Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Charles Spencer

Peel appeal

If someone had asked me last month when it was that the revered Radio One DJ John Peel had died, I’d have said a couple of years ago. If someone had asked me last month when it was that the revered Radio One DJ John Peel had died, I’d have said a couple of years ago. In fact he died in Peru on 25 October 2004, while on a trip for the Telegraph’s travel pages. This is one of God’s many cruel tricks on His creation. As one grows older, time passes more quickly. Just when you want each day to last longer, it becomes shorter, until you feel that

Kate Chisholm

Quiet courage

‘Listeners may find some of the content disturbing,’ said the announcer before the programme began (a warning that was also given in the Radio Times). ‘Listeners may find some of the content disturbing,’ said the announcer before the programme began (a warning that was also given in the Radio Times). You’d have thought we were about to hear a particularly raunchy play, or some horrific accounts of death by torture, murder or old age. Behind Enemy Lines (Radio Two, Saturday) was shocking at times, and needed to be. That was the point. John McCarthy, the Beirut hostage who was held captive by Islamic Jihad for almost five years, talked to

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Risqué associations

Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill Royal Academy, until 24 January 2010 Supported by BNP Paribas and The Henry Moore Foundation It’s an unlikely grouping, this alliance of Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska and Gill. In many ways, this should be an Epstein solo show, or possibly an Epstein and Frank Dobson show (to link two key modernist sculptors who currently deserve reassessment), but neither of those interesting permutations would have pulled in the crowds. The popular appeal in Wild Thing is Eric Gill’s unorthodox sex life and the fact that the young rebel Gaudier died so romantically fighting ‘pour la patrie’ in the first world war (currently very fashionable). It helps that Epstein

Michael Tanner

Top of the class

L’assedio di Calais Guildhall School of Music and Drama This is the time of year, before the long hibernation of opera companies sets in, when there is sometimes a choice of several operas per night, many of them performed by the schools of music, which often seem to adopt the unintelligent course of having their performances on in the same week. This year, however, it is possible to go to the Guildhall School this week, the Royal Academy next week, with Semele conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, and the Royal College the week after that to see The Magic Flute. The Guildhall School’s choice of Donizetti’s L’assedio di Calais was

James Hamilton

Present, conserve, explain

‘Thank you. It’s magnificent,’ said Philip Pullman as he opened the new extension at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford at the end of October. ‘Thank you. It’s magnificent,’ said Philip Pullman as he opened the new extension at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford at the end of October. And magnificent it certainly is, a triumphant reinvention of the Ashmolean, with 39 new galleries being added in this inspired development designed by Rick Mather Associates. The orientation of the museum has been radically altered, bringing archaeology and antiquity into the foreground. Given the roots of the Ashmolean, founded in 1683 with the Tradescant

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Darwin revisited

Origin of Species Arcola Seize the Day Tricycle Oh, not again. Yup, I’m afraid so. I had no wish to return to the vexed topic of Darwinism but a much-praised show in east London tempted me out on a frosty night to the Arcola theatre. Bryony Lavery’s new play has a storyline that’s as nutty as a Christmas cake in Broadmoor. Molly, an archaeologist working in Africa, smuggles the skeleton of a female hominid back to her home in the Yorkshire Dales. The unearthed Neanderthal springs to life and Molly proceeds to school her in the amazing truths of evolution. The characters in this bizarre educational farce are symbolic rather

Simon Hoggart

Spectator sport

The X Factor (ITV, Saturday and Sunday) is the most popular show on television at the moment. I felt I should watch it so that you don’t have to. It’s very loud. There is a lot of clashing and banging and whooping and whooshing. A voiceover booms at you, and the presenter shouts at everyone. The audience sounds as if it’s on something which might not trouble Professor Nutt but could cause grief to Alan Johnson. The slightest remark makes them cheer or boo irrationally. It’s very camp and ironic. The two male judges — Simon Cowell and some Irish bloke called Louis — constantly niggle at each other, but

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

Sharp as an arrow

Four couples but only three available bedrooms is the brilliant stratagem devised by Alan Ayckbourn for his 1975 relationship comedy Bedroom Farce. Four couples but only three available bedrooms is the brilliant stratagem devised by Alan Ayckbourn for his 1975 relationship comedy Bedroom Farce. It’s being revived at the Rose Theatre in Kingston in repertory with a rather different take on coupled life, Strindberg’s Miss Julie, for an aptly named season, ‘Behind Closed Doors’. The three separate bedrooms fill up the unusually wide lozenge-shaped stage of the new Rose (modelled on the Elizabethan original) as our four couples writhe and wrangle under the spotlight of Ayckbourn’s all-seeing, all-knowing wit. Ernest

Giannandrea Poesio

Bad boys

Mark Morris Dance Group Sadler’s Wells Michael Clark Company The Barbican Sleeping Beauty Royal Opera House Last week, the 2009 Dance Umbrella season rolled merrily towards its end with performances by two former ‘bad boys’ of the choreographic world. Luckily, neither event looked anything like those boyband comebacks the music industry thrives on these days. After all, Mark Morris and Michael Clark never cease to amaze and enthral audiences, thus remaining, Peter Pan-like, ‘bad boys’ for much longer than actual boyhood. Interestingly, they both presented recent works that allowed seasoned dancegoers to take the pulse of their current artistic creativity. Those who love Morris’s tongue-in-cheek reading of illustrious scores might

Michael Tanner

Glorious Gershwin

Porgy and Bess Royal Festival Hall Artaxerxes Linbury Studio Cape Town Opera has been on tour in the last ten days, taking its production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess to Cardiff, the Southbank Centre and Edinburgh. I went to the first of the two London performances, staged but without scenery. The action took place behind some of the orchestral players, with the rest either side. That is not an ideal situation, but nevertheless Gershwin’s finest score came across with enormous impact — in fact, I was freshly astonished at how much finer this work is than anything else he wrote. Whereas, I gather, the production is set in Soweto, at

Deborah Ross

Deprived of emotion

Bright Star PG, Nationwide The most curious thing about Jane Campion’s Bright Star is that I did not cry, even though I was certain I would. I always cry in films. I cry at the drop of a hat. I cry when it only looks as if a hat might drop. I am continually alert for all hat-dropping possibilities. I cried when Rachel returned to Ross in Friends, and that’s an American sitcom. On TV! And this is about the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, which began when he was 25 and she was 18, and finished with his death from tuberculosis at 25. This story is

Marcus Berkmann

Mythic quest

An old friend of mine has a list of books he wants to buy. It’s very long and he is very disciplined (so he tells me), so when he goes into a bookshop and sees something else he wants, something that isn’t on his list, he doesn’t buy it, as anyone else would. No, he writes down the title of the book on a piece of paper, goes home, adds it to the bottom of his ‘master list’ and when the book reaches the top of his ‘master list’, he goes out and buys it, even though, by this time, the book is long out of print and he has

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Unholy alliance | 4 November 2009

Damien Hirst: the Blue Paintings The Wallace Collection, until 24 January 2010 John Walker: Incoming Tide Offer Waterman & Co, 11 Langton Street, SW10, until 14 November Weeks ago, when the review schedules were first plotted, I had thought to include here a feature on Damien Hirst. Although I find his work unremittingly thin, I thought I would give it another chance. After all, he is showing new paintings he’s made himself rather than instructed a studio to produce. But the results are so feeble and insignificant that detailed execration (however enjoyable) is more than they’re worth. Hirst’s product thrives on publicity, and his new show has generated so many

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Street culture

What Fatima Did… Hampstead Mrs Klein Almeida What Fatima Did… is billed as a play. Really, it’s a fugue, a variation on a theme, a crude and boisterous tone poem. The plot is deliberately small-scale. A gang of fun-loving inner-city sixth-formers are shocked to learn that one of their pals, Fatima, has forsaken Western values and adopted the nijab. Her boyfriend George is hit hardest by her betrayal, and he retaliates by showing up at a costume party dressed as a medieval crusader. This gesture doesn’t quite work now that the flag of St George has been reinvented as a multicultural symbol. To freak Fatima out properly he’d have to

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Near flawless

A few months ago my wife said something to me so awful and shocking I contemplated divorce. ‘I don’t want to watch any more war programmes with you,’ she said. ‘It’s like watching paint dry.’ Imagine, then, my secret joy when, right near the end of Into the Storm (BBC2, Monday), I detected beside me on the sofa the hint of a promising snuffle. It was VE Day. The King was on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, beckoning Winston Churchill to come and join him. As soon as he did, the crowd erupted with joy and gratitude. I glanced sideways just in time to catch the wife sneakily wiping a

Alan Judd

Dependable or exotica?

Two visitors this month. One, the latest iteration of the VW Polo, now in its fifth generation and with ten million Polo ancestors. The other, a 1968 Bristol 410 whose ancestors can probably be numbered in the hundreds and siblings in scores, maybe dozens. The first was for a week, courtesy of VW, the second is for a few months, courtesy of a friend who wants to sell but wants it used while he’s away. Think Polo and you think smaller Golf, runabout, district nurses, retired primary- school teachers, reliable, sensible choice for modest budgets. That’s still largely true, except that, as Golfs have grown and put on weight, the

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 31 October 2009

Watch what you say. There may be people around who haven’t really been listening ‘Say what you like about servicemen amputees,’ said the comedian Jimmy Carr on stage last week, ‘but we’re going to have a f–—g good paralympic team in 2012.’ Odd to see Patrick Mercer, of all people, calling on him to resign. From what, though? From leaving the house? Maybe Mercer thought this self-employed stand-up comedian was somebody else. Some sort of junior minister for Agriculture and Fisheries, perhaps. Scottish, obviously, with a name like Jimmy. Maybe one of those fat ones who used to hang around with Michael Martin, who all have faces like sanctimonious haemorrhoids.

Patrick Carnegy

Lovers in the Levant

Twelfth Night Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon It’s a welcome refreshment after the RSC’s recent dramatisations of hard drinking and mass starvation in Russia to be landed on the sun-soaked coast of Mediterranean Illyria, and especially so in the company of a new and exquisitely beguiling Viola. Director Gregory Doran has been to much scholarly trouble in updating Shakespeare’s pirate-infested Illyria to Byron’s Albania. There, when visiting the court of a notorious warlord, Byron rhapsodised ‘The Turk, the Greek, the Albanian and the Moor/ Here mingled in their many-hued array’. Doubtless there were atrocities enough around the corner, but Doran has always been strong on devising exotic Mediterranean settings for Shakespeare’s comedies.

Tom Sutcliffe

Troubled Wexford

The new Wexford Opera House has certainly raised the profile of opera in Ireland. You cannot argue with a prize-winning building that is one of just four large purpose-built opera auditoriums in these islands, alongside Glyndebourne, Covent Garden and the Wales Millennium Centre. Built with Irish taxpayers’ money, it would be a sick Irish joke to mothball the place within a year of its grand successful opening. Yet the Wexford Festival’s obsession with traditional dress-code (black tie, long frocks) adds to the feeling that opera belongs to a class with alien tastes. Meanwhile, even the Abbey Theatre — which scoffs the lion’s share of Irish performing-arts subsidy — has no

Simon Hoggart

Pillow talk

Wonderland: The British in Bed (BBC2, Thursday) consists of long periods of boredom interrupted by moments of extreme embarrassment. The notion is to get couples — old, young, black, Sikh, gay — to sit up in bed next to each other, in nighties and jimjams, and talk about their lives as partners. Presumably, the notion is that in these relaxed circumstances, even with a camera crew at the foot of the bed, they will be inclined to tell us all. But they don’t. For a start, they hardly talk about sex, except in the most general way. The fact that they’re in bed, accompanied only by a cameraman, a soundman,