The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions
Forget for a moment the importation of ‘Gothic’, a term more usually confined to architecture or the novel, and consider the main protagonists. Blake will be familiar to most art-lovers, but what about Fuseli? Born Johann Heinrich F
Radio Four listeners have been complaining about the John Humphrys ‘interview’ with David Cameron on Today a fortnight or so ago. So they must have been even more irritated to hear the programme’s deputy editor, Gavin Allen, defending the encounter on Feedback last week (Friday, repeated Sunday), even going so far as to describe it as a successful interview in which he thought Humphrys didn’t interrupt too much. The presenter, Roger Bolton, put it to him that according to the head of radio news even Humphrys didn’t think the interview had gone as he intended. Allen doggedly stuck to his line that he wasn’t at all disappointed by it. Obviously,
One reason I find most TV thrillers such a huge waste of life is that the bad guys so often turn out to be evil capitalists, corrupt Tory MPs or sinister right-wing terrorist organisations. This owes more to the wishful thinking of instinctively bien-pensant scriptwriters than to reality. Since the war — or even before the war, if you accept that the Nazis were National Socialists — all the greatest threats to our existence and civilisation, from the IRA to militant Islam, from rampant trade unionism to communist imperialism, have come from the extreme Left, not the Right. Until watching The Plot Against Harold Wilson (BBC2, Thursday), I was inclined
Phoenix Dance Theatre is ‘25 years young’, as a filmed documentary shown halfway through last Thursday’s performance reminded us. The notion of youth is a relative one, particularly in the performing-arts world, where a quarter of a century is often regarded as a respectable old age, synonymous with a well-established reputation, a sound history and, arguably, a string of successes. Indeed, 25 years down the line, Phoenix remains a vibrant dance company that thrives on the collaboration with cutting-edge performance-makers. I was not surprised, therefore, to attend a programme, intriguingly entitled Stories in Red, that encompassed a wide variety of styles, techniques and forms; after all, artistic eclecticism has long
At its première just over 50 years ago, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was, at least in part, a sane man’s strike against America’s McCarthyite paranoia about communism. Miller’s cover for his protest was, of course, the infamous Salem witch-hunts conducted by the New England Puritans in 1692. In resurrecting the play as its tribute to Miller, who died just over a year ago, the RSC is plainly aware that the piece is now tested against new terrors confronting the liberal world. Extraordinary that Miller, four years after the play’s première, should have admitted that at the time of writing The Crucible he didn’t conceive ‘that there are people dedicated to
When Berg’s great tragic masterpiece Wozzeck opened at the Royal Opera in 2002 in Keith Warner’s production, I was more angry and depressed than I have ever been in an opera house. The utter betrayal of everything that Berg, who included in his score extremely detailed specifications as to how it should be staged, indicated, to convey the intense pain of his vision of degradation, made me feel that it should be possible to instigate criminal proceedings on behalf of works and composers subject to such gross abuse. Warner, I felt, treated Wozzeck just as everyone in the opera treats Wozzeck, but whereas Berg writes an overpowering elegy for him,
In the summer of 1811 the 37-year-old Turner packed his sketchbooks, paints and fishing rod and headed west for his first tour of Devon and Cornwall. The purpose of his trip — from Poole in Dorset around Land’s End and back along the Bristol Channel to Watchet in Somerset — was to gather material for a series of Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England to be published as engravings by the Cooke brothers. On the bone-rattling roads of the day the tour will have taken eight weeks, but Turner was an enthusiastic traveller, ‘capable of roughing it in any mode the occasion might demand’, according to one local
The Sackler Wing of the Royal Academy is currently in deep-green livery to conjure up a rus in urbe setting for the grandest of the Dutch landscape painters of the 17th century — Jacob van Ruisdael. The first impression is a dark one — storm-tossed seas and forests, cloud-filled skies: the untamed might of nature and plenty of lush verdure. The painted green of the gallery walls is here and there relieved by pale-grey partitions, like silver birches in a conifer wood, upon which smaller works can be hung. (There’s an excellent sampling of Ruisdael’s powerful black chalk drawings made from direct observation.) The screens provide extra wall space for
I caught the last Facing The Truth (BBC2, Saturday–Monday) in which Desmond Tutu moderated a meeting between the widow of a Catholic killed in the Ulster troubles and Michael Stone, the Milltown cemetery killer, who was behind her husband’s murder by loyalist gunmen. It was slightly less moving than expected — at least before the startling finish. At the risk of being forced to go to Belfast and apologise, like the previous editor of this magazine in Liverpool, Northern Ireland people do grief well — they have what would now be called the ‘grammar’ of grief; they know what’s expected, they have the tone of voice, they have lists: how
I hope that I am second to none in my fondness for Dutch art galleries — normally, at least. A candlelight evening in the Franz Hals museum, over 40 years ago, memorably transported me straight to 17th-century Holland — or so I imagined. The unmissable Vermeer exhibition in The Hague in 1996 reinforced this magical experience. Just over ten years ago, reviewing a Hockney exhibition in Rotterdam, I discovered that the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen had organised a race for ‘teckels’ (the Dutch for dachshunds) in honour of the artist’s famous pets. Simultaneously, vodka, samovars, blinis, borscht and waitresses in colourful Russian costumes were laid on in the museum’s restaurant
Verdi’s Macbeth is one of those operas which I always have hopes will be greater than it ever actually seems in performance. Its seriousness of intention is plain from the outset, and by and large Verdi maintains an intensity which the subject requires, and which isn’t to be found in any of his previous nine operas. The Witches are a problem, and all the special pleading on their behalf still doesn’t begin to solve it convincingly. But there are other, more elusive things about the opera than that which cause me difficulties, and which mean that Macbeth, for all the great interpretations of the two chief characters which there have
‘Syriana’ is ‘a term used by Washington think-tanks to describe a hypothetical reshaping of the Middle East’, according to this film’s director. As the title of his film, he uses the word to describe a concept: ‘the fallacious dream that you can successfully remake nation states in your own image’. Just in case you were wondering. The biggest problem facing Syriana is to contextualise its events without losing its narrative drive. Of course we all need to know as much as we can about what is going on between the Middle East and America, but this is a motion picture, not a presentation. Since we are well aware that there
London is about to experience two exhibitions about early 20th-century Modernism. The V&A is mounting a substantial themed display of design, art, film and life, based primarily on France and Germany before 1930. Tate Modern will exhibit jointly the work of two faculty members of the Bauhaus, Josef Albers and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. In anticipation, two exhibitions outside London demonstrate outgrowths from this core of experience, supposedly the rootstock of radicalism in the past 100 years of art and design. At Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933–57 shows how the European modernist diaspora improbably made one of its significant early landfalls in North Carolina, in a small,
I have been talking tosh. Well, not entire tosh, but certainly substantial dollops of wishful thinking and airy, groundless supposition. I have come to this conclusion after reading a book by a plant scientist called Ken Thompson. However, it is written in such an engaging, amiable and witty way that it doesn’t hurt too much; especially since I can console myself that almost everybody else has been as deluded as me. Ever since Ken Thompson’s first book — An Ear to the Ground; Garden Science for Ordinary Mortals — was published in 2003, I have been a big fan. He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Animal and
It is hard to imagine the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood as the same man. In 1958, Truman Capote wrote the story of a social butterfly whose anxieties are banished by a trip to Tiffany’s; in 1959, he began his dark examination of a quadruple murder, In Cold Blood, a book he finished just before it finished him, in 1966. In Cold Blood was the first non-fiction novel, attaching skilful and superior writing to a sensational ‘real-life’ subject. Capote turns the microscope from the subject matter of the book on to its author, making a clinical study of his experience during these six years. Reading of
Southwark Fair by Samuel Adamson. Ever heard of it? Nor me but it sounds like a sprawling comedy of manners written by some forgotten Enlightenment wag. I trotted along to the Cottesloe full of expectation but I was in for a let-down. Samuel Adamson is no wag. Nor is he enlightened. And as for forgotten, well, it won’t take long. The play, staged on the South Bank of the Thames, is also set on the South Bank of the Thames. Good idea? Possibly. But as the action unfolds you quickly see what trouble the author has given himself by disregarding one of the basic conventions of drama. Most plays are
Welsh National Opera’s Der fliegende Holl
When a Bostonian wit remarked, ‘Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris’, he was merely expressing the secure place the French capital occupied in the nation’s heart. Paris represented a dream (or reality for the increasing number who travelled there) of happiness, a spiritual or physical home, the premier destination for thousands of American artists and art students. Many who went, perhaps as many as a third, were women. As one of their number, the little-known painter Cecilia Beaux, remarked, ‘Everything is there.’ Three of her paintings are included here, among a glittering list of 87 exhibits by more than 30 artists. This is not just another exhibition tagging
Where have I been all these years? A listed Francophile managing to miss the utter delight of Bizet’s la jolie fille de Perth! Not averse to Carmen, tickled by the dusky oriental charms of The Pearl Fishers, diverted by the precocious brio of the 18-year-old’s sole symphony, enchanted and moved by the music for l’Arlésienne; yet incurious enough not to have explored such a likely route towards pleasure as this full-length opera written in 1866, three years after the first, some eight before the last, of his famous repertory pieces. That its so-called plot is lost beyond recall from start to finish should be no disadvantage for an operatic culture
Blackbird is the kind of play critics absolutely adore. Indeed, the reason it has managed to secure a berth in the West End — a rarity for a new straight play — is that it got such rave reviews at Edinburgh last year. For one thing, it’s about paedophilia, and that enables the critics to congratulate the writer, David Harrower, on his ‘bold’ choice of subject matter. They like playwrights who don’t pander to commercial interests — it demonstrates how serious they are about their craft. In addition, Harrower’s attitude to paedophilia is complex and nuanced — he refuses to condemn the middle-aged perpetrator, even though his victim was only