Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Revelatory Richie

Theatre: Lone Star & Pvt. Wars, King’s Head; We The People, Globe; All About My Mother, Old Vic The King’s Head has a deserved hit on its hands with a James McLure double bill about soldiers haunted by Vietnam. Emasculation is the linking theme and the scripts dance nimbly between the opposing poles of pathos and high comedy. James Jagger (handsome boy, highly watchable, famous dad) has a very promising line in wry comedy. But the real revelation here, to me at least, is Shane Richie, whom I last saw hosting game shows on telly. I thought that’s all he did. But what an actor. His two performances are expertly

Deborah Ross

Not great western

3:10 to Yuma has everything you might want from a western apart from anything original or interesting, and as for Russell Crowe, he’s actually pretty crap. Obviously, I can’t say what the director, James Mangold (Walk the Line), who apparently fought hard to make this project, was thinking of. What shopping to get in on his way home? Do we need milk? Cat food? But the result is both dull and deeply unnecessary; a stinker. This is a remake of the 1957 film of the same name (starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin) and while life is too short to get all het up about remakes — there is nothing

Michael Tanner

Musical youth

British Youth Opera celebrates its 21st birthday season with its annual two productions at the Peacock Theatre: this year one is reasonably successful and one a triumph. The moderate success is The Magic Flute, in Jeremy Sams’s sharp translation. Flute is a work which students and young singers go for whenever possible (this is the fourth production BYO has mounted), yet it is extremely taxing, in several ways. At least three of the roles are almost impossible for anyone to sing very well, and the reams of spoken dialogue, in whichever language the opera is being performed in, seem to present a challenge few singers can rise to. The differences

Kate Chisholm

Play school

Catch ’em young makes sense if you’re selling a product, an organisation or a belief system. Catch ’em young makes sense if you’re selling a product, an organisation or a belief system. And the BBC has never lagged behind the commercial broadcasters and their advertisers in this regard. From its inception children’s programming was seen as crucial to its output. Dutifully at five o’clock, just in time for family tea, Children’s Hour began on the Home Service, with a medley of dramas, quiz shows, news bulletins designed to entrance five- to 15-year-olds. (Does anyone else remember the inimitable voice of Derek McCulloch as Larry the Lamb, or the gravelly tones

Simon Hoggart

Raising Reith

Watching television as a critic is an artificial way of watching television. For the most part we see DVDs supplied by the television companies. We start and finish when we like. If the phone rings, we don’t groan and bark ‘yes?’ — we can press pause and settle down for a leisurely chat about our double-glazing needs. If we miss part of a programme, we can catch it again. We are a little like those restaurant reviewers who write: ‘Dinner for two, with a glass of champagne and a bottle of Volnay, came to a very reasonable £165,’ because they aren’t paying. We are privileged. In the same way we

Friday

The Spectator

The pick of the weekend’s films

If you’re planning a visit to the cinema this weekend, I recommend you bypass the  cold, albeit visually impressive, ‘Atonement’, in favour of  Julie Delpy’s first effort as an actor, writer and director, ‘2 Days in Paris’.  The premise is simple: a couple round off a tour Europe by spending two days with the girl’s parents in the ‘city of love’, hoping to inject fresh life into their flagging relationship.  Not everything goes according to plan as the boyfriend, played by the relatively unknown Adam Goldberg grows increasingly troubled by his girlfriend’s past and swelling number of ex-lovers.  It may sound like you’ve seen it all before – fans of

Thursday

Saturday

Henry Sands

How I was saved from Mongolian torture

My 12-year-old sister shouted, ‘Come and watch this TV programme, you’ll love it. It is all about naked men trying to prove how tough they are.’ She was right, I did like it, so much so that at the end, when applicants were invited to apply for the second series, I filled in the online form immediately. The programme was Last Man Standing and involved six contestants travelling the world to live with tribes for two weeks. At the end of each show they fought members of the tribe using the tribes’ traditional form of combat. They had stick fighting with Zulu warriors in South Africa and wrestling with nomads

Henrietta Bredin

The Wagner effect

Henrietta Bredin has put together a series of events to celebrate the Royal Opera House’s Ring cycle It is with considerable trepidation that I venture to write about Richard Wagner in these pages, considering that in doing so I am following a trail well blazed by Bernard Levin — a passionate and lushly articulate devotee — and that no fewer than three highly eminent Wagner scholars are current contributors: Michael Tanner, Patrick Carnegy and Robin Holloway. However, I shall take my courage in both hands as I am in the final throes of a project I was asked to take on by the Royal Opera House just over a year

Andrew Lambirth

Beguiling mix

Exhibitions: Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach’s ‘Adam and Eve’; Work, Rest & Play Amazingly, the Courtauld can claim to have mounted the first exhibition in England devoted to Lucas Cranach the Elder (c.1472–1553). He’s not an artist we know at all well here, though one or two images will be familiar from reproduction, probably elegant, elongated and slightly heraldic full-length portraits, or glimmering erotic nudes. There’s something very individual and instantly recognisable about his images, an aura of self-containment which is based on a decorative unity which looks back to Gothic art. This is balanced by the new naturalism of the German Renaissance. Cranach employed landscape elements (in the wake

Michael Kennedy

Fighting Finn

Where does Sibelius stand today? Twenty years ago, the answer would have been not very high. Today, 50 years after his death, I think it would be ‘on the up’ again, especially as we now know not just the symphonies and tone-poems but also the wonderful songs in performances by Karita Mattila, Soile Isokoski, Anne Sofie von Otter and Jorma Hynninen. In Britain during the first half of the 20th century Sibelius was regarded as the symphonic heir to Beethoven. There was no mention of Mahler and Bruckner in those days, except in very restricted circles. It almost seemed as if Sibelius was an honorary Englishman. The composer had first

Marcus Berkmann

Past perfect | 8 September 2007

I see Squeeze have reformed and are touring again. In fact, there don’t seem to be many bands who haven’t reformed and aren’t touring again. Out there on the road: that’s where the cash is. There seems to be a particular process here. 1. Band splits up in a spirit of mutual enmity and recrimination. 2. Principals embark on solo careers of varying success. 3. World forgets about band. 4. Principals, interviewed in rock press, express undying hatred for each other. 5. Accountant has quiet word in ear. 6. Fifty-date world tour is announced. It’s strange to think that, 20 years or so ago, bands toured to promote the record.

Michael Tanner

Misinterpreting Strauss

For its final operatic offering, this year’s Edinburgh Festival presented what it billed as ‘World première of a new production’ of Richard Strauss’s last opera Capriccio. I suppose every new production is a ‘world première’ but they don’t need to say so. Anyway, this turned out to be a dismal affair, part infuriating and part just inadequate, the only redeeming feature being the conducting of Markus Stenz and the playing of the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne. As soon as anyone mentions this inspired product of Strauss’s old age they seem to need to carry on at length about its relation to the time and place in which it was written, Germany

Peter Phillips

Tale of two cities

Eternal though they may seem, the Proms and the Edinburgh Festival are susceptible to change. Roger Wright will take over the former next year and Jonathan Mills has just assumed responsibility for the latter. New appointments do not necessarily mean that anything more up-to-date will happen, nor that the change will be for the better — the Bath Festival seems to have been all but destroyed by a recent and tactless overdose of innovation; but the signs from the two capitals are encouraging. The Edinburgh Festival has traditionally been hostile to what is still called ‘early music’, the received wisdom being that the people of Scotland would not come to

Deborah Ross

Losing heart

There has been such a lot of fuss and hype around this adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel — as if this is all anybody has ever been waiting for — that I did wonder if I had anything new or useful to say. But then I realised: 1) it’s never stopped me before and 2) it’s never stopped me before and 3) it’s never stopped me before. So, in short, if it’s never stopped me before, why stop now? Shall we proceed, now we’ve decided we are not stopping? Good. What I am saying, I think, is that you will probably have a sense of Atonement already, considering it’s

James Delingpole James Delingpole

General grumble

Sorry, I’m in Sardinia at the moment and I couldn’t find any preview tapes that really grabbed me before I went away so if you don’t mind I thought I’d just have a general grumble about the state of TV. First, Weekend Nazis (BBC1, Monday), whose undercover team made the truly cataclysmic discovery that one or two members of Second Battle Group — a British second world war re-enactment outfit which specialises in portraying German Waffen SS soldiers — may have neo-Nazi sympathies. Well, knock me down with a feather. Perhaps next week this same crack team will manage to infiltrate the Vatican and emerge with the shock horror revelation

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The end of the ‘noddy shot’ is a ray of hope for television

Nobody much likes television, especially not the people who work in it. They think it’s a cretinous medium, a sort of institutionalised con-trick, the cultural equivalent of a McDonald’s Happy Meal — processed excrement which everybody, including the consumer, knows to be dumb and bad for you. I suspect that this has always been true. It wouldn’t surprise me if John Logie Baird was gripped by a feeling of revulsion and self-disgust shortly after transmitting images of his fingers wiggling up and down back in the 1920s, the first ever TV show — and, you have to say, a suitably banal and metaphorically appropriate debut for the medium. Television: a

Friday

The Spectator

What you should do if you can’t see Atonement this weekend

Cinema goers will all be planning to go to see Atonement this weekend: I know I am. But if you are defeated by the queues, which threaten to be of English Patient/Shakespeare in Love proportions, do go and see Knocked Up instead. If ever a film was let down by its title it is this one. Clearly marketed for the audience that loved American Pie and US gross-out comedy, this is actually a very sophisticated film which brilliantly explores the gender gap and uses an old and unremarkable plotline – beautiful woman falls pregnant by unattractive male – as a sturdily reliable framework over which to drape the most delicate

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Luciano Pavarotti, 1935-2007

Opera Chic has all you need to know about Luciano Pavarotti’s death, including a collection of terrific YouTube clips. If only the Washington National Opera’s forthcoming Boheme could feature a voice such as this… But, of course, the point is that it can’t.

Wednesday

The Spectator

The greatest living Englishman

Last night’s GQ Men of the Year Awards were, as ever, a glittering occasion and a tribute to the talents of the magazine’s editor, Dylan Jones (whose most recent Spectator Diary you can read here). Plenty of excellent choices for the 10th annual ceremony, including the editor of the year, Will Lewis, editor in chief of our stable mate Telegraph titles. I finally got to meet Michael Caine, who was given a Lifetime Achievement award and rewarded with a thunderous standing ovation at the Royal Opera House. He is almost certainly the Greatest Living Englishman. Why? Because, in the end, it is more fun to be Harry Palmer, a spy