Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Top of their game

God, I’m jealous of Michael Gove. Not for being a cabinet minister in the same coalition as Nick Clegg and Vince Cable, obviously, but for being outed as a queer in the new series of Harry & Paul (BBC2, Sunday). Now that’s what I call fame. Harry & Paul has had mixed reviews. Some of the sketches — the ‘I’m a cop’ one; the US car salesmen — simply aren’t funny. But so what? Even at its best The Fast Show, arguably the funniest-ever broken-sketch comedy series, contained some sketches that weren’t funny. It goes with the territory. Unfunny sketches are the equivalent of the ‘darlings’ that William Faulkner advised

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Warring outcasts

Are we barmy or what? Our mawkish obsession with the first world war demonstrates that we’re in the grip of a mass delusion: institutional sentimentality. The latest symptom of our death-mania is Nick Dear’s engaging play about the pastoral poet Edward Thomas, who was killed in action in 1917. Thomas began writing verse aged 36 at the suggestion of his American chum Robert Frost. We first meet the pair in a West Country croft in 1914. Frost is a smug, wily and sententious trustafarian who likes the idea of tilling the earth but stops short of actually tilling it himself. Thomas, a suicidal depressive, is incapable of showing warmth to

Michael Tanner

Change of heart | 22 November 2012

I think I have developed a crush on Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, which is strange, considering that it is so evidently adorable a work that most opera-goers fall for it straight away. I have never been averse to it, in the way that I am to quite a lot of Donizetti’s work, but in the light of the last two performances I’ve seen, within a few weeks, it has risen in my estimation to the level of being a masterpiece. The first was the Met’s broadcast, delightful in all respects, but with an interestingly unusual balance of sympathy towards the characters. Now, at the Royal Opera, Laurence Pelly’s production is revived

Clarissa Tan

Faking it | 22 November 2012

The star of Gambit, it seems, is the Savoy. And why not? Nobody else seems to want to lay claim to this movie, a refashioning of the 1966 art con caper that starred Michael Caine. Not even Colin Firth, who spends a fair amount of time in the new film unhappily legging it, trouserless, up and down the hotel’s refurbished corridors. If you want to make an artistic copy, it had better be really good or you might as well not try, is the inadvertent message of this film. Scriptwriters the Coen brothers have taken the basic elements of the vintage Caine vehicle, which also had Shirley Maclaine, and made

Stephen Bayley

The Dagenham Dustbin

For those of us who find passion in national iconography, this is a melancholy historical moment. It’s a very bad time for British manufacturing and an even worse one for British symbols. The Chinese-owned maker of the London taxi (which Charles Eames described as one of the greatest designs of all time) is going bust. Soon, all London cabs will be efficient but characterless Mercedes-Benzes, Peugeots or Nissans. Penguin Books, the most influential and well-meaning Modernist experiment of them all, more useful than its contemporary, the BBC, more international than London Transport, has been acquired by a grim German multinational. And Britain, spiritual home of the commercial jet, long ago

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Israel’s Tragedy: Even If She Wins She Loses – Spectator Blogs

Next time someone bores on about the so-called decline of the British literary novel you might consider pointing out to your dinner-party companion that this is not such a bad thing. It suggests, if the thesis is true, that there aren’t too many problems in this realm that are still worth exploring, far less solving. Consider, by contrast, the twin and warring agonies of Israel and Palestine. Is there a better, bigger, subject for any novelist working today than this? I suspect not which is one reason why the likes of Amos Oz and David Grossman (and, doubtless, others too) are vital in every sense of the word. These dual

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

Mark Rylance the star attraction

There was some TV stardust at Stephen Fry and Mark Rylance’s all male production of Twelfth Night at the Apollo on Friday night. Gary Lineker and his wife Danielle were part of an ecstatic audience that gave a standing ovation to the players in this wildly successful show, which has recently transferred from the Globe to the West End. For those of you who are surprised to find that the perma-tanned resident of the Match of the Day sofa and his good lady wife take in Shakespeare of an evening, I hear that the Linekers count themselves as massive Mark Rylance fans after seeing him star as Jonny ‘Rooster’ Byron in

Thursday

Trevor Nunn

Everything goes

When I first began rehearsing a musical, I discovered to my genuine surprise that I was breaking an unwritten rule…that directors of serious ‘legitimate’ theatre should not dirty their hands by contact with such a lower form of entertainment! Since that time, it’s become almost impossible to name a leading play director who has not been successful and influential with musicals. It’s just possible that, back in 1986, our Royal Shakespeare Company show Les Misérables, which survived a universal critical drubbing in this country, was a vital step forward in proving that a musical could actually be about something — poverty, injustice, revolution, religious fundamentalism, that sort of thing. But

Andrew Lambirth

Unexpected structures

There are only eight single paintings in the current show of early work by Gillian Ayres (born 1930) — eight paintings and the four panels of a mural created for the dining room of Hampstead High School for Girls. The mural is over seven feet high and 27 feet wide, and its scale and achievement are remarkable for a young painter. (Ayres was 27 when she painted it.) But it is less original than the paintings it prepared the way for, and which now hang in the Foreshore Gallery of the Jerwood Foundation’s splendid new space in Hastings. The mural has an undeniably decorative impulse and looks very much of

Tanya Harrod

Weaving magic

Tapestry, papal and princely, never quite went away. Today it satisfies a need for conspicuous displays of skill of the kind celebrated in the V&A’s recent show Power of Making. The surprise hit of last year’s Venice Biennale was Penelope’s Labour: Weaving Words and Images, an exhibition of weavings and tapestries old and new, while the reception of Grayson Perry’s six narrative hangings, ‘The Vanity of Small Differences’, confirms our current fascination with crafted art. Miraculously, true tapestry weaving survives in these islands (see William Crozier’s 2010 ‘Untitled rug’, above), and this year the Scottish Dovecot Studios celebrates its centenary with a touring exhibition (currently at Compton Verney in Warwickshire

Olivia Glazebrook

Time trials

It’s amazing what can be squeezed into an hour of The Hour (Wednesday, BBC2): smutty photos, gang violence, bent coppers, illegal gambling, fascism, racism, a political cover-up, a media exposé, leaked documents, seduction, abuse, neglect, the corrupting temptations of celebrity, the corrupting temptations of complicated dessert recipes, a dog in space, the threat to the nation of nuclear war, the threat to the BBC of commercial television and the threat to an English bluestocking of a sexy, bare-legged French girl with a carving knife, a wedding ring and a gamine haircut. The poor old kitchen sink, left out like Cinderella, must have had a dull time sitting at home by

Kate Chisholm

Carry on broadcasting

By some strange, freakish coincidence, just as the biggest story to hit the BBC in recent years was about to cut through the airwaves on Saturday night, Radio 4 was discussing the question, Who’s Reithian Now? It was as if, by some act of God, Lord Reith, the corporation’s creator, was speaking to us direct from the upper ether (or maybe the lower furnace?) and reminding us of why the BBC was set up as a licence-funded organisation in 1927, and what it is supposed to do in a crisis: carry on broadcasting. The Archive on 4 programme (produced by Karen Pirie for the independent company Whistledown Productions) replayed clips

Deborah Ross

Everlasting love

Michael Haneke’s Amour is about love as we near the end of life and is so painful it isn’t a film to ‘like’ or ‘enjoy’ but is one you do have to see. It’s amazing. It is, effectively, two hours and seven minutes of watching someone die, but it is riveting, and I’m still jangling from it. Haneke has taken the ordinary — getting old; dying; happens to us all; no exceptions — and has transformed it into something so literate, powerful, terrifying, intelligent and extraordinary. I’m still jangling from it, and expect to jangle until at least next Wednesday, if not Friday week. Actually, that’s overoptimistic. This is one

Michael Tanner

Slow progress

As usual on the rare occasions when Vaughan Williams’s last and largest opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress, is performed, the new production at English National Opera has been greeted antiphonally, with cries of ecstasy mingled with indignation that it is so little performed from one side, and moans of boredom and weariness from the other. Though I am temperamentally disinclined or even unable to take a compromise position on almost any subject, in this case that is what I find myself doing. It seems to me that there are long stretches where The Pilgrim’s Progress is serene, noble, elevated, radiant and life-giving, others where it stalls, nothing much happens (in the

Patrick Carnegy

Vengeance, at a price

Where have you been all my life, Orphan of Zhao? Come to think of it, where has any Chinese theatre been? Bang up to the minute, the RSC’s new artistic director, Gregory Doran, launched his regime with the so-called (actually, badly called) ‘Chinese Hamlet’ on the very day that President Hu Jintao, dwarfed by a 20ft hammer and sickle, prepared to hand over control to Xi Jinping. As the Orphan is about successful resistance to the misuse of power, Xi Jinping will need to pay good attention. In truth, the Orphan is a deeply interesting play with a history running back over two millennia. Enraptured by its theme of the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Issues of Trust

An orgy of navel-gazing on the South Bank where a national treasure is satirising the National Trust at the National Theatre. Alan Bennett sets his latest comedy in the drawing room of a crumbling Georgian mansion in South Yorkshire. Greedy speculators are queuing up to seize the house from its plucky owner, Lady Dorothy Stacpoole, a high-born hippie who spent her youth going to parties and modelling. Now aged 80 or 90, she’s ill equipped to outwit the circling vultures. Bennett is good at creating warm, believable women but with Lady Dorothy he simply regurgitates a stale theatrical burp: the beatnik with a bus pass. Writing plots has never been

Philip Hancock

Wear and Tear

Buttons like liquorice Catherine wheels on the cape coat I always loved you in. No longer flush, the top one dangles by two last threads, face down. A couple of minutes, why not sort it? For God’s sake, you say, turning back the lapel. You’re obsessed. Flip through the pages of your Grazia. Mum’ll fix it. Monday, doing it up for work, the shock, where, when — in the surge off the tube at Green Park, plucked from the back of the seat at the Curzon? Could be anywhere. Despite the miles of haberdasheries, nothing comes close.

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Global power

Go back 90 years to the first radio broadcast by the newly formed BBC and you might think you’ve entered a time warp. The company (it became a corporation later) was obsessed about a government inquiry and accusations that it was elitist and biased towards London. How could it survive without the licence fee? How do you keep those troublesome regional stations happy? How do you stop your unruly artistes (as they were then so politely called) from landing you in the muck? Not much has changed in 2012. The BBC has always been at the mercy of the licence fee, set initially by the government at ten shillings (equivalent

Andrew Lambirth

Missing links

The primary experience of looking at painting is the crucial encounter between a painted surface and the human eye. Nothing is quite like it, and this unique experience cannot be replaced or replicated by looking at a painting in printed reproduction or on a computer screen. This may be a truism but it is worth emphasising once again in an age that relies increasingly on mediated experience, and lives — almost literally — by the screen. It is a truth brought into especial prominence by the concatenation of three exhibitions currently showing in London. Photography does not require the same intimate experience of viewing. A reprographic medium, it appears (in

Andrew Petrie

London pride

The trend for documentary portraits of individual cities assembled from archive footage continues with Julien Temple’s London: The Modern Babylon, out now on Bfi DVD. Temple was the obvious choice of director, as a native of the city and creator of London films Absolute Beginners and Oil City Confidential, not to mention 2010’s superb Requiem for Detroit? for the BBC. The film has been compared to Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg and Terence Davies’s Of Time and the City (about Liverpool), though London lacks those works’ deeply personal perspective and strict avoidance of cliché: this is a film that opens to the sound of  ‘London Calling’ and closes with ‘Waterloo Sunset’.