Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Clarissa Tan

Will the internet save television?

Forget The Apprentice. A ‘reality TV’ show where you have no say, and where you can only watch as Sir Alan Sugar does all the hiring and firing? That is so last decade. Forget, too, quaint programmes such as The X Factor, where you pick the contestants you like and the ones you don’t — a format that’s been kicking around since Eurovision. No, imagine if your power as a viewer extended way beyond deciding which participant stays and which goes: instead, you get to choose whether an entire TV series deserves to be born. ‘Out!’ you can say after watching a single episode of a wannabe series, and finding

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Josie Rourke has a hit at last with The Weir, The Tempest: a karaoke version of all

The Weir is the ultimate hit-from-nowhere. It was written in 1997 by the 26-year-old Conor McPherson. It opened at the Royal Court Upstairs and glided over to Broadway and then toured America. The script defies every rule of theatrical physics. It’s wordy and static, it’s entirely devoid of action or spectacle, and the atmosphere is mired in gloom. Four morose drinkers, stuck in a pub in the west of Ireland, try to impress a pretty incomer from Dublin by telling her ghost stories. Nothing else happens. The faint stirring of a romance between the Dublin girl and the handsome deadbeat behind the bar provides a tiny note of optimism at

David Blackburn

Benedict Cumberbatch is brilliant in Star Trek Into Darkness

P.D. James is a figure of fun in my household. She used to be a regular pundit on Newsnight Review, the old BBC arts programme, and her film criticism was guided by her hearing. Every new film, she complained, was ‘terribly loud’. Why didn’t projectionists reduce the volume? We wondered if it had ever been thus with James. We replaced the baroness’s soft tones with the austere squawk of Dame Edith Evans and declared that Buster Keaton was ‘terribly loud’. But the great lady is on to something: an overbearing sound system can harm a film. Star Trek Into Darkness began and it was as if a choir of Hell’s

Michael Tanner

Joshua, Opera North, Don Carlo, Royal Opera House

Why stage a Handel oratorio, or anyone else’s for that matter? The recent urge to do it, with Bach’s Passions — even, I’m told, with Messiah — suggests a further incursion of TV into our lives, the inability to absorb anything that isn’t partly or primarily visual. At least Handel’s Joshua, which Charles Edwards directs and designs in a new Opera North production, is bellicose so there is a fair amount of action, though the most indelible parts of it are the choruses, some of them, strangely, sung with scores in hand, some not. The setting is post-second world war, yet another production with an excuse for dressing the characters

Thursday

William Cook

Artists Open Houses: Brighton’s alternative to gallery going

I’m standing in a palatial flat in one of the most beautiful squares in Brighton, in a huge whitewashed room flooded with natural light. The lucky man who lives here, Ted Davis, is showing me around. His home isn’t usually open to the public, but this month anyone can wander in. Ted is a photographer — rather a good one, in fact. His perceptive portraits adorn these walls, alongside his still lifes of wilting flowers,  and for the next four weekends his splendid apartment in Palmeira Square will become a temporary exhibition space. It’s part of an annual festival here in Brighton called Artists Open Houses, in which hundreds of

Andrew Lambirth

Cabinet of curiosities

In 1951, the artist and writer Barbara Jones (1912–78) organised an exhibition called Black Eyes and Lemonade at the Whitechapel Gallery celebrating the popular arts of toys, festivities, souvenirs and advertising, to reveal to a largely unsuspecting public the richness of vernacular art in Britain. The original exhibition was evidently an Aladdin’s cave of objects, from decorated pub mirrors to ships’ figureheads, horse brasses, corn dollies and needle packets. Jones crossed the boundaries of folk art, mingling the handmade with the machine-made, and the traditional with the contemporary and ephemeral. She wrote a book about the subject, published the same year and called The Unsophisticated Arts. This has just been

Laura Gascoigne

The two sides of painter Joan Eardley

There were two Joan Eardleys, according to a new biography of the Scottish painter by Christopher Andreae. There was ‘the tender and gentle Joan’, as revealed by her bosom friend Audrey Walker, and ‘the tough, cussing, swearing, bulldozing, indomitable creator of what may be masterpieces’. Both are reflected in the Portland Gallery’s new exhibition of drawings and paintings from the last 20 years of her short life (until 17 May). The tough Joan chose the challenging subject matter, dividing her time between the rotting tenements of unreconstructed Glasgow and the leaky fisherman’s cottages of Catterline, south of Aberdeen. Her restless eye was irresistibly drawn to moving targets, whether swarms of

Kate Chisholm

Radio: We are too gender blasé to want to listen to the sex-specific Men’s Hour/Woman’s Hour

Forty years ago, the idea of having an hour of BBC Radio devoted to men talking about themselves would have been so cutting-edge. Back in that dark age, you could still see City gents striding to work in pin-striped suits and bowler hats, whose buttoned-up appearance reflected (or so we have always been led to believe) their social behaviour. No self-respecting member of the male élite would have been happy to sit behind a mike chatting about their emotional problems. Now, though, after witnessing the extraordinary sight of wet cheeks on George Osborne, Andy Murray, and even Ken Livingstone, all the mystery of male difference has evaporated. We know, we’ve

James Delingpole James Delingpole

TV: I would surely die if I watched more than five minutes of Ben Elton’s The Wright Way; Rupert Murdoch: Battle With Britain

The controversial counterintuitive piece I was going to write concerned Ben Elton’s new sitcom The Wright Way (BBC1, Tuesday). You may have noticed it has been panned by all the critics, but the main focus has been on Elton’s shift from darling of the Eighties alternative comedy left to bourgeois sell-out. So what I was going to do was note that, whatever you think of Elton, he doesn’t half know how to capture the zeitgeist, and that this beautifully acted send-up of Elf n Safety gone mad starring the great David Haig is a bourgeois gem to rank with My Family and Outnumbered. But then I made the mistake of

Deborah Ross

Deborah Ross is so NOT excited by Almodovar

I was so excited about I’m So Excited but now I am just so disappointed. I love Pedro Almodóvar, usually. I would be his bitch any day, I’d have said, and although I’d probably still be his bitch, because you can’t hold one film against a person when they’ve made so many terrific ones, I may not be quite so wholehearted now I’ve been sold a pup. I thought this was going to be a ‘fun, screwball comedy’. I thought it was Almodóvar returning to his ‘wild comedy roots’. But it’s thin, banal, boring, unwitty and, if satirical, then poorly satirical, and poorly satire is no good to anyone. It

Patrick Carnegy

You can’t judge the RSC’s As You Like It with the crude star system

Grumbler: I suppose I have to begin by asking whether, if you’ll forgive the obvious question, you actually did like it? Optimist: Equally obviously, your question is too simple. Remember The Spectator rates its readers’ intelligence, abjuring the crudity of the ‘stars out of five’ system beloved of its competitors. G: You could at least begin by telling me about the starring role, for isn’t the play all about Rosalind? Doesn’t it stand or fall on whether it’s ‘love at first sight’ for the audience as well as for the actors? How can any of today’s actors charm the birds from the trees as the likes of Vanessa Redgrave once

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Adrian Lester is one of the great Othellos; Glory Dazed

Amazing news at the National. Nicholas Hytner has invented a time machine that can bring Shakespeare to bumpkins who’ve never bothered to read him. His up-to-date Othello begins with Venice’s powerful élite dressed in two-piece suits, like Manchester Utd on tour, and striding around a war-room plotting military action against ‘the Turk’. In Act II, Othello and his task force are choppered out to Cyprus where a heavily fortified compound is ready and waiting for them. Crikey. Looks as though they conquered the enemy and built Camp Bastion in 24 hours flat. Fast work, chaps. Othello’s squadron boasts two strange new recruits. Iago’s wife, Emilia, wears full British army uniform

Simon Courtauld

Verdi’s Don Carlos is the tops

I go to about half a dozen operas a year, mainly by 19th-century Italian and French composers, plus some Mozart, bits of Handel, Richard Strauss and Britten and, most recently, Wagner. Having seen my first Don Carlos — the memorable Luchino Visconti production — more than 50 years ago, I thought then that it had all one could wish for in an opera, and it remains my favourite. Hearing the live broadcast from New York of the Met’s Don Carlos in March, I was reminded once again of the treats in store as the Nicholas Hytner production (which had its first outing in 2008) returns to Covent Garden this month.

Oliver Comins

Herring Way (15th Hole, 321 yards)

Where the golf course curls along the sea’s granite edge and wholesome turf seeps around outcrops of dark rock, a modest drive is required to carry beyond a deep gully reaching into the heart of a succinct and slender fairway.  A poorly struck ball can leap between knobs of stone before, occasionally, being tossed just a short chip or long putt away from the wavering flag.  More normally, you will see its final despairing hop into the ravine, sacrificed to the tide or disappearing into camouflage among like-sized pebbles on the beach below. At one time or another, in a kind of ritual, most golfers reaching this high place will

Thursday

Harry Mount

An artistic rebirth: reopening the Rijksmuseum

Hallelujah! The minimalist fashion for dreary acres of white walls is coming to an end. During the long decade that the Rijksmuseum has been closed — it was only supposed to be shut for three years — the taste for colourless voids has come and, please God, is going. Jean-Michel Wilmotte, the designer behind the museum’s new interior decoration, is obsessively anti-white. It kills anything on show, he says — that’s why he’s gone for a series of hangings of blue-grey shades as the background for objects and paintings. Occasionally, the fine gauze over the windows gives the place a touch of sepulchral gloom, but that’s a minor gripe. The

Daniel Grant

Why on earth paint portraits in the age of photography?

‘Everybody faces rejection,’ the portrait artist Aaron Shikler said. He should know, having had three official White House portraits of former President Ronald Reagan rejected — one was too large, one was too casual and one ‘they just didn’t like it’. The commission finally was given to a different artist. Don’t feel too sorry for him. His posthumous portrait of President John F. Kennedy hangs in the White House along with those of First Ladies Jacqueline Kennedy and Nancy Reagan, and he has also painted likenesses of US senators, Supreme Court Justices, cabinet officers, socialites and people who just had a lot of money. Still, fame and past successes don’t

Andrew Lambirth

Exhibition review: Looking at the View, Tate Britain

Most of us like to look at a view, though not all are fortunate enough to live with one, in which case art can offer an alternative, a window on the world. Landscape is a great solace, and particularly refreshing for the tired urban spirit, but we want more than holiday snaps of foreign places briefly visited. We need the deeper exploration of art to feed hearts and minds, an investigation through the procedures of painting and drawing, a reordering of shapes and a fitting together, a showing again under other than a purely mimetic guise. With luck and application, through bearing witness to that process of recreating, we come

Matilda Bathurst

Trading places | 25 April 2013

The Philippines: An Archipelago of Exchange at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris (until 24 July) brings together an impressive range of objects that demonstrate the fluidity of ideas and forms dispersed through exploration, trade and the blood of battle. The exhibition focuses on the fertile interactions between Filipino tribes and naval traders preceding the 16th-century Spanish colonisation. Housed under the canopy of Jean Nouvel’s extraordinary building, the display treads a fine line between fetishisation and objective examination. On entering, you are surrounded by semi-circles of carved wooden rice gods, expanding outwards like shockwaves; you leave through a dark chamber lined with funerary objects. Through the photographic lens of the

Kate Chisholm

Radio 4’s Front Row is brilliant, witty and eclectic. So why let Tracey Emin spoil it?

Front Row is one of those Radio 4 programmes that it’s too easy to take for granted. It’s on every weekday, all year round, at the same peak listening time (after The Archers), with a team of presenters, John Wilson, Mark Lawson and Kirsty Lang, who have become such a reliable fixture they’re almost like chums. If you’re lucky enough to catch it regularly you’ll know its mix of interviews, reviews and conversations about buildings, books, pictures, poems, galleries, anything that’s remotely creative. Sometimes the reviewers are awfully pretentious, sometimes what’s being talked about is way too weird or winsome, sometimes it’s a reminder of just how silly, time-wasting and

Clarissa Tan

Television: The United States of Television; The Politician’s Husband

There are two American Dreams — the one that happens in real life and is experienced by people such as Barack Obama, and the one that happens on screens, both silver and small, shared by millions across the world. BBC2’s The United States of Television: America in Primetime (Saturday) traces the history of the latter, focusing on the TV series shown during those magical hours when Americans sit down to dinner after a hard day’s work chasing the former. Only the fittest, finest programmes survive in this slot, where Nielsen ratings mercilessly track the tastes of 300 million people as they chow down and chill out. For this four-part series,