Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Enigma variations | 3 November 2016

Exhibitions

On 2 August 1933 one of the more improbable meetings of the 20th century took place when Albert Einstein had lunch with James Ensor. Apparently, Einstein attempted to explain his theory of relativity to Ensor, who doesn’t seem to have understood it. That evening the painter gave a speech, entitled ‘Ensor to Einstein’, ending with

Mistaken identity

More from Arts

The Romanovs were a hot topic in 1967: it was the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, memories of Ingrid Bergman’s Oscar winning Anastasia were still fresh and Robert Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra was on every bestseller list. Kenneth MacMillan was ‘sick to death of fairy tales’ and his one act treatment of the Anna

Heaven knows they’re miserable now

Cinema

The Light Between Oceans is one of those films that comes issued with a handy how-to-use manual. Shudder as hero arrives on remote Australian island to man lighthouse. Cheer when in swift dash to mainland he secures hot bride to join him. Grimace when her womb proves incapable of holding anything in for a whole

Lloyd Evans

Just kidding

Theatre

Amadeus by Peter Shaffer is haunted by its own antecedents. Viewers are apt to feel that a new production lacks the beauties they’ve seen, or believe they’ve seen, in previous versions. Director Michael Longhurst opens with a fusion of time zones. The courtiers are attired in silk curtains like proper 18th-century toffs, while the musicians

Buried treasure | 3 November 2016

Opera

Wexford is to opera-goers what casinos are to gamblers. The uncertainty, the hope, the exhilaration — they’re all a crucial part of a festival that annually rolls the dice, plucking three obscure, often all but unknown, operas from the repertoire and giving them a staging. Dealing the cards is David Agler, the artistic director whose

Contours of the mind

Arts feature

In Australia, I have been told, the female pubic area is sometimes known as a ‘mapatasi’ because its triangular shape resembles a map of Tasmania. And since we are discussing cartography and the nether regions, it is wonderful to find in the British Library’s new exhibition, Maps and the 20th Century, that Countess Mountbatten wore

Halloween hire

Exhibitions

To use a vulgar phrase, I can’t get my head around this exhibition. It seems anything but ‘vulgar’. Daintily laid out and dimly lit in the gloomier cloisters of Fortress Barbican is a series of dresses — the chaps hardly get a look-in, save for some of those white-knee-britched, jaboty, gold-laced-coat get-ups that people like

Romantic modern

Exhibitions

In 1932 Paul Nash posed the question, is it possible to ‘go modern’ and still ‘be British?’ — a conundrum that still perplexes the national consciousness more than 80 years later. It is true that the artist himself answered that query with an emphatic ‘yes’. But, as the fine exhibition at Tate Britain makes clear,

Going Dutch | 27 October 2016

Exhibitions

In debates about what should and should not be taught in art school, the subject of survival skills almost never comes up. Yet the Dutch, who more or less invented the art market, were already aware of its importance in the 17th century. In his Introduction to the Academy of Painting (1678), Samuel van Hoogstraten

Rod Liddle

How Pete Burns helped to create our fatuous modern world

Columns

So RIP Pete Burns, transgendered Scouse popstar. His indescribably awful song ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’ — clever allusion, no? — reached number one in 1985 and, as part of the band Dead Or Alive, he had a couple of minor follow-up hits. When David Bowie died in January of this year, a

James Delingpole

The lying game | 27 October 2016

Television

‘Adam Curtis believed that 200,000 Guardian readers watching BBC2 could change the world. But this was a fantasy. In fact, he had created the televisual equivalent of a drunken late-night Wikipedia binge with pretentions to narrative coherence…’ You really must watch Ben Woodhams’s brilliant 2011 Adam Curtis-pastiche mini-documentary The Loving Trap, which you’ll find on

A night at the circus

Opera

The Royal Opera’s latest production is Shostakovich’s The Nose and to paraphrase Mark Steyn, whatever else can be said about it, you certainly get a lot of noses for your money. Noses are tossed from character to character, noses kneel in prayer and noses stroll casually past in the background. They poke through curtains, mingle

Net effect

Cinema

As a documentary-maker, Werner Herzog is a master of tone. His widely parodied voiceovers — breathy, raspy, ominous — are cunningly ambivalent. The interviews he conducts are seldom less than strange, often shocking, and the pacing and tenor of his films are subtly modulated. Never more so than here. Lo and Behold is divided into

Identity crisis | 27 October 2016

Radio

You may not listen to them every year. Or even to every lecture in the current series. But the survival of the annual Reith Lectures on Radio 4 from the old days of the Home Service and Radio 3 (they were established in 1948 to honour what Reith had done for the corporation) is crucial

Lloyd Evans

Sweet and sour | 27 October 2016

Theatre

Great subject, terminal illness. Popular dramas like Love Story, Terms of Endearment and My Night With Reg handle the issue with tact and artistry by presenting us with a single victim and a narrative focus that reveals as much about the survivors as about the patient. Crucially, the disease is omitted from the title for

March of the makers

More from Arts

Until earlier this year, a squat sculpture nestled rather unobtrusively outside 20 Manchester Square in Marylebone, an address once made famous by the cover of a number of albums by the Beatles. The building has since been renovated into smart, slightly anonymous offices and the sculpture suited it. Few knew that it was a work

Kate Maltby

Emma Rice was never as radical as she thought she was

Towards the end of Emma Rice’s recent production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of the mechanicals decides to give us a piece of her mind. ‘It’s a visual concept!’ screams Nandi Bhebhe’s Starveling (for it is She), as the young lords and ladies mock her costume in the play within a play. ‘Why is

Face time

Exhibitions

As a chat-up line it was at least unusual. On 8 January 1927, a 46-year-old man approached a young woman outside the Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris and announced, ‘You have an interesting face; I would like to do your portrait. I feel we are going to do great things together.’ The approach was

Shady past

Arts feature

David Hockney: It is a kind of joke, but I really mean it when I say Caravaggio invented Hollywood lighting. It is an invention, in that he quickly worked out how to light things dramatically. I’ve always used shadows a bit, because that’s what you need below a figure to ground it, but mine are

The power of song | 20 October 2016

Radio

‘I went in at seven and came out aged 22,’ said Brian as he looked back on the day in October 1966 when his primary school in Aberfan was smothered in a great black wave of coal slurry. On that day, of his small school of just 141 pupils, only 25 children survived. Brian lost

Lloyd Evans

Ziggurat of bilge

Theatre

Ella Hickson’s new play analyses our relationship with oil using the sketch format. First, there’s a candlelit soap opera set in Cornwall, in 1889, with a lot of ooh-arr bumpkins firing witless insults at each other. Next, a bizarre Persian scene, set in 1908, where a Scottish footman (who uses the celebrated Edwardian colloquialism ‘OK’)

High and low

Opera

‘Besides feeble writing, there is a mixture of tragic-comedy and buffoonery in it, which Apostolo Zeno and Metastasio had banished from serious opera’. You can always rely on Charles Burney (the celebrated musicologist, who spent most of the 18th century being professionally underwhelmed) to find fault. But writing here about Handel’s Xerxes he has a

Loach at his most Loach

Cinema

I, Daniel Blake is a Ken Loach film about a Newcastle joiner who can’t work but faces a welfare bureaucracy that won’t listen, humiliates him, grinds him down, so it’s fun, fun, fun all the way. Yes, it is that Ken Loach film, but as that Ken Loach film is more powerful than most other

Muslim magic

Arts feature

In 1402, when the Turkic conqueror Temur, better known in the West as Tamerlane, was poised to do battle with the mighty Ottoman Sultan Bayazid I, the greatest power in the Muslim world, he called in the astrologers. Knowing which side their bread was buttered on, the court officials duly pronounced that the planets were