Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Simon Hoggart

Special effects

There is no end to the programmes about the land we live in: we have had portraits of Britain, the Britain we built, the coast of Britain, and journeys around Britain. There seems no aspect of the country that’s not been covered. The Beeb must be desperate. How about Underground Britain, Around Britain on a Milk Float, or Excitable Foreigners Praise Britain? I offer all those ideas free to whoever becomes the new controller of BBC1. In the meantime we have Alan Titchmarsh presenting Nature of Britain (BBC1, Wednesday), and it must be the most patriotic programme the Beeb has made in decades. I was whisked back to my childhood,

Kate Chisholm

Favoured few

The only good thing about being stuck in crawling traffic at 9 a.m. on Monday morning was that it gave me the rare chance to tune in to Andrew Marr’s Start the Week on Radio Four, and even better to listen to it full-on instead of with my attention half-drawn to a weekend’s worth of emails or the previous night’s washing-up. It’s years since I’ve heard a whole edition of the programme, having got tired of its relentless plugging of the latest books. Hype usually backfires on me as the more I hear about something the less I want to read it. There’s nothing worse than deflated anticipation. But the

Saturday

Jane Feaver

From the horse’s mouth

Following the National Theatre’s hugely successful productions of His Dark Materials and Coram Boy, an epic realisation of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse opens at the Olivier on 17 October. Originally published in 1982, the book was, the author told me, ‘the first I’d written that I thought was any good’. He has since written over a hundred books for children, but this is still one which is counted by them (and by his wife Clare) as one of his best. I went to see Morpurgo at his home in Devon to talk about the original inspiration for the story and the prospect of having the book adapted for the stage.

Andrew Lambirth

Bucolic pleasures

It’s tempting to think we know everything about Henry Moore (1898–1986), household name that he is. As early as the 1950s, Percy Cudlipp was composing satirical ditties for magazines like Punch with rousing first lines such as ‘Don’t do any more, Mr Moore’, which suggests an over-familiarity perhaps bordering on satiety. But it’s all too easy to shoot down a leviathan — the most miserable shot can hardly miss. It’s far more profitable to consider Moore’s strengths and look at some of his real and substantial achievements. One of these was to make large-scale sculpture that looked at its best in the landscape. Moore always maintained that sculpture was an

Laura Gascoigne

Scottish love affair

In 1838 the Duke of Sussex was presenting the awards for drawing at the Society of Art, when the silver medallist failed to appear. His Grace complained that he was taking his time, until someone pointed out the nine-year-old Mr J.E. Millais hovering below his line of vision. The Duke patted the young prodigy on the head and told him to write if there was ever anything he needed. Millais took up the offer, but not to advance his artistic career. Instead, he begged the Duke for the restoration of fishing rights for himself and his brother William in the Round Pond. That the painter of all those bloodless Pre-Raphaelite

Michael Tanner

Sinking spirits

The opera season at ENO began with a new production of Carmen. It was an occasion so dispiriting that I’ve been toying with the idea that the management had decided on provoking a mass act of critical suicide in order to solve the seemingly endless crisis that the house has been in for several years, with one decent production being forgotten in the welter of catastrophes, either in choice of repertoire or execution or both. Carmen can seem to be a work that is too well known, but only inside a fairly hermetic fraternity, not to the whole theatre-going world, and it is the latter to which ENO is now

Marcus Berkmann

Knowing when to stop

One of the rudest things you can ever say about a pop record is that it’s overproduced. We have all said it at some point in our lives, often before the age of 20, when you must repeatedly demonstrate to your contemporaries that you can hear the subtle differences between, say, Deep Purple and Boney M. In the punk years and afterwards, ‘overproduced’ was often used to describe any record that had been produced at all. In the late 1980s, though, overproduction became the norm. Bands like Tears For Fears were famous for spending weeks perfecting a computerised drum sound, when really a long holiday on a beach somewhere would

Deborah Ross

Saved by Jim

Although And When Did You Last See Your Father? is probably not a great work of cinema, and may not even be a work of cinema at all — it could easily be 90 minutes of above-par Sunday night telly — it is touching and the cast are wonderful. That Jim Broadbent, can he do anything wrong? I don’t think so. I think he could recite the menu from Pizza Hut and somehow make it not just a must-see event, but poignant, too. How does he do that? I have no idea, as I know little about anything, but I do know this: Jim Broadbent saves this film, if it

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Dynamic duo

If you can, get to Macbeth. Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood have set a benchmark that will remain for years. Never mind impersonating the murderous couple, these two look like the genuine article. Consider Stewart. That sly and lordly head, those inscrutable little eyes, the smirking menace, the sudden changes of temper. A king, easily, or a killer of kings. And Kate Fleetwood is the most terrifying Lady Macbeth I’ve ever seen. Imagine Lauren Bacall with the eyes of a cobra. There’s a coldness and cruelty about her so palpable that it seems an aspect of her nature, not of her art. And the sexual chemistry between them, the slow

Kate Chisholm

Survival tactics

You couldn’t move across the BBC’s airwaves this week without stumbling on an anniversary programme celebrating 40 years since the launch of Radios One, Two, Three and Four. The Corporation even laid on a self-congratulatory ‘Radio Week’ on BBC4, which seems a bit OTT to me. (Did anyone really choose to watch the ‘earliest episode of The Archers ever recorded’ at 11 p.m. on Thursday?) What surprises me is not so much that radio has survived the onslaught of TV — there’s an aural quality to the experience of listening to a play, a documentary, even a news bulletin that TV can never satisfy — but that it’s survived despite

Fay Hart

‘At Casa Verde’

A poem At Casa Verde, five in the afternoon after Rimbaud I ripped my feet to bits walking the pilgrim trail to Guadalupe as far as Hidalgo. At Casa Verde I ordered a bottle of beer and the special: greasy tortillas, fried cactus, chillies con carne. I cooled my feet on the dirt floor under the table, pictures of movie stars and saints papered the walls, out of the kitchen came a Cuban-heeled boy, able- bodied, slicked-back, skintight jeans and a scowl — He could have me in a heartbeat, that one! — carrying a plate piled with tortillas, bowls of hot sauce and meat, cool beer, and shot glasses

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Today’s issues

So the big question this week is: is the Today programme a viper’s nest of evil pinkoes, all of whom should be put in sacks and dropped into a deep well? And the answer is: yes. Shame, though, really, because wrong and bad though it is I do have a soft spot for Today. I like the poshness of the cars they send to pick you up when you’re on it and the producers’ apparently genuine gratitude that you’ve agreed to appear at such a hideously early time. I like the teeny-weeny half-nod of acknowledgement which is all you get from the presenters when you creep to your mic in

Amelia Torode

A final farewell to the dating game in New York

The wedding of the author’s wing-woman The HBO drama Sex and the City arrived on our shores in 1999. Prior to that television show, it would be fair to say, British women (and, for that matter, men) were fairly clueless when it came to matters of grown-up ‘dating’. Sex and the City offered a stylish and contemporary guide to social and sexual mores in the Big Apple, teaching a generation about such concepts as exclusive dating and non-exclusive dating, A-list nights and B-list nights, and the three-day rule (as in the ‘always wait three days after the date to phone him otherwise you come across as too keen’ rule). Unfortunately

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

An American Life and Death

Christopher Hitchens’ piece in this month’s Vanity Fair is quite something. Mark Daily, a young officer in the Seventh Cavalry, volunteered for the army despite his reservations about the wisdom of the war in part because some of Christopher’s articles inspired him to do so. Hitch’s latest piece reflects on that heavy burden (shared to one degree or another by all of us who supported the war) and on the life and death of a remarkable young American. If you read one thing today, make it this article. Here’s Christopher describing his first meeting with the Daily family: As soon as they arrived, I knew I had been wrong to

Henrietta Bredin

Evil’s inspiration

I’m certainly not suggesting that any of the political parties follow this particular source of inspiration but if you want to see, terrifyingly clearly, exactly where Hitler got a great many of his ideas about military parades, civic display and how to combine an appealing brand of paganism with symbolic Christianity, look no further than the British Film Institute on the Southbank. Last night, and again on Saturday, you could see Fritz Lang’s silent film Siegfried – not the Wagner version but based on the original Nibelung saga. It was made in 1924 and is quite astonishing, helped along by a brilliant improvised piano accompaniment. Also on Saturday, and again

Liz Anderson

An award winning life

A huge screen behind the stage at the Dorchester Hotel yesterday showed Montserrat Caballé singing for a hot-dog in a café. Sadly, she wasn’t there in person to collect the Lifetime Achievement award at the Classic FM Gramophone Awards. Neither was Steven Isserlis present, but his friend Barry Humphries — in the wittiest speech of the lunch — collected the Instrumental award on his behalf for his Bach Cello Suites (Hyperion). Other winners included the violinist Julia Fischer (Artist of the Year) and Vasily Petrenko (Young Artist Award), Principal Conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

Liz Anderson

A portrait of the artist

An exhibition of self-portraits by members of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters has opened at the Bulldog Trust, 2 Temple Place, London WC2, and runs until 10 October. The Trust, which was started in 1983, supports selected charities, such as Hampshire Hospices and the Prince’s Trust, and gives advice as well as money. Rolf Harris has a self-portrait in the show, as do some 50 other artists, including Michael Noakes (pictured). The winner of the first Bulldog Bursary worth £5,000 is Joseph Galvin (31), who says he will move from Wales to London for a year.

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Pulitzer Bait

This post reminded me of a terrific piece Sarah Lyall (one of the NYT’s under-appreciated stars) wrote for Slate a couple of years ago. She made the mistake of attending the British Press Awards dinner. The Pulitzers these are not. Most papers crow about their own successes while failing to even report the existence of winners from other titles. Happily, however, there are enough award ceremonies for almost everyone to claim the title “Newspaper of the Year”. In their own way, the hacks treat these awards with the proper level of contempt and, since no-one spends all year dreaming of ways to win them we are at least spared the

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Is Don Giovanni really the greatest?

Just received an email from Washington National Opera touting their new production of Don Giovanni in which they claim that it’s “widely regarded as the greatest opera ever composed”. Is this true? I suppose it could be, but as with novels it had never occurred to me that there was a clear or obvious “Number 1 Opera”. Still, parlour-game time: if you had to nominate an opera for “Greatest Ever” status, what would you select and, secondly, what opera would you choose to see if it was understood that this would be the last opera you’d ever see? UPDATE: Meanwhile, the Lyric Opera of Chicago calls La Boheme “the world’s

Saturday

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Man with a mission | 29 September 2007

Mary Wakefield talks to Jonathan Kent about his plans to jump-start the West End Something is rotten in the West End. It’s not just the sour smell of lager, or the Saturday night binge drinkers. It’s more that as I walk up St Martin’s Lane, through what should be the beating heart of theatreland, there’s an unmistakable whiff of artistic decay. It’s been said before and often, with varying degrees of gloom, but it’s difficult to deny: nearly all the shows on offer here are musicals, and most of them adapted from movies or TV: The Lion King (‘Pure delight floods the Lyceum!’) Bad Girls: The Musical (‘If you’re in