Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Simon Hoggart

Sweet and sour

Lewis Carroll invented the word ‘mimsy’, probably soldering it from ‘miserable’ and ‘flimsy’. Lewis Carroll invented the word ‘mimsy’, probably soldering it from ‘miserable’ and ‘flimsy’. Since then mimsy has taken on a separate life. Chambers defines it as ‘prim, demure, prudish’ and Oxford as ‘feeble and prim’, though I think modern usage would imply a certain self-conscious prettiness, like sprigged pillowcases, tiny pens with floral designs and anything by Cath Kidston. Anyhow, The Delicious Miss Dahl (BBC2, Tuesday) was mimsy from the opening credits — all spindly drawings in pastel colours. It was nominally a cookery show, and a lot of cookery went on, but it was principally meant

Kate Chisholm

Straight talking

I had to rush into the house from the car so as not to miss a word. Two virologists were talking with Sue MacGregor about their favourite books on last week’s A Good Read (Tuesday, Radio 4), and came up with such unusual choices and spoke with such matter-of-fact appreciation, so different from the usual literary fare, that it made me want to read all their choices immediately. It was an inspired decision by Sue and her producer (Jolyon Jenkins) to invite not just one but two science professors on to the programme in the same week; like giving an Alka-Seltzer to an old favourite after it’s ingested just one

Ursula Buchan

Digging the dirt

News that the government is setting up a ‘land bank’ of brownfield sites, consisting of bits and pieces of spare or disused land, and encouraging councils and private landowners to lease these out to local groups as allotments, underscores the impression of a national appetite for ‘growing your own’. News that the government is setting up a ‘land bank’ of brownfield sites, consisting of bits and pieces of spare or disused land, and encouraging councils and private landowners to lease these out to local groups as allotments, underscores the impression of a national appetite for ‘growing your own’. Certainly, according to the National Society of Allotments and Leisure Gardeners, there

Saturday

Ben West

A diet of unrelenting mush

Ben West on the decline in quality of regional theatre; he fears it can only get worse We may have been languishing for months in the worst recession for decades, but theatre appears to be booming. West End theatres enjoyed a record £500 million in ticket sales in 2009, with audience figures exceeding 14 million for the first time. Attendance for straight plays was up 26 per cent on 2008, at 3.6 million. The many hits have included Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart’s Waiting for Godot, the National Theatre’s War Horse, and Enron and Jerusalem, which both transferred from the Royal Court to the West End. Quality theatre is supposedly

Michael Tanner

Celebrating freedom

Albert Herring Royal Academy of Music La bohème The Cock Tavern, Kilburn Whenever there is a new production of Britten’s great comedy Albert Herring I go to it and then carry on at some length about how wonderful the opera is, and this particular production, whichever it may be. And it is always true. For several obvious reasons, Herring is an opera that producers mess around with very little — mild and harmless updatings are just about all that it is subject to; and, though it would be catastrophic to impose a radically new interpretation on it, it would be no worse than what is visited on many other stage

Lloyd Evans

Gothic caricatures

Love Never Dies Adelphi, booking to October The Fever Chart Trafalgar Studio 2, booking to 3 April Love Never Dies has been bugging Andrew Lloyd Webber since 1990. He felt that the Phantom of the Opera needed a sequel and he’s been working on it for roughly three times as long as it took Tolstoy to write War and Peace. The script assumes no knowledge of the earlier show. Christine, an unhappily married French diva, is offered a singing contract by a mysterious maestro who runs a theatre in Coney Island. She arrives with her husband and son and discovers that the maestro is none other than the obsessed Phantom

Peter Phillips

Prize lottery

News that the archivist of the Booker Prize, Peter Straus, has discovered that in 1970 the prize was not awarded for technical reasons set me thinking about annual music prizes. This thinking was in no way discouraged by an aside, made by Matt Damon at the recent Oscar ceremony, to the effect that it would be a good thing if the only films which were in contention for prizes were those that had been made at least ten years ago. He, of course, would still star — and might be less keen if the wait was 40 years — but that was not the point. He thought that, if these

James Delingpole

Making a difference

Many years ago, when I decided to ‘become’ a novelist, I shipped myself off to a village in south-west France called St Jean de Fos for three months, banned myself from reading any novels in English (lest they corrupt my style) and became an obsessive maker of French dishes like cassoulet because my first book was about a restaurant critic and I wanted to make it perfectly authentic. Many years ago, when I decided to ‘become’ a novelist, I shipped myself off to a village in south-west France called St Jean de Fos for three months, banned myself from reading any novels in English (lest they corrupt my style) and

Kate Chisholm

The long and short

It’s such an important book, the first great psychological novel, yet few people can with honesty claim to have read it, and even fewer to have read it all the way through, past the violent rape scene that takes place halfway through volume five. It’s such an important book, the first great psychological novel, yet few people can with honesty claim to have read it, and even fewer to have read it all the way through, past the violent rape scene that takes place halfway through volume five. Clarissa; or the history of a young lady is Samuel Richardson’s most prolix novel (at just about a million words, and eight

Robin Oakley

The trouble with Cheltenham

By the time you read this, I will either be taking Mrs Oakley out for a well-deserved dinner at Le Caprice or I will be carrying a sack of stones and a pair of leg-irons, looking for a deep river. The Cheltenham Festival will have come and gone, probably taking with it most of my betting money for the year. This column had to be submitted before the Festival but if by the time you see it Khyber Kim has been placed in the Champion Hurdle, Baby Run has won the Foxhunters, Mourad the Coral Cup and Enterprise Park the Albert Bartlett Novices’ Hurdle the unseemly struggle over whether the

Andrew Lambirth

Interpreting history

Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey National Gallery, until 23 May Just up the road from where I write is the dramatic ruin of Framlingham Castle, the historical seat of the Howard family and the Dukes of Norfolk. The castle was granted to Princess Mary by her half-brother King Edward VI, and she took refuge there when on Edward’s death his second cousin Lady Jane Grey was named as his successor, rather than she herself. The country was in the grip of its worst period of internal religious strife, which Protestant Edward had tried to avoid by commending devoutly Protestant Jane to the crown. But the Catholics would have

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The Blarney Festival Arrives Again

Faith and begorrah it’s that time of year again. Time, that is, for the kind of “virulent eruptions of Paddyism” that, in the words of Ireland’s greatest newspaper columnist, is another form of “the claptrap that has made fortunes for cute professional Irishmen in America.” Yes it’s St Patrick’s Day and Myles na Gopaleen’s withering verdict on the nonsense of professional Irishism remains about the best there is. These days, mind you, it’s gone so far that you can no longer easily determine what’s pastiche and what’s become parody. In a curious way, the celebrations in New York, Chicago and Boston are the real deal and it’s the attempts to

Saturday

Mary Wakefield

A woman of substance

Felicity Kendal tells a surprised Mary Wakefield of her admiration for Mrs Warren From the moment Mrs Warren bustles in halfway through Act I of Mrs Warren’s Profession, she’s clearly an excellent sort. ‘A genial and presentable old blackguard of a woman,’ says George Bernard Shaw fondly of his heroine. And she is a heroine, though she’s also a brothel-keeper as compromised as St Joan is righteous. I’ve only read the play, not seen it, but I’m also very fond of Mrs Warren, and, as I walk to the Comedy Theatre to meet Felicity Kendal, I begin to worry. Kendal playing Mrs Warren in the West End? The more I

Andrew Gilligan

Why does the BBC air Islamist propaganda?

Down at that self-proclaimed centre of ‘tolerance and harmony’, the East London Mosque, they’ve been holding some pretty tolerant and harmonious meetings lately. On 9 July last year, for instance, there was the half-day conference on ‘social ills’. One of the ‘social ills’ — with an entire session to itself — was ‘music’, described by one of the speakers, Haitham al-Haddad, as a ‘prohibited and fake message of love and peace’. Then there was the talk, on 26 June, by a certain Bilal Philips — named by the US government as an ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And if that particular outrage was a little too

Andrew Lambirth

Talking point

Michelangelo’s Dream Courtauld, until 16 May This is one of the series of exhibitions built around a single masterpiece from the Courtauld’s collection — in this case Michelangelo’s remarkable presentation drawing ‘The Dream’ — placed in an informative context of closely related loans. The Courtauld does it superbly: quietly stated, rigorously researched, laid out with clarity and authority. It is accompanied by a hefty but handsome catalogue (published by Paul Holberton, £30 in paperback), packed with scholarly exegesis, with particularly useful notes on individual exhibits. The show consists of a group of Michelangelo drawings, original letters and poems by the artist, and certain works by his contemporaries. I’m not entirely

Michael Tanner

Long evening with Handel

Tamerlano Royal Opera, in rep until 20 March Handel’s Tamerlano is rated extremely highly by the cognoscenti, indeed routinely listed as being among his two or three greatest operas. I have only seen it twice, once at Sadler’s Wells nine years ago in a production by Jonathan Miller, conducted by Trevor Pinnock, and now at the Royal Opera in a production by Graham Vick, with Ivor Bolton conducting. On both occasions I have been bored to the verge of paralysis, but more so by the present one. It lasts from 6.30 until 11 o’clock, with two relatively short intervals. So it is as long as Die Walküre or Tristan, though

Lloyd Evans

Sister act | 13 March 2010

Private Lives Vaudeville, until 1 May Party Arts, until 13 March This isn’t right. This can’t be happening. She’s over 50. Quite a bit over. In fact, she’s 53 and she’s playing the 29-year-old heroine in one of the finest comedies in the repertoire. And she’s doing it in London. And she isn’t even English. What possessed Kim Cattrall to imagine she could play Amanda in Private Lives? The answer turns out to be, supreme self-possession. From her first entrance, her starry grace communicates itself to the entire auditorium. The age question resolves itself straight away. She appears half-naked in a bathrobe. Her soft bare arms are plump and tanned

Patrick Carnegy

Storm still within

King Lear Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in rep until 26 August At the prospect of every fresh attempt on the summit that is King Lear, one’s heart begins to sink — the bleak, bleak vision, the convoluted subplottings of son against sibling and father, of sister against sister, the merciless length of the play. It seems only yesterday that Ian McKellen triumphed in Trevor Nunn’s Stratford staging. But here’s the RSC with a new production, this time with Greg Hicks in the title role. For him it’s the culmination of a run of major roles in which his wiry physique and nervous intensity have always been memorable. Caesar and Leontes suited

Marcus Berkmann

Buggles are best

Hooray for the one-click purchase. Reading one of the music monthlies, I saw that the Buggles’s second album from 1981, Adventures in Modern Recording, had been released on CD, digitally remastered, with ten extra tracks I clearly had to hear. A mere week or so later, the package came through the letterbox, slightly battered but still just about recognisable as a CD. Anyone who suggests that Amazon has taken away the joy of shopping simply has no soul. I did have the album, once, long ago. When you lend someone an album that you don’t much like or that is easy to replace, they always return it promptly and in

Deborah Ross

From the Gothic to the Goth

Shutter Island 15, Nationwide The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 18, Nationwide. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island is really rather outrageous. Thunder! Lightning! Crazies! Cliff drops! Creepy scientists! Nazis! It’s a madhouse thriller that plays like a wildly cranked-up B movie which, being Scorsese, must mean he intended it to play like a wildly cranked-up B movie. I can’t imagine he set out to make a deep, dark, intricately plotted mobster movie and this came out instead. What would he have said when he saw the final cut? Would he have slapped his head and exclaimed, ‘Bloody hell, where’s my mobster movie? This is a cranked-up B movie! I’m a schmuck!’?