Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Girl Power

Those seeking to banish the January blues should hotfoot it to the Cambridge Theatre for a gloriously uplifting injection of energy and exuberance courtesy of the RSC’s Matilda the Musical. Roald Dahl’s celebration of the redeeming power of the imagination is magically translated to the stage by writer Dennis Kelly and lyricist Tim Minchin. Watching pint-sized prodigy Matilda, champion of justice and mistress of her own destiny, triumph over a truly toxic trio of odious parents and diabolical headmistress is both enormous fun and unexpectedly moving. The role was expertly played by mini powerhouse Kerry Ingram (who alternates with three other girls).

Wednesday

Michael Heath

Here’s to Searle, the captain of cartoonists

The business of cartooning is in a pretty perilous state now that we have lost the captain of the ship. Ronald Searle was a cartoonist who could also draw — a rare thing. After the war, he became famous for a series of drawings he did for 'Lilliput' called St Trinian's. The girls Searle created did the most appalling things to each other and to their teachers. But it wasn't really about school-children. Searle was in fact using St Trinian's as a way of exorcising the horrors he encountered whilst a prisoner of the Japanese, building railways in a chain gang. After the success of St Trinian's, he ran away from England to rid himself of the naughty school girl tag and became famous for his documentary drawings.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

A look ahead | 31 December 2011

For those seeking refuge from the Olympics, Andrew Lambirth picks out the exhibition highlights of 2012: Freud, Hockney, Turner, Zoffany, Lely, Picasso... In the coming year, when the country will be besieged by all things Olympic, and many people of taste and discernment will (I am assured) be fleeing to spots less barbarous and sports-obsessed, there will still be a lifeline of art exhibitions to refresh those parts that physical activities cannot reach. Focusing on English artists, the main attractions will be shows dedicated to Lucian Freud (at the National Portrait Gallery), David Hockney (at the Royal Academy) and Damien Hirst (at Tate Modern).

Lloyd Evans

Glorious farewell

Michael Grandage says farewell to the Donmar with a farewell play. Richard II tells of a glorious but profligate king compelled to hand over his realm to a workmanlike, Steady Eddie successor. Entirely devoid of romantic interest, and with only teeny-weeny roles for women, this is not a show-stopping Shakespeare favourite. It appeals to specialists who note that it marks the Bard’s transition from medieval thriller-writer to dramatic philosopher. Grandage rises to this level and puts on a production that will satisfy the most ardent purist. Richard Kent’s ecclesiastical set is ravishing. The clever split-level arrangement of arches and tracery creates a versatile warren of spaces that are entirely practical but also fully evocative of religious awe.

Michael Tanner

Beyond compare

Bernard Levin once wrote an article in the Times called ‘But seriously, how can anyone compare Verdi with Wagner?’ (or something very like that). I can’t remember the article in detail, but its drift was ‘No one can seriously compare them’, something that I had and have always felt. Yet there is the temptation: they were born within a few months of one another in 1813, they were indisputably the two greatest opera composers of the 19th century, and each of them is thought to embody some of the most striking characteristics of their country.

Kate Chisholm

Highlighting the goodies

Since the Home Service was relaunched as Radio 4 in September 1967, the station has established itself almost as the ‘heartbeat’ of the BBC. The chance to direct, shape and enhance such a treasure-house of programmes — ranging from Farming Today to ElvenQuest via Something Understood,  Classic Serial and The World Tonight — must be endlessly fascinating. But therein lies the challenge. Radio 4 does sparkle with its intellectual brilliance, its flashes of humour, its ability to make sense of the moment through its reporters, interviewers and the editorial wizards who pull the news together in seconds.

Simon Hoggart

Watching brief

The most watched programme on television this past year was the royal wedding, which is hardly surprising, since we had the day off to watch it. Bagehot said that royalty was the institution that ‘riveted’ the nation, by which he meant bound together rather than fascinated. However, strange as it may seem, most people in the UK weren’t sufficiently fascinated, or bound together, to see the ceremony — they were republicans, too young, having a day out, were on the street in London, or just didn’t care. Some 26 million were in front of their sets, only 3 million more than watched in the US, where the coverage started at 6 a.m. East Coast on a normal weekday.

Scott Jordan-Harris

A laughing matter

Barry Cryer, defiantly old-fashioned in a dinner suit and red-velvet waistcoat, sits in a director’s chair and addresses his audience as if they are devoted friends. Most of them are: every joke he tells is met with affectionate laughter of a kind given only to national treasures. Butterfly Brain, which is currently touring, is structured around the alphabet, but each letter is simply a starting point for masterly flurries of unconnected comedy. Some of these, such as ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ sung to the tune of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, come directly from I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, on which Cryer has appeared ‘since before sound’. Others are anecdotes collected across a lifetime of listening to backstage stories.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

An ideal Christmas

Andrew Lambirth on John Leech, artist friend and travelling companion of Dickens, whose pictures help illuminate the novelist’s work Christmas approaches, and my thoughts turn, with reassuring inevitability, to Dickens. As the nights draw in and the winter winds blast across the fields of East Anglia, the counter-urge is for the comfort of a good book, to be read preferably by the fireside in a snug armchair. Dickens is the high priest of cosiness, forever creating situations in which the fire and wine within are contrasted with the cold and storm without. In his novels, hearth and home are crucial images of goodness, comfort and continuance, and nowhere more so than in his first and greatest festive story, that indisputable classic, A Christmas Carol.

Emily Maitlis

One false move

It’s never been easier for a single mistake to define a whole life Occasionally, as a television presenter, you come across stories that make your blood run cold. The last time it happened, I was live on air and I virtually stopped speaking. I wish I could say the story was about some appalling human rights abuse or a new threat of global recession. But no. It was about a Russian newsreader, Tatyana Limanova, who committed a spectacular act of career self-sabotage by apparently flipping her finger at the camera live on air, immediately after a reference to President Obama. She seemed to have survived, at first, but within days her moment was on YouTube and the world was watching.

Neil Tennant

Out of tune

Going to see the new smash hit show Matilda the other night, I was once again reminded that, as a creative musical force, the contemporary West End musical is dead. It contains the sort of music you only find in musicals; it has no relevance to contemporary music; it exists in a creative ghetto. The musical has become divorced from popular musical culture. Theatre critics seem to have no value system for judging the music in musical theatre.

William Cook

Indefatigably British

My German grandmother never understood the point of pantomime. She’d lived in England for more than half her life, spoke English like a native (actually, a good deal better) and had a sound appreciation of English humour, from Lewis Carroll to The Good Life. However, she was happy to admit that the panto bug had completely passed her by. She knew that pantomime was the one art form that was indefatigably British, and that no foreigner could ever hope to decipher it. Of course she was absolutely right. No other entertainment sums up our innate Euroscepticism quite like panto. And no British Christmas is complete without a chorus of ‘Oh, no you’re not!’ or ‘He’s behind you!’ That’s not to say, though, that we actually enjoy it.

Michael Henderson

Those I have loved

It is one of Kenneth Tynan’s most-quoted observations. After seeing the first night of Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in May 1956, the mustard-keen young critic could not contain his enthusiasm for John Osborne’s play. ‘I could never love anybody,’ he wrote, ‘who did not want to see Look Back in Anger.’ On reflection it says rather more about Tynan’s eagerness to be recognised than about the play’s merits, but the phrase has entered the language. From this distance Look Back in Anger does not look particularly lovable. It was important, certainly, in the sense that there were English plays before, and after, and they were not the same. Tynan was the first man to spot Osborne’s talent, and wanted others to know it.

Michael Tanner

On top form

Having seen and been most impressed by two New York Met relays of Wagner operas on the big screen, I was interested to see how the largely close-up medium would cope with a Handel opera, where the challenges are quite different. Both composers have single characters singing for large stretches of time, but, while Wagner’s are always involved in a process of feeling, so that there is a sense of exploration at every moment, Handel’s are immersed in states of feeling.

Lloyd Evans

Dollop of woe

Juno and the Paycock is a slice of documentary realism from the earliest years of the Irish Free State. The skint Boyle family are living like a gang of hobbits in the leprotic ruins of a grand Dublin townhouse. The paint blisters and peels. Diseased mortar crumbles into scabby flakes. The plaster-work centrepiece on the ceiling is like a charred meringue the size of a cartwheel. It’s grim. Money’s tight, food is scarce. Everyone’s depressed. There’s no work. The pride of the family, young John Boyle, would probably give his right arm to get a job if it hadn’t been blown off during the civil war. Then a glimmer of hope. Cap’n Jack Boyle inherits a small fortune from a forgotten cousin. Hooray! The happy times are here. The Boyles go bananas.

Deborah Ross

Plucky woman

The Iron Lady is a better performance than it is film, although I suspect the performance will carry the day. My good friend Meryl Streep, whom I have personally witnessed making pie with her very own Meryl hands, is awesome, flawless and magnificent, etc. but the film itself is peculiarly glib and superficial and somehow brushes over her actual politics. It is Thatcher without Thatcherism. It is Thatcher as a kind of Boadicea or Queen Elizabeth I. It is Gloriana of the kind that will please the Right and pleases Bruce Anderson (see feature pages) although, let’s be honest, anything that pleases Bruce Anderson does have to be a bit wrong somewhere. I hope Bruce will forgive me saying this, or what? Not sit on me, I hope. No one could be expected to survive that. (No, Bruce, no!

Kate Chisholm

Twelve crackers

It might cheer the spirits of our over-stressed EU leaders this weekend if they were allowed time out from their delicate financial machinations to listen to the Day of Christmas Music broadcast on Radio 3 on Sunday and in the other 55 countries of the European Broadcasting Union (set up in 1950 as a cultural balance to the economic community). This annual flit round the countries of the union is always a refreshing antidote to the festive frazzle; an upmarket Eurovision with snatches of announcements in exotic languages as a reminder of the spirit of co-operation.

James Delingpole

Victory to the vicar

My prize for the best thing on TV this year goes to the comedy Rev (BBC2, Thursdays). I know Simon Hoggart disagrees with me on this  — he finds it all a bit predictable. But in the spirit of Christmas I should like to point out that Simon is a wine-soaked pinko Guardianista who hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about, whereas I am world-famous for being right about everything, so there. Why is Rev so good? Let us count the ways. Its alpha and omega — as with all the best sitcoms — is character. Apart from Perry and Croft’s various masterpieces and The Simpsons, I’m hard pushed to think of any other TV comedy with quite so extensive a cast of well-drawn, plausible, compelling major and minor characters.

Andrew Petrie

Disappearing lords

‘I don’t like him looking daft,’ growls Alastair Campbell to the camera as Bafta-winning documentary film-maker Molly Dineen shadows Tony Blair for the 1997 party election broadcast. The warning is clear. Forty hours of footage became a mere ten minutes of spin, but it’s testament to Dineen’s rapport with the member for Sedgefield that despite its brevity the film was described by the late New Labour strategist Philip Gould as ‘probably our most effective broadcast’. Twenty-five years after her acclaimed debut Home from the Hill, Dineen’s collected works now fill three double DVDs.

Friday

Kate Maltby

The top ten plays of 2011

66 Books - The Bush Theatre The Bush opened its new theatre with an extraordinarily energetic celebration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. The 66 playlets, one inspired by each of the books of the Bible, included the occasional dud - but the overwhelming majority were sparklers. Stand-outs included Ony Uhiara as Esther, no longer an unwilling biblical wife but instead a courageous innocent fighting to survive the horror of human trafficking; Obi Abili in Tom Well's tragicomic reworking of the Samson story; and the gentle mystery of the Archbishop of Canterbury's own offering, a newly penned version of the resurrection of Lazarus.