Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Cut-price treat

La Bohème Cock Tavern The Enchanted Pig Linbury Studio Puccini’s La Bohème has oddly become the Christmas opera of choice, broadcast on BBC TV on Christmas afternoon (an especially ludicrous affair), and major opera houses dusting down their elderly versions. I doubt whether any of them will be as involving, indeed thrilling and upsetting, as OperaUpClose’s production at the Cock Tavern Kilburn, originally scheduled to run from early December to 20 January, but now extended by two full months, it is proving so popular. The Cock has seating for only 40, so that is not quite as amazing as it sounds, but given the comparative obscurity of the venue it

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Meddling with Molière

The Misanthrope Comedy Molière is a genius but only in France. Play-goers here need some convincing that he belongs in the first rank. This new production of The Misanthrope shifts the action from 17th- century Paris to present-day London and turns the bickering upper-class lightweights into film-makers and their hangers-on. Gosh. What a breakthrough. Translator Martin Crimp has single-handedly discovered that the movie world is a sort of aristocracy. Call the Nobel committee. They need to hear about this guy. The most striking aspect of his translation is its incessant jangling lexical peculiarities. He’s decided to preserve one minor facet of Molière’s language, the rhyming couplets. Shakespeare toyed with this

Kate Chisholm

Digital maze

New Year, New Radio. And not just any old wireless. It’s one of the latest digital wonders, which has inside its chic black casing a mini-computer that can whisk me round the world in a matter of seconds to visit tens of thousands of radio stations. For reasons that are as yet beyond me, though, I’ve only succeeded so far in travelling straight to Z, with no idea how to get back through the alphabet, not having a tame teenager on site to show me the way. (The instruction manual can of course only be accessed on computer and is written in a language some way between Urdu and Mandarin.)

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Childhood hero

I think I might be about the second-last person on earth finally to have replaced his squat, bulbous, stone-age TV set with one of those new angled, wide-screen, narrow, HD-ready jobs. My worry is it’s not big enough. ‘No, you can’t have a 50-inch. No way are you having a 50-inch. Not in MY house,’ said the wife, as the kids and I all begged and begged to no avail. Of course, I understand where the wife is coming from. There was indeed an era when to have a large TV screen dominating your sitting room would have been considered vulgar or nouveau-riche or what we now call chavvy. But

Alan Judd

Carbon sins

Awoken the other night by cold and concern for global warming, I searched my conscience for ways to reduce my carbon footprint. The trouble is, a large part of it is simply my existence. During the now-forgotten demographic panic of the 1970s, I knew a man who killed himself in the interests of population reduction, though it would have made greater demographic sense to kill lots of us. Deciding against either option — for the present — I got up and gazed at the silent snowscape outside. My own tyre tracks were already obliterated and that set me thinking: are there any particular tyre-track sins that might damn me for

Robin Oakley

All-weather winner

Where would we be without ‘all-weather’ racing on artificial surfaces? Where would we be without ‘all-weather’ racing on artificial surfaces? With Sandown’s jumping card frosted off last Saturday, I wasn’t the only one who scuttled across Surrey to Lingfield’s polytrack, where Betdaq had sponsored an extra day to keep the cash tills rolling and the internet wires humming with the bets that help to sustain our sport. All-weather racing began here only 20 years ago, just before the Berlin Wall fell. But with an ear-nipping chill and snow still visible on the grandstand roof we still enjoyed a seven-race card. Gone are the days when you went to Lingfield just

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

A look ahead | 2 January 2010

Andrew Lambirth on artistic delights and pleasures we can look forward to in 2010 The juggernaut of blockbusters at last shows signs of slowing down. In recent years, museums have deluged us with loan exhibitions of often very mixed quality in order to generate the increasingly large amounts of revenue necessary to fund their extended bureaucracies. Too many shows really, particularly when concocted by curators of boundless self-esteem with scant regard for the public. I long for fewer exhibitions chosen with greater discernment, and it seems that the crisis in international finance is finally helping to achieve this. World tours are being cancelled, ambitions checked, sponsorship withdrawn. Initially, this means

Simon Hoggart

Call of the wild

One intriguing statistic from last year’s television went almost unnoticed. One intriguing statistic from last year’s television went almost unnoticed. In October, an edition of Jonathan Ross’s 9 p.m. chat show on BBC1 had fewer viewers than Autumnwatch. Even though Barbra Streisand was his main guest, the six-million-pound man was defeated by barnacle geese and rutting stags on the Isle of Rum. Autumnwatch took 2.9 million viewers, which is pretty good for a wildlife programme on BBC2, whereas Ross got 2.8, which is pitiful for prime time on BBC1. These days everything that can go wrong seems to go wrong for the poor old Beeb. They have hanging over them

Kate Chisholm

Sight and sound

Just sometimes a radio programme comes along that really changes the way you hear — and interpret — the everyday sounds around you. Just sometimes a radio programme comes along that really changes the way you hear — and interpret — the everyday sounds around you. With perfect timing, on New Year’s Day, Joe Acheson’s programme for the BBC World Service began the year with a startling, pin-drop-sharp lesson on how to listen. Sound of Snow and Ice took us to Finland in midwinter, to the Jyväskylä School for the Visually Impaired. The temperature in my study seemed to plummet as an extraordinary rasping noise echoed through the room, the

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Fizzing with charisma

Morecambe Duchess Red Donmar Peter Kay: ‘I’ve never met a person who didn’t at the very least love Eric Morecambe.’ Hello? Peter? Over here. I remember Eric and Ernie during the 1970s and they were as entertaining as a power cut. Perfunctory, passionless mother-in-law jokes. Semi-funny puns pouring out like weak tea. Nursery-rhyme repetition everywhere. The catchphrases. The trick with the paper bag. Eric slapping Ernie’s cheeks. Endless jibes about Ernie’s hairy legs and his playwriting ambitions, even though both gags were non sequiturs: we couldn’t see Ernie’s legs and we knew for sure he wasn’t a playwright because he was too busy being the country’s richest unfunny stand-up. Their

Saturday

Henrietta Bredin

Opera

Henrietta Bredin on boats, trains, planes that transport singers around the stage Opera, so they say, has the power to transport the listener on wings of sound to places beyond the imagination — on a good night, at any rate. But just to keep singers, and directors, on their toes, a number of composers have, over the years, been tickled by the notion of writing specific modes of transport into the opera’s storyline. Puccini was car-mad, so you’d think he might have put one of his favourites into an opera. His first purchase was a De Dion-Bouton 5 CV in 1901, and some years later he commissioned a special off-road

Robin Holloway

Building bridges

December 2009 — the final month in the bicentennial of the great composer (obit. 1809) once dubbed by Tovey ‘Haydn the Inacccessible’. December 2009 — the final month in the bicentennial of the great composer (obit. 1809) once dubbed by Tovey ‘Haydn the Inacccessible’. No longer! His vast protean output has never been more widely available nor more highly esteemed. Father technically and spiritually to Mozart and Beethoven, revered by Brahms and (unexpectedly) by Wagner, beloved of Stravinsky, Britten and Ligeti, Haydn was something of a well-kept secret, but is now a universal possession, treasured as equal with the highest. Tovey himself, pressed on his deathbed by a kindly meaning

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Territorial imperative

Ever since I gave up watching TV over Christmas and New Year I have become much, much happier. The reason Yuletide TV is so depressing is that — as with those tantalising presents under the tree — it’s fraught with a level of expectation it can never possibly fulfil. You think, ‘At last: I’m free. Free to slob; free to watch without having to worry about going to bed and getting a good night’s sleep so I can be fresh for work tomorrow. So, go on, TV: entertain me!’ I’m not even sure that it’s TV’s fault. I think it’s the problem with Christmas generally. The whole season reminds me

Kate Chisholm

Listen with mother

‘Television makes your eyes go square,’ reports Will, one of my three nephews, avid listeners all. ‘Television makes your eyes go square,’ reports Will, one of my three nephews, avid listeners all. They’ve already got the radio habit (having had, of course, absolutely no pressure from their interfering aunt). They’ve discovered for themselves that listening to Sherlock Holmes’s ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ is far more scary than watching Doctor Who. Radio, pipes up Tom, lets you paint the pictures in your head. Television just tells you ‘that’s how it’s got to be’. To get any pleasure from radio, though, you have to make an effort, focus attention, follow

Ursula Buchan

Talking heads | 19 December 2009

The days are short, there is no light for gardening after work, and local horticultural societies are halfway through their winter programme of illustrated talks. All over the country, gardeners are gathering, in spartan village halls and echoing church rooms, on every first Tuesday in the month to listen to a ‘speaker’. These talks are designed to entertain, enlighten and generally see gardeners through until the spring, when allotments beckon, and garden visits and flower shows can once more be organised. All towns and most large villages have a horticultural society, which is impressive in an age when people increasingly refuse to join things. But then members of gardening societies

Robin Oakley

Tales from the track

For me little that is memorable, and even less that is sheer fun, has been penned about football, apart from Gary Lineker’s definition of the game as ‘Twenty-two men chasing a ball — and in the end the Germans win’. For me little that is memorable, and even less that is sheer fun, has been penned about football, apart from Gary Lineker’s definition of the game as ‘Twenty-two men chasing a ball — and in the end the Germans win’. Horseracing, though, has always attracted both purple prose and anecdotage. Sea The Stars’ winning of the 2000 Guineas, the Derby, the Coral Eclipse, the Juddmonte International, the Irish Champion and

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Avatar Season is Upon Us. Alas.

James Cameron’s mega-blockbuster Avatar seems destined to win the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director (as well as the technical awards). Peter Suderman explains why: So despite its genuinely impressive technical innovations, Avatar isn’t much a movie: Instead, Cameron’s cooked up a derivative, overlong pastiche of anti-corporate clichés and quasi-mystical eco-nonsense. It’s not that the film’s politics make it bad, it’s that even if you agree, the nearly three-hour onslaught of simplistic moralizing leaves no room for interesting twists or ambiguity in the story or characters: corporations are bad, scientists are good, natives are pure, harmony with nature is the ultimate ideal — the only suspense comes from wondering what movie Cameron will rip

Monday

Andrew Lambirth

‘All must be safely gathered in’

Andrew Lambirth reflects on Stanley Spencer’s ‘Study for Joachim Among the Shepherds’ Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) is a rare figure of international standing among British 20th-century artists. As the painter and critic Timothy Hyman has observed, Spencer can be ranked alongside Munch, Bonnard, Kirchner, Beckmann and Guston for his extraordinary work exploring the relationship between the self and the world. He was a wonderfully original and inventive artist whose work has paradoxically suffered because of his unconventional private life. People remember that he loved bread and jam and was obsessed with rubbish, that his sexual compulsions drove him to divorce the love of his life and marry a man-hating and gold-digging

Olivia Glazebrook

Film

There is one day in the year when it is acceptable for anyone, of any age, to lie on the sofa all day and for much of the night. The blinds remain legitimately lowered; the telly can stay switched on. One hand will grasp the remote control; the other might leaf through a jumbo box of After Eights. It will probably be raining; you may be feeling more than a little sick; the trousers you were given yesterday feel a size too small today, and Granny has just announced she will be staying another night. It’s Boxing Day. Traditional feelings — disappointment, torpor, lassitude — can be kept at bay