Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Bid low, break even

A new Seagull lands in Regent’s Park. Director Matthew Dunster has lured Chekhov’s classic into a leafy corner of north London to see if it needs an upgrade. The new script, by yuppie-baiting playwright Torben Betts, is casual, slangy and sometimes gauche. Favourite moments have been struck out including the great opening line, ‘Why do you always wear black?’ And Betts decides to make Chekhov’s characters swear. ‘Bollocks’, ‘piss off’. I don’t know Russian but I’m sure Chekhov didn’t need coarse language to portray coarse souls. The outside staging has been jazzed up too. A clunking great mirror hangs over the playing area like a bit of broken satellite. Angled

Ismene Brown

Dying of the light

It’s a comfort that the creation of a new ballet inspired by French court entertainment can still happen in the amnesiac ballet country that Britain has become. The idea of making a modern-day meditation on the first ballet — Louis XIV’s 12-hour epic Le Ballet de la nuit (1653) — is as intellectual as Wayne McGregor’s roping in of cognitive science as source material. It faces many of the same traps when it comes to capturing that elusive necessity: theatricality. Only David Bintley could do this, deploying his artistic authority as the 20-year director of Birmingham Royal Ballet as any French despot would. The scheme’s theatricality is innate. Le Ballet

Deborah Ross

Eyes wide shut | 2 July 2015

Asif Kapadia’s documentary about Amy Winehouse, whom Tony Bennett describes as ‘one of the truest jazz singers that ever lived’, and who died of alcohol poisoning at 27 (FFS), is masterly and gripping, which is a pity, as you can’t look away. You will want to look away, and may even yearn to do so once the heroin comes into play, and the crack, and that husband and that gig in Belgrade, when she was all unsteady, shuffling and broken beneath the big hair, but you can’t. Oh, Amy, I kept thinking, if only — if only — you’d said, ‘Yes, yes, yes’. It is almost unbearable in this way.

Kate Chisholm

Anniversary fatigue

There’s a part of me that thinks OK, we’ve heard enough now, one year on from the beginning of the centenary commemorations, about the first world war. Do we really need any more programmes (on radio or television) about Ypres, Gallipoli, Akaba, Versailles, and the Western Front? Or are we wallowing in history’s horror stories rather than trying to learn from them? There’s a danger that anniversary fatigue will set in and stop us pausing to think, to really contemplate, the reality of that terrible, catastrophic war and whether there is any way it can be prevented from happening again. But then events, as ever, take over, such as the

James Walton

The bankers’ darling

This week’s Imagine… Jeff Koons: Diary of a Seducer (BBC1, Tuesday) began with Koons telling a slightly puzzled-looking Alan Yentob that what spinach was to Popeye, so art is to the rest of us: a way of achieving transcendence and appreciating ‘the vastness of life’. As it turned out, though, not all the claims made in the programme were quite so straightforward. Later, for example, Koons argued that ‘the only thing you really have in life is your interests and when you focus on them it takes you to a connecting place where time really kind of bends’. And even that was possibly beaten by the art dealer Jeffrey Deitch’s

Roy Kelly

Cold-blooded

An unidentified lizard, the same size as a Grecian stick, the colour of dirtied sand, holds the dissolving power of invisibility. Only by the abrupt weird- angle turn of the head is its presence revealed; only this and movement swift and soundless as vanished moments, as previous love, here and gone, here and gone, so limbs and friction seem almost never to have been involved.

Wednesday

Guy Dammann

Boo the knee-jerk reaction to William Tell not the rape scene

‘I blame Princess Diana’, was my guest’s response to it all. Certainly, there is much we might lay at the feet of our long lamented People’s Princess, but I struggled to see how the current situation was her fault. The situation in question was as follows: a sizeable group of offended opera goers sought, with an extended imitation of disgruntled livestock, to bring the third act of the Royal Opera’s new production of William Tell to its knees. And there they were again, booing and braying their way through the curtain call, making sure the production’s director Damiano Michieletto knew their unease was intended personally. Certainly, something was to blame.

Tuesday

Alexandra Coghlan

The gang rape was the least offensive thing about Royal Opera’s new William Tell

Guillaume Tell Royal Opera House, in rep until 17 July There’s no such thing as a tasteful rape scene — or there certainly shouldn’t be. It’s an act of grossest violation, of primal violence. It’s also a reality — and a growing one at that — of contemporary warfare, a ‘weapon’ increasingly deployed strategically, coolly, by armies rather than individuals. Setting his new production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell in the Balkan conflict of the 1990s, director Damiano Michieletto puts the issue front and centre in a scene whose music was almost lost on opening night in the extraordinary and unprecedented chorus of boos and catcalls from the audience. The booers have ensured all

Thursday

Clive James

Verse Letter

In reply to Ann Baer, aged 101, of Richmond-on-Thames.   Your handwriting, so perfect for its style And firmness, made me feel that this must be A brilliant schoolgirl. Hence my knowing smile At your comparing of my maple tree   With Tennyson’s. But further down the page, And seemingly in passing, you revealed The secret of your learning: your great age. In your day, verse was not a special field,   It was a language, so to speak: a tongue For all who read books. No such luck today, Alas. Just look at how it keeps you young, This love for words that time can’t take away   From

Lloyd Evans

Savile exposed

Ho hum. Bit icky. Not bad. Hardly dazzling. The lukewarm response to An Audience With Jimmy Savile has astonished me. This is the best docudrama I’ve seen on stage. From the early 1970s, Britain swooned before Savile. Marketing pollsters found him the country’s best-loved celeb (bar the Queen Mum). He enforced his influence by winning over several establishments at once, the royals, the Beeb, the NHS, the media, the charity sector, Westminster. Evidence of his criminality existed but it never affected his reputation. He’s the nearest we’ve come to Hitler. The show takes the format of a TV biography which is intercut with scenes from Savile’s early life and testimony

Martin Gayford

Shape-shifter

In the last two decades of her life, Barbara Hepworth was a big figure in the world of art. A 21-foot bronze of hers stands outside the UN headquarters in New York, emblematic of her friendship with secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld — a Hepworth collector — and of her international fame. This was how a modern monument looked half a century ago: abstract but organic, romantic but starkly simplified. Since Hepworth’s death, however, her status has become less clear: was she a towering giant of modern sculpture or relatively minor, a slightly dreary relic of post-war Britain? Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World at Tate Britain does not quite supply

Michael Tanner

Better than Bayreuth

Which of Wagner’s mature dramas is the most challenging, for performers and spectators? The one you’re seeing at the moment, seems to be the answer for me. The better I know them, the more apprehensive I get about whether I can rise to their level, and whether the performers can, and whether we can pace ourselves and not flag at the prospect of the last act, in most of them the greatest and most exhausting. In the end, though, I think Tristan und Isolde takes the biscuit. It’s a matter of gratitude, almost, if the Prelude isn’t as overwhelming as it naturally tends to be. At Longborough this year it

James Delingpole

Look back in anger | 25 June 2015

‘Cringe!’ said Boy, after I’d exposed him to a few seconds of last week’s special nostalgia edition of TFI Friday. And he did have a point. From its once almost-daring name to its zany title graphics to its whatever-happened-to guest list (Shaun Ryder, Blur, Ewan McGregor), Chris Evans’s irredeemably Nineties game show now looks so dated and impossibly remote you might as well be looking at an early episode of Face to Face with John Freeman, or The Black and White Minstrel Show or Muffin the Mule. Gosh, time is cruel. But it was great at the time, right? No, it wasn’t, actually. I watched this one-off revival mainly to

Deborah Ross

Maestro maker | 25 June 2015

The writer and director Peter Bogdanovich has made three of my favourite films of all time (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, What’s Up, Doc?) but I don’t think I’ll be adding his latest, She’s Funny That Way, to the list. It’s a screwball comedy of the old school and, although it is slightly intriguing at first, where is all this manic activity going? You get your answer after 96 minutes. The answer is: absolutely nowhere. Set in New York, it stars the British actress Imogen Poots laying on a Brooklyn accent with several trowels and also a spade. (Oh, how one yearns for just the one trowel.) She plays

Kate Chisholm

Sea sound

It’s often not visual images that stimulate memory but a smell, a taste, the sound of pebbles crashing on to the beach, ice cream being scooped into a cone, seagulls circling overhead. Where was I when I first heard that sound? That’s why the National Trust (in association with the British Library sound archive) has just announced its Coastal Sounds of our Shores campaign. We are all invited to send in our own audio recordings from the beach: short, five-minute clips, impressions taken outdoors, in real time, which capture what the seaside means to us. Not photos, or postcards, but an online archive of sound memories. Interpreting our surroundings through

Stephen Bayley

City life

In its pomp, they used to say that what was good for General Motors, Detroit’s Medici, was good for America. Detroit was imperial. Like Rome, it stood for the whole. Michigan Avenue was like something from a Roman urbs: a decumanus maximus of this planned city that created and was enriched by the automobile. Then, like all empires, it began to collapse. By the time of my first visit 30 years ago, there were already clusters of youths on street corners picking their teeth with switchblades. All the signs of decay were present: boarded-up shops and discount stores. The Renaissance Center, a mirror-glass tubular tower whose form suggested a car’s

Paul Birtill

The Durable Postie

(For Karl)   He doesn’t even bother to change out of his uniform, just goes straight to the pub after his walk in his red jacket and stays till late evening. He’s usually drunk by the time I get there — drunk and loud, but always pleased to see you. He must get through a dozen pints, but the next morning he’s out there pushing his trolley and delivering his load in all weathers without a care in the world, or so it seems.

Monday

Steerpike

Charlotte Church takes her anti-austerity message to Glastonbury

Last week festival goers were disappointed to learn that Foo Fighters had cancelled their headline slot at Glastonbury. While bookies were quick to offer odds on the different musical giants who could take their place at the music festival which takes places this weekend, the organisers ended up simply moving Florence and the Machine, who were already performing at the festival, up to the headline slot. However, fans who were keen for a new act can at least take heart that another artist has been added to the line-up. Step forward Charlotte Church. The classical singer turned anti-austerity ‘prosecco socialist‘ will now appear at the festival on Sunday in a Left Field debate to

Thursday

Steve Hilton

Elysian fields

There is a phrase that has been fashionable for years in wonkland — places like the upper echelons of the civil service and high-end think tanks. The phrase is ‘evidence-based policy-making’. There, I bet that’s got you going. When I was a citizen of wonkland and heard those words from the Sir Humphreys and Lady Susans I would typically roll my eyes or head for the door, because you can generally gather whatever evidence you want to justify whatever policy you want. In the end, you have to believe in something. Have the courage of your convictions and be judged by the results. But the reason I bring this up

N. S.

Fiuggi

L’acqua di Bonifazio This spa town sparkles on its hilltop: hydros, park       For ballo liscio; stands For full dress orchestras, where guests remark       On benefits for glands And organs as they feel the waters percolate,       Diuretic. So, to springs Stiff couples waltz off to another date       With porcelain. Dusk brings Relief: cool hands are kissed; pipes play delightfully       On lawns; and you resist Until regretful sighs say there must be       Another fox trot missed.