Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Francesca Steele

People like us | 3 March 2012

This week A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s deceptively simple domestic drama, added the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film to its trophy case. Its success abroad has been attributed largely to its universally recognisable premise; unlike much Iranian cinema, Farhadi’s film feels modern, offering an intimate snapshot of social divisions in present-day Tehran. Most Western audiences will spend the first five minutes, in which we see a husband and wife asking a judge for a divorce, marvelling at just how like us these people seem. The film’s style feels familiar, too. As in Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (which Farhadi openly admits to imitating), the camera is close-up, inquisitive rather

Saturday

Robert Gorelangton

A break from posh

The actor Ed Stoppard is kicking off the year in some nice period costumes. One of our brightest young actors, he’s back at 165 Eaton Place in the new BBC Upstairs Downstairs (reviewed on page 60) playing the diplomat Sir Hallam Holland. It’s got gas masks, the Munich Crisis, cocktails, a dead pet monkey, the odd conchie servant and, not least from Ed’s point of view, some great clothes. ‘In this series I get to wear jodhpurs and hacking jacket, naval uniform, black tie, white tie and a dressing-gown that would make Hugh Hefner green with envy. It will look sumptuous — more so than the last series. So there

Andrew Lambirth

The Picasso effect

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) cast a very long shadow over the 20th century, not least in England. Although he did not visit this country often, he apparently had a high regard for it, despite his somewhat sketchy knowledge of its contemporary painters. He once complained, ‘Why, when I ask about modern artists in England, am I always told about Duncan Grant?’ This remark is usually taken as a slight to Grant, though the two knew each other and maintained friendly relations. In Tate Britain’s exhibition Picasso and Modern British Art (until 15 July) Grant is triumphantly vindicated — one of the show’s pleasant surprises — and we are reminded that he

Rod Liddle

Good as Gold

This is a bit of a non-blog really, so apologies for that. Just that if you get a chance to buy the magazine this week, turn to Tanya Gold’s restaurant review first. She’s done The Grand Hotel, Brighton and it’s the best bit of writing I’ve seen for a bit, here, there or anywhere. The Grand, she says, and hotels like it, are ‘made of nylon and ennui and could live, full-sized, in Ian McEwan’s head.’ The English Channel, meanwhile, is ‘a stretch of water so boring it looks more like paint…….(it) is a disgrace and it knows it, it doesn’t even try to be a sea.’ And there’s much

Lloyd Evans

Retro rubbish

Joy of joys. Huge, fat, inebriating doses of adulation have been squirted all over Josie Rourke’s first show as the châtelaine of the Donmar Warehouse. It’s a breakthrough production in many ways. You have to break through the treacly tides of critical approval. Then you have to break through the Donmar’s overenthusiastic heating system, which sends unwary play-goers to sleep long before their bedtimes. Finally you have to break through the script — The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar, one of those neglected classics that everyone agrees is marvellous and no one bothers to read. Hardly surprising. We’re in Herefordshire in 1706. The Duke of Marlborough is abroad fighting the

Michael Tanner

Sturdy specimen

A few weeks ago I was speculating anxiously on the possibility that even the greatest masterpieces, in opera or other art forms, might be exhaustible, or that anyway I might not be able to find anything fresh in them, and therefore might succumb either to a state of mild boredom, or else, like some critics, irritably demand that every production ‘break new ground’, as if it is the job of directors and performers to cater primarily to jaded palates. Any production of an opera which bewilders an audience that knows, at least in moderate outline, what the plot is, who the characters are, is a betrayal of the work: even

Kate Chisholm

New world order | 25 February 2012

Not much fuss has been made about it. We might not have realised it was happening if news of the leaving bash with its tales of uninvited guests (former staff members) had not been gossiped about in the press. But from March the BBC World Service will no longer be broadcasting from Bush House, that once very grand but now rather shabby crescent-shaped building at the heart of the Aldwych in central London. Instead, all 27 of the specialist radio teams broadcasting in Arabic, Persian, Swahili, Russian, Urdu, Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin, Tamil and Nepalese…will be moving in to swanky new studios in Portland Place, just north of Oxford Circus, as

Simon Hoggart

All eyes on Melvyn’s hair

An American reporter once said to me that all television in his country was fundamentally about race, and all TV in this country was about class. There was some truth there, I thought, if exaggerated. Then in one week along comes a new Melvyn Bragg series about class and another attempt to revive Upstairs, Downstairs, whose original ended on ITV some 37 years ago. Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture began at BBC2’s prime time on Friday. There are problems with documentaries about class. In this case, one difficulty is Melvyn’s hypnotic hair. When he’s indoors, it is thick and lustrous, as if a King Charles spaniel had settled on

Tuesday

Alex Massie

British Sailors for British Ships!

Mary Wakefield, writing this week’s Diary column for the magazine (remember: subscribe!), deplores the Art Fund’s appeal for public subscribers to help purchase Yinka Shonibare’s Victory in a bottle so it may be displayed at Greenwich: Every day, except when it’s raining, I cycle to work through Trafalgar Square and pause to gaze at the ship in a big plastic bottle on the fourth plinth. What makes it so horrid? The ship is a scale model of Nelson’s Victory with sails made of an African print and I’m told it symbolises the triumph of ethnic diversity over pallid, monocultural imperial Britain. But that doesn’t make it pretty. To each their

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Displeasures of the flesh

When Lucian Freud (1922–2011) was hailed as the Greatest Living Painter towards the end of his career, it was almost as a mark of respect for having survived so long and kept stubbornly painting in the way he wanted, without any quarter given to fads and fashions, in pursuit of truth to appearances, whatever that term may actually mean. This lifetime achievement award, though understandable (the English love a Grand Old Man), was misplaced, for Freud was not a great painter. He was often a striking image-maker, but from the overwhelming evidence of the knotted, gnarled and pelleted textures of his later paintings, the turgid accumulations of dry pigment, he

Peter Hoskin

A silent revival

Peter Hoskin says that thanks to the DVD and advances in film restoration there has never been a better time for movie fans Whatever happened to silent cinema? Oh, yes, that’s right, it was supplanted by the talkies in the late Twenties and early Thirties, until it suddenly came back to life in time for the Academy Awards next week. Never since the first Oscars were handed over in 1929 has a silent film looked more likely to win the Best Picture statuette. And even if The Artist doesn’t achieve what every bookie expects it to, then there’s always Martin Scorsese’s Hugo; not itself a silent film but — perhaps

Deborah Ross

Terribly long & awfully sentimental

Unless I am Extremely Dim & Incredibly Thick, which is always a possibility — you think I don’t know? I do — this Stephen Daldry adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close just doesn’t seen to have any point, and is sentimental and banal as well as very, very long (or so it seemed). It may have worked as a book — I can’t say; I never read it — but as a film it’s a trial. Why has it been Oscar-nominated in the Best Picture category? No idea, although I would suggest it caters to America’s idea of itself as a nation that can

Michael Tanner

Offenbach hotchpotch

Is any opera more frustrating than Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann? It persistently arouses hopes which it almost as persistently fails to realise. Because there is no such thing as an authoritative text, one always hopes that a new production will have hit on a solution to its numerous problems. I’ve seen enough accounts of it now to feel miserably confident that any production will be a mixture of pleasures and let-downs. This new effort by ENO, a co-production with the Bavarian State Opera, is as good an attempt as any I ever expect to see, and its shortcomings are emphatically not to be attributed either to Richard Jones and

Lloyd Evans

Callas versus Callas

As a human, Maria Callas was a diva. As a musician, she was a divinity. In the early Seventies she came down from Olympus to share her wisdom with us mortals and gave a series of open classes at the Julliard in New York. These seminars inspired Terrence McNally to create a full-scale portrait of opera’s greatest star. The play opens as a biting slice of character comedy as Callas inflicts her brand of ‘coaching’ (i.e., character assassination) on three wannabe soloists. It’s amazing. She’s back. The legend walks the earth again in all her gorgeous and contradictory coloration. She’s exacting, brilliant, charming, shy, arrogant, needy, fragile, evasive, fiery, frigid,

Patrick Carnegy

Songbird in a gilded cage

Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz is accounted the most considerable literary figure in 17th-century Latin America. I’m happy to take this on trust, remembering with great pleasure her comedy The House of Desires, a palpable hit when given in 2004 as part of the RSC’s still memorable festival of plays from the Spanish Golden Age. Sister Juana, born in 1651, was a favourite in the viceregal court in Mexico City. She shared the court’s delight in the cloak-and-dagger comedies of Calderón. But as a scholar and poet who expressed ‘abhorrence’ for matrimony, she had no option but to take the veil. Although this gave her the freedom to write,

Kate Chisholm

Character building | 18 February 2012

He writes about the stuff you’d rather not know, prefer not to think about, pretend to ignore. But it lives on with you in the mind. It won’t let you go. By his words, the sharp, brittle, spot-on dialogue, he forces you to recognise the limitations of your experience, your understanding. Roy Williams’s new trilogy of plays for Radio 4, The Interrogation, takes three predictable situations — a Premier League footballer rapes an underage girl, a white woman batters her racist husband to death with a brick, a black kid joins a gang and shoots dead a young mother — and fills in the details behind those black-and-white headlines. It’s

James Delingpole

Eco-loons on the march

Only this morning I got an email from an evidently very bright 17-year-old at a certain nameless public school. ‘I’m so sick of having to study “environmental ethics” for hours on end, being split into “study groups”, and making lovely colourful mind-maps for presentations; the syllabus is infantile, and I feel increasingly infantilised by my relativist, happy-clappy and downright incompetent teachers,’ he wrote. Amen, brother. I’m not sure who I feel sorrier for: the poor kids being force-fed this drivel; or the poor parents who probably imagined that for the price of £30,000 a year they’d bought the right not to have their beloved ones indoctrinated with all this specious

George Hull

Unfinished business | 18 February 2012

Absent Friends is the least technically adventurous of Alan Ayckbourn’s plays. Yet Jeremy Herrin’s revival (Harold Pinter Theatre, booking until 14 April) seems determined to display all its workings. The fact that the action unfolds in real time is thrust in our face with a big clock on the back wall, and an even bigger one on the curtain (lest we forget during the interval). Of the three couples who meet for a reunion, one is flattened into a caricature, with David Armand overplaying John’s fidgetiness, while Kara Tointon’s Evelyn (above) takes taciturnity to an exhibitionistic extreme. And then each awkward conversational pause is held just enough seconds too long

Wednesday

Kate Maltby

Frankenstein’s family

Danny Boyle’s staged version of Frankenstein packed in the crowds to the National Theatre last year with its Olympian scale and throbbing orange sunsets. But if you were hoping for a more intimate invitation to the world of Mary Shelley’s monster, you might be better off popping down to the small but central Jermyn Street Theatre, for fringe company Primavera’s new production of Bloody Poetry. Howard Brenton’s 1984 play is unflinching in its depiction of the feckless ménage of poets that produced not only Frankenstein, but also Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ and Percy Shelley’s ‘Masque of Anarchy’, along with a traveling assortment of illegitimate children. Yet in Tom Littler’s engaging, if

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Memorable imagery

The RWA galleries offer a superb setting for a sculptor, and Ivor Abrahams RA (born 1935) has taken full advantage of the beautiful top-lit space of the main rooms to present a lively retrospective look at his principal themes and achievements. The work ranges from the 1950s to the present day, and embraces a number of different media, from drawing, painting, collage and screenprinting to relief and fully three-dimensional objects. The scale also runs the gamut from hand-held to overwhelming (‘Head of the Stairs’ is three-metres high), while the variety of materials includes bronze, plastics, ceramic and flocking. This is the kind of work that cannot be judged from reproductions