Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Bent bureaucrats, ‘fake dykes’ and bad bakers — this week’s theatre

Eye of a Needle, by newcomer Chris MacDonald, looks at homosexuality and asylum. Gays from the Third World, who’ve suppressed all evidence of their orientation at home, find they have to leap out of the closet once they reach the UK, and provide documentary proof of their hot-tub marathons and nitrate-fuelled rubdowns. Lots of comic potential there. We open with a boastful Ugandan describing his ten-in-a-bed shenanigans to a shy English civil servant, who transcribes his X-rated testimony with silent professionalism. The message is upbeat: good old Britain helps grateful refugees escape from tyranny and prejudice. Then everything curdles. We meet Natale, a Ugandan lesbian, who treats the application process

Deborah Ross

Before I Go to Sleep prefers creepy car parks to feelings

Before I Go To Sleep is Rowan Joffe’s adaptation of S.J. Watson’s bestselling thriller of 2011, but whereas the book was smart, gripping, ingeniously plotted and had psychological depth — who are we, when we can’t remember who we are? — this is a disappointment on so many levels. It’s not as if it’s even set in Crouch End, north London, any more. According to my press notes, Crouch End was not deemed sufficiently ‘cinematic’, which has to be upsetting, if you live in Crouch End, as I do, and have always said to people, ‘Come on over. You’ll love it. It’s just so very cinematic round here’, but there

Hugo Shirley

Mariinsky’s Les Troyens — a bad night for Berlioz and Edinburgh

I wonder whether grand opéra really takes war as seriously as this year’s Edinburgh Festival wanted it to. These vast works, written to exploit and reflect the power, resources and tastes of mid-19th-century Paris, tended to favour history and its battles for the scenic opportunities they afforded rather than for the lessons they taught. It was the cross-cultural love stories in the foreground that were the dramatic focus; whatever the context, the obligatory ballet always had to be shoehorned in. Berlioz provided a work that ostensibly fitted the formula with his Troyens, fashioned from Virgil’s Aeneid during the 1850s, painstakingly, obsessively and with minimal reward. It was rejected by the

Kate Chisholm

Even near the front line, there were flowers on the ward

It’s the tub of bright red geraniums at the heart of the picture that startles. How did anyone have time (or energy) to water these bright, hopeful flowers amid the chaos of a field hospital in early 1915? ‘Tents with Stores and Flower Tub’ is one of ten paintings by Victor Tardieu in the Florence Nightingale Museum’s latest exhibition, dedicated to the pioneering work of the first world war nurses. Tardieu, a French artist who went to the front as an officer in an ambulance unit, created a vivid record of the makeshift camp in Bourbourg set up by volunteer nurses led by the indomitable Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland (portrayed

Candy Neubert

The Indian lady at the chemist

I trust her look the shadow round her eyes her level stare explaining paracetamol these ones are strong take them at night she looks straight at me she is not very tall either inside deeper than skin confidence blooms more fragile and more certain than the hug of a friend

Wednesday

Tristram Hunt

Here’s why we should save the Wedgwood Museum

A public appeal has been launched to save the Wedgwood Museum pottery collection, which is being sold to pay off the ceramics firm’s pension bill. The museum entered administration in 2010 after the firm collapsed and its £134m pension debts were transferred to the museum trust. The Art Fund said it had raised about £13m to buy it, but that a further £2.7m was needed by 30 November in order to save the collection.  Here’s why we need to save this museum: We are fairly certain that the late Robert Maxwell never met the even later Josiah Wedgwood, but Cap’n Bob’s nefarious legacy is now being keenly felt by Wedgwood’s

Friday

William Cook

The false paradise of Metroland | 29 August 2014

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens runs the red electric train… Near the end of the Metropolitan Line, where London dwindles into woods and meadows, stands a Tudor manor house, built within the moat of a motte-and-bailey castle. Now a quaint museum, charting the history of the farms that once surrounded it, this modest landmark shares its name with the local Tube station, Ruislip Manor. A century after they built it, the railway that runs through here still feels out of place. There are fields on one side, suburban semis on the other. Welcome to Metroland, the bizarre no-man’s-land between town and country, created by the Metropolitan Railway, which celebrates its 150th

Nicholas Mayes

Will we learn to love our ugly houses?

What are the root causes of Britain’s housing crisis? The Philosophers’ Mail – which has copied the format of MailOnline but I suspect is not aiming at quite the same demographic – recently offered an alternative to the usual explanations. That most people are opposed not to building more houses, but to building ugly houses, and that this accounts for most of what we dismiss as a nimbyism that prevents much-needed development. As they put it: ‘Most of the large housing developments built in the South East of England in the last 25 years share one common and (in this context) generally undiscussed feature: they are very ugly. Or, to be more

Thursday

William Cook

The enigma of Werner Herzog

Strange things happen to Werner Herzog — almost as strange as the things that happen in his haunting, hypnotic films. In 1971, while making a movie in Peru, he was bumped off a flight that subsequently crashed into the jungle. Years later, he made a moving film about that disaster’s sole survivor. In 2006, while filming an interview with the BBC in Los Angeles, he was shot in the belly by some nutter with a small calibre rifle. Most film-makers would have been turned to jelly by this terrifying interruption; Herzog simply laughed it off, cheerfully dropping his trousers to reveal a bleeding bullet wound, and a natty pair of

Andrew Lambirth

Agitprop, love trucks and leaflet bombs: the art of protest

Titles can be misleading, and in case you have visions of microwave ovens running amok or washing machines crunching up the parquet, be reassured — or disappointed. Disobedient Objects, the new free display in the V&A’s Porter Gallery, is about objects as tools of social change. It’s a highly politicised exhibition and contains a great deal of fascinating material, from films to how-to guides (not quite ‘how to make a bomb’, but nearly). The gallery was packed when I went along. An admission charge might have made a difference. However, this is the kind of exhibition that should be free in a democratic country — if only to remind as

Diana Hendry

My First Love

I made the mistake of getting in touch with him twenty years after – invited him to stay. He was almost alcoholic, had lost his front teeth, told endless anecdotes and, worst of all, was allergic to my dog. You’d think that’d be a cure or antidote to all those years of unrequited love spent yearning and longing, that I could forget that time — was I seventeen? — when he asked me to go with him to the States, could forget that moment years later when, at long long last he proposed, could forget that because I was young and fearful and he was wild, arty and penniless, I

Roderick Conway-Morris

A wooden UFO lands in Yorkshire Sculpture Park

The New York-based sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard comes from a long line of Polish and Ukrainian peasant farmers. She was born in Germany in 1942 on a forced labour farm to which her parents had been transported by the Nazis. Her early memories are of a wooden world — of huts, fences, domestic utensils and tools — on the farm and in postwar refugee camps. After von Rydingsvard’s family emigrated to America in 1950, wood was to become the primary material of her powerfully evocative sculptures, more than 50 of which are now on show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, both in the open and in the indoor Underground Gallery

Kate Chisholm

Who needs drugs when you have Radio 3?

I’m willing to bet it’s only on the BBC’s Radio 3 that you’ll find yourself listening to a programme quite like Words and Music (Sunday evenings). You might want to disagree. Surely, it’s just a few bits of music stuck together with some poems and other readings on a random theme dreamt up by the production team? How easy must that be to pull off? Seventy-five minutes (or sometimes even longer) of dirt-cheap radio, quick to make, very few overheads, involving just a few hours per programme of research (nowadays so easy on Google) and a dead-simple edit job splicing everything together. But name another station anywhere that could make

James Walton

BBC2’s Hotel India: slums? What slums?

Viewers who like their TV journalism hard-hitting should probably avoid Hotel India, a new BBC2 series about the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai. The tone of Wednesday’s episode was set immediately when the narrator introduced us to ‘one of the oldest and grandest hotels in the world’, where ‘no detail is too small or demand too great’, and there’s ‘an army of staff dedicated to flawless service’. To prove it, head of housekeeping Indrani then strode fearsomely down a corridor like a more elegant version of Hattie Jacques’s matron in the Carry On films. After using a torch (in daylight) to make sure the sheets just back from the laundry

Lloyd Evans

Dolts, Doormats and FGM: theatre to make you physically sick

Wow. What an experience. A 1991 movie named Dogfight has spawned a romantic musical. We’re in San Francisco in 1963. Eddie is a swaggering, shaven-headed Marine and Rose is a shy, awkward waitress. Come to a party, he says. She refuses, prevaricates, reconsiders, accepts. They reach the venue; he ignores her. Furtive conversations in corners and a pervasive air of mystery suggest that something is up. The party, or ‘Dogfight’, turns out to be a secret Miss Piggy contest in which a bunch of insecure soldiers award a cash prize to the creep who invites the ugliest escort. When Rose learns she’s been tricked, she asks for an explanation. ‘You

Deborah Ross

Night Moves – the opposite of a Dan Brown film

Night Moves is a film by Kelly Reichardt, who also made the heart-wrenching Wendy and Lucy (2008), which may be one of my favourite films of all time. (If you don’t know it, go look it up; I’m old now, so no longer have the energy to educate you in these matters.) Her films, she has said, are ‘just glimpses of people passing through’ but whereas you or I would make a film about people just passing through which would be just that — everyday people would pass through, uninterestingly — her understanding of character and narrative and character as narrative is so profound, these ordinary people become wholly absorbing.

Hugo Shirley

The small rewards of small-scale opera

Perhaps I should come clean straightaway and admit that, despite the fact that OperaUpClose is about to celebrate its fifth birthday, I’d never been to see one of its shows before last week. This has not been a conscious decision; maybe, though, I’d been unconsciously put off by the company’s early braggadocio — by the manner in which it gleefully trumpeted the Violetta-like decline of ‘traditional’ opera so that it could offer itself up as a timely cure. I can’t say that I’ve ever been attracted, either, by the prospect of a luscious Puccini score reduced for three instruments, or of singers, many only just out of music college, tackling

Fred Johnstone

Like a Prayer

The heat in the day-room can put you to sleep there’s a man reciting the days of the week like a prayer he keeps his coat on, but he’s going nowhere the place is a circus of contradictions nurses anonymous as nuns push trays of benedictions in all colours and shapes; on the tongue they taste vaguely of a memory of Christ hung for our sins on a mates rates tree you count the minutes until the redemptive delivery kicks in; the bed’s unmade, it reeks of you the unrisen penis and the unrepentant view of a wall dulled in industrial blue paint you’d want the submissiveness of a consumptive

Wednesday

Steerpike

Citizen Brand

So it turns out the revolution will be televised after all. ‘Brand’, a full length documentary about the comedian turned political activist Russell Brand, is heading our way next year. The multi-millionaire comedian—who is dating a scion of the Goldsmith family—used a recent appearance on Newsnight to call for the overthrow of the state, claiming ‘profit is a filthy word’. It sounds like we are in for a treat: ‘This feature documentary film promises to follow his spiritual and biographical journey from comedian turned film star, and husband of pop star, to his present incarnation, following his realisation that he had, in Russell’s own words, “embraced the superficial and doped

Monday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Remember Richard Attenborough for his acting – not his directing

Jurassic Park has a lot to answer for. When I was growing up, I was convinced Richard Attenborough was a real dinosaur scientist. I was also convinced that Richard was David. When I became a bit older and wiser, and grew to realise there could be two Attenboroughs, I came to the conclusion that Richard might just be famous for being David’s brother. My problem with understanding how Richard fitted into the world was that, though he was ubiquitous, it wasn’t entirely clear to me (in the mid 90s) exactly why. Then I saw Brighton Rock… It’s a shame his later behind-the-scenes big-shot-ery so overshadowed his prolific earlier acting career. Between 1945 and 1971 he starred in