Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Sheridan Morley

The importance of being British

Sheridan Morley died suddenly last weekend. He was The Spectator’s theatre critic from 1990 to 2001. His knowledge of both the stage and its leading practitioners was encyclopedic, while his many theatrical anecdotes were hugely entertaining. He and his wife, the producer and critic Ruth Leon, were planning to spend more time shuttling between London and New York, from where he was going to send occasional reviews. What follows is the first — and now sadly the last — in the planned series. Sheridan was a good friend of The Spectator. We will all miss him a lot. The business of Broadway is still a cash business. The politics are

Patrick Carnegy

Dynastic dissonance

The RSC’s Complete Works festival continues to produce wondrous juxtapositions. In the Courtyard Theatre Michael Boyd has rounded off his Wars of the Roses sequence with a Richard III which for a week played alongside an Arab reworking of the same play in the Swan. There seems no end to the uses to which the poor old hunchback villain can be put. Plainly he was in the running to be exposed sooner or later as Saddam Hussein. This was confessedly the first idea of Sulayman Al-Bassam in adapting the play for his Kuwaiti-based theatre  company. But thankfully he saw that such a notion was too simplistic, and that it would

Robin Holloway

Marriage of minds

‘Made in Heaven’: the contrasts and complements linking Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky in two-way reciprocality form a felicitous marriage of true minds perfect for the week of wall-to-wall broadcasting on Radio Three covering (sometimes more than once) every note the two Russian masters composed. First, the contrasts: Tchaikovsky the emotional, passionate, subjective, confessional, pouring his heart all down his sleeve, supreme in inflammatory melody, harmony, orchestration, personally present in his every utterance, whether by direct ‘programme’ (however withheld, the general tenor of the story is never in doubt) or by identification with character and situation (Tatiana’s uncalled-for declaration of love in Eugene Onegin; the tragic or ultimately radiant outcome in the

Michael Tanner

Act of sabotage

Exactly 400 years ago, 24 February 1607, the first great opera received its première in Mantua. It’s a crucial date in the history of the arts in Western Europe, and it would have been agreeable to be able to report that Opera North, in its new production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, did it justice. And musically speaking it would not have been hopelessly wide of the mark. But what we saw was as ferocious an act of sabotage as you are likely to see in a tour of the world’s operatic stages, whatever they may be doing, and the competition for impertinent inanity is intense. Paul Steinberg’s set is an uglily

Kate Chisholm

Comfort station

Sometimes when listening to Radio Four you can have the odd experience of spiralling downwards into your very own time warp. Lying in the bath on Sunday morning, for instance, with the radio warbling in the background, you could almost pretend you were back in the 1970s (except that the cork tiles and avocado finish will probably have been swapped for upmarket granite and stainless steel, and the miniature transistor for a digital Bose). At ten, there’s The Archers omnibus edition (floruit 1954), followed by Desert Island Discs (fl. 1944) and Just a Minute (fl. 1974). It’s very comforting, knowing that there are bits of life where nothing has changed,

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Morpheus descending

Insomnia is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When, for example, I made up my mind that I was going to review the BBC’s new series Sleep Clinic (BBC1, Monday), I knew that later that night I would have enormous difficulties getting to sleep. This is one of the horrible tricks we insomniacs play on ourselves. We’ll have had maybe four or five good nights’ sleep in a row and the nasty little voice in our heads will go, ‘Well, you’re not seriously expecting to get another good night, are you?’ To which our nice, rational, sensible voice will reply, ‘Well, why not? I’ve been doing pretty well so far. I’m quite tired.

Saturday

Laura Gascoigne

Middlesbrough’s lofty ambitions

The most exciting thing to do in Middlesbrough on a Sunday afternoon, Ronnie Scott used to say, is watch the traffic lights change. Not any longer, since the opening in January of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Mima is the latest addition to the band of new public galleries stretching across Britain from the West Midlands to the north-east. In the six years since the Millennium, our old industrial heartlands have been ruthlessly rejuvenated by the erection of landmark gallery buildings designed by what my dyslexic cowboy builder used to call ‘artitects’. First up in 2000 were Salford’s The Lowry and the New Art Gallery Walsall, followed in 2001 by

Tom Rosenthal

Unfamiliar connection

It was a dark and stormy night when I got to Liverpool and, on my way to the Tate at Albert Dock the next morning, a gale-force wind nearly propelled me into the Dock’s murky, choppy waters before I reached the sanctuary of the museum. Here, on a quiet lower floor, there’s a small but revelatory exhibition of little-known Lowry paintings and drawings of Liverpool. Revelatory because, while everyone is familiar with his endless explorations of Manchester and Salford, his Liverpool connection was, to me at least, unfamiliar. The pictures are housed in what Tate calls a Focus Room, an intimate gallery which, when I was there, was full of

Andrew Lambirth

Test of stamina

William Hogarth (1697–1764) was a rambunctious figure, controversial and quarrelsome by nature, but the first British artist to achieve worldwide recognition. He did this not through his paintings but through his prints, which were easier and cheaper to obtain, distinctly portable and offered a clear indication of his ideas. For Hogarth was a man of ideas and strongly held opinions, who not only designed and painted several series of unforgettable images, such as ‘A Harlot’s Progress’ and ‘A Rake’s Progress’, but also devised the stories which they so superbly illustrated. No scriptwriter or collaborator for him. These ‘Modern Moral Subjects’, as their author termed them, are what Hogarth is best-known

Michael Tanner

Patience rewarded

Agrippina is widely agreed among Handelians to be his first major opera. Constituted, to a large extent, of arias from pre-existing works, it does have a strongly distinctive character, and is as precocious a work as any operatic composer has achieved by the age of 24. What makes it still more striking is that it is pitilessly satirical, a portrayal of relationships among the ruling class of ancient Rome showing them to be determined by gross ambition, with long-term ends even further from its characters’ minds than one expects from politicians, and instant sexual gratification vying with vengeance as the leading motive for action. Given who the characters are, the

Kate Chisholm

The third way

By the time you read this, the new Radio Three schedule will be up and running — more jazz, more words, fewer ‘live’ broadcasts (as opposed to live recordings) and Choral Evensong switched from Wednesdays, where it has been for decades, to Sundays. There was a terrible hoo-ha at the time these changes were announced back in the autumn, from the listening press as well as from the station’s cohort of Friends. ‘A bullet through the heart of Radio Three,’ warned the Daily Telegraph. But where’s the victim? If you look through what’s on offer in the coming week, there’s Janacek’s fabulous, wrenching opera Jenufa, live from New York, two

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

‘Time is eating away at one’s life’

I’m talking to Maggi Hambling in the downstairs studio of her south London home, because her beautifully light upstairs painting space is being given a new coat of white paint, the first for years. She always says that if she ever comes to sell this house the agents can market it as having ‘four reception rooms, two bathrooms and a ballroom. No bedrooms’. It’s a misleading description of the Hambling lifestyle: work is the order of the day, not partying, and the ballroom is of course the main studio. Hambling is not out on the tiles every night, but is more likely to retire to bed early in order to

Marcus Berkmann

Follow your muse

How pleasant it has been to hear songs from the new Norah Jones album on the radio these past few weeks. Soft, deftly performed, vaguely jazzy in that way that everyone likes, these latest songs sound almost completely indistinguishable from the songs on her first two albums. And why not? Those first two albums sold 31 million copies between them. She might have recorded a thrash-metal album this time round, or a symphony for banjo and orchestra, but fortunately for EMI, whose share price depends almost wholly on the performance of this record, Norah has her shtick and she has stuck with it. Each new song wafts through your head

Michael Tanner

Double riches

I had the unusual opportunity of seeing two productions of Il Trovatore in one day last week, the circumstances of them about as contrasting as could be when they were within a couple of miles of one another. Both were richly rewarding, though naturally in quite different ways. The first, at lunchtime, took place in Brady Community Centre in Tower Hamlets, the annual production of the Children’s Music Workshop. It was attended by about 50 Bangladeshi schoolchildren, aged ten or so. They had been primed in the story and to some degree the music, and were encouraged to join in the choral sections. As always Howard Moody had fashioned an

Peter Phillips

Tales from Trinity

It seems that the fuss which surrounded the appointment of Stephen Layton as organist and choirmaster of Trinity College, Cambridge some 15 months ago has not gone away. Rumour and Lunchtime O’Boulez have it that some of the fellows of Trinity itself have finally become queasy at the high-handedness of their colleagues, to the extent that they want to ‘roll back’ the terms of Layton’s employment. One wonders how the legality of such a move might play out, but then the whole point of this story is that Trinity gets what it wants in every situation, because it is stinking rich. My original complaint, made in this column, was that

Deborah Ross

The case for Guest

As far as I can tell, Christopher Guest’s latest film, For Your Consideration, pretty much bombed in America, which must be a recommendation, surely. Listen, I’m only kidding. I have nothing against America. Sometimes, I even think it’s quite the nicest country anyone ever stole and, as for Americans, utterly, utterly charming. Quite fat and quite stupid and always waddling off to amusement parks — I’m not busy today; I know, I’ll ask someone to strap me upside-down and spin me around until I puke — but aside from that, utterly, utterly charming. Anyway, I suppose whether you will like this film depends largely on whether you like Guest’s loose,

Saturday

Mark Glazebrook

‘Culture’s still a low priority’

For a hundred years or so, the director of the Tate Gallery has normally been a major figure in the art world. Sir Norman Reid, director in a dynamic period between 1964 and 1979, increased the Tate’s exhibition space and acquired, for example, an important group of paintings by Mark Rothko. Sir Alan Bowness (1980–8) made many significant additions to the collection. He helped father both Tate Liverpool (a precursor of Tate St Ives) and the Clore Gallery at Millbank. He also initiated the Turner Prize. A comparatively minor figure was the bibulous bohemian J.B. Manson, theoretically responsible between 1930 and 1938. According to his immediate successor, Sir John Rothenstein

Andrew Lambirth

Charming the aristocracy

Canaletto is one of the best-loved of foreigners who visited these shores and attempted to capture the English spirit through depictions of our countryside and buildings. London was the magnet, inevitably, when commissions began to run short in his native Venice. Canaletto had sold a great deal of work to the English aristocracy as they called in on Venice during the obligatory Grand Tour of the wonders of Europe. Now war had curtailed the influx of visitors, and Canaletto felt the pinch. He may also have seen the wisdom of attempting a new subject, rather than continuing to flood the market with versions of Venetian views already mastered. In 1746

Charles Spencer

Ten for the road

Back in November, I wrote about the sad death of my old VW Passat on the way down to Dorset. It was gloomily pronounced on all sides to be irreparable, and the poor old thing languished in the car park outside Netherbury Village Hall before Andy, the local garage man, managed to dispose of it for, as he put it, ‘the price of a drink’. With 127,000 miles on the clock I could hardly complain. Until its death rattle at the midnight hour on the A303, it had been a good and faithful servant. I now have a new car, another Passat, for we Spencers are creatures of habit, though

Michael Tanner

All-purpose affair

The Royal Opera’s new Carmen, which opened last month, is back with different singers in all the most important roles.  The balance among the principals has changed and, rather surprisingly, though Carmen is now clearly the central figure, as she wasn’t in the first run, that hasn’t turned out to the benefit of the show overall. The Hungarian Viktoria Vizin is a considerable improvement on her predecessor, with a richer, sexier voice and persona. There is nothing much individual about her interpretation, but that goes with the general tendency of the production, an all-purpose affair with no intention of making us reconsider to the smallest degree our stereotyped views of