Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Series of distractions

Verdi’s Macbeth is one of those operas which I always have hopes will be greater than it ever actually seems in performance. Its seriousness of intention is plain from the outset, and by and large Verdi maintains an intensity which the subject requires, and which isn’t to be found in any of his previous nine operas. The Witches are a problem, and all the special pleading on their behalf still doesn’t begin to solve it convincingly. But there are other, more elusive things about the opera than that which cause me difficulties, and which mean that Macbeth, for all the great interpretations of the two chief characters which there have

Olivia Glazebrook

Personal priorities

‘Syriana’ is ‘a term used by Washington think-tanks to describe a hypothetical reshaping of the Middle East’, according to this film’s director. As the title of his film, he uses the word to describe a concept: ‘the fallacious dream that you can successfully remake nation states in your own image’. Just in case you were wondering. The biggest problem facing Syriana is to contextualise its events without losing its narrative drive. Of course we all need to know as much as we can about what is going on between the Middle East and America, but this is a motion picture, not a presentation. Since we are well aware that there

Alan Powers

Rootstock of radicalism

London is about to experience two exhibitions about early 20th-century Modernism. The V&A is mounting a substantial themed display of design, art, film and life, based primarily on France and Germany before 1930. Tate Modern will exhibit jointly the work of two faculty members of the Bauhaus, Josef Albers and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. In anticipation, two exhibitions outside London demonstrate outgrowths from this core of experience, supposedly the rootstock of radicalism in the past 100 years of art and design. At Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933–57 shows how the European modernist diaspora improbably made one of its significant early landfalls in North Carolina, in a small,

Ursula Buchan

Exploding myths

I have been talking tosh. Well, not entire tosh, but certainly substantial dollops of wishful thinking and airy, groundless supposition. I have come to this conclusion after reading a book by a plant scientist called Ken Thompson. However, it is written in such an engaging, amiable and witty way that it doesn’t hurt too much; especially since I can console myself that almost everybody else has been as deluded as me. Ever since Ken Thompson’s first book — An Ear to the Ground; Garden Science for Ordinary Mortals — was published in 2003, I have been a big fan. He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Animal and

Saturday

Olivia Glazebrook

Murder he wrote

It is hard to imagine the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood as the same man. In 1958, Truman Capote wrote the story of a social butterfly whose anxieties are banished by a trip to Tiffany’s; in 1959, he began his dark examination of a quadruple murder, In Cold Blood, a book he finished just before it finished him, in 1966. In Cold Blood was the first non-fiction novel, attaching skilful and superior writing to a sensational ‘real-life’ subject. Capote turns the microscope from the subject matter of the book on to its author, making a clinical study of his experience during these six years. Reading of

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The write stuff | 25 February 2006

Southwark Fair by Samuel Adamson. Ever heard of it? Nor me but it sounds like a sprawling comedy of manners written by some forgotten Enlightenment wag. I trotted along to the Cottesloe full of expectation but I was in for a let-down. Samuel Adamson is no wag. Nor is he enlightened. And as for forgotten, well, it won’t take long. The play, staged on the South Bank of the Thames, is also set on the South Bank of the Thames. Good idea? Possibly. But as the action unfolds you quickly see what trouble the author has given himself by disregarding one of the basic conventions of drama. Most plays are

Andrew Lambirth

Crossing continents

When a Bostonian wit remarked, ‘Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris’, he was merely expressing the secure place the French capital occupied in the nation’s heart. Paris represented a dream (or reality for the increasing number who travelled there) of happiness, a spiritual or physical home, the premier destination for thousands of American artists and art students. Many who went, perhaps as many as a third, were women. As one of their number, the little-known painter Cecilia Beaux, remarked, ‘Everything is there.’ Three of her paintings are included here, among a glittering list of 87 exhibits by more than 30 artists. This is not just another exhibition tagging

Robin Holloway

Bizet’s delight

Where have I been all these years? A listed Francophile managing to miss the utter delight of Bizet’s la jolie fille de Perth! Not averse to Carmen, tickled by the dusky oriental charms of The Pearl Fishers, diverted by the precocious brio of the 18-year-old’s sole symphony, enchanted and moved by the music for l’Arlésienne; yet incurious enough not to have explored such a likely route towards pleasure as this full-length opera written in 1866, three years after the first, some eight before the last, of his famous repertory pieces. That its so-called plot is lost beyond recall from start to finish should be no disadvantage for an operatic culture

Saturday

Toby Young Toby Young

False note

Blackbird is the kind of play critics absolutely adore. Indeed, the reason it has managed to secure a berth in the West End — a rarity for a new straight play — is that it got such rave reviews at Edinburgh last year. For one thing, it’s about paedophilia, and that enables the critics to congratulate the writer, David Harrower, on his ‘bold’ choice of subject matter. They like playwrights who don’t pander to commercial interests — it demonstrates how serious they are about their craft. In addition, Harrower’s attitude to paedophilia is complex and nuanced — he refuses to condemn the middle-aged perpetrator, even though his victim was only

Michael Tanner

Miller’s antiques

Having had no operatic performances at all in January, English National Opera is filling February with two hardy perennials, Jonathan Miller’s productions of The Mikado and Rigoletto. Odd, considering how successful they both are, as are so many of his productions, all of which must be thought of as old, that he is not asked to do any new ones. One wonders how many of today’s directorial Wunderkinder will still have any of their productions running after more than 20 years — and how many will be thought of primarily with the director’s name attached. This particular pair, though Miller subjected them to superficially similar treatment, and with similarly brilliant

Andrew Lambirth

Impresario or artist?

Right from the start of this retrospective exhibition, the complications set in. In Room 1 are four paintings from the 1981 series ‘Dear painter, paint for me’. One of them strikingly depicts a figure (presumably the artist?) seated on a black sofa placed out in the street and surrounded by black plastic rubbish bags. The painting has the air of a snapshot, and you begin to think, so Kippenberger was into photorealism? But, no, we soon learn from a handy wall panel that Kippenberger didn’t paint these pictures himself, but hired a Berlin sign painter, Mr Werner, to do them for him. Does this make them less/more/just as interesting? While

James Delingpole James Delingpole

As time goes by

Until I had a daughter I used to think the problem with me and girls was me. But when you’re given the chance to observe the female of the species up close from birth onwards under home laboratory conditions, you soon lose any post-feminist illusions you might have about the blame for the war between the sexes being divided roughly 50/50. Chicks are great. I love their poppety faces, their pretty girlie clothes, and their darling little whims. But the fact remains that they should never, ever be taken as seriously as they think they ought to be taken. Do that and you might as well say to the lunatics

Mark Glazebrook

Quest for self

Over a year ago my six-year-old grandson Henry Flynn rushed home from his multi-ethnic south London school playground in Streatham with a solemn but urgent question for his father, an art historian, as it happens. So far as is known, incidentally, mainly Anglo-Saxon and Celtic blood flows in young Henry’s veins. ‘Am I a Muslim, dad?’ he asked. Now, at the well-planned eight-year-old Sharjah Art Museum in the United Arab Emirates until the end of February, there is a British Council travelling exhibition involving 22 artists from nine separate countries which is also about the quest for identity. Many of the exhibits are photographic portraits and one of them is

Saturday

Ursula Buchan

Gardeners’ gardener

Christopher Lloyd died on 27 January. Not since the deaths of Gertrude Jekyll in 1932, William Robinson in 1935 and Vita Sackville-West in 1962 has so much homage been paid in the broadsheets to the memory of a gardener. In the nation at large, more people mourned the deaths of Percy Thrower and Geoff Hamilton, but these were television personalities. Christopher’s reputation rested on a weekly column, ‘In My Garden’, in Country Life from 1963 until shortly before his death, his contributions to the Observer and the Guardian, a succession of thoughtful, opinionated books, such as The Well-Tempered Garden, and, most particularly, on his garden and nursery at Great Dixter

Andrew Lambirth

Great leap forward

Andrew Lambirth on Maggi Hambling’s forceful seascapes and Rose Wylie’s quirky art Let me at once state an interest: I have just written a book with Maggi Hambling about her life and works, currently available from all good booksellers. But long and intimate knowledge of an artist’s oeuvre should not disqualify the critic from writing more; in fact, it’s to be hoped that experience may bring with it increased insight and understanding. So let me say at the outset that, in her new paintings at the Marlborough, Hambling (born 1945) has produced something remarkable — an extension of her territory as an artist and a great leap forward in terms

Saturday

Toby Young Toby Young

Head turner

It’s been 44 years since Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? made its debut on Broadway, but it still seems extraordinarily fresh. Why? The obvious answer is that the subject matter — the battle of the sexes — is timeless. Anyone in a heterosexual relationship will experience a shudder of recognition at certain points during a performance of this play, if not all the way through. But I don’t think that’s the reason. Rather, it’s because Albee’s ear for dialogue is so good. His ability to capture the rhythms and cadences of the way people speak is uncanny. Paradoxically, even though Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is set in

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Classic question

‘Why can’t all our schools be like Eton?’ the heroic Claire Fox asked on Question Time (BBC1, Thursday) last week, and the question was so shocking that the pinkos, class warriors and terrorist-sympathisers who comprise the majority of your typical QT audience weren’t sure whether to clap or hiss. The point the Fox Goddess (what I particularly like is the way you think she’s going to be another of those ghastly women but then she turns out to speak pure truth and wisdom) was trying to make is that all this government talk about giving schools more freedom is so much tosh. No state school, even if it wanted to,

Charles Spencer

Never say never

I promise I’m going to come up with some hot musical recommendations this issue, but I must thank those Spectator readers who wrote about last month’s column in which I announced my intention to stop smoking. The letters — all from reformed smokers — were full of kindness, sympathy and practical suggestions, and they have spurred me on. I was especially moved by a letter from a 91-year-old former prisoner of war on the Burma–Siam railway who said smoking had been a lifesaver during that terrible time. He continued to smoke during his working life, and found it a great help, and gave up when he retired at 60. Now

Russell Chamberlin

Saving the spike

It seemed a curious place for one of the grimmest of Victorian institutions, tucked under manicured downs, surrounded by handsome villas with flowering gardens and cosy cottages. But when the Guildford Union Workhouse was built in 1905, it was positioned on the edge of the town in order not to offend the susceptibilities of the townsfolk. After the abolition of workhouses it was turned into a hospital, and then, in the 1980s, the site was used for an upmarket residential estate. Curiously, the ‘spike’ or casual ward for vagrants survived and received Grade II listing in 1999. Spikes figure largely in the books of George Orwell and Jack London, who