Arts Reviews

Rain whimpers from Edinburgh’s skies. The sodden tourists look like aliens in their steamed-up ponchos as they scurry and rustle across the gleaming cobblestones. Performers touting for business chirrup their overtures with desperate gaiety. Thousands of them are here. Tens of thousands. Vanity’s refugees hunkering on the wrong side of fame and hoping to get through the ego-crisis alive. A familiar name forces its way through the anonymous wastes. Julie Burchill: Absolute Cult (Gilded Balloon) is a one-act play by Tim Fountain. We’re at home with the Queen of Spleen as she cracks open a litre of vodka. It’s mid-morning. ‘I’m a hideous parody of myself,’ she tinkles in her

As so often, no one put it better than Papa. Here is Ernest Hemingway talking of all the movies made from his novels and short stories: ‘The only two I could sit through were The Killers and To Have and Have Not — I guess Ava Gardner and Lauren Bacall had a lot to do with it.’ Mr S can’t say fairer than that of Lauren Bacall, who has died at the age of 89. Bacall was, however, rather more than a husky voice and a sultry look. In 1981 she starred in The Fan, in which she played a middle-aged film star idolised by a demented fan (played by

And they’re off. The mighty caravan of romantic desperadoes, radical egoists, stadium wannabes, struggling superstars and vanity crackheads is on its way to Edinburgh. This year’s Fringe sponsor is Virgin Money, which must be some kind of in-joke because most performers spend August watching their life savings being ritually despoiled by landlords, press agents and venue owners. Five years back the Fringe was ready for a gastric band when it grew to more than 2,000 productions. This year it glides past the 3,000 mark and it seems determined to maintain its place as the most cluttered congregation of twits and pipe-dreamers on the planet. It’s also, of course, the world’s

Ever since Mr Blair’s New Dawn of 1997, the dominant idea in public policy towards public collections has been ‘access’. The doctrine is more than half-right: art, antiquities etc paid for by the public are not doing their work unless we can see them. But it has promoted the heresy that the person chosen to run every museum must be a communicator rather than a scholar. Actually, both is best. True, some learned persons are interested only in objects and cannot communicate with the human race, but the best evangelisers for a museum or gallery are the people who really know its contents. The best-known current example is Neil Macgregor,

At the end of his performance at the Barbican with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Wynton Marsalis made a little speech. The next piece, he announced, was a number that Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers used to play. Marsalis then recalled how he himself had played with the Jazz Messengers as an 18-year-old trumpet prodigy. He described how much he had learned from the drummer, who was then approaching 60, and especially about ‘the sacrifices you have to make to play this music’. Then the band roared into ‘Free for All’ by Wayne Shorter. A couple of days before, I had met Marsalis for a chat — it wasn’t precisely

Jake Chapman, one half of the YBA duo the Chapman Brothers, has been rude about taking children to art galleries. He told the Independent that ‘it’s as moronic as a child’ to expect a child to understand complex modern artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko as ‘children are not human yet’. His forthright views have elicited a predictable response. Stephen Deuchar, the director of the Art Fund (who seems to be angry on a regular basis about some latest insult to the noble visual arts), countered on the Today programme that children can indeed appreciate a work of art deeply. Anthony Gormley told the Times that art is there

In a studio in Birmingham, there’s an air of excitement. Jessica Dromgoole and her team are recording new scenes for Home Front, Radio 4’s specially commissioned drama commemorating the first world war. They know that they’re about to launch on to the airwaves the boldest, most creative and enterprising venture yet heard on the station. The years of planning, of making endless decisions about how to do it, what to focus on, where to set it, which real stories to fictionalise, which to abandon, have paid off. A random scene between a volunteer at a makeshift hospital and a wounded soldier is being recorded. There’s no preamble, no explanation, just