Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Michael Tanner

Opera review: Deborah Warner’s production of Death in Venice is everything that a production should be, Lohengrin

Thomas Mann, Gustav von Aschenbach, Benjamin Britten, united in a common interest, one the expression of which is still taboo, yet which Mann succeeded in writing a bestseller about, and Britten his last testament. Mann surmounted the interest, just, by fantasising and remaining amazed that people actually ‘do it’, if his reaction to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar is anything to go by. Aschenbach is so enthralled that he dies rather than separating from his pubescent beloved, and never has the courage to speak to him. About Britten things are still a bit unclear, and are likely to remain so. What astonishes is that Mann’s story has been

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Theatre: James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner is dazzlingly funny. Kim Cattrall is a revelation in a monstrous role

Good and bad at the National. The Amen Corner by James Baldwin is a wryly observed comedy drama written for a studio theatre. It’s an excellent small play. The director Rufus Norris pumps it full of steroids and tries to turn it into a great American epic like Streetcar or The Crucible. His staging suggests the finale of a country-house opera festival. Costly baggage impedes the script’s sprightly flow. On-stage jazzmen snivel through trombones and hack at double basses. Preening choirs warble and sway. Spare actors hang out of windows trying to look cool and indolent. The running time reaches a Napoleonic 155 minutes. Megalomania infects the furniture too. Baldwin

Ed Rex

Laura Marling at Secret Music: a concert without croquet is a concert not worth attending

The word ‘concert’ means different things to different people. For some it evokes dinner jackets and not clapping between movements; for others, jumping up and down in a stadium, desperately trying to spot the band through a sea of blinking smartphones. But Secret Cinema’s latest brainchild, dubbed Secret Music, is something else entirely: its inaugural production brings Laura Marling’s new album to life and places you right at its core. Stepping into the grounds of a grand Victorian hospital in East London, transformed for the night into a 1920s hotel, you’re left to explore its various rooms, with their eclectic and unfailingly interesting occupants, at your leisure. I won’t reveal

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Which television chef would you most like to see throttled in a restaurant?

Which television chef would you most like to see throttled in a restaurant? I have to say, Nigella Lawson would be well down the list for me, as I’ve always rather liked her. It’s true that some of her recipes are a little precious, especially all that fairy cake stuff, but surely not to the point that one would wish to strangle her, or witness her being strangled? Gregg Wallace, perhaps? He’s the one from Masterchef who looks like a badly boiled egg which is permanently on the cusp of ejaculation. Obviously Gordon Ramsay — that’s a given, as they say — but I’d also like to make a case

Wednesday

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. 

Friday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 14 June 2013

Sir Alfred Munnings lived his life in true bohemian style, ‘carousing with gypsies and horse-trainers, living rough and constantly on the road’. Summer in February is based on his early life living in Cornwall, with Munnings played by Dominic Cooper: ‘Irrepressible as an electric eel, and twice as dangerous’. But does the film live up to Munnings’ art – and, of course, to the hype? The problem with films about artists is, says Andrew Lambirth, the art. But Summer in February is ‘as vivid and visually complex as a Munnings masterpiece’ – in fact, almost as good as the book. Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, on at the Lyttleton, has been

Steerpike Steerpike

Hollywood and oligarchs descend on Art Basel

The art world has descended on the almost attractive city of Basel in Switzerland this week, for the annual art fair. And where the art world goes, glamorous collectors follow. Leonardo di Caprio appeared to be in the mood for some serious shopping when I glimpsed him, casting his eye over a Warhol or two. He may have looked at the Alexander Calder, or perhaps he saw the Edmund de Waal or the exquisite pair of Peter Doig etchings. And there’s this chap called Picasso; mark my words, dear readers, he’s going to be big. Di Caprio had competition from one Roman Abramovitch, who sloped by a few Edvard Munchs,

Thursday

Leanda De-Lisle

Royal bling with the Tudors at the Queen’s Gallery and the V&A

As soon as the battle of Bosworth was won, Henry VII’s politically astute mother sent him appropriate clothing for his state entry into London. A king was expected to look like a king, having ‘a prerogative is his array above all others’. Sumptuary laws policed the system under the Tudors, with everyone — in theory — wearing only as much glitter and flash as their rank permitted. You really were what you wore. The Great Wardrobe Accounts of Henry VII and Henry VIII offer numerous unexpected insights into contemporary events. One sinister detail I spotted during my research on the period is a warrant issued in November 1498 for black

Andrew Lambirth

To survive the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, don’t linger — just scan and pounce

The Royal Academy’s biggest annual prize is the Charles Wollaston Award, worth £25,000, for the most distinguished work in the Summer Exhibition, this year won by the Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui (born 1944). Although his preferred media are clay and wood, El Anatsui has taken to making installations from found materials woven together like cloth, and has done rather well with them around the world. He was invited to make a hanging for the façade of Burlington House for the duration of the Summer Exhibition, and this junk curtain (composed inter alia of aluminium bottle tops, printing plates, copper wire and roofing sheets) now obscures or ornaments — depending on

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Television review: The Returned is the finest, purest heroin

With the possible exception of Game of Thrones, The Returned (Channel 4, Sunday) is the best series you will see on TV all year. I caught some early previews about a month ago when I was on The Review Show (BBC4). Normally the reviewers don’t agree on much but on this we were unanimous: we all felt like newly made addicts who’d been introduced to the finest, purest heroin — only to be suddenly denied our next fix. When was the rest of the series going to be broadcast? When? WHEN? Well, now, finally it has made it on to Channel 4 and I hope you’ll all be as hooked

Kathryn Simmonds

The Reluctant Natives

Fate landed us here by mistake, set us to walk Welsh hillsides with a plodding heart or paddle Essex estuaries under duress, our talk always of somewhere else (tacked to kitchen walls a Swedish lake, a mountain range in Switzerland). See us crouch in living rooms as daylight palls, an old draught trespassing beneath the door, the trick of day too quickly turning night, the radio’s relentless classic serial, that Sunday evening tick of now becoming then. Hear us planning new retreats, rephrasing sentences it takes a lifetime to pronounce — How nice to meet you in Hungarian, or I’m from Hull in faulty Greek — curtains drawn against the

Deborah Ross

Review: Stir yourself — I am Nasrine is far from an Earnestly Grim Wrist Slitter

I Am Nasrine is one of those small, low-budget films showing somewhere awkward on a day and time that probably aren’t ideal but you can’t expect everything in life to be handed to you on a plate, and it’s worth the effort, if you can stir yourself sufficiently. (Can you? Most people I asked said you couldn’t, but I believe in you, as I always have.) Its writer-director, Tina Gharavi, who is Iranian-born but is now a lecturer in Digital Media at Newcastle University, was nominated for a Bafta for most outstanding debut, and although it is one of those films about the immigration experience, and a young woman who

Andrew Lambirth

Film review: Summer in February: as vivid as a Munnings masterpiece

We like our artists to be larger than life and preferably bohemian, even if nowadays we’ve had to accept that the ones we hear about are more likely to live in a castle than a garret. Sir Alfred Munnings (1878–1959) began life as an artist in true bohemian style, carousing with gypsies and horse-trainers, living rough and constantly on the road, painting at full-stretch. On form, he was a superb painter of horses and English country life, and although he is denigrated as a reactionary by the current art establishment, his paintings still sell for large sums. He ended up covered in honours as President of the Royal Academy, but

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Theatre review: Despite the wordiness and monstrous plotlines, Strange Interlude is gripping

First the good news. Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill has been cut down from five hours to just under three and a half. The action, if you can call it that, begins at 7 p.m. but if you reach the Lyttelton theatre at the more civilised hour of 8 you’ll have missed very little. The first act could be disposed of in six words, ‘my fiancé died in the war’, but O’Neill is such a colossal twaddler that he wastes absolutely ages gabbling on about this and that before plunging into his story. The main character, Nina, is a bourgeois flapper who approaches life in a spirit of cynical pragmatism.

Ed Rex

We should be teaching kids to make programs like Word, not how to use them

Technology is turning the human urge to consume information into an unhealthy addiction. Some of this consumption — reading, following the news, exposing ourselves to culture — has obvious merits; I’d have no trouble downloading the entire works of Shakespeare in the time it would have taken someone ten years ago to find their keys before setting off to a bookshop. But with so much around us to consume we seem to have lost the ability to make things ourselves. How can we be creative when every waking moment is spent trying to keep up with the feeds, updates and new releases volleyed at us from all sides? Take, for

Michael Tanner

Opera review: Crying with the heroine in WNO’s Lohengrin

In Act II of Lohengrin, after the villainess Ortrud has interrupted the procession to the Minster, and sown the seeds of doubt in Elsa’s mind about the provenance of her rescuer, Lohengrin himself appears and comforts Elsa, saying, ‘Come! Let your tears of sorrow become ones of joy.’ That is followed by a solemn quiet passage, only 11 bars long, and unrelated to anything we have heard before or will hear subsequently, but of such grave beauty that it makes you, too, cry. This kind of pathos and nobility permeate Lohengrin, and though each of Wagner’s dramas has its own feel and colour, those of this opera are so wonderful

Kate Chisholm

Radio review: The Archers — Soapland’s response to our post-9/11 world

He’s gone. Not that anyone apart from Lilian will miss him. But Paul’s been despatched (at long last) to the Land of Discarded Soap Actors, despised, rejected and scorned by most of those who knew him in Borsetshire — and also, I hope, by any self-respecting Archers Addict. I felt nothing, absolutely nothing, at the news of his heart attack in a hotel room in Cardiff, except perhaps relief that we will never again have to listen to his wheedling, self-satisfied tones. How could smart, zappy Lilian ever have fallen for his oleaginous charms? It was clear from his very first words that he was as badly behaved as his

Andrew Petrie

Herzog at the BFI: Mad men in the rainforest

‘I am the wrath of God. The earth I pass will see me and tremble.’ Not my words, Mr Speaker, but those of demented conquistador Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s electrifying Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972). Now back in cinemas nationwide in a restored print that makes its rainforest setting a real feast for the eyes, Aguirre heralds a two-month Herzog season at the BFI Southbank. Five weeks of location shooting in Peru effectively meant the film crew endured the same hardships as the characters: heat, hunger and the unpredictable behaviour of Kinski, scarcely any less a madman than the treasure-seeking Aguirre. The director claims that Kinski only calmed down

Polly Walshe

Thirteen and a half

Have you looked across the Sound? On the other shore life lies. Can you see it over there? The palaces, the esplanade? It only takes a little while to cross, A year or two at most, sometimes just days. In clear weather you’ll see boats leaving the marina, The scarlet awnings of the shops And fortune-tellers on the steps; At night there are restaurant lights And houses glimmering on nameless slopes. Over there are parties you’ll attend, The masques and tattered carnivals And all the long white hours of getting wise. You’ll talk about returning here – You’ll say it’s where your heart is – But, knowing the tides, we

Sunday

Sebastian Payne

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones goes mad on BBC Sunday Politics

Everyone enjoys a good conspiracy theory, particularly Alex Jones. His Infowars.com site can explain every single problem in the world through his theories on the rise of the ‘New World Order’. I only discovered Jones a few weeks ago and wrote him off as a wacko on the fringe American media. Today, he’s arrived on a mainstream BBC programme. In the above video clip, David Aaronovitch of The Times and Andrew Neil try to figure out Jones’ big theory on the Bilderberg conference. Instead of explaining, he ranted on topics including ‘the SS office Prince Bernard’, ‘the Nazi German plan’ behind the EU to ‘hydroflourons in the water’. It makes