Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Six hours with Stockhausen

Opera

Arriving for the world première of Stockhausen’s opera Mittwoch aus Licht (Wednesday from Light), we were greeted by the sight of two Bactrian camels, delightful and patient creatures, standing almost immobile for at least an hour while many visitors inspected them, before leaving in Joseph’s Amazing Camels coach. The one we saw later on stage

Racking up the tension

Cinema

Berberian Sound Studio is a film about a man who can’t get his expenses repaid and hurts a lot of vegetables — don’t worry, the RSPCV is on to it — although I suspect there may be rather more to it than this. I suspect there are hidden meanings. I suspect there are references to

Money and the Flying Horses

More from Books

Intriguing, the oaten seethe of thoroughbred horses in single stalls across a twilit cabin. Intimate, under the engines’ gale, a stamped hoof, a loose-lip sigh, like dawn sounds at track work. Pilots wearing the bat wings of intercontinental night cargo come out singly, to chat with or warn the company vet at his manifests: four

Birds in the Blue Night

Poems

Not birds I know, dank-feathered, inky-eyed, spinning in a ring until one breaks free, flies in. And already I am out of bed and on the path to my father’s room, the whole house sleeping but for him, his old face stunned in the white light webbed on the wall and I say Dad, the

Martha Wainwright’s family affair

More from Arts

Martha Wainwright was keeping it in the family at the Union Chapel in Islington last week. Arcangelo, the singer-songwriter’s three-year-old son, joined her on stage and had the audience eating out of the palm of his tiny hand; the spectral presence of her mother, the folk legend Kate McGarrigle, was never far away; and the

A painful but brilliant film: Deborah Ross on Maisie’s betrayal

Cinema

What Maisie Knew is an adaptation of the Henry James 1897 novel, updated to Manhattan in the now, and is described in the bumf I received as ‘heart-warming’, which is utterly strange, as it’s a child-caught-in-the-middle drama, and just so painful. It’s compelling. It’s exquisitely done. It’s brilliantly acted. (According to the most recent figures, 

Lloyd Evans

The best satire at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Theatre

Politics is everywhere in Edinburgh. It’s embedded in the architecture of the streets. The New Town, built in the latter half of the 18th century, is a granite endorsement of the Act of Union, a stone pledge of loyalty to Britain’s new Germanic monarchy in London. The layout forms an oblong grid. The horizontals of

Fish oil, exercise and no wild parties

Poems

My lifelong friend, dear heart, these days you’re losing the plot: you’re a fish in a bucket, open-mouthed, flopping about in a panic, bereft of your sheen, all confidence gone. Examined in action on a black and white screen, every movement recorded, you’re haplessly tethered, chaotically jumping, locked into a pulse of your own. Tracked

Only Evan Davies can keep his guests in order

Radio

It must have sounded like such a great idea. To gather a group of thinkers, agitators, experts, intellectuals and media people round a large table, mike them up, ply them with drink, choose a presenter from the radio hall of fame to act as monitor and shut the studio door. Then switch on the red

The Email About Writing the Poem

More from Books

I’ve been occupying myself trying to write a long-ish poem. It’s an odd sensation writing a poem. You’re trying to make something come out of nothing, and you have an idea of what it could be, of stray lines and thoughts, and it takes shape as you do it, and you have to somehow notice

Kuma would shine at any time of the year

Cinema

Mid-August is a hopeless time for films; so hopeless, useless and bleak, if I don’t use three words when one would have done, I am just never going to fill up this space. The assumption is people don’t wish to visit the cinema on summer evenings, or they are on holiday (I wish!), so the

State-sponsored cultural renaissance in revolutionary Mexico

Exhibitions

Revolution shook Mexico between 1910 and 1920, but radical political change was not mirrored in the art of the period. In this exhibition, we do not see avant-garde extremes, but witness instead a deepening humanism, as if for once art was interlocking with human need. The cultural renaissance that followed was state-sponsored, and artists were

Big School left me po-faced

Television

How did our comedies become so sad? BBC1’s new sitcom Big School (Fridays) opened with a scene that would probably tickle the ribs of many, but I, in my usual humourless way, found it depressing. Chemistry teacher Mr Church, played by David Walliams, hoped to excite his morbidly uninterested pupils about the effects of dunking

Happy 80th birthday, Dame Janet Baker

Music

Raise your glass on 21 August to wish a happy 80th birthday to one of the greatest singers and singing actresses this or any other country has produced — Dame Janet Baker, the mezzo-soprano from Yorkshire, who never went to a music college and won the hearts of her audiences in a career spanning 35

Lloyd Evans

The next Joyce Grenfell at the Edinburgh Fringe

Arts feature

Strict bylaws in Edinburgh prevent you from buying off-licence booze after ten at night. You can, however, buy all the sauce you want from ten in the morning. (This may explain why alcoholism is so rare up here.) When midnight tolls, Festival revellers pour forth and fill the air with chanting and singing of variable

Climb aboard the runaway train

More from Arts

Brother, can you spare me a train? Or maybe just a Pullman carriage or two? There are so many brilliant films set on trains that I’d love to screen some of them in loco locomotive, as it were. Shanghai Express (1932), The Lady Vanishes (1938), The Narrow Margin (1950), Night Train (1959)… I’ll stop there.

Kate Chisholm connects to her inner tortoise

Radio

Of course there’s a future for digital radio, it’s just that we’ll probably be listening to it online, or on the phone. The wireless set, tucked on the kitchen shelf, beside the bed, among the vases in the lounge, permanently tuned in to Aggers or Humphrys, Livesey or Lamacq, will become a museum piece, an

Wagner at the Proms

Opera

It would be interesting to know why Tristan und Isolde was placed in the Proms programme in between Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. You might as well programme Othello between acts four and five of King Lear. Wagner wrote Tristan and Die Meistersinger between acts two and three of Siegfried, and to be really chic some company

Send George Osborne to the Tower

More from Arts

Send George Osborne to the Tower, then he might learn that currency manipulation rarely ends well. Coins and Kings occupies four small rooms in a Yeoman Warder’s house on the site of the old mint, which was established by Edward I in the 1270s in response to endemic counterfeiting, coin clipping and general skulduggery. This

Hell is other people’s taste in music

Music

‘I don’t really like most of the music you play,’ said the tall blonde woman with whom I share my life. ‘There are no tunes. Where are the tunes? A lot of it sounds like the sort of thing you’d hear in Topshop.’ I was outraged. Admittedly, the song playing at that moment — a

Samuel Courtauld’s great collection

Exhibitions

In 1929, Samuel Courtauld owned the most important collection of works by Paul Gauguin in England: five paintings, ten woodcuts and a sculpture. He subsequently sold two of the paintings, but for this show the gallery that bears Courtauld’s name has borrowed them back. One of them is the very beautiful ‘Martinique Landscape’ (1887), now