Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Anthony Thwaite

The Colours of London

(after Yoshio Markino, 1911) Colours of women, a grey-veiled pink, a bloom Fading to yellow, stippled, dust-hung, flecked Soot startling white lace in summer gloom. Colours of trees, pavements sticky with leaves Trodden to blackened bronze, a patina Attached to every twig. The heart grieves, Colours the blood with fungus, smudges all Spires, bridges, waters, with its spores, Catches each raindrop as the bruised clouds fall. Colours — the names of them, the languages Seeping between — slip into sepia, Then steely white, as words freeze images. Colours of women, trees, blood, stone on stone Piled high, dismantled, crowded as a dream Night after night in London, and alone.

Kate Chisholm

Radio review: Rambling across Europe and into Asia with Tara Bariana and Clare Balding

One morning in 1995 Tara Bariana walked out of his house in Walsall and didn’t stop walking until he had reached the village in the Punjab where he was born and grew up. Ten thousand miles in 19 months is a lot of footwork. What made him do it? ‘I came here in 1960 with my mother and two sisters,’ he told Clare Balding in Ramblings (Saturday), her Radio 4 programme dedicated to those who love nothing better than to tramp for miles with no other objective in mind than the reassuring pleasure of putting one foot in front of the other. ‘But I’ve never forgotten my childhood; those early

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Anna Chancellor: I vetoed a kiss with Dominic Cooper

We meet in the late afternoon at a jazzy little bistro near the Old Vic. I hadn’t quite prepared myself for the sheer visual impact of Anna Chancellor. Imposingly tall and wearing a simple glamorous frock, she rises to greet me. The dispositions of her face — the dimpled chin, the high cheekbones and the smoky blue eyes — combine in an extraordinary synthesis of softness, elegance and power. It’s like looking at a beautifully designed weapon. She’s playing Amanda alongside Toby Stephens, as Elyot, in Jonathan Kent’s production of Private Lives at the Gielgud. The show originated in Chichester last autumn. ‘I’m thrilled it’s going into town. But I

Andrew Lambirth

Exhibition review: Rory McEwen: the botanical artist who influenced Van Morrison; Paul Delvaux: a show to savour for its unusualness

By all accounts, Rory McEwen (1932–82) was a remarkable man, hugely talented in several different disciplines (artist, musician, writer) and very much loved by his friends. Grey Gowrie calls him ‘a spectacular human being’ and writes: ‘Even now, 30 years after his death, he lights up the mind of everyone who knew him.’ Renowned as a botanical artist, McEwen was also an exceptional musician, specialising in blues and folk, whose mastery of the 12-string acoustic guitar rivalled the legendary Lead Belly. With his brother Alexander, Rory toured across the USA in 1956, becoming one of the first British acts to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. Back in London, Rory

Paul Henry

War fiction

That ‘bullet hole’ in your bush hat, there should have been two holes — for the truth to pass through. I think you believed your own lies, liked how they altered the light on the bullet, as it passed through. Who fired the gun? Who died? Who prayed for the victim’s soul? So many questions, passing through.

Peter Hoskin

Chronicle of a Summer: Reality TV decades before it had a name

Here’s a documentary called Chronicle of a Summer. Which summer? Why, the summer of 1960, in Paris, when fag-end colonial struggles were burning away in Algeria and other parts of Africa. And how is it chronicled? An anthropologist and a sociologist, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, put cameras on the streets and ask questions of the people they find. Who are you? Are you happy? The usual French existential stuff. The results are gripping, even from a distance of more than 50 years. Rouch and Morin focus on the personal; the everyday lives of factory workers, artists, immigrants, models and students. But when France’s present and recent past break into

Kate Chisholm

Radio review: Damascus Diary: destruction of a city

We’ve heard it all before — the misery that war wreaks on everyday lives — but Lina Sinjab’s audio diary of her experiences in Syria took us right into the heart of what it feels like to be hounded out of your home, your memories, your sense of who you are and where you belong. Sinjab grew up in Damascus, her whole life has been lived there, but now she has left, forced out by the uprising. In Damascus Diary, produced by Nina Robinson (Radio 4, Monday), she recalled how at first the demonstrators in support of the government and against the rebels chanted ‘Long live Assad’, and ‘Assad for

James Delingpole James Delingpole

TV review: Russell Brand socks it to the gods and goddesses of daytime TV

This week I witnessed the bloody, brutal death of mainstream television. It will, I think, go down in media history as one of those ‘Where were you when JFK was shot?’ moments. The victims were the presenters of a US breakfast television show called Morning Joe; the executioner was Russell Brand. Russell Brand? No, it’s OK, I’m quite with you: on a bad day he can be the most annoying person on earth, with his swarthy, beardie, slimy, wheedling faux-grandiloquence and even more faux-intellect and that little-puppy-dog-lost way he has of looking you straight in the eye and impudently demanding your forgiveness for having just shagged both your wife and

Giannandrea Poesio

Dance: William Forsythe’s new work is choreographic narcissism

As someone who once raved about William Forsythe’s innovative approach to ballet and fondly admired his groundbreaking choreographic explorations, I felt let down by last week’s performance by his company at Sadler’s Wells. Things did not start badly, though. The way gestural solutions unfold and develop in a crescendo of movement variables, variants, similes and opposites in N.N.N.N. (2002) is rather engaging. The game of quick interaction between four male dancers moves rapidly from the simplest hand movement to demanding acts of powerful physicality; there are humorous moments and tense ones, as well affectionate references to the neoclassical oeuvre of George Balanchine — whom Forsythe has often referred to as

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Theatre review: Wonka will create enough kiddie glee to guarantee its survival. What a pity it isn’t good!; Four farces: two weak; two excellent

Off to Wonka. With no preconceptions either. I’ve never seen this story on stage, page or screen and it strikes me as a dysfunctional hybrid of Oz and Twist. The show kicks off with a cartoon history of chocolate which — whoopsidaisy! — omits to mention sugar as an ingredient. We meet Charlie Bucket, an angelic drudge, who must win a prize in order to rescue his whining, crippled parents from impoverishment. He visits Willy Wonka’s candy emporium along with four surpassingly obnoxious child-rivals. There are two grotesque beauty queens (one is slaughtered early on in an industrial accident). There’s a Bavarian fatso who scoffs garbage non-stop and belches into

Deborah Ross

Film review: I was right: a British thriller starring Jason Statham is to be avoided

Hummingbird is a British thriller starring Jason Statham which may be all you need to know to keep away and if it is, can’t say I blame you. Statham is the actor who rose to fame as one of Guy Ritchie’s entourage and now plays bad-ass, hard-boiled action heroes of the kind who can take on whole armies and crack open all their heads and emerge breathless, admittedly, yet with only one small graze. I normally avoid his films and films of this type as they are just not my thing — you’d think anyone who could take on whole armies and emerge with just a single graze would be

Michael Tanner

Opera review: Britten’s Gloriana may be a failure but it still manages to shock

The most surprising thing about Benjamin Britten’s coronation opera Gloriana, for me, is that it merely fell rather flat at its first performance. The composer, we read, had insisted on its virtually official status as part of the coronation proceedings, and it seems to have been his major bid to be accepted as an establishment figure, and not merely as the most significant of the younger generation of composers. But to have chosen, at the suggestion of the Earl of Harewood, the nearest relation to the royal family with any serious pretensions to being artistically cultivated, Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex, with its characteristically world-weary deflating view of human affairs

Kathryn Simmonds

Hotel Pool

Twelve? Thirteen? She arrives in advance of her parents, fat as I was thin, wrapped in a towel, pattering to safety — a bench where she sits obscured before abandoning herself to the indecency of a walk towards water, (though who’s to see? To care? The retirees? Me with my puckered stomach?) My eyes meet hers, hers dart away like fish; this is not the place to say You’ll be all right, the body must become itself, nothing to do but swim out, follow.

Friday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 21 June 2013

In this week’s lead feature in the Arts section, Tom Rosenthal explains just why he thinks the Lowry retrospective at Tate Britain is so long overdue. Lowry is one of our most popular artists – and it is exactly this that has been his downfall. ‘Can one disapprove of someone merely because he popular? Clearly one can’, writes Rosenthal. The lack of Lowry in London only highlights ‘the fashionable dislike of Lowry’s art’. But, finally, Lowry has made it to the walls of Tate Britain. Should his work be there? Andrew Lambirth will be reviewing the exhibition in a future issue of The Spectator, but for now you can make

Thursday

Tom Rosenthal

At last! The snobbish Tate has finally overcome its distaste for L.S. Lowry

One day in Berlin, I saw the rerun of the RA’s Young British Artists exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin’s equivalent of Tate Modern. After that, I saw a superb retrospective of Lyonel Feininger at the Neue Deutsche Galerie. In the evening, I ran into the onlie begetter of the YBA show (which, with the exception of Ron Mueck’s amazing sculptures, had not given me much pleasure), my (unrelated) namesake Norman. I had no wish to discuss Norman’s pride and joy, the YBA, so turned the conversation to Feininger and asked whether Norman had seen it. ‘Ah,’ said Norman, ‘what a bore; I won’t waste my time on him.’ After

Andrew Lambirth

One leaves the Patrick Caulfield exhibition longing to see more

In the wake of the Roy Lichtenstein blockbuster at Tate Modern comes Patrick Caulfield at Tate Britain, and what a contrast! Where Lichtenstein looks increasingly like a one-trick pony, an assessment driven home by the excessively large show, Caulfield emerges as fresh, witty and visually inventive. Undoubtedly this impression is fostered by the size of the exhibition: Tate Britain’s Linbury Galleries have been divided between Caulfield and Gary Hume, allowing each enough space for a highly focused solo exhibition. There are thus only 35 paintings by Caulfield spanning his entire career, and one leaves his show wanting to see more, not suffering from the usual museum overkill. This is an

Ariane Bankes

Exhibition review: The charm and dexterity of Sir Hugh Casson

It is nothing short of a miracle that this aptly titled exhibition could be shoehorned into just two rooms at the Royal Academy, such was the range of the irrepressible Hugh Casson’s work and influence during his lifetime. Architect, artist, designer and writer, he was a fireball of energy and a fount of ideas. He was described by one friend as ‘the golfball on an IBM typewriter’. Not the least of his multifarious talents was, indeed, making friends with anyone, from the casual visitor queuing for the RA’s latest exhibition to the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, for whom he worked discreetly but tirelessly for many decades on a series

Kathryn Simmonds

Nocturne

Midnight for the squirrels and the drunks, midnight for you dear and your chest hair too, put your pen down pet and rest here. Midnight swallowing the mirror whole, swallowing my mother in her pale blue slippers, and my brother, my big brother in his too small bed. Bed, the longed for stopped short sound delivering us at last from sense-making. The trains are empty, the magnolia trees are still, the tower block has lost another dozen yellow squares but they’ll fill up and we’ll fill too, and in tomorrow’s morning we’ll awake, washed up again among the bills.  Meanwhile, the stars are queuing up to get behind your lids. 

Clarissa Tan

Television review: Channel 4’s mating season

Channel 4 is deep into its summer of love. It’s having a Mating Season and — unusually for the network — it’s not all about sex. Instead, it’s about those fluttery butterflies that occur before the birds and the bees come in, when two people meet for the first time and get to know each other. Not mating then, but dating, which is scarier. When you watch Dates, it seems scarier still. The drama series is about ‘the social minefield’ of modern dating, and what a minefield it is. Ex-escorts, closet gay bankers, Cantonese lesbians — there’s the lot. The first episode, about two very different people on a blind

Peter Hoskin

Film review: Before Midnight is a perfectly crafted movie

To quote the watch adverts, here’s a timepiece that will last a lifetime: the Doomsday Clock. And the reason it will last that long? Because when it stops, so will your life. This is the figurative clock that has been maintained by a bunch of Chicagoan atomic scientists since 1947. The closer its hands are to midnight, the closer we are to nuclear annihilation. It started off at seven minutes to midnight. But now, as any paranoiac will tell you, it is two minutes further on. We are, in this one specific sense, five minutes away from The End. Did Richard Linklater have this in mind when he named his