Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Torments of love

Handel’s Orlando, apparently one of his greatest operas, is much more impressive in the first revival of Francisco Negrin’s production at the Royal Opera than it was at its first outing in 2003. Though my visual memory is most unreliable, I remember it as revolving dizzyingly, with characters whipping through door after door as the tripartite set sped round. There seemed then, too, to be far too much business going on during the da capo arias, as if Negrin didn’t trust Handel to command the audience’s attention unless they had something adventitious to watch. This time round the revolving set struck me as having slowed down somewhat, and as more

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Lower the volume, please

‘How I hate!’ is the first line of Torben Betts’s new play. Not a promising start. A teenage Goth with a scowl like a squashed spider crouches in her bedroom ranting against her smugger-than-smug parents. A revolution erupts. The Goth cheers and is then raped by a mad soldier. The civil war ends and order is restored, and in the closing tableau the stupefyingly complacent parents spout bourgeois platitudes while their pregnant daughter is assaulted afresh, with their connivance, by her rapist. Clearly this is a Big Idea production which seeks to mount a blistering attack on Western values. That’s why it feels so dated. And yet there are good

Peter Phillips

Hearing voices

One of the most persistent and tiresome misunderstandings about how sacred music was performed in the past is that boys’ voices were always involved. In any number of places this was simply not true: male voices, yes, always; children’s voices, not at all necessarily. The country where boys seemed to have been used most standardly was England, which, typically, has encouraged us to assume that everywhere else was or should have been modelled on what we were doing. We have no licence to rush around the world insisting that Church music without boys is a debased currency. There is a study waiting to be written about this — I am

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Can of worms

Just to remind you, this is the week my splendid anti-Left polemic How To Be Right is published and if you Speccie readers aren’t its natural constituency I don’t know who is. So buy it, please, or I’m never going to be able to put Boy through that brilliant prep school I mentioned a few weeks ago, and instead of Latin and Greek, all he’ll ever be taught about is Diwali, Mary Seacole and global warming. Talking of which, I should like to thank two ideologically disparate institutions for having saved my bacon this week. The first  is the Centre for Policy Studies, which published Martin Livermore’s timely report on

Kate Chisholm

Heaven and hell | 10 March 2007

‘Keep your angels about you,’ was the inspiring advice given by William Blake in Peter Ackroyd’s Drama on 3 (Sunday), based on ‘the story’ of the visionary poet and artist who was born 250 years ago in 1757 and who is famous for giving us ‘Bring me my bow of burning gold’ and ‘Tyger tyger’. It was stirring stuff. And particularly apt for the Christian season of Lent, which so often is depicted as 40 days (or rather, as those who, like Eddie and Lilian on The Archers, have given something up for the duration will have calculated, 46 days) of painful penance for sins past, present and future. It

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

The squinter triumphs

To be called ‘the squinter’, which is what ‘il Guercino’ means, might not seem an auspicious nickname for an artist, but it doesn’t appear to have stood in the way of Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591–1666), who became one of the most famous Italian artists of the 17th century. Not only was he a distinguished Baroque painter, he was also a very fine draughtsman, and it is this aspect of his achievement which is celebrated in a glorious new exhibition at the Courtauld. Guercino’s quarter-centenary was in 1991, and was appropriately commemorated, but there’s no need of an excuse for a show of this quality. It’s quite simply ravishing. We are

Roderick Conway-Morris

Saint for all ages

‘His clothes are drenched in brine, his beard drips with seawater, and his brow is covered in perspiration due to his continual efforts to reach sinking ships to save them from the angry waves.’ Such is the lively picture of St Nicholas recorded by an anthologist of popular Greek calendar customs, contrasting somewhat with the venerable stasis of his painted images in Orthodox churches. Protecting sailors from shipwreck was and still is one of the saint’s primary occupations. Even today no Greek vessel would put to sea without his portrait on board. But over time he also became the patron saint of travellers in general, children, scholars, merchants, pawnbrokers, pirates,

Deborah Ross

Glower power

The Illusionist is one of those films that gains points for trying to be clever and different and ingenious but then promptly loses them all for being not clever or different or ingenious enough. It’s frustrating, really, because you can feel the good film trying to get out — ‘let me out, let me out!’ — but a banal script, some woeful miscasting and a rather desperate plot ‘twist’ simply won’t let it. I put the ‘twist’ in quotation marks because you’ll figure it out way before the characters, and will spend at least an hour of this film wishing they’d figure it out so we can all call it

Michael Tanner

Pyrotechnic display

Sunday evening at the Barbican was a revelation, no less gushy word will do. Janacek’s comic opera The Excursions of Mr Broucek is the Cinderella in his operatic output, if you don’t count the very early works, whole or fragmentary; even the weird but kind of wonderful Osud is more likely to turn up these days. Broucek didn’t make it into Decca’s much-lauded Janacek series under Mackerras, though it is he who has supervised the new edition which was used at the Barbican. After the intense exhilaration of this performance, it is difficult to remember what the problem was supposed to be. Admittedly, if you stress ‘comic’ you have to

Giannandrea Poesio

Hectic romp

Michael Keegan-Dolan is to dance–theatre what radical and elusive Banksy is to the visual arts. Indeed, these two acclaimed bad boys of modern-day culture have a great deal in common; both derive their art from cruel satire of the everyday, which they portray with similar irreverent and shock-provoking strokes, in spite of their different means of expression. Both indulge in challenging the tenets of existing culture by tackling — some would say ‘desecrating’ — revered monoliths of the art world. And, in formulating their scorching critiques of the surrounding reality, they both resort to a kaleidoscopic pastiche which defies any classification. Banksy’s live rats crawling around the improvised gallery in

Simon Hoggart

Man with a mission

I used to write a few political profiles in my time, and the one thing I always hoped was that the subject would refuse to co-operate. You had to offer to interview them, naturally, otherwise there might be legal difficulties. But you prayed they would say no. That rarely happened. When I did see them, I would try to concentrate on the sort of detail that can be hard to come by — where they spent their honeymoon, why they had that row with X, favourite television programme and so forth. What I usually got was the elder statesman in relaxed and contemplative mode, casting his wise, benign eye over

Saturday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

I don’t believe it!

Got the right place? Yup, this looks like it. I’m about to meet TV’s grumpiest man, and his fixers have booked us a room in a fashionable media institute in Covent Garden. I peer through the frosted glass at what appears to be a hotel, a bistro, a therapy centre and a health farm all wrapped into one. It’s the kind of place where brunching executives can enjoy an organic chocolate bun and a milky stroppuccino while upstairs, in the anxiety suites, commissioning editors are being massaged, hypnotised and rebirthed from the comfort of their rowing machines. I glance down the street. A dark figure is ambling towards me. His

Andrew Lambirth

Distinguished company

If ever there was an exhibition which warranted a speedy and assessing first look, and then a longer, more lingering concentration on certain pictures, then Citizens and Kings is it. Subtitled ‘Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760–1830’, it doesn’t have an exactly prepossessing moniker. Citizens and Kings sounds like something out of one of the duller Dickens novels, a historical tale where they chew bootlaces and eat rat soup. (Or is that Arnold Bennett?) In actual fact, the show is a grand slice of history, illustrated by some of the most remarkable faces of the period. But it also works as a sumptuous display of paintings, with masterpieces by

Mark Fisher

Feathered friends

The Parrot in Art? Unraise your eyebrows: parrots have featured in Western European art for 500 years, depicted by Dürer, van Eyck and Mantegna; Rubens and Rembrandt; Tiepolo, Reynolds and Goya; Delacroix and Courbet; Matisse and Frieda Kahlo. It is hardly surprising. Ever since they were imported into Europe from India in the 4th century BC, parrots have been a source of marvel: their exotic plumage, their near-human mimetic voice, squawking, talking. They have intrigued Aristotle and Pliny, Aesop and Ovid. Now Richard Verdi, the director of the Barber and for many years a lover of parrots, has given them their first exhibition that charts the ways in which artists

Sheridan Morley

The importance of being British

Sheridan Morley died suddenly last weekend. He was The Spectator’s theatre critic from 1990 to 2001. His knowledge of both the stage and its leading practitioners was encyclopedic, while his many theatrical anecdotes were hugely entertaining. He and his wife, the producer and critic Ruth Leon, were planning to spend more time shuttling between London and New York, from where he was going to send occasional reviews. What follows is the first — and now sadly the last — in the planned series. Sheridan was a good friend of The Spectator. We will all miss him a lot. The business of Broadway is still a cash business. The politics are

Patrick Carnegy

Dynastic dissonance

The RSC’s Complete Works festival continues to produce wondrous juxtapositions. In the Courtyard Theatre Michael Boyd has rounded off his Wars of the Roses sequence with a Richard III which for a week played alongside an Arab reworking of the same play in the Swan. There seems no end to the uses to which the poor old hunchback villain can be put. Plainly he was in the running to be exposed sooner or later as Saddam Hussein. This was confessedly the first idea of Sulayman Al-Bassam in adapting the play for his Kuwaiti-based theatre  company. But thankfully he saw that such a notion was too simplistic, and that it would

Robin Holloway

Marriage of minds

‘Made in Heaven’: the contrasts and complements linking Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky in two-way reciprocality form a felicitous marriage of true minds perfect for the week of wall-to-wall broadcasting on Radio Three covering (sometimes more than once) every note the two Russian masters composed. First, the contrasts: Tchaikovsky the emotional, passionate, subjective, confessional, pouring his heart all down his sleeve, supreme in inflammatory melody, harmony, orchestration, personally present in his every utterance, whether by direct ‘programme’ (however withheld, the general tenor of the story is never in doubt) or by identification with character and situation (Tatiana’s uncalled-for declaration of love in Eugene Onegin; the tragic or ultimately radiant outcome in the

Michael Tanner

Act of sabotage

Exactly 400 years ago, 24 February 1607, the first great opera received its première in Mantua. It’s a crucial date in the history of the arts in Western Europe, and it would have been agreeable to be able to report that Opera North, in its new production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, did it justice. And musically speaking it would not have been hopelessly wide of the mark. But what we saw was as ferocious an act of sabotage as you are likely to see in a tour of the world’s operatic stages, whatever they may be doing, and the competition for impertinent inanity is intense. Paul Steinberg’s set is an uglily

Kate Chisholm

Comfort station

Sometimes when listening to Radio Four you can have the odd experience of spiralling downwards into your very own time warp. Lying in the bath on Sunday morning, for instance, with the radio warbling in the background, you could almost pretend you were back in the 1970s (except that the cork tiles and avocado finish will probably have been swapped for upmarket granite and stainless steel, and the miniature transistor for a digital Bose). At ten, there’s The Archers omnibus edition (floruit 1954), followed by Desert Island Discs (fl. 1944) and Just a Minute (fl. 1974). It’s very comforting, knowing that there are bits of life where nothing has changed,

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Morpheus descending

Insomnia is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When, for example, I made up my mind that I was going to review the BBC’s new series Sleep Clinic (BBC1, Monday), I knew that later that night I would have enormous difficulties getting to sleep. This is one of the horrible tricks we insomniacs play on ourselves. We’ll have had maybe four or five good nights’ sleep in a row and the nasty little voice in our heads will go, ‘Well, you’re not seriously expecting to get another good night, are you?’ To which our nice, rational, sensible voice will reply, ‘Well, why not? I’ve been doing pretty well so far. I’m quite tired.