Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Laura Gascoigne

An insider’s view

A Critic’s Choice Selected by Andrew Lambirth Browse & Darby, until 7 May The bravest thing an art critic can do is to show their own work; the next bravest is to mount a show of the artists they admire. Publishing one’s critical opinions in print is one thing; hanging up the physical evidence in public is quite another. One normally fearless critic of my acquaintance, when invited to do it, declined with a shudder and a quote from ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. Cork Street didn’t feel like the Valley of Death when I visited Andrew Lambirth’s Critic’s Choice last week. Lambirth has a long association with Browse

Lloyd Evans

Porn and propaganda

Porn — The Musical Theatre 503, until 1 May Posh Royal Court, until 22 May Here’s the rule. Provocative title equals lousy show. The playbill Porn — The Musical filled my heart with misgivings as I made the long trek south of the Thames to a venue at a Battersea boozer. The room above the pub was huge and empty, but the theatre wasn’t here but higher up, via a trapdoor, wedged in under the beery roof-eaves. A fug of lavender and sawdust hung over the creaking benches and the stage was the size of a card-table. As I took my seat, a furry insect expired in midair and landed

Peter Hoskin

Blood and guts

Centurion 15, Nationwide You know how it is. There are two sword-and-sandal films opening in cinemas, and you just can’t decide which one to see. Will it be Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora, which looks poised, if a little sterile? Or will it be Neil Marshall’s Centurion, which is all about the action, action, action? So you do as I did, and reach for a coin in your pocket. Heads, it’s Agora; tails, Centurion. You throw. The coin somersaults in the air, plunges back towards your hand, and… Centurion is Marshall’s fourth feature, and it remains faithful to the horror-cum-comic-book stylings of his previous three. In Dog Soldiers (2002), it was soldiers

Robin Holloway

Suffering for art

Great bafflement during a recent week in Berlin, city of bleak exteriors, whose human and cultural rewards are almost wholly indoors — in its wealth of concert halls, opera houses and museums. Great bafflement during a recent week in Berlin, city of bleak exteriors, whose human and cultural rewards are almost wholly indoors — in its wealth of concert halls, opera houses and museums. Museums are, 20 years after reunification, ever-reliable. The music scene is passing and evanescent. I had hoped to find, over the Easter period, seasonal relevance of the most exalted kind — a St Matthew Passion or Parsifal on or around Good Friday itself. But schedules were

Michael Tanner

Jarring Janacek

The Adventures of Mr Broucek Edinburgh Festival Theatre Prima Donna Sadler’s Wells There is no composer to whose works my reactions fluctuate so much as Janacek. I don’t mean the various compositions in his output, I mean specific works on different occasions. When I saw a concert performance of his comic opera The Adventures of Mr Broucek at the Barbican in 2007, conducted by Jiri Belohlavek, I became an instant, passionate convert to a piece that I had previously thought was mostly a dismal flop. And I felt the same when the CDs of that performance were issued. Then, last October, when it was staged in English by Opera North

Simon Hoggart

Cookery class

The other day there were four cookery programmes in prime time on the terrestrial channels. Why? What on earth makes this subject of such relentless fascination? At least on the similarly ubiquitous antiques shows you can look at the antiques. But so far you can’t taste the food, though no doubt they’re working on that as the next big thing after 3D. Instead of buying HD-ready televisions, we’ll get oven-ready sets. ‘Press the red button for venison in a raspberry coulis, or the blue button for turbot in a beurre blanc…’ The latest is Out of the Frying Pan (BBC 2) in which contestants who didn’t quite make it on

Ursula Buchan

Wild at heart

On the face of it, the phrase ‘forest garden’ is a contradiction in terms, since trees in mature forests do not allow enough sun through the canopy for satisfactory gardening. On the face of it, the phrase ‘forest garden’ is a contradiction in terms, since trees in mature forests do not allow enough sun through the canopy for satisfactory gardening. But it is meant simply as a shorthand for ‘a garden of useful plants (trees, shrubs and perennial vegetables) in an environment similar to a young natural woodland’ — which, if not exactly snappy, is certainly an interesting concept whichever way up you hold it. Indeed, ‘forest garden’ is likely

Saturday

Henrietta Bredin

In the firing line

Henrietta Bredin goes backstage at the Royal Opera House and finds a stash of weaponry I am standing outside a heavily reinforced metal door somewhere in the furthest flung recesses of the labyrinthine corridor-tangle backstage at the Royal Opera House. A painted shield has the word Armoury picked out on it in gold lettering and next to a no smoking warning is a sign saying ‘No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again’. The door swings ponderously open to reveal the possessor of this somewhat macabre sense of humour, chief armourer Rob Barham. He is not a small man and his lair seems to fit around him

Andrew Lambirth

Tears of the soul

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective Tate Modern, until 3 May Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World Tate Modern, until 16 May Arshile Gorky (1904–48) was a great and versatile painter, either the last major surrealist or the first Abstract Expressionist. In truth, he was a bit of each, an Armenian who fled to America where he became a focus of European influence and an innovator of considerable potency. André Breton called him ‘the eye-spring’, and wrote: Gorky had the extreme sensitivity to be such a conducting wire, but his brief career was cut short by tragedy — a studio fire, cancer, a broken neck sustained in a

Michael Tanner

Hypermanic Rossini

Il Turco in Italia Royal Opera, in rep until 19 April Commentators on Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia tend to take a defensive line, comparing its absence from the repertoire for many decades with that of Così fan tutte, and even comparing the two works directly, as well as pointing out that Mozart’s great opera was playing in Milan at the time that Rossini was composing Turco. And Gregory Dart, in his essay in the programme of the Royal Opera’s production, first seen in 2005 and now revived for the first time, quotes Stendhal, a passionate admirer of both composers, writing that ‘Rossini is always amusing, Mozart never; Mozart is

Peter Phillips

Sound effects | 17 April 2010

The Tallis Scholars’ 50th concert in New York City — the first was in 1988 — took place in St Bartholomew’s Church, Park Avenue, on 26 March. The Tallis Scholars’ 50th concert in New York City — the first was in 1988 — took place in St Bartholomew’s Church, Park Avenue, on 26 March. Since we have sung now in 15 different spaces in NYC — more than in any other city in the world and including the Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art — this was an unusual choice of venue for a celebration. St Bart’s is famous for a number of things, but since reverberant acoustics

Lloyd Evans

Rotten truth

The Empire Royal Court, until 1 May Polar Bears Donmar, until 22 May The Royal Court’s stuffy little upstairs theatre is hosting a new play about cultural imperialism. D.C. Moore sets his scene in Helmand where a young English corporal finds himself morally compromised by his desire to torture a Taleban prisoner. The twist is that the prisoner is a norf-Lunnin geezer, of Asian extraction, claiming to have been kidnapped by insurgents while ‘holidaying’ in Kandahar. This device neatly brings the war back home and turns the play into an examination of the competing religious factions in Britain. And though the script is never less than absorbing, and often very

Giannandrea Poesio

Spell bound

Cinderella Royal Opera House, in rep until 5 June I know that old fairy tales are not popular or fashionable any more. But last Saturday, at the opening of the Royal Ballet’s new run of Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella, I was shocked to overhear two nicely behaved children ask their grandparents why the good fairy had asked Cinders to fetch a pumpkin and why there were dancers dressed as white mice pulling her coach. It’s true that, in Ashton’s superb choreographic adaptation of the old story, the transformation scene is not as graphic as it is in Walt Disney’s animated film. Yet the youngsters’ questions were symptomatic of the cultural, psychological

Kate Chisholm

Missing humour

After listening to an advance copy of tonight’s Archive on 4 I’m almost beginning to look forward to the general election of 2010. After listening to an advance copy of tonight’s Archive on 4 I’m almost beginning to look forward to the general election of 2010. A Night to Remember looks back over 60 years of Election Night Specials, guided by the curiously comforting voice of Anthony Howard, whose reflections and rummaging through the archives make dusty, devious politics begin to sound quite exciting. His programme is a useful reminder that what happens on the night of 6 May might actually make a difference. And, even if it doesn’t, the

Saturday

Marianne Gray

Alive and kicking | 10 April 2010

Marianne Gray talks to Debbie Reynolds, one of the last of Hollywood’s Golden Era Debbie Reynolds is the first to admit she’s no longer Tammy. At 78, she’s more like the Unsinkable Molly Brown as she tours Britain this month in her one-woman show, Alive and Fabulous. ‘You people in England probably think I died years ago but I’m still kicking,’ she says, laughing. ‘I know that a lot of young people don’t know who I am unless they’ve noticed me as Grace’s mother, Bobbi Adler, in the sitcom Will & Grace, but I’ve never stopped working. I’m an Aries and it’s in my nature to be a performer. ‘I’ve

Andrew Lambirth

Sacrificing art for ideas

Richard Hamilton: Modern Moral Matters Serpentine Gallery, until 25 April This year is the 40th anniversary of the Serpentine Gallery, that most welcoming of exhibition venues — the gallery in the park — with its wide views and well-appointed rooms. Expectation rises as the visitor walks through gardens burgeoning with spring, even if it is raining. To start its anniversary year, the Serpentine has mounted an exhibition of Richard Hamilton’s political work entitled (in homage, presumably, to Hogarth) Modern Moral Matters. The show is a real disappointment: the blinds are down to focus the visitor’s attention inward, which might be acceptable if there were riches to be seen. Instead, the

Michael Henderson

The Master’s voice

Götterdämmerung Salzburg Easter Festival Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety. Rather more than safety, if truth be known. The Salzburg Easter Festival, which concluded on Monday with a performance of Götterdämmerung, topping off a Ring cycle shared with the summer festival in Aix, was an event of considerable beauty. Given the extraordinary prelude to this year’s pageant, with a toxic cloud of scandal hanging over the city amid charges of embezzlement being drawn up against the outgoing director and technical director, it was more than anybody could have hoped for. As well as conducting the last quarter of Wagner’s mighty tetralogy, Simon Rattle led the Berlin

Michael Tanner

Fallen Angel

Angels in America Barbican Angels in America is the latest in the series of contemporary operas which are being mounted at the Barbican by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The others have been semi-staged, this was three-quarter staged, with props, moved around by the performers, and an Angel crashing into the action at the close of Act I. It is the latest opera by the Transylvanian composer Peter Eötvös, whose previous opera Love and Other Demons was premiered at the 2008 Glyndebourne Festival, to no great acclaim. Angels in America, by contrast, has been given very warm welcomes in the various cities in which it has been produced, beginning with Paris

Deborah Ross

No laughing matter | 10 April 2010

The Infidel 15, Nationwide I wish, wish, wish, wish, wish I had liked The Infidel better. I wanted to like it. I longed to like it. And I did think it would be a hoot. It’s written by David Baddiel, a thoughtful, clever and witty writer (usually). It stars Omid Djalili, who has a lovely, big, funny face and is always an engaging physical presence. The premise is neat and brave and topical: it’s about a Muslim who discovers he is adopted and was actually born Jewish. It sounded right up my street, as I do like to laugh at religion. Some days, I am so busy laughing at religion

Lloyd Evans

Triumphant pursuit

London Assurance Olivier, in rep until 2 June Bedroom Farce Duke of York’s, booking to 10 July Trickster nature has been maliciously kind to Simon Russell Beale. It made him the leading actor of his generation and instilled in him a desire to perform Shakespeare’s awesome roll-call of warrior princes. It also built him like a chest of drawers. His physique has always hampered his Shakespearean outings, so it’s a great relief, and a pleasure, to see him on the stage of the National in a role that complements every last bauble in his dazzling thesaurus of effects. London Assurance, a slapstick comedy, was written in 1841 by a 20-year-old