Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Box of tricks

Travesties is a multi-layered confection of art, song, literature and pastiche. Tiny snippets of it are true. In Zurich, in 1917, James Joyce directed a production of The Importance of Being Earnest featuring a British diplomat, Henry Carr, in the role of Algy. Joyce and Carr fell out over the costume budget and became embroiled in a brief legal wrangle. That’s the starting-point for Tom Stoppard’s dazzling intellectual pantomime which features cameos from Lenin and Tristan Tzara, both residents of Zurich at the time. Tzara was an experimental vandal whose penchant for slicing sonnets into pieces was taken up by copycats and flowered, or degenerated, into the Dada movement. Lenin,

Kate Chisholm

It’s (still) a man’s world

When Jane Garvey announced to the audience who had just ‘taken part’ in the 70th birthday celebrations of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour on Monday morning that a woman listener had sent in an email asking, ‘Why do we need a programme like this in 2016?’, she almost caused a riot in the BBC Radio Theatre. A riot of disbelief and horror. What? Abolish the only programme on the BBC entirely devoted to the issues that affect women? Cut down in its prime a daily audio magazine that since its first broadcast in October 1946, and in spite of initially being commissioned and presented by men, has raised provocative questions about

Richard Bratby

Sinful treat

Shiny swags of gold cloth hang in front of the curtain before David McVicar’s production of Der Rosenkavalier, and that’s good. You want a touch of luxury in a Rosenkavalier. This is 20th-century opera’s great sinful, indulgent treat. Think of it and you think of Karajan and Schwarzkopf: huge creamy voices, silken Viennese strings, and New York Met production budgets. In truth, when Der Rosenkavalier gets under your skin, none of that matters. It’s not the glittering set pieces that turn out to be the real heart of the thing; not even the final Trio or the justly famous sequences in which the Marschallin ponders the transience of youth. They’re

Tuesday

Michael Henderson

What is it with luvvies wanting to be ‘thoroughly European’?

There’s always room for one more on the Ship of Fools, and Tom McCarthy has just booked his passage. The English novelist (no, I’d never heard of him, either) has written a column of such fifth-form puerility in the Guardian that it marks him down as a dunce of exceptional plumage. Make way, Hadley Freeman. Step aside, Zoe Williams. There’s a chap out there who can give you five yards and still beat you to the tape. McCarthy, of Dulwich College and Oxford (just right for the Guardian), is in a frightful bate because he has been invited to a bash at the Royal Academy to celebrate British art and

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

All things bright and beautiful | 6 October 2016

For much of the Middle Ages, especially from 1250–1350, ‘English work’ was enormously prized around Europe from Spain to Iceland. Popes took pains to acquire it; bishops coveted it; the quality was such that the remnants have ended up in the treasuries of Europe. London, especially the area around St Paul’s, was famous for its production. And what was English work? Embroidery, that’s what. Beautiful, costly, high-quality embroidered pieces, much of it using gold or silver thread, sometimes embellished with pearls and precious stones. Matthew Paris tells a story about Pope Innocent IV spotting some English bishops wearing lovely vestments and badgering them to find some of it for him,

Neil Armstrong

Kids’ stuff | 6 October 2016

When a new TV channel calls its flagship food show Fuck, That’s Delicious, we might surmise that the Reithian ideals are not foremost in its corporate philosophy. You probably haven’t heard of Viceland. You certainly haven’t watched it. It seeped on to the airwaves with little fanfare and few viewers. Viceland is the new 24-hour TV channel of Vice Media, the Canadian-American outfit that describes itself as the ‘world’s preeminent youth media company and content creation studio’. Vice began in 1994 as a magazine but now encompasses a news division, a record label, a film studio and myriad digital ventures. It prides itself on being ‘alternative’, ’disruptive’, sticking it to

Donald Hutera

Yes, he Khan

Giselle endures in the collective imagination as a charming, sorrowful, supernatural love story. Premièred in Paris in 1841, this keystone romantic ballet concerns a peasant girl whose trust in a disguised nobleman destroys her fragile mind and heart. Little wonder, given the ballet’s mixture of sunniness, deception, spooky woe and redemption, that it retains a timeless grip or that the title role has become the ballerina equivalent of Hamlet. English National Ballet will be at the London Coliseum in January performing Mary Skeaping’s Giselle, a chilling and historically accurate version originally mounted by the company in 1971. But first comes Akram Khan’s brand new take, another savvy commission by ENB’s

Lloyd Evans

Kate Tempest

Kate Tempest, a 30 year old dramatist and poet, has an appeal that’s hard to fathom. Is it all in the elbows? Like most performers raised on hip hop, she recites with her upper limbs flapping and wiggling as if by remote control. For emphasis she uses that impatient downward flicking gesture, beloved of rappers, like a countess at a buffet ridding her fingers of unwanted guacamole. Few would describe the south Londoner’s poetry as ‘moreish’. Less ish, perhaps. She sates the ear too rapidly because her technique has an obvious and easily corrected fault: no variety. Tempo and mood never change, so she can’t create expectation, uncertainty, surprise or

Lloyd Evans

Top of the Pops with silk tights

Here are three roles all actors love to play. The drunk (no need to learn your lines), the dementia victim (ditto) and the aristocratic roister-doisterer humping his way through the brothels of restoration London. Nothing quite beats the 17th century. Great costumes, stylish language, shoes that add three inches to your height, and a parallel universe of moral licentiousness where every cleavage is there be ogled and every passing bottom pinched. It’s Top of the Pops with silk tights. Into this land of platitudes walks Dominic Cooper, a super-smooth baddie, who has very little warmth or humour about him, and not a trace of vulnerability. Excellent qualities, it turns out,

Michael Tanner

Hole in the heart | 6 October 2016

Richard Jones’s new production of Don Giovanni at ENO bears some passing resemblances to the opera as envisaged by its librettist and composer. Mainly, however, it goes its own way, refusing most of the time, especially at key moments, to listen to the music Mozart wrote, with consequences that Jones no doubt regards as ‘creative infidelity’. When we enter the auditorium we see a contemporary streetlight and a phone booth, straight out of Jones’s production of Siegfried at the Royal Opera 20 years ago. The curtain rises on a huge ‘Wanted’ poster of Christopher Purves, followed by a depressing series of bleak rooms, in one of which the Commendatore is

Kate Chisholm

Head ache

Quite how one person is expected to oversee not just radio but also ‘arts, music, learning and children’s departments’ was not made clear by the BBC when it announced the stratospheric rise to power within the corporation of James Purnell as the new director of everything that’s not TV or light entertainment. You may recall that Purnell was once culture minister under the Labour government and in 2013 became head of strategy at the BBC, an appointment that at the time was excused (given Purnell’s lack of programme-making experience) by Tony Hall, the director-general, as ‘of course not editorial’. But this new job is very much in charge of overall

James Walton

Question time | 6 October 2016

At my wife’s first 12-week scan, I was expecting — and duly got — that much-documented sense of thrilled wonder at the grey blobby thing on the screen. What came as a genuine shock, though, was realising the scan also had the entirely undisguised aim of calculating the baby’s chances of Down’s syndrome, on the apparent assumption that, if they were high, we’d want to terminate. In the event, this wasn’t a dilemma we faced — which possibly makes it easy to take the moral high ground. Even so, the whole process left me feeling both uneasy and rather naive. How long had this been going on? Did everybody else

Deborah Ross

Wrong side of the tracks

You will surely have seen the posters for The Girl on the Train with Emily Blunt staring from a train window beneath the question: ‘What did she see?’ I don’t know …buddleia? Bindweed? The occasional abandoned supermarket trolley? That is all most of us see from trains and while it’s true that buddleia, bindweed and the occasional abandoned supermarket trolley would make for a very dull film, it could scarcely be any duller than this. And that is the truth. This is an adaptation of the thriller by Paula Hawkins; a thriller that, I would venture, attained bestseller status largely because it was touted as ‘the next Gone Girl’ and

Thursday

Martin Gayford

American beauty | 29 September 2016

‘At last,’ wrote Patrick Heron, a British painter, in 1956, ‘we can see for ourselves what it is to stand in a very large room hung with very large canvases by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline and others.’ Just over 60 years later, we, too, can stand in a series of grand galleries at the Royal Academy’s Abstract Expressionism and see what Heron saw, and much more. He was at the (greatly anticipated) first showing of those fabled American artists in Britain. Since then, they have frequently been exhibited individually, but there has been just one collective show of the movement. Now Pollock, de

Deborah Ross

White Knight

Free State of Jones is an American Civil War drama ‘inspired’ by the life of Newton Knight, who led an armed rebellion against the Confederacy in Jones County, Mississippi, and one rather wishes that that was all it was about. Directed by Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, The Hunger Games), and starring a whiskery, leathery Matthew McConaughey, it tells that story, then thinks: while you’re here, might we tell another story? And another one? So you are fully educated in all matters? In the end, such is the weight of all these stories that you won’t lose the will to live exactly, but you will find it has been significantly weakened. The

Kate Chisholm

One day in November

The weather was ‘treacherous’ on Saturday, 23 November 2013, the day chosen randomly by Gary Younge as the focus for his latest book, Another Day in the Death of America. As he described it, a ‘Nordic outbreak’ of snow, rain and high winds swept across the desert states and up into the northern plains. It was for many Americans a winter’s day like many others but for ten families a shot rang out sometime during those 24 hours and their lives changed for ever. Not that these ten disparate events made the national news. Death by gunshot is so commonplace in the USA that not even when those who died

James Delingpole

Close encounters of the Eighties kind

Stranger Things is the most delightful, gripping, charming, nostalgic, compulsive, edge-of-seat entertainment I’ve had in ages. Like a lot of the best TV these days, it’s on Netflix, which I highly recommend so long as you can cope with the technical complexities of getting it to appear on your screen in the first place. Yeah, I know, all you bastard millennial types sneering at Granddad for his inability to do stuff that’s like so totally easy and obvious. But if like me you grew up in an age when there were just three channels and an on/off button, it’s a bloody nightmare grappling with this future where there’s an Amazon

Alexandra Coghlan

Losing heart | 29 September 2016

The subtitle for Mozart’s Così fan tutte may be ‘The School For Lovers’, but it’s as a school for directors that the opera is most instructive. From four lovers and two different romantic pairings, the composer spins a parable whose moral is as elusive as its morals. Faced with so much ambiguity (and so little political correctness) directors tend either to sand down the rough edges with laughs, or fling a capacious concept over the whole lot. It says something about the awkward profundity of this most inscrutable and affection-resistant of the Mozart-Da Ponte collaborations that it can take it. It says even more that you so rarely see an