Arts Reviews

The summer ballet season in London, with the traditional arrival of illustrious foreign guests, has a well-established historical tradition. It was during the summer months that, in the 19th century, famous and not-so-famous foreign ballet stars appeared on the stages of theatres such as the Her Majesty’s, the Alhambra and the Empire. Later on, renowned ballerinas such as Lydia Kyasht, Olga Preobrajenska and the legendary Anna Pavlova came to London in summer with small companies or groups, leading the way for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the quintessential ‘visiting’ ballet company of the first half of the past century. Since then, the summer ballet season in London has provided dance goers with

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

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

‘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