Arts Reviews

Mariinsky Ballet Sadler’s Wells Tiago Guedes: Various Materials The Place: Robin Howard Dance Theatre I know I am not alone in thinking that an all-Forsythe programme was not an ideal choice for the Mariinsky Ballet’s opening night in London. As the man who dared successfully to manipulate ballet’s centuries’ old principles, William Forsythe is regarded by many as the initiator of a long-awaited and much-needed artistic revolution. It is no surprise, therefore, that a few years back he was invited to stage his most controversial creations for the Kirov Ballet — which is how the Mariinsky Ballet was formerly known — as part of a modernisation campaign aimed at shedding

Further thoughts on the ever renewed quest for the perfect acoustic for performance and audition of music. Over the past five months I’ve heard one of my string quartets given five of its six première performances in exceedingly diverse and discrepant venues, so much so as (sometimes) to make almost a different piece of it.   The official première was in the equivalent of London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, in the newish concert-complex in Madrid. András Schiff, playing simultaneously in the large hall, was a dangerous rival; nevertheless the smaller was substantially filled for the chamber event, one in a two-year-long series celebrating next year’s bicentenary of Haydn’s death with his

Ghost Town 12A, Nationwide Ghost Town stars Ricky Gervais in his first leading Hollywood role, and how much you like this film will probably depend on how much you like Gervais — what? You expected him to turn in a Daniel Day-Lewis-type performance? — and how much Gervais you can take at one sitting; the two not being the same at all. I like Gervais but now realise there is only so much I can take at the one sitting. Bubbles likes Gervais but says there is only so much he can take at the one sitting. Meanwhile, Bubbles’s fiancée, Goldie, says, ‘I haven’t been exposed to a lot of

Love’s Labour’s Lost Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon In Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare uses the most transparent of silly plots as a pretext for pyrotechnics with the raw material of his craft. On a sudden whim, a king and three courtiers dedicate themselves to scholarship and celibacy. A princess and her companions arrive and duly scupper this plan. Diversions en route are afforded by a fantastical Spaniard, and a schoolmaster and curate who are living proof of the futility of the courtiers’ aspirations to academe. Much of this looks like parody of such contemporaries as John Florio, Thomas Nashe and Walter Ralegh, but it’s clear that Shakespeare’s also mocking his own facility.

Who’d be a car dealer now? With new sales 20 per cent down and dropping, manufacturers moving to four-day weeks, dealerships closing and the used-car market awash with unsold vehicles, they must feel like turkeys being sized up for Christmas. And that’s before anyone has felt next year’s swingeing road-tax increases on post-2001 mid-sized vehicles and upwards. Mark-ups are surprisingly thin — even in the good times there were few real goldmines among main dealerships. A friend who owns a chain calculated that he’d make more and have a far easier life if he sold all his sites for building and invested the money. But that was last year. Who’d

It’s possible that my life would have been quite different if I hadn’t met the literary agent Jacintha Alexander at a party in 1985. At the time I was an impoverished researcher and aspirant writer, with a specialism in 20th-century British art. As we chatted of this and that, it emerged that Jacintha had a project that might interest me — working on the memoirs of an artist who’d already written quite a substantial text but needed help to prepare her book for publication. The artist in question was the distinguished surrealist Eileen Agar, and I jumped at the suggestion that I might work with her. I remember our first