Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Toby Young Toby Young

Double identity

Listing page content here I can’t make up my mind about Shared Experience. Since 1988, this company has been adapting classic works of literature, transforming some of the greatest books in the Western canon into visceral pieces of physical theatre. The results are distinctly mixed. On the one hand, the plays are rarely more than crude summaries of the original novels, almost as if they’ve been designed to help GCSE English students revise for their exams. But on the other, they’re undoubtedly theatrical, retelling these famous stories on stage in ways that are often very imaginative. Jane Eyre, which is the most famous example of Shared Experience’s work, is a

Giannandrea Poesio

Company celebrations

Staging the 1890 classic The Sleeping Beauty in the 21st century is not an easy task. Recent studies, discoveries and even philological reconstructions have heightened historical and stylistic awareness among dance-goers, thus generating expectations that cannot be easily overlooked. Yet philology and historical accuracy alone turn any work into a dead museum exhibit, at the expense of its vibrant theatricality. New ideas must thus be sought to enliven the old text and to make it viable for contemporary audiences. These issues are particularly sensitive ones for the Royal Ballet, given that Beauty is, historically, the company’s signature work and the classic that has suffered most in the company’s recent history,

Michael Vestey

The good things in life

Listening to The Archive Hour: Down Your Way Revisited on Radio Four (Saturday) made me wonder why the network got rid of the programme in 1995. It had been running since 1946, with a simple formula of interviews and music, the idea of a producer called Leslie Perowne. It visited towns and villages across the country, and in its heyday attracted an audience of ten million a week. It avoided controversy and looked for the good in people and places, and while some thought it bland and cosy, most liked it. It occurred to me that when the awful Home Truths on Saturday mornings is eventually replaced, Radio Four could

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Destabilising forces

‘Picasso, Miró, Masson and the vision of Georges Bataille’ is the subtitle of the latest extravaganza at the Hayward Gallery. Georges Bataille (1897–1962) is one of those buzz figures, beloved of the moment, without a quote from whom no contemporary art-speak catalogue introduction is complete. He has been influential as a philosopher as well as a writer (he penned a minor cult classic called Story of the Eye), and as a worthy opponent of André Breton, the self-styled Pope of Surrealism. Between 1929 and 1930 Bataille edited a radical surrealist magazine called Documents, which offered a heady mix of art and archaeology, ethnography and popular culture. This show is an

Henrietta Bredin

Trusting to instinct

This year is Opera Holland Park’s tenth anniversary season, and to my great shame I have never attended a performance, despite having had the best intentions of doing so for roughly the past ten years. If I don’t turn up this summer, I get the feeling I’ll be in serious trouble with the two men who were sitting on the other side of the lunch table from me a few days ago, Michael Volpe and James Clutton. At least I will be if I survive the fusillade of their rattle-attack enthusiasm without slumping into my salad, lethally punctured by a hail of conversational bullets. They give seriously good schtick, this

Monday

Andrew Lambirth

Reassuring period pieces

Here in London are two historical exhibitions which treat more of human identity, national and individual, than they do of pure painting. Each one showcases art, but in the wider context of the artefacts of a particular period. For a nation which loves to visit country houses (courtesy of that great institution, the National Trust), both exhibitions should prove reassuringly familiar in format and content. Searching for Shakespeare, at the National Portrait Gallery (until 29 May, sponsored by Credit Suisse), celebrates the 150th anniversary of the NPG appropriately, given that the very first painting presented to the gallery in 1856 was the famous ‘Chandos’ portrait of Shakespeare. This supposed depiction

Peter Phillips

American demands

Listing page content here The war on terror means little to a lot of people, but to the itinerant musician at an airport it means ever-increasing hassle, rough treatment and delay. In case you didn’t know, the Americans have just invented a new queue the traveller must stand in: in addition to being photographed and fingerprinted on the way into the US, you are now required to be photographed and fingerprinted on the way out of it as well. I won’t claim that this is the last straw, because there can be no last straw. We have to make part of our living in the US, therefore we must negotiate

Friday

Alan Powers

Moving on

Listing page content here Twenty years ago, Britain was gripped by an architectural battle of styles. The Lloyd’s building in the City opened, representing the hopes for a resurgence of modernism, while Quinlan Terry’s classical Richmond Riverside was beginning to emerge from scaffolding like a vision by Canaletto. Since 1986, a great deal has happened, but readers of Roger Scruton’s article in The Spectator of 8 April (‘Hail Quinlan Terry: our greatest living architect’) would know nothing of it. In a similar vein, articles by Thomas Sutcliffe in the Independent and Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, responding to the Modernism exhibition at the V&A, present a harsh opposition between two

Olivia Glazebrook

Hitched and hooked

Listing page content here I don’t know quite what came over me during the screening of Confetti. I was well prepared: I had curled my lip and rolled my eyes at the daft poster on the Tube; I had sighed and shaken my head over the British obsession with weddings — and films about weddings; before the lights went down, as I read about the concept in the production notes (three engaged couples enter a magazine’s ‘Most Original Wedding’ competition in the hope of winning a Dream Home), I felt my heart travel bootwards, and I checked the number of minutes I’d be expected to stay in my seat… …But

Giannandrea Poesio

Missing erotica

Listing page content here Dance and eroticism have long gone hand in hand. For centuries, moving bodies have been regarded as arousing and dangerously tempting. Twenty-first-century adverts still draw upon that popular equation and delve more or less seriously into the intrinsic sensuality of dance, whether it be ballet, modern or even street dance. Yet the continuous bombardment of alluring images we are subjected to every day has somewhat tempered the erotic impact of those dancing bodies. Thanks to a multiplicity of urban, suburban, extra-urban, postmodern and transmodern cultures and meta cultures, today we are far more used to the sight of an erotically moving, and often perfect, body than

Charles Spencer

Cool cat

Listing page content here My sister and I never had pets as children, or rather we had them but they didn’t tend to last very long. Indeed, no sooner had some dumb animal entered the house than my mother seemed to be making plans to get rid of it. The raven itself was hoarse that croaked the fatal entrance of Hammy the Hamster under our battlements. Hammy was a rather sweet brown and white creature who spent much of his time sleeping and the rest of it going round and round on his treadmill. It can’t have been much of a life and he eventually escaped; my sister and I,

Michael Tanner

Murder in the cathedral

Listing page content here There can’t be many more tantalising prospects for an operatic composer than writing an opera about the murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 and then conducting performances of it there. That is what Stephen Barlow has pulled off, the première and two subsequent performances taking place at the end of last week, the opera, or ‘piece’, beginning when the cathedral was still flooded by daylight, and ending with the audience largely in darkness, though much of the time there were lights shining from high up on pillars, which provided just enough illumination to encourage you to think you could follow the words, but

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Fiddling with Milton

Listing page content here Good and evil slug it out in Paradise Lost. Good triumphs, just about. So, too, in the Oxford Stage Company’s version of Milton’s epic, where flashes of brilliance overcome a few choppy patches. The staging is simple and sometimes powerful but the costumes are a poor blend of mediaeval pastiche and modern party-gear ripped up and spattered with blood. The ensemble playing is very strong and at least one of the visual settings — where Satan surveys the solar system — is extraordinarily beautiful. But the text has been fiddled with a lot. I was surprised by unMiltonic phrases like ‘Let us recognise’ and when I

Michael Vestey

American beauty

Listing page content here Although I don’t buy it often, I’ve always liked the New Yorker magazine, not only for its good writing but also for the humour. The cartoons are consistently sharp and amusing and the owners have cleverly marketed them as greeting cards, as The Spectator did recently.     The magazine has somehow survived for 81 years, and, as Naomi Gryn, the presenter of Inside The New Yorker on Radio Four (Saturday), told us, it now sells a million copies a week. She spent a week at its offices at 4 Times Square talking to staff and contributors. I suspect it takes itself a little too seriously, but most

Simon Hoggart

First impressions

I greatly enjoyed The Impressionists (BBC1, Sunday) in spite of clunky lines such as ‘This is Paris, in 1862,’ and ‘Cézanne! Do you know everybody?’ There are the scenes where they are painting their actual paintings, when Rolf Harris seems to have been parachuted into an episode of ’Allo, ’Allo! There was an unconsciously funny moment when Renoir is injured by a discus hurled by the English discus champion — who just happens to be training in the Forest of Fontainebleau, an activity which seems only marginally less stupid than practising the shot put on a mud flat. But the series charges along, helter-skelter, artists-behaving-badly, no pause for reflection except

Stephen Pettitt

Orchestrating support

I am in Raleigh, North Carolina, unexpectedly invited here by my old friend Grant Llewellyn, who is in his first season as music director of the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra and enjoying both the challenge and the celebrity status it gives him in the university- and technology-rich region known as The Triangle. Llewellyn has been treating his audiences to a mini-festival of contemporary American and British music. I am about to hear what turns out to be a fine concert in the orchestra’s handsome new Meymandi Hall of works by George Benjamin, Robin Holloway, Nicholas Maw and James MacMillan. According to your point of view, the United States of America

Andrew Lambirth

Mixed company | 19 May 2006

The pre-eminent Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) is frequently called an artists’ artist, which is usually taken to indicate that his extreme formality or painterliness (depending on who is arguing the case) appeals more to those in the know than to the man in the street. Morandi undoubtedly does have a deep and lasting appeal to artists, as this exhibition reminds us, but his profoundly unassuming and contemplative pictures also speak directly to a wider public, if the context is congenial. Morandi’s work is quiet, concentrating on groups of jars and bottles or odd corners of landscape, and in the bustle and cacophony of a mixed exhibition they can

Olivia Glazebrook

Chaos theory

A model couple, Alain and Bénédicte, live a perfect life in a clean white suburban house. A model couple, Alain (Laurent Lucas) and Bénédicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg), live a perfect life in a clean white suburban house. Alain is an engineer who is developing a way of protecting the home by remote control, using a minute helicopter which carries a camera and can download its images on to a laptop. Even from afar, Alain tells his audience during a presentation, you can limit damage to your home. Alain and Bénédicte invite Alain’s boss Richard Pollock (André Dussollier) and his wife Alice (Charlotte Rampling) to dinner, and as Bénédicte washes the salad

Michael Tanner

Expensive silliness

On 5 August 1993 Sviatoslav Richter wrote in his notebook, after listening to a recording of Götterdämmerung (the Rome Radio recording under Furtwängler, made in 1953): ‘What can you say about this music? You can only throw yourself on your knees and offer up your thanks. For me, personally, this is the supreme masterpiece.’ An adequate performance of Götterdämmerung should make anyone feel like that, at least temporarily. Even a seasoned opera-goer feels awe at the prospect of sitting through this richest product of Wagner’s genius, in which strands from the previous three dramas of the Ring cycle, and a surprising number of new elements, too, both musical and dramatic,

Toby Young Toby Young

Clash of cultures

The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Peter Shaffer’s 1964 play about the conquest of the Incas The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Peter Shaffer’s 1964 play about the conquest of the Incas, contains one of the most famous stage directions in modern drama: ‘They cross the Andes.’ On the face of it, these four words are completely preposterous. How could a theatre company possibly create the illusion that a 4,000-strong army is crossing a mountain range? Yet there was method in Shaffer’s madness. By including a stage direction that was impossible to follow naturalistically, he was forcing directors, actors, set designers, and so on to fall back on their ingenuity.