Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Kate Maltby

A compelling but unheroic Richard

Thanks to some mistake of history, Shakespeare’s Richard II has never quite been recognised as one of those roles against which the great actors are measured. But it takes a virtuoso to bring Richard to life: like all the toughest roles, he’s a heap of contradictions out of which only the most talented actors can construct a consistent man. We despise him in the first half and then weep with him in the second. He’s a decadent and incompetent king but, once deposed, he becomes an introspective tragic hero, a cousin of Hamlet. Against this challenge, newly minted film star Eddie Redmayne never quite finds the dignity needed to make Richard truly heroic.

Saturday

Robert Gorelangton

Consumed by Dickens

If you don’t like Simon Callow, you probably don’t like the theatre either. He is as theatrical as a box of wigs. Who else would bark ‘come!’ when someone knocks on his dressing-room door? There he is with a glass of wine, a boom of good cheer, having peeled off his side whiskers after his lushly enjoyable one-man show based on two rediscovered Dickens stories, Dr Marigold and Mr Chops. But that tour is now over and Callow (probably still best known for his part in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral — the funeral was his) is going straight into another Dickens, his new version of A Christmas Carol. The actor-writer who has cornered the market in Dickens works likes Dickens. He has a book coming out next year, his 13th.

Andrew Lambirth

Pushing the boundaries | 10 December 2011

When I was at school, I remember the art teacher returning incensed from a trip to London during which he’d taken a group of seniors to the Tate Gallery. The particular object of his ire was what he described as ‘a pile of blankets’ by Barry Flanagan. He could not accept that this was a legitimate work of art, and, in a state of raging mischief, he’d grouped his school party around the thing in question and surreptitiously changed the order of the blankets. This subversive act was intended not only to relieve his feelings but also to prove the falseness of the work. If it could be fundamentally changed without anyone noticing, it was — to his mind at least — undeniably bogus.

Simon Hoggart

Knock-off news

The Onion is a comic giveaway American newspaper that satirises the awfulness of most American newspapers. ‘Doofus Chilean miner stuck down there again’ is one of their recent headlines, along with ‘Parents honor dead son by keeping up his awful blog’. Now we in Britain can watch the television version, Onion News Network (Sky Arts 1, Saturday). It is the latest spoof of 24-hour news. The first, and probably the best, was Armando Ianucci and Chris Morris’s much-too-brief The Day Today back in 1994. You may remember the hopeless Peter Hanrahanrahanrahan. Morris used to duplicate those cosy chats between reporter and presenter except that in this case he would tear Hanra’s reports to shreds.

Kate Chisholm

Wild wastes of forgetfulness

Too much dark, not enough light, often leads us inwards, into those dark regions of the mind where memory resides. Between the Ears (Radio 3, Saturday evening) echoed the mood of the month by taking us on a journey back into that hinterland of darkness where names begin to disappear, places can no longer be recognised, the fridge becomes the oven, and words become jumbled so that the Radio 3 announcer no longer makes sense. What happens to us when the memory begins to go? Is it just a loss of self, of personality? After all, most of us have no memory at all of those first three years of life, when everything is astoundingly new and fresh and challenging? Should we instead embrace amnesia as a way of extending the boundaries of self, as a way of becoming?

Patrick Carnegy

Conjuring with morality

You can see why Harold Bloom, in his marvellous book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, should have called Measure for Measure one of Shakespeare’s most ‘rancid’ plays. But it’s also one that he greatly admired, though it takes a good production like Roxana Silbert’s new one at Stratford to show you just why. Bloom’s rancidity resides in the unpleasantness of the characters, and in the way in which even the seemingly virtuous go about their morality. Wisely eschewing any overly specific setting, Silbert lets the costumes do the work.

Lloyd Evans

Geometry lesson

It’s the usual old muddle. You take a Shakespeare classic and you time-travel it to an alien century, usually the present one, which has no connection with its historic setting. The plan, we’re always told, is to generate that supremely irrelevant attribute, ‘relevance’. Director Dominic Cooke has fast-forwarded The Comedy of Errors to modern London and I have to confess it works extremely well. For once, it’s OK to have wrong-era costumes and juggled chronologies and a visual setting that’s out of whack with the literary context because Cooke is simply mimicking Shakespeare. The Bard nicked a Roman favourite, The Menaechmi of Plautus, and dolled it up in the culture and lingo of London’s red-light district, Southwark.

Michael Tanner

Highs and lows

This year’s Christmas offering at the Royal Opera is yet a further revival of Richard Eyre’s production of La Traviata, which began the season and is being revived again early in 2012. The main reason I went again to an opera for which I usually feel distaste was to see and hear Simon Keenlyside in the role of Germont père, hoping that he might make me see the opera in a different light. And, with a few gestures and in magnificent vocal form, that is exactly what he did. Normally I object strongly to Violetta’s giving in to the old bully, and then asking him to bless her, when if there is any blessing to be done it should be the other way round.

Olivia Glazebrook

For your eyes only

Puss in Boots was the surprise hit character — the standout sidekick — of the second Shrek movie, and went on to tickle us in Shrek the Third and Shrek Forever After. Sleek, foolish, vain and blessed with the all-butter voice of Antonio Banderas, he was the roving ginger tom whom audiences wished to take home and make a pet of. His easy charm and roguish asides have earned the well-heeled moggy what every sidekick wants but few deserve: his own ‘origin story’. Puss in Boots is a full-length, computer-animated feature film which describes the making of the mouser. Several fairy tales are put through the scriptwriters’ mouli and served up where once upon a time and long ago a story might have been written.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Ed Balls & his Fellow-Travellers at the New York Times

Ed Balls is a bonny fighter and even his opponents often appear to enjoy being wound-up by the Shadow Chancellor's pleasingly-shameless* approach to opposition. There was a typical piece of Ballsian chicanery during this afternoon's debate on the economy when Balls accused George Osborne of stubbornly sticking to a failed "Plan A" and, to buttress his argument, pointed out that the New York Times agrees that the coalition has failed to get Britain working again. Well, if the New York Times says something it must be true! Or, you know, not. Though the Old Gray Lady is a mighty paper it is not the last word on anything, let alone the British economy.

Saturday

Michael Henderson

Top of the pops

Michael Henderson talks to John Wilson, whose obsession with songs from the golden age of musicals led him to form his own band ‘People think I am an expert on musicals,’ says John Wilson, in his pleasing Geordie voice, ‘but that is something I am certainly not. I am obsessed with songs, written by professional songwriters for professional singers in the golden age of popular music.’ It is a nice distinction, to restore the original meaning of that adjective, and Wilson, who is currently touring the country with the orchestra that takes his name, is proving as good as his word. This is a fruitful time for the Gateshead-born conductor, one year short of his 40th birthday.

Andrew Lambirth

Mysterious ways | 3 December 2011

Among exhibition organisers, hyperbole is clearly the order of the day. The crowds are going wild over Leonardo at the National Gallery, expecting an exhibition packed with paintings (though only nine are by the master), and now the Fitzwilliam is hauling them in with a show called Vermeer’s Women that contains just four paintings by Vermeer. On the day I visited, the gallery was thronged, though the queues of which the management warned were thankfully not in evidence. I am frankly horrified by the volume of visitors to art galleries these days. I should perhaps be thankful that art is so popular, but the sheer numbers make the experience of viewing an exhibition increasingly disagreeable and unrewarding.

George Hull

Power games

Plays used to end in marriage. Then they anatomised the highs and lows of life as a couple. Now — at least in Neil LaBute’s latest London première — the relationships are all either over or heading that way fast. Reasons to Be Pretty (Almeida, until 14 January) gives a spot-on depiction of those no-man’s-land months following a break-up, when relations between exes are loaded with an electric ambiguity, and contradictory feelings alternate with bewildering rapidity. After an apocalyptic row in the first scene, estranged Greg and Steph keep bumping into each other about town.

James Delingpole

Sage advice

To the Manor Reborn (BBC1, Thursday) is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant programmes in the history of television. But then I’m biased for the Rat is in it, and what a splendid, handsome and talented young fellow he has turned out to be. If you looked very carefully about halfway through episode one, you’ll have caught him standing facing interior designer Russell Sage, holding a sheet of wallpaper or something. And then later, you’ll have caught him again being told by Sage to remember something he’d forgotten. Superb! The boy is a natural, he’ll go far, and as his proud stepfather I shall accept nothing less than the highest offers for his services.

Kate Chisholm

Dark time

Keep awake, urges the Gospel messenger in the readings for the beginning of the Christian festival of Advent. That’s not easy in late November when by lunchtime the sun is already fast dropping to the horizon. The propensity to nap, to switch off, can be overwhelming. In Finland it must be so much worse. For two months, from mid-November to mid-January, the sun never rises at all. Everything has to be accomplished in total twilight. The Light in Darkness, a 20-minute short on Radio 3 (Thursday evening), took us inside the ‘dark time’, with an eerie impression of the northern winter that was so sharply evoked you could almost hear the air freezing on your breath, crackle, crunch.

Giannandrea Poesio

Saved by the Bel

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s and Jérôme Bel’s 3Abschied is the latest addition to a long and historically well-established series of choreographic works set to music by Gustav Mahler. There are still those, however, who cringe at the idea of dancing to the notes of this revered composer — as Keersmaeker points out in her initial monologue where she recounts her encounter with the conductor supremo Daniel Barenboim. Barenboim’s words linger menacingly through most of the performance. When Keersmaeker first dances to the ‘Abschied’, from Das Lied von der Erde (in a Schoenberg transcription), played live on stage by the superb Ictus ensemble, one can hear the words ‘I told you so’ ringing eerily in the dark.

Lloyd Evans

Anatomy of an uprising

They can’t even be bothered to think of a decent title. Good thing too. The Riots, at the Trike, is a rush job, a gripping and pacey attempt to analyse the disturbances that engulfed Britain last August. Cops, criminals and community leaders have been interviewed by Gillian Slovo, who fashioned their statements into a dramatic investigation. The riots might never have happened if more prudent tactics had been used at the start. The family of Mark Duggan, shot dead by police on 4 August, staged a demonstration outside Tottenham police station two days later. Police refused to speak to them, claiming that the independent investigation into Duggan’s death obliged them to remain tight-lipped. The family didn’t believe this.

Deborah Ross

A la recherche du temps perdu

Hugo 3D is Martin Scorsese’s first child-friendly family film and the first thing to say about Martin Scorsese’s first child-friendly family film is that it is a visual wonder: rich, lush, beautiful, gorgeous. But the second thing to say is nothing else is as exciting as the look of it and if there is a third thing it is this: Hugo himself is rather boringly bland and I didn’t much care for him. Honestly, you can wait ages for one thing to say and then three come along at once. Isn’t that always the way?

Jonathan Croall

Forthright to a fault

Her mother was Ellen Terry, the most admired actress of the day. Her brother was Edward Gordon Craig, the celebrated stage designer. Little wonder then that Edith Craig was overshadowed for most of her life by two such towering figures. Yet her theatrical achievements were substantial. She was a talented costume designer and maker, the founder of the radical theatre group the Pioneer Players, and an indefatigable producer and director of countless plays and pageants. She was also an important figure in the suffrage movement, staging many feminist plays, and lived in a famous artistic lesbian ménage-à-trois.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Buried treasure | 26 November 2011

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the treasures hidden in our public art collections, many of them rarely if ever on view. The Tate Gallery is perhaps the principal offender here, showing only a tiny percentage of its glorious and wide-ranging holdings of British art, but attention is now being directed towards our provincial galleries and museums. Since 2003 the Public Catalogue Foundation has been recording and publishing the oil paintings held in galleries and civic buildings, county by county, and issuing invaluable volumes of colour illustrations to show us what usually remains invisible. By its calculations, a shameful 80 per cent of these paintings are not on view.