Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Science fiction as reality

What’s that in your pocket? Magic or art? The near ubiquitous iPhone may be rammed with very new technology, but it is a witness of very old, even mysterious, values. Few of us understand its inner workings, even as we indulge ourselves daily with its impressive powers to astonish. ‘My life,’ Daniel Harris wrote in Cute, Quaint and Hungry, his witty critique of consumerism, ‘is suspended above an abyss of ignorance. Virtually nothing I own makes sense to me.’ This is a familiar feeling. If we had to start over, few of us would know how to light a fire, still less design and manufacture a beautiful smartphone. If civilisations

Thursday

Philip Hancock

Martini Man

Blondes, brunettes, ginger nuts, I’ve had ’em all, sunshine. Could be Janet the cleaner or that Irish cook at the day nursery. A dead cert’s Aunty Pat. What Aunty Pat? His wife puts two and two together. But in the back of his minivan? Unsnaring her heel from his bosun’s chair, ruining her Wolford’s on a gripper rod. From a dust sheet, wood slivers and flecks of paint adhere to her pasty arse, her perfume made nameless by linseed. He lies back thinking of cricket bats and summer fences. Tells her how it works for kneading old putty: softening it up, bringing it to life. Got to look after your

Kathryn Simmonds

The Unborn

mooch about and waste time starting things they’ll never finish. The next world is nothing to them but shadows, some don’t have patience for any of that crap at all – What, grass, they say, waving their wobbly arms, You mean you actually believe in grass?

Rosanna Durham

Peacocks and passion

Not many peacocks could handle an 8,000-strong festival audience. But such is the gentle atmosphere of the annual End of the Road music festival — set in the historic Larmer Tree Gardens, north Dorset — that the resident peacocks get on just fine with their weekend visitors. Last weekend was the seventh outing of the festival and, true to form, the line-up did not have something for everyone’s musical taste. Listening to unfamiliar music was half the joy of the weekend. Still, the curators have a strong musical bias so it is a good thing I enjoy Americana, modern folk, blues and indie pop; otherwise there were the peacocks for

Olivia Glazebrook

That’s entertainment

Comparisons may be odious but sometimes they are irresistible — and, frankly, more fool the BBC for screening Treasures of Ancient Rome on the same night as The Shock of the New (Monday, BBC4). Here is Alastair Sooke on the spread of the Roman Empire: ‘Rome’s generals romped around the Med, sacking cities willy-nilly…’ Here is Robert Hughes (in 1980) on the impact of the first world war (and for anyone watching Parade’s End the implications of this speech — and indeed Hughes’s whole programme, The Powers That Be — will strike with particular resonance): ‘The life of words and images in art was changed radically and for ever because

Deborah Ross

This world really is a stage

Joe Wright’s adaptation of Anna Karenina is so bold and audacious its bold audacity becomes the story, rather than the actual story itself. This is both a strength — it is always visually dazzling, inventive and surprising — and a weakness, as it is so goddamn distracting. The entire action, more or less, is set in an old decaying theatre beneath a proscenium arch with its own backstage, balconies and rat runs, and an origami-ish ability to fold in on itself, or fold out on itself to become ballroom or bedroom, and even horse-race track. According to Wright, this makes sense as high society in Tsarist Russia was all about

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Chance encounter | 6 September 2012

If you’re thinking of putting on a West End show, here’s what you need. Half a million quid. That should cover it. Unless it’s a musical, in which case you’ll need five or ten times as much, depending on how munificent/crazy you happen to be. Investors tend to be fretful, superstitious types who rarely make rational decisions about the start date of their theatrical ventures. No producer is willing to send 500 grand’s worth of dramatic wonderment into the skies if his rivals aren’t launching similar attractions in the same week. So the West End calendar is either overcrowded or utterly barren. Every year there are two dead zones. One

Andrew Lambirth

Cut to the Chase

Circles and Tangents sounds like a show of abstract art, but actually the title is somewhat misleading. As Vivienne Light, the exhibition’s curator and author of the accompanying book, explains, the circles are intended to denote networks of artists (not the circular forms in a Ben Nicholson painting, though Nicholson is included in the show), and the tangents are really digressions. Clear? Put more simply, the exhibition focuses on art made on or about Cranborne Chase, the lovely unspoilt stretch of Dorset landscape once William the Conqueror’s hunting ground and more recently the inspiration for countless painters and sculptors. The work on show is largely figurative and much of it

Amander Baillieu

What’s it all about? | 6 September 2012

The Venice Architecture Biennale, the world’s biggest and most prestigious architecture exhibition, struggles to know who it’s for — the professional architect or the interested public — and indeed why it exists at all. This is partly Venice’s fault. To spend one’s time looking at architectural models, drawings and, this year, photographs and film when you could be slinging back Bellinis in an 18th-century palazzo seems perverse. Added to which, the Biennale organisers have now decided the vernisagge — the private view — should take place in late August, when Venice is at its hottest and the Corderie, the former rope-making factory of the Arsenale where the main exhibition is

Saturday

Douglas Murray

The history of Islam is not off-limits

I’ve only just got around to watching Tom Holland’s documentary for Channel 4 from earlier this week: ‘Islam: the untold story.’ It had some good things in it, despite suffering from the two problems all documentaries now suffer from: attention-grabbing statements at the end of segments which are not followed up on, and endless shots of the presenter doing strangely unconnected things (travelling on an elevator, sitting on a bed etc.) But Holland was an engaging and pleasant presenter, and the documentary was something of a landmark in that it finally brought to wider public attention a subject which has been almost completely off-limits in recent years. Because of violence

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Conversation pieces

Anyone interested in art holidaying in the Lake District this summer — or indeed taking a short break in the Lakes — is in for a treat. The Lakeland Arts Trust, which administers both Blackwell and Abbot Hall, has mounted a pair of exhibitions which offers a range of painting and sculpture a good deal better than most things currently on view around the country. And many people may find that tuning into the wild beauty of Cumbria will help them to look with greater enjoyment and discernment at contemporary art. Certainly Baillie Scott’s magnificent 1898 Arts and Crafts house, Blackwell, on the shores of Lake Windermere, is the perfect

Michael Prodger

Making Russia great

Catherine the Great was born neither a Catherine nor with any prospects of greatness. As Sophie Frederica Augusta of Anhalt-Zerbst she was a minor German princess with modest expectations, but when the Empress Elizabeth of Russia chose her to be the consort of her nephew and heir, the Grand Duke Peter, Sophie’s and Russia’s fates were transformed. In 1744 the 15-year-old Sophie arrived in her new country, converted to Orthodoxy, changed her name to Catherine and set about becoming history’s ultimate self-made woman. She was to rule Russia for 34 years and turn it into a global power. She overhauled Russia’s economy, foreign policy, legal system and education; she expanded

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The accidental director

She’s certainly a class act. But how did she manage it? Nina Raine, the 36-year-old writer-director, has established a formidable position in the British theatre. Her first play, Rabbit, opened at a pub venue in Islington in 2007. It transferred to New York and has since been performed all over the world. Last year she directed April de Angelis’s family comedy Jumpy at the Royal Court and the show has just transferred to the Duke of York’s in the West End. Yet, the way Raine tells it, her career has been nothing but a series of blunders and accidents. She left Oxford with an English degree and a few drama

Kate Chisholm

Crime and punishment

Just a snippet on an edition of Today last spring taken from the programme that had just won an esteemed Sony Gold radio award was enough to create an impact. Ray and Violet Donovan were talking about the murder of their son, Chris, on a feature made by the Prison Radio Association. The programme was part of an innovative Restorative Justice scheme, using the power of listening to help victims, heal prisoners, and of taking that one further step by then broadcasting their conversations throughout the prison network. It was one of those moments when you just had to stop whatever you were doing. There was something in the voice,

Patrick Carnegy

John Bull versus Hiawatha

Written soon after Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida is by a long chalk Shakespeare’s most unpleasant play. With a pox-ridden Pandarus and the filthy-minded nihilist Thersites as our guides to one of the least savoury episodes in the Trojan war, Shakespeare probes the cesspit of human nature. It’s an exploration of a farthest frontier from which Shakespeare might never have returned, only to do so magnificently in the works of his final period. To grapple with this play is to increase one’s awestruck understanding of Iago’s dedication to evil and the sagacity of the Fool in Lear. Stratford’s outrageous new co-production is a madcap transatlantic gamble. An RSC ensemble directed by

Michael Tanner

Four play

Going to the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith for the annual season of Tête à Tête is a chancy affair, though one can be sure of a very high standard of performance, both vocally and instrumentally. It helps, of course, that none of the studios is large, so the singers can produce their voices at conversational level, though many of them choose not to. As always, there is a big range of operas to choose from, so the choice of the pair I shall be discussing was based on no principle other than that the subject of one of them intrigued me, and while I was about it I saw another.

Radhika Kapila

Working men’s clubs

Where better to explore the history of the city than at its very heart? Guildhall Art Gallery, nestled between St Paul’s Cathedral and the Bank of England, is currently home (until 23 September) to Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker, a collection of artefacts from London’s Livery Companies, or guilds — an historic part of London’s identity. Dating from the Roman period, these 108 companies operated as trade associations, regulating and cultivating their industries. From illuminated medieval manuscripts to ornate tobacco jars and clothing (Master Carpenter’s Crown, 1561, above), visitors are provided with a rare insight into the codes and traditions of the guilds. Detailed hall plans demonstrate how important London Livery-owned

Peter Robins

The great wall of Peckham

The Peckham Peace Wall began life as a window: a long pane of shop glass in the front of Rye Lane’s newly refurbished branch of Poundland. During the riots last summer, the glass went, along with some of Poundland’s stock. The next morning, after the damage had been boarded up, a local theatre group covered the MDF with multicoloured Post-It notes, asking passers-by to fill them in with messages about why they loved Peckham. They called it, with impeccable logic, ‘The “Why We Love Peckham” Wall’. The notes filled to overflowing with affection and wounded civic pride. And they attracted reporters, who gave the display a more resonant name. For

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Edinburgh snippets

I saw a few car crashes at Edinburgh but I’ll mention only one. Hells Bells (Pleasance, Courtyard) by the excellent Lynne Truss is a peculiar experiment. Truss sets her play in a TV studio and she spends the first 40 minutes explaining the storyline. The show lasts 45 minutes. So when we finally learn what the action is about, the action is about to cease. The nub of the drama concerns a TV show that was cancelled suddenly in 1995. So the play’s conflicts are rooted in the distant past and involve characters who aren’t on stage. The play culminates, weirdly, in a fight involving the destruction of some elaborately

Andrew Gimson

Conduct becoming

Every so often a programme appears which can be recommended even to people who hate television. Parade’s End (Friday, BBC1) is such a work. The awkward — one might think impossible — problem of shortening Ford Madox Ford’s 800-page masterpiece into five hours of television, without violating the spirit of the book or seeming to cram a quart into a pint pot, has been solved by getting Tom Stoppard to write the script. Stoppard’s less is not exactly more, but there is a certain liberation in being able to leave things out. Ford’s wit, penetration and eloquence are distilled into the five acts of a play, and some of his