Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Crossing the divide

TV or not TV, that is the question pondered by Edinburgh every year. An unseen faultline divides the audiences from the performers. Audiences want to get away from TV while performers — especially comedians — want to embrace it. Les Dennis, who has done telly already, transcends the rift in his new hybrid show which combines drama, mime and cabaret in a way that would never work on the box. Certified Male (St George’s West) is the sentimental story of four businessmen on a bonding holiday in the tropics. Laddish humour abounds. ‘Cover that up,’ says Dennis’s mate as he bares his plump belly, ‘before Friends of the Earth push

Andrew Lambirth

Passionate precision

If you feel strong enough to postpone for a while the pleasures of the bookshop and the restaurant (without which it seems no self-respecting art gallery can exist these days), proceed upstairs at Camden Arts Centre into the light and welcoming hall, where the visitor is offered an introduction to the work of Kenneth and Mary Martin, husband and wife team of abstract artists, once deemed radical and avant-garde, but now somewhat out of fashion. Both came to abstraction relatively late, in the third wave, so to speak, after the Vorticists under Wyndham Lewis had initially ploughed the abstract furrow in England in 1914–18. The second wave was in the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Edinburgh street life

At Edinburgh this year I caught a show I usually miss. The festival attracts a shifting underclass of cadgers, dodgers, chancers and scroungers, and each has a tale to tell that’s as fascinating as any of the ‘real’ entertainment. The show is free. All it takes is a little inquisitiveness. There’s a cobbled lane just north of Princes Street full of cafés, shortbread shops and tartan knick-knackeries. Here the tourists throng and the beggars and buskers follow them. Every ten yards there’s someone rattling a pot or throttling a tune. Beside Frederick Street a trio of student violinists are sawing their way through one of Vivaldi’s elevator classics. Opposite them,

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

You watchin’ me?

In the spirit of Not Reading Books, it’s time to move on to Not Watching Movies. Megan kicks matters off by confessing that, despite loving Marlon Brando, she’s never actually seen On the Waterfront. Not a bad contender. For my part, I’ve never actually seen Gone With the Wind. Or, even more oddly, Taxi Driver. What about you? What are the biggest gaps in your movie watching lives?

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

Yesterday’s world

The hunt is on for the missing first edition of Radio Four’s Today programme, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in October. The hunt is on for the missing first edition of Radio Four’s Today programme, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in October. Radio Four has been broadcasting invitations to the on-air party for months already in an endless series of mock ‘commercials’. But as Paddy O’Connell advised us on Broadcasting House on Sunday the party organisers have discovered a great lacuna in the archives. It’s difficult to believe that any readers of The Spectator are old enough to have been around for those first 20 minutes of ‘topical talks’ introduced

Michael Tanner

Could do better

As part of its reopening season the Royal Festival Hall is staging a month-long run of Carmen Jones, the 1943 musical by Oscar Hammerstein II adapted from Bizet’s Carmen. The show is far more successful than the production of Sweeney Todd which preceded it, partly because a fair amount of progress has been made with the amplification system, though not enough. Now almost all the words are intelligible, but there is still the problem of the sound coming from huge speakers suspended above the stage, and therefore de-locating voices. It took me some time to find where the character whispering an intimate line was, among the moderately dense crowd thronging

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Music and mayhem

Tony Blair — the Musical / Gilded Balloon; Tony! The Blair Musical / Chambers St; Yellow Hands / St George’s West; Jihad: the Musical / Chambers St; The Bacchae / King’s Theatre Here’s the formula for satire at the Fringe. Take a scary concept, stick ‘the musical’ after it and you’ve got a catchy title and an audience. Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam, Osama — all been done before. This year it’s Blair. Twice over, in fact. Like we haven’t had enough of him? Tony Blair — the Musical is so toothless it belongs in an old people’s home. The cast are genial but the presentation is slapdash. Tony’s floppy

Toby Young Toby Young

Bourne again

Whatever happened to the good, honest practice of sticking numerals after a sequel’s title to indicate what number it was in the series? I grew up in the days of Jaws 2, Superman III and Police Academy 7 and, whatever the shortcomings of those pictures, at least you knew where you stood. Generally speaking, the higher the number, the worse the film in question was likely to be. You wouldn’t know it from the title, but The Bourne Ultimatum is actually the third outing for Jason Bourne, the Bond-like character played by Matt Damon. The word ‘ultimatum’ is cunningly chosen in that it carries the suggestion that this may be

Roderick Conway-Morris

Lessons from the East

Venice and Islam: 828–1797 Gazing up at the walls of the Sala dello Scrutinio in the Doge’s Palace, at the enormous canvases depicting tumultuous scenes of colliding fleets, flashing armour and swords, flying arrows, broken spars, burning and sinking ships, and waters congested with enemy dead and dying, you could be forgiven for thinking that Venetian history was one long sea-battle, with the Serenissima fighting almost single-handed to stem the Islamic tide. And for that reason this lofty hall is a perfect setting for this exhibition, because so much of what we see in the paintings, art and artefacts on view at floor level (and in the art and architecture

Andrew Lambirth

The power and the glory

Taking the train from Paddington to Bristol can be hazardous if you coincide with an exodus of holidaymakers on summer excursions. I travelled down on a Thursday morning and the Paignton express was not only packed to the gunnels (if trains can rightly be said to have gunnels), but even picked up more passengers en route. But the effort was very definitely worthwhile: in the superb top-lit galleries of the Royal West of England Academy is a glorious show of paintings by the RWA’s president, Derek Balmer (born 1934). Here are paintings of place coursing with rich colour, evocations of foreign travel and the landscapes of home, cities and fields

Robert Gorelangton

Blackpool’s cheap thrills

Whatever happened to poor old Blackpool? The last time I went it was alive, busy and reasonably full of life. The place today is a windswept vision of destitution and bleakness, home to roaming bands of stag and hen weekenders, fat people with limps and aimless geriatrics waiting to be mugged. A town once synonymous with aspiration and elegance struck me as a deeply seedy place, notable for its lovebites and sick. It is, however, cheap. This presumably explains why, despite its dramatic decline, it’s still Britain’s most popular seaside resort. There are legions of beyond-parody hotels where you can stay for £20 a night or less — including all

Saturday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Not-so-fresh viewing

‘I’m sure I’ve read this before,’ said the Fawn, skimming through my review of Heroes in the week-before-last’s Speccie. ‘I’m sure I’ve read this before,’ said the Fawn, skimming through my review of Heroes in the week-before-last’s Speccie. ‘You can’t have done, we were away when it came out,’ I said. ‘Well, it seems very familiar,’ she said. ‘That’ll be because all my pieces start to resemble one another after a time. Same style. Same jokes. Maybe I should just give up now, before anyone else notices.’ But I can’t, obviously. Nor can Michael Wood, Griff Rhys Jones, Tony Robinson, Dan Cruickshank, Simon Schama, Stephen Fry, Lenny Henry, Gordon Ramsay

Kate Chisholm

Voices of protest

It was a bit surprising to find a programme marking the 62nd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Radio Two (Tuesday), not Radio Four. The stations are changing, morphing into each other as they seek ever more urgently to catch that elusive thing, a dedicated listener. Next we’ll find Terry Wogan putting on the selected hits of Pierre Boulez. It’s also why we’re all being constantly persuaded to listen again, download and podcast — it’s another way of boosting audience figures. Power to the People, for example, was scheduled for broadcast at 10.30 p.m. The bosses in Broadcasting House, I’m pretty sure, were not expecting an audience

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Unenchanted evening

When the public ignores a playwright, it’s not because the public is wrong but because the playwright deserves to be ignored. Director Paul Miller and translator Clare Bayley have ‘rediscovered’ an obscure Swedish novelist, Victoria Benedictsson, who wrote one play (and it shows) and then stabbed herself in the throat. Set in Paris, The Enchantment is a feeble and self- conscious replica of Hedda Gabler. The characters are supremely unattractive. Niamh Cusack’s Erna is a spiky shrew, Nancy Carroll’s Louise is a squashed rose petal, Hugh Skinner’s Viggo is a beaming jerk and Zubin Varla’s Gustave is a narcissistic stud bristling with clichés from the rotter’s handbook. Varla has been

Marcus Berkmann

Perils of Poddery

Oh, to be an Early Adopter. They are the marketing man’s friends. Oh, to be an Early Adopter. They are the marketing man’s friends. Early Adopters buy only the latest thing, they are up to the minute, maybe even up to the second, these crazed opinion-formers whose reckless compulsion to spend all their money on rubbish keeps the global economy ticking over. You can’t compete with an Early Adopter, and who would want to? Myself, I am a Late Adopter. I don’t own a mobile phone, I can’t drive and I only acquired a DVD player last Christmas. (And didn’t plug it in for six weeks.) In July it was

Michael Tanner

Dying of love

‘I fear the opera will be banned — unless the whole thing is parodied in a bad performance — : only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, — I cannot imagine it otherwise.’ So Wagner famously wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck, his muse while he was composing Tristan und Isolde, when he was writing Act III. If he’d seen the Glyndebourne production, first unveiled in 2003 and now revived with a largely identical cast, he would not have worried about the dangers of experiencing what everyone agrees is a uniquely intense work, unique both in kind and in degree. For this is

Peter Phillips

Musical gazumping

Why do people spend their lives doing something which makes them nervous, even to the point of making them sick? I have watched musicians go on stage so frightened that it has been obvious to everyone present that they could not possibly be about to perform as well as they could. They look pale, they may be physically shaking, they are swallowing hard. What lies ahead of them seems like sheer hell. How can they bear to put themselves through this every time they want to ply their trade? They remind me of sportsmen. In fact at one level the two ways of life are quite closely linked by gesture

Andrew Lambirth

Artistic harmony

If you are planning a holiday visit to Shakespeare country and fancy a change of mood and visual pace from the usual round of sightseeing and theatre-going, Compton Verney is a splendid alternative destination. Besides the remarkable permanent collections of paintings, Chinese bronzes and English folk art, there is a programme of changing exhibitions which make something of a virtue out of contrasting the historic with the contemporary. Thus an older master will be shown side by side with a modern (a previous grouping was the sculptor Messerschmidt with Van Gogh and Francis Bacon) in order to strike new resonances from each by this unexpected juxtaposition. Currently, the pairing is

Mark Glazebrook

Move over, Monet-maniacs

On 30 January 1999, not long after the Royal Academy had mounted its second Monet exhibition, The Spectator published my first exhibition review. It was about a renewal of Cubism in the sculpture of Ivor Abrahams and began as follows: ‘The end of a century, like a wedding, notoriously calls for something new. A millennium apparently calls for New Impressionism, although in a recent speech at the Royal Academy Gordon Brown made a special point of not claiming Monet for New Labour, despite his admiration for the great man’s credentials, such as his stance on the Dreyfus case.’ We had yet to experience Monet 3 and various subsequent shows, at

Saturday

Interconnect

Brimming over with music

‘Hello, Gavin. Have you got the sackbuts with you?’ Administrative magician Rebecca Rickard is dealing with what is, for her, a fairly ordinary sort of phone call in the greater scheme of things. As it turns out, Gavin (Henderson) has indeed got no fewer than three sackbuts, and is planning to bring them with him the following morning on the London to Totnes train. Three musicians in this, the first week of the 60th Dartington International Summer School, will no doubt be duly grateful. The Summer School is a unique gathering point for musicians of every possible description and of varying standards of ability. Following a roughly chronological scheme from