Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

Painted, sculpted and stuffed: a history of the bird in art

These days, as the sparrows and starlings so common in my youth are growing scarce, there’s less need for a rarity like the osprey or butcher bird (the red-backed shrike) to raise awareness of the plight of birds, and with Radio 4’s Tweet of the Day you might say that birds are in (or on) the air — but then they would be. The flightless varieties, such as the dodo, have always been in greater danger, unless they could run very fast. Birds are synonymous with flight, and as such are a potent symbol and embodiment of many of humanity’s hopes and dreams. They connote both the human and the

Deborah Ross

A miracle: a three-hour film that flies by

Richard Linklater’s observational chronicle, Boyhood, was 12 years in the making and is 166 minutes long — that’s nearly three hours, in real money — and I wasn’t bored for a single moment. Isn’t that miraculous? Have you ever heard the like? Me, who is generally bored at the drop of a hat? Me, who is generally bored before the hat even hits the ground? But those 166 minutes (still nearly three hours, in real money) just flew by, as can happen, when you are utterly engrossed. Who knew? This is the story of a family, as told through the eyes of a boy, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), who ages from

Lloyd Evans

The sweating, dust-glazed saints at the Hampstead Theatre tells us nothing new about the miners’ strike

Hampstead’s new play about the 1984 miners’ strike was nearly defeated by technical glitches. Centre stage in Ed Hall’s production there’s a clanking great iron chute that stubbornly refused to go up and down when ordered. A bit like the miners. The writer, Beth Steel, is a collier’s daughter and she romanticises the pit workers to the point where they seem like an exotic species of humming bird. Brave, high-minded and selfless, these noble sons of toil go marching off to the pithead every day to hack and burrow their way through the depths of hell. Into the elevator they trudge, their shovels resting on their shoulders, their voices uplifted

James Delingpole

Your starter for ten: why do we Brits so love University Challenge?

‘Fingers on buzzers!’ says Jeremy Paxman on University Challenge. But technically this is inaccurate. Only one of the teams actually has buzzers. The other side has push-button bells, instead. I’ve been watching the programme religiously for God knows how many years without ever consciously noticing this. But, once you’ve been told, it’s obvious — in much the same way it’s obvious that the way you tell Thompson and Thomson apart is that one has an upturned moustache and the other doesn’t. Which, come to think of it, would be quite a good University Challenge question. Apparently, one of its main criteria is that every question must have ‘inherent interest’. That

Kate Chisholm

The next new presenter of Woman’s Hour should be a man

It seems incredible now but when the BBC’s youth station, Radio 1, was launched in 1967 there were no female presenters. That’s right. Not a single woman’s voice to leaven the mix of Fluff, Blackburn and co. One-half of the young people the Corporation was hoping would stay tuned beyond Listen with Mother and Children’s Hour were burning their bras and demanding the pill. Yet the world presented to them by Auntie was strictly male-only. It took three years before Annie Nightingale was allowed behind the mike, and several more before she had company. Lessons had been learnt by the time Radio 5 Live was launched 27 years later, and

Martin Vander Weyer

Ryedale Festival: a beacon of survival without subsidy

There are festivals of everything, everywhere. So why get excited about the Ryedale Festival (11–27 July) apart from the fact that it happens on my Yorkshire home ground — and I used to be its chairman? Every summer music festival proclaims the richness and variety of its menu. Ryedale, under the artistic directorship of Christopher Glynn, competes with the best, from its opening Monteverdi Vespers in Ampleforth Abbey to its Royal Northern Sinfonia finale at Hovingham Hall. But what’s really special about this one is the opportunity to pass an extended fortnight tootling across what I truly believe is England’s loveliest landscape, picnicking en route. The itinerary takes in Lastingham

Hugo Shirley

Royal Opera’s Maria Stuarda: pathos and nobility from Joyce DiDonato, lazy nonsense from the directors

London is lucky to have heard Joyce DiDonato at the height of her powers in two consecutive seasons. The American mezzo has arguably done less well out of the arrangement, however, finding herself at the centre of two disappointing new productions. Last year it was Rossini’s La Donna del Lago, an intractable non-drama which John Fulljames’s staging (sponsored by Harris Tweed) turned into an unconvincing treatise on constructions of Scottish nationalism. This season it’s Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda — similarly, if even more obliquely, concerned with Anglo–Scottish relations. Based more on Schiller than on actual history, it might have plenty of bel canto padding, but it presents a director with much

Giannandrea Poesio

Perfect dancing but boringly beautiful

Aesthetically speaking, last week’s performance by the Nederlands Dans Theater 1 was one by the slickest of the season. Fashionably engineered juxtapositions of black and white, sets that stun on account of their elegant simplicity and mechanical complexity, chic costumes that de-gender dancers, scores decadently à la mode and clockwork dancing came together seamlessly to make a powerful visual impact. Beauty can be boring, though. Created by Paul Lightfoot and Sol León, who are the driving force behind Nederlands Dans Theater 1, Sehnsucht (‘longing’) and Schmetterling (‘butterfly’) came across as perfectly structured concoctions of derivative formulae, though they lacked any spark. In the former, a would-like-to-be languorous duet took place

Lloyd Evans

Isn’t it time we asked the National Theatre to support itself?

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_10_July_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Lloyd Evans and Kate Maltby discuss the National Theatre’s funding” startat=1261] Listen [/audioplayer]Two glorious playhouses grace the south bank of the Thames. Shakespeare’s Globe and the National Theatre stage the finest shows available anywhere in the world. Both are kept in business by the play-going public who last year helped the Globe to turn over £21 million, with a surplus of £3.7 million. Audiences also flocked in record numbers to the NT and it notched up nearly 1.5 million paid attendances, with its three houses playing to over 90 per cent capacity. But there’s a massive difference between the two. The Globe is funded by customers who spend

Alison Brackenbury

My Grandmother Said

It was the First World War. Her husband was away. So she knew fear, but also found new freedom in the day. On Thursdays, with the farmer’s wife, old basket in her lap, by butter slabs, she rode to Brigg, shawled, in the pony trap. Oh how I envied her! I whined to Brigg by bus, for school, no pony’s dancing knees, first sun in elder bush. She would have crossed the Ancholme, seen the canal glint wide. She could buy apples and white thread, jog home, to new moon’s rise. ‘But I was frozen, to my bones, all winter.’ Was that all? My grandfather took up the reins. She

Tuesday

Nicholas Mayes

Why Eric Gill would have enjoyed the 3D-printed dildo as much in principle as in practice

‘At the Sign of the Cross in St James’s Street, When next you go thither to make yourselves sweet By buying of powder, gloves, essence, or so, You may chance to get a sight of Signior Dildo.’ So wrote John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, in 1673. But the era of having to go to St James’s Street to buy dildos appears to be drawing to a close: the Daily Mail reports that owners of 3D printers can now design and make their own, thanks to a website that lets users ‘create different shapes and adjust the height, curviness, colour and angle of the toys to make a 3D model’. With

Saturday

Fisun Güner

Why I love Tracey Emin’s bed

My Bed, one of the works that failed to win Tracey Emin the Turner Prize (she lost to Steve McQueen in 1999), made £2.2m at Christie’s this week, going to an anonymous buyer. Charles Saatchi, who put it up for auction, had bought it for £150,000 in 2000. It has apparently lost none of its controversy since it first went on display at Tate Britain 15 years ago. And by ‘controversy’ I simply mean that many people – and that includes art critics – don’t think much of it at all. And note, I only use the term ‘controversy’ – and in scare quotes – because many sections of the

Mark Mason

Hacking Trial: the movie

We may have had the verdicts and the sentences in the hacking trial, but the biggest question remains unanswered: who’s going to play everyone in the movie? There’s one clear and obvious frontrunner for the part of Rebekah Brooks: Bonnie Langford. Sadly, however, Ms Langford has heavy panto commitments and cannot be released for filming. So we’ll have to make do with a B-list purveyor of ginge instead – Nicole Kidman, perhaps, or Julianne Moore. (Cate Blanchett might have got a look-in if we’d avoided the temptation to base everything on the hair, but Brooks herself never did so why should we?) Andy Coulson should be played by Ewan McGregor,

Thursday

Ariane Bankes

‘I would find myself forging my own work’: Quentin Blake on how he came to found the House of Illustration

The illustrator Quentin Blake is uncannily like one of his own creations: tousled, bright-eyed, quizzical, and apologetic about his summer cold. He greeted me warmly and conducted me down a dimly lit hallway into his lair, a studio giving on to a leafy London square, piled high with the tools of his trade: papers teetering on plan chests, jars of brushes, palettes of paints, toppling books — all the shambolic clutter of a busy artist’s life and work. I was there to find out about the eagerly anticipated House of Illustration, which opened this week in the old railwaymen’s house on Granary Square, that ineffably cool destination north of King’s

Andrew Lambirth

Charles Hadcock – taking on the age of speculation with sculpture in the City

As the boundary between auction house and art dealer blurs yet further, with auctioneers acting increasingly by private treaty as well as taking over commercial galleries, and as West End gallery space becomes ever more expensive, alternative exhibiting venues are being sought with growing urgency. One solution is to move further into corporate territory, and Charles Hadcock (born 1965) is currently doing just that with an exhibition of his latest sculptures in the foyer of 60 Threadneedle Street in the City. There are a number of Hadcock’s monumental organic-abstract sculptures already on permanent display in London, from Canary Wharf to Chiswick Mall (his twisting, leaping forms are among the few

Camilla Swift

Seeing London afresh, one bridge at a time

Bridges aren’t necessarily something you think of as being beautiful, particularly if you consider them primarily as the means to cross a river, rather than as works of art. London, however, has always been famous for its bridges, many of which are architectural marvels. From medieval London Bridge, piled high with shops and houses, to the gothic beauty of Tower Bridge, their variety is one of their most interesting assets. The capital has built itself up around the river over thousands of years, and its bridges offer contrasting viewpoints of the city. This is all emphasised in Bridge at the Museum of London Docklands (until 2 November).  It is one

Kate Chisholm

Why I’m switching to Danish radio

Out there in the great ether there’s a whole new world of radio beyond the stations of the BBC and the FM dial. This week I found myself listening to a programme in Danish. I know. It sounds mad. But there I was glued to my computer screen reading the English subtitles while I listened to Stig and his helpers chatting away in Danish as they fitted him with a new set of teeth. Stig’s Teeth (produced by Kim Hansen and Rikke Houd) was a runner-up in this year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest, which for the first time had an audio category. Doc/Fest was set up to celebrate the art of making

James Walton

The Honourable Woman could have done with some help from an overpaid executive in a suit

BBC2’s The Honourable Woman (Thursday) began with a rather portentous voice-over bringing us the unsurprising news that ‘We all have secrets. We all tell lies just to keep them from each other and …pause to indicate psychological profundity …from ourselves.’ Luckily for the viewer, this was accompanied by the sight of man in a restaurant being stabbed to death by a waiter in front of his young son and daughter. As it turned out, this would set the tone for much of what followed — an hour of drama that combined memorable set-pieces with slightly too transparent an insistence on its own significance. Meanwhile, we cut to 29 years later

Michael Tanner

Opera North’s Götterdämerung is astounding (nearly)

It seems a very short time since I interviewed Richard Farnes about Opera North’s planned Ring cycle, the dramas to be done one a year, semi-staged in an idiosyncratic way. In fact, it is four years, and now the complete cycle has been performed to universal acclaim, with the loudest cheers going to the conducting and the stupendous playing by the orchestra of Opera North, with some reinforcements — all six harps, and so on. Farnes explained to me in the interview that he was studying the Ring, with which he had previously had no professional connection. I jumped up and down with envy and excitement, but it was clear

Lloyd Evans

Fashion Victim – the Musical!: daft camp with a warm heart

Fashion Victim — the Musical!. There’s a title that’s been waiting to be used for ages. The Cinema Museum is a frumpy warehouse, tucked away in a Kennington backwater, crammed with big-screen memorabilia. A cobwebby salon fitted with a catwalk serves as the theatre. Charmingly camp Carl Mullaney kicks things off by introducing the cast as if they’re already Hollywood legends. Which they are. In their heads. The storyline is eccentric and a little out of step with the world it seeks to mock. A Canadian wannabe, Mimi Steel, descends on London determined to become a superstar. She seduces a Parisian hunk, Cedric Chevalier, whose list of contacts is sufficiently