Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Ramshackle muddle

Mother Courage and Her Children Olivier Speaking in Tongues Duke of York’s Mother Courage, Brecht’s saga of conflict and suffering, is set during the Thirty Years’ War. The title character is a maternal archetype who ekes out a perilous existence selling provisions to the warring factions and chasing off the recruiting sergeants who want to lure her children into the army. Deborah Warner’s wrong-century production announces its intentions early. At curtain-up we know nothing of Courage except that she has ‘lost a son’. And here she comes, aboard her famous cart, wearing sunglasses, bawling into a microphone while cavorting to the sound of an on-stage rock band like the saddest

Alan Judd

Ride with the devil

If Milton had owned a Land Rover he’d never have vanquished Satan and his fallen angels to nether regions of rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades of death. If Milton had owned a Land Rover he’d never have vanquished Satan and his fallen angels to nether regions of rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades of death. He’d have known that they could have had too much fun with the right wheels, as I did recently among the rocks, lakes, fens etc. of the 54,000 acre Roxburgh estate. Along with, I should add, 679 other motoring hacks, between 60 to 80 Land Rover staff and 80 vehicles.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

A propensity to meaning

Andrew Lambirth talks to the sculptor Anish Kapoor on the eve of his major new exhibition at the Royal Academy I interviewed the sculptor Anish Kapoor (born 1954) while preparations for his major new exhibition at the Royal Academy were nearing conclusion. The galleries were busy with technicians so we talked in the Members’ Room (Kapoor has been an RA since 1999). I last interviewed Kapoor 11 years ago, on the eve of his last big museum show in London, when he had the whole of the Hayward Gallery. Now he has been given the grand rooms which comprise the entire main floor of the Academy. Our talk was inevitably

Robin Holloway

Worth the Price

A long drive mitigated by congenial and erudite company, through bosomy green hills under what felt like permanent soft mizzling rain, from one choice little festival on the Welsh borders, Presteigne, to another altogether more remote — Machynlleth, close to the coast, a tiny town (for all that a Welsh king once located his court there), where, in a converted nonconformist chapel, surprising and rewarding events take place. Not so the first I attended, a recital of poetry and song occasioned by the first world war, trudging through well-worn trenches and pastoral hankerings, the recitation shambling, the singing insensitive, the piano overweening. One left depressed by the subject, and without

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

False trails

The Shawshank Redemption Wyndham’s Othello Trafalgar Studios All change at Wyndham’s. The wayward sophistication and creative adventure of Michael Grandage’s first West End season has drawn to a close and been replaced by a karaoke version of The Shawshank Redemption. Smart move. Cameron Mackintosh, the theatre’s owner, must be hoping that this stale piece of air guitar will sharpen our appetite for Grandage’s return in 2010. The Shawshank copycat, directed by Peter Sheridan, has been cast with lookalikes in the Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman roles, reinforcing the impression that the priority is to cook up a comfort-food replica and not upset the punters with unfamiliar tastes. It’s a maddeningly

Kate Chisholm

Remains of the day

Back in 1924 when radio was still a young upstart technology, full of daring invention and brazen self-confidence, a nature-loving cellist, Beatrice Harrison, sat in her Surrey garden and played duets with a nightingale, which were broadcast ‘live’ on the BBC’s Home Service. Back in 1924 when radio was still a young upstart technology, full of daring invention and brazen self-confidence, a nature-loving cellist, Beatrice Harrison, sat in her Surrey garden and played duets with a nightingale, which were broadcast ‘live’ on the BBC’s Home Service. We heard a clip from one of them on Richard Mabey’s inspiring quintet of meditations for this week’s The Essay (Radio Three). Harrison’s cello

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Techno deprivation

Every summer my wife and I conduct an extraordinary social experiment with our kids which, if the authorities got to hear about it, could land us in jail. We take them for a fortnight to a remote house in the Welsh borders, take the fuse out of the plug so they can’t watch TV, and force them to entertain themselves using nothing but books, board games and the outdoors. ‘The Noughties Kids are going back in time. How will they cope?’ you can imagine the voiceover to the accompanying fly-on-the-wall documentary asking in the manner of such previous retro-porn, home-makeover, history-light classics as The Viking House, The Victorian Farm, The

Wednesday

Laura Gascoigne

Ancient and modern

Rogier van der Weyden 1400–1464: Master of Passions Museum Leuven, until 6 December Musée Hergé Louvain-la-Neuve When I was a child in Belgium, architecture was a dirty word — angry drivers would wind down their windows and yell, ‘Architecte!’ The insult dated back to the 19th century, when the megalomaniac architect Joseph Poelaert imposed the enormity of the Palais de Justice on Brussels, forcing large numbers of residents from their homes. Times change and memory fades; architects are back in favour in Belgium. Last week saw the inauguration of Santiago Calatrava’s new birdcage-roofed station at Liège-Guillemins, hailed as a destination in itself — not a description you’d use, unfortunately, of

Ariane Bankes

On the move

Last weekend, as part of Open House London, the Government Art Collection flung open its doors to allcomers, probably some Spectator readers among them. Its energetic acquisitions and commissioning policy over past decades has made it one of our country’s most valuable cultural resources — yet those of us who don’t stalk the corridors of power may still be only vaguely aware of its existence, let alone the astonishing breadth of its collections. These span four centuries and now contain around 13,500 works of art in almost every medium you can think of. The sceptic might suppose that a collection of this size might on occasion have sacrificed quality for

John Spurling

Back to the sublime

Martin Greenland: Arrangements of Memory Art Space Gallery, 84 St Peter’s Street, London N1, until 10 October ‘In Painting there must be something Great and Extraordinary to surprise, please and instruct, which is what we call the grand Gusto. ’Tis by this that ordinary things are made beautiful and the beautiful sublime and wonderful,’ wrote Roger de Piles in his Art of Painting, translated into English in 1706, extending the notion of the sublime from literature to painting and opening the road to Romanticism. Martin Greenland’s large, skilful, traditionally painterly landscapes bring us smack back from what Reynolds called ‘the little elegancies of art’ to the sublime. Andrew Lambirth’s persuasive

Mark Glazebrook

Love of queens and princes

Watercolour: only a medium but what a medium! It’s so versatile, and when painting the landscape it can respond with lightning speed to changes in the weather. Watercolour: only a medium but what a medium! It’s so versatile, and when painting the landscape it can respond with lightning speed to changes in the weather. The latter’s unpredictability has made it our most predictable national topic and the English have long taken watercolours to their hearts, both as practitioners and as collectors. Indeed, Queen Victoria (a watercolourist herself) presided over no fewer than two comparable organisations, the Royal Watercolour Society (RWS), founded in 1804, plus the Royal Institute of Painters in

Michael Tanner

Anarchic spectacular

Le Grand Macabre English National Opera Don Carlo Royal Opera House Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre has opened the season at ENO in a production of spectacular, amazing brilliance. Every aspect of the piece, visual, musical, dramatic, is dispatched with such panache that it seems a pity to enter any reservations at all, and for anyone in two minds about getting a ticket I’d unhesitatingly say ‘Go!’ The reservation is that the work itself is so feeble a piece, and by Ligeti’s standards shockingly thin, that one is forced to regret directorial and designer’s inventiveness amounting to genius for so unworthy a cause. Anarchy in art, as in life, is

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Journey’s end | 19 September 2009

Away We Go 15, Nationwide Away We Go is a comic drama directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Revolutionary Road) and it’s sweet, I suppose, but it’s also oddly inconsequential, fake and annoying. It’s a sort of road movie, following the journey of an expectant couple who travel the US in search of the perfect place to put down roots and raise a family. And what does this journey teach them? According to my press notes, they ‘realise they must define home on their own terms’, which has to be good. I mean, imagine if they hadn’t realised that, and had defined it on Gilbert & George’s

Michael Tanner

Hole in the heart

Linda di Chamounix Royal Opera Così fan tutte Opera North Four years ago the Royal Opera opened its season with concert performances of Donizetti’s Dom Sébastien, which came as a near-revelation to many of us, and subsequently appeared on Opera Rara. This year it opened with the scarcely better-known Linda di Chamounix, which was no revelation at all. In both cases Mark Elder conducted, and manifested his passionate devotion to the scores. While Dom Sébastien is a serious work, Linda is a melodramma semiserio, which means not only that it ends happily, but also that it conjoins, sometimes disconcertingly, serious and comic elements: not like Don Giovanni, say, but in

Peter Phillips

Writing matters

All my adult life I have wondered how people write about music, and how their efforts are received by the public. It has always struck me as being an uncertain business, more miss than hit, and more miss than writing about other artistic endeavours. It seems to be more difficult for a writer to find an individual voice, a convincing prose style, when talking about music than when discussing painting or architecture, or even when writing across the arts. By and large the public have responded to this sense of uncertainty by putting music on one side: not by giving up on the concerts themselves, but by not elevating music

Kate Chisholm

Celebrating Dr Johnson

If Dr Johnson, who was born 300 years ago on Friday (at least according to the post-1752 Gregorian calendar, which overnight lost 11 days from British life), had been around today he would most probably have been a radio star, and been paid a fortune for it, unlike the pittance he earned as a writer. Conversation was for him the breath of life, not just as the antidote to the depression that never really left him but as the surest way to discover the truth. In talk (not chitchat), Johnson could flex his intellectual muscle, wrestle with ideas, and satisfy his hugely competitive desire for victory. But he was also

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Whipping up a storm

Mary Wakefield talks to Angus Jackson about directing David Hare’s latest play If I’m never quite content with a glass of water in an interview again, it’s Angus Jackson’s fault. There we were in a soundproofed meeting room on Friday evening, the National Theatre a whirl around us: jazz in the foyer, gossip in the restaurant, Bertolt Brecht in the Olivier. Jackson and I in our box of calm, a black-and-white still of John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson for company. PR enters stage right: ‘Anything to drink?’ I think: if I’m lucky, there might be tea. Jackson says, ‘A large glass of white? Perhaps…’ — he cocks his head —

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Burnished bigotries

Punk Rock Lyric Hammersmith Judgment Day Almeida In rolls another bandwagon. And who’s that on board? It’s Simon Stephens, the playwright and panic profiteer, who likes to cadge a ride from any passing controversy. His latest play is about a teenage psycho who enacts a gory shoot-out at his local school. What a strange choice. Stephens frets vociferously in the programme notes about Britain’s ‘distrust’ and ‘marginalisation’ of its youngsters. With an episcopal air, and a peculiar turn of phrase, he asserts his ‘continuing faith’ in the young. ‘They get stuff. Sometimes they may lack the vocabulary always to articulate that which they understand but I have faith that they

Andrew Lambirth

Joint account

Utmost Fidelity: The Painting Lives of Marianne and Adrian Stokes Penlee House, Penzance, 19 September– 28 November, and the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, 19 September–21 November The first thing that needs pointing out is that the artists reviewed here were a husband-and-wife team painting around the turn of the 20th century, with no connection to the art historian and painter Adrian Stokes (1902–72) who came on the scene later. Marianne Stokes was Austrian, her husband English, and they met in the artists’ colony of Pont-Aven in 1883. They married in Marianne’s home town of Graz and spent much of the rest of their lives together travelling and painting through Europe.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Sublime Stravinsky

The Rake’s Progress; Il signor Bruschino Peacock Theatre Just before the opera season gets under way each year, British Youth Opera puts on a couple of operas, or this year three, with three performances each, at the newly comfortable Peacock Theatre, off Kingsway. Few people go, since BYO treats the enterprise as a jealously guarded secret, and makes sure that you need detective skills to discover what and when, and never tells you, even if you’re as well disposed a critic as I am. This year the show which is really outstanding is their production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, at least the equal of any that I have seen