four. The stations are changing, morphing into each other as they seek ever more urgently to catch that elusive thing, a dedicated listener. Next we’ll find Terry Wogan putting on the selected hits of Pierre Boulez. It’s also why we’re all being constantly persuaded to listen again, download and podcast — it’s another way of boosting audience figures. Power to the People, for example, was scheduled for broadcast at 10.30 p.m. The bosses in Broadcasting House, I’m pretty sure, were not expecting an audience

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Unenchanted evening

When the public ignores a playwright, it’s not because the public is wrong but because the playwright deserves to be ignored. Director Paul Miller and translator Clare Bayley have ‘rediscovered’ an obscure Swedish novelist, Victoria Benedictsson, who wrote one play (and it shows) and then stabbed herself in the throat. Set in Paris, The Enchantment is a feeble and self- conscious replica of Hedda Gabler. The characters are supremely unattractive. Niamh Cusack’s Erna is a spiky shrew, Nancy Carroll’s Louise is a squashed rose petal, Hugh Skinner’s Viggo is a beaming jerk and Zubin Varla’s Gustave is a narcissistic stud bristling with clichés from the rotter’s handbook. Varla has been