Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Ursula Buchan

Private patronage

Sir Edwin Lutyens reckoned that there will never be great architects or architecture without great patrons, and I rather think the same is true of botanical art. The exhibition presently on show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, entitled A New Flowering: 1,000 Years of Botanical Art, seems to reinforce the point. Displayed are works by the greats of the past — Besler, Ehret, Redouté, Jacquin and the Bauer brothers — all of whom were dependent on imaginative private patronage, and these hang alongside paintings by more than a score of contemporary artists from the collection of one patron, Dr Shirley Sherwood. She is the guest curator of the exhibition

Saturday

Frank Keating

These are the days!

I fancy that quite a few of the apparent zillions who turned up at, or tuned into, what someone on Radio 5 described as ‘Bob Gandalf’s pop festival’ spent much of their time asking above the din, ‘I wonder what the score is?’ Because sport also put on an extended whoopee of variety acts last weekend. You had rugby’s Lions for Saturday breakfast, Australia’s opening overs at Lord’s for elevenses, Wimbledon for lunch, Henley for tea and cucumber sandwiches, Le Tour in France for an early evening pastis snifter — and much more of the same next day. Some regard the rugby as a calamity, the combined British and Irish

Simon Hoggart

Compelling viewing

Last Saturday. BBC1 was showing the most exciting women’s Wimbledon tennis final for many years and Sky Sports had what turned out to be a thrilling tied one-day cricket final between England and Australia. On BBC2 you could catch the Live8 concert. In all cases — whatever the loss in atmosphere or the excitement at being present at ‘historic’ occasions (in fact, I suspect most of them will have faded from the memory quite fast) — you got a much better view on television. Those of us who recall fuzzy white players knocking a fuzzy grey ball over a dark grey tennis court can only marvel at the superb images

Marcus Berkmann

The missing sixth

I’m confused. Did five-sixths of the world’s population really watch Live8? If so, what did the other sixth think they were doing? Did they ask permission? I and my friends were playing cricket on the day, and during the tea interval, while stuffing cheese and pickle sandwiches into our faces, we naturally and automatically tuned into Williams v. Davenport on BBC1. (The pavilion didn’t have Sky Sports for the cricket.) But we all agreed that, if any market researchers or undercover policemen challenged us, we would say we watched Live8 like everyone else. ‘Pink Floyd were good, weren’t they?’ we rehearsed. ‘And why on earth were The Who given only

Saturday

Toby Young Toby Young

Cuban cliché

I had quite high expectations when the curtain went up on The President of an Empty Room. The writer, Steven Knight, produced the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Dirty Pretty Things and the director, Howard Davies, was responsible for Mourning Becomes Electra, one of my favourite productions of 2003. Nor was I the only one who thought this sounded like a winning combination. The press night audience included Derek Jacobi, Imelda Staunton and Stephen Sondheim. My first impression of the play seemed to confirm this optimism. The designer, Bunny Christie, has ingeniously managed to convert the Cottesloe into a Cuban cigar factory, and the atmospheric lighting design by Mark Henderson underlines the

Michael Tanner

Fresh touch

It’s a good thing that the Royal Opera keeps its revivals of standard Italian repertoire in good shape, considering the many acute disappointments we have had this season from new productions, Italian, German, French. John Copley’s La Bohème was first staged in 1974, but the latest revival, with a fair number of fresh touches added by the associate director Richard Gregson, and with Mark Elder conducting, is welcome, even if not quite ranking with the finest of its previous runs. It has an almost uniformly excellent cast, but some of these performers are mildly miscast; and for all the lucidity and careful climax-building of the conducting, it may suffer from

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Glasto vibes

For the first time since 1990 I decided not to go to Glastonbury this year. It was a purely practical decision: the drug intake needed to get you through those three days is so vast that it wipes you out for the rest of summer and, for a change, I thought it would be interesting to see what July, August and September are like unmediated by insomnia, lethargy, paranoia, depression and the continual urge to dance to anything with a repetitive beat. Watching it all on TV instead, it struck me that the BBC’s fantastically thorough coverage of Glastonbury is one of the wonders of the modern world. I won’t

Andrew Lambirth

Favourite themes

As a landscape painter, Graham Sutherland (1903–80) enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame through the 1930s and 40s, culminating in the Venice Biennale in 1952, a prestigious Tate retrospective in 1953 and the Order of Merit, Britain’s highest award, in 1960. His later years saw success as a portrait-painter to the rich and famous, and the scandalously destroyed portrait of Sir Winston Churchill. Yet there hasn’t been a decent Sutherland exhibition in Britain for more than 20 years, since, in fact, the rather-too-inclusive Tate retrospective of 1982. In the meantime his stock, once dangerously inflated by certain over-eager supporters, has sunk dramatically. This happens to many artists, who go through

Saturday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Tangled phonetics

Strange goings-on at the Globe. After a Tempest performed by Mark Rylance as a Reduced Shakespeare skit, we now have Pericles directed by Kathryn Hunter. This is a tricky, strange and fascinating dream-work. The text is so complex and elusive that the obvious approach is to play it straight and let the audience’s imagination fill in the gaps. Imagination. Audience. Not words many directors would welcome, since they imply a minimum of intervention. And here we have maximum intervention. Kathryn Hunter has created a brash, stylish, modern-dress production which unfolds like a set of magazine photo-shoots. Everything is gorgeous, calculated, cocksure and superficial. On its own this would not be

Giannandrea Poesio

Sombre journey

Performance-makers like to experiment with creative modes and ideas. It is a natural urge in a world in which ‘new’ is synonymous with survival. Jiri Kyli

Mark Steyn

Back to basics

Every culture creates heroes in its own image: it’s difficult to imagine transferring the British adventurers — Rudolf Rassendyll and Richard Hannay, the Saint and 007 — to America. Likewise, ‘superheroes’ — guys in gaudy tights and capes flying through the streets — never quite work outside the United States. Marvel had a Captain Britain in the Seventies, and Jim Callaghan’s decrepit wasteland could certainly have used one. But he was the superhero equivalent of Elvis impersonators’ night in Romford. I seem to recall a Captain Canada, too, and a few other attempts at Canuck heroes — Mapleman? Beavergirl? — but contemporary Canada is not an heroic culture, never mind

Michael Tanner

Orchestral mastery

While the Grand Theatre in Leeds is being refurbished, Opera North is doing concert performances of operas, though in the case of Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle the semi-staging amounts to quite as much action as one needs in this work, while the purely visual side of things is best left to the imagination. Unfortunately, Opera North doesn’t quite do that: there’s a large screen hanging above the orchestra on which abstract shapes are projected, not very distracting but unnecessary, and not even lurid. The two soloists move around, Bluebeard mainly remaining seated at the front, and impressively clad; while Judith takes up positions in the orchestra, making a contrast, which

Laura Gascoigne

Spiritual dimension

The human eye is an amazing mechanism, but its vision is limited. We can’t see behind us, we can’t see much to the side, and in front — unless we’re desert tribesmen or Eskimos — our view is almost always obstructed by something. So some of what we see is actually ‘seen’, the rest is extrapolated from experience. Plus, our view from any one point — between those rocks, beyond that gateway, through those trees — exists only in that one spot at that one time. Move forward, back, to the side and it changes; wait for the light to alter and it’s further transformed. These are not questions that

Andrew Lambirth

At the shrine of Frida

Frida Kahlo (1907–54) is apparently the most famous female artist in history (who is the nearest competitor, I wonder — Grandma Moses or Paula Rego? Probably not Artemisia Gentileschi), and as such, with a recent feature film dedicated to her legend, a hot commercial property. The merchandising angle alone is substantial. There’s never been a solo exhibition of her work in England, so, with her reputation at an all-time high, a show becomes a viable and desirable museum proposition. Yet Kahlo is such a cult figure (‘bohemian artist, a victim turned survivor, proto-feminist, sexual adventurer who challenged gender boundaries’) that the Tate exhibition pamphlet makes this extraordinary statement: ‘First and

Simon Hoggart

Channel surfing

I answered the door the other day and a cheerful, rangy Afro-Caribbean youth stood on the step with a remote control. I suddenly recalled the appointment. ‘You’re the cable guy,’ I said. He looked affronted. ‘Cable guy, eh? No, I’m the television engineer!’ Half an hour later, the engineer had installed digital TV, and we now have 129 channels. This is more than most people need. Channel surfing at, say, 8.30 a.m. can be deeply depressing. For instance, we now have Channel 4, so we can watch Big Brother. But we also have E4, so we can watch Big Brother highlights all day. And we now have a channel called

Robin Holloway

On the waterfront

So much for equality! More subtly than in mediaeval, Tudor, baroque times, the musician is placed below the salt if not literally below stairs. (I mean the composer, of course; not the diva, the glitzy pianist, the star conductor.) You’d imagine the whole raison d’

Saturday

Mark Steyn

Marital stress

We Don’t Live Here Anymore is very faithfully adapted from a couple of Andre Dubus novellas I read a long time ago. Quite how long ago I didn’t realise until the point in the movie when Hank, a failed writer teaching literature at some small-town New England college, gets yet another rejection letter and ceremonially burns his manuscript in the backyard barbecue as the bemused kids look on. What’s wrong with this scene? Well, just ten minutes earlier, we’d seen him writing…on a laptop. So there is no ‘manuscript’. It’s on a computer, and probably backed up on CD or some such. But Dubus wrote the original story in the

Toby Young Toby Young

Doing the business

I was in a troubled mood when I sat down to watch Guys and Dolls and, alas, it didn’t do much to raise my spirits. Before I started reviewing plays four years ago, I had no time for musicals. I have a tin ear for music and almost no visual sense, and the only pleasure I derived from going to the theatre was literary. For me, the characters and the plot were the thing and any musical interludes were an irritating distraction. But seeing Trevor Nunn’s production of South Pacific changed all that. For the first time, I experienced the ecstasy that a really good musical can produce. During Nellie’s

Andrew Lambirth

Listening to whales

Every 10 years, it seems, we are blessed or afflicted, depending on your point of view, with a major exhibition of the internationally acclaimed sculptor, poet and filmmaker Rebecca Horn (born 1944). The first show I remember was at the Serpentine in 1984. Then in 1994 she had the Tate and the Serpentine. Now it’s the turn of the Hayward. At the time of that first Serpentine show, I remember being intrigued and not a little fascinated by this strange artist who made occasionally functioning machines, wore custom-built bodystockings with strange appendages, and liked to be filmed disporting in long grass. At the Tate exhibition, her grand piano strung up

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Bottling out

Quite the most upsetting thing I saw on TV all week was Bob Geldof on the Jonathan Ross show (Friday), talking about all the dead Africans who are found washed up on the shores of Lampedusa, between Libya and Sicily. So many, he said, that the mayor of Lampedusa complained that he had ‘literally’ no room anywhere left to bury them. Now, obviously, Africans dying en masse is a bad thing. But I’m afraid what upset me far, far more was the fact that Ross allowed Geldof to get away with this lachrymose homily (which got a huge cheer from the audience, unfortunately) on a show normally characterised by its