Arts Reviews

Was it a shock, Joan Bakewell was asked, when Harold Pinter showed you the script of his latest play? Bakewell was hardly going to reveal live on air to ten million listeners what she really felt about Pinter’s use of their affair as a plot device in Betrayal. She’s far too smart for that. All she would say on Desert Island Discs this week is that their long friendship of 40-plus years was far more important than their seven-year affair. Her inquisitor, Kirsty Young, still would not give up. But surely it was a curious situation for someone like you to be in? ‘We had a damned good time,’ Bakewell

Janet Boulton: Remembering Little Sparta Edinburgh College of Art, until 30 August Janet Boulton (born 1936) is an artist of integrity and dedication, whose principal subject is still-life. She paints in watercolour, that most demanding of media, and eschews drama of subject or treatment. She has chosen a difficult path, and one which attracts little attention, particularly in an art world dominated by sensationalism. Boulton’s is a quiet art, its aim residing in the subtlest differentiations of tone and placing. She paints exquisite compositions of glass vessels, making of their reflective surfaces a fitting subject for contemplation, a modern vanitas. She is also a passionate gardener, and one of her

Sean Rafferty tells Henrietta Bredin how an abbot persuaded him to make his first recording Six minutes to go before the daily live broadcast of BBC Radio Three’s In Tune goes on air and the atmosphere is full of a sort of supercharged alertness, of tension expertly controlled by a small team of people who all know exactly what they are doing. The producer asks about a recording of a Handel aria she wants to play later in the programme — it’s not here yet, and may only be available on DVD, but it’s being looked for, and if it fails to materialise, she’s got an alternative as back-up. Two

A Streetcar Named Desire Donmar Too Close to the Sun Comedy Kissed by Brel Jermyn Street Streetcar opens with a strange spectacle. Christopher Oram’s lovely — too lovely — design has the upper circle decked out in peeling ironwork which soars across the boards and modulates into a chic spiral staircase overlooking the Kowalski’s open-plan apartment. This Manhattan-loft gesture exposes the impossibility of making the Donmar’s airy spaces look like a cramped one-bedroom flat in the wife-beating district of New Orleans. The grime, the physical claustrophobia are missing from Rob Ashford’s production but these are the only failings in this fabulous, horrible, thrilling, galling, hair-pricklingly uncomfortable show. As Stanley, Elliot

Lloyd Evans celebrates Tennyson’s miraculous musicality ‘He had the finest ear of any English poet,’ said W.H. Auden. ‘He was also, undoubtedly, the stupidest.’ This famous jibe aimed at Tennyson (whose bicentenary falls on 6 August) is revealing in its shrill and almost triumphant bitchiness. Every age rejects the one before and it’s no surprise that Auden, a gay, left-wing, pacifist democrat, was keen to advertise his contempt for the uxorious, High Church, monarch-loving imperialist. But the severity of his scorn and its blatant falsehood (Tennyson knew half a dozen languages and was famed for the brilliance of his conversation) suggest that Auden’s real feelings may have been more complex

Lord knows there’s almost no idea too dumb to appear in a newspaper, but this recent effort from the New York Times is a cracker: Does Hogwarts have a drinking problem? As Harry Potter fans crowd movie theaters to catch the latest installment in the blockbuster series, parents may be surprised by the starring role given to alcohol. In scene after scene, the young wizards and their adult professors are seen sipping, gulping and pouring various forms of alcohol to calm their nerves, fortify their courage or comfort their sorrows…recreated on the big screen, the images of teenage drinking are jarring. Previous Harry Potter movies have shown drinking, but this

British Self-Portraits in the 20th Century: The Ruth Borchard Collection Kings Place Gallery, 90 York Way, N1, until 29 August This makes self-portraits fascinating documents but not always easy to live with. Self-communing can be a very private matter, and if the artist has used the painting to exorcise devils, the results can be deeply disturbing. Nevertheless, Ruth Borchard (1910–2000), a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, decided to concentrate her collecting entirely on the self-portrait, citing the fact that her taste in literature was introspective and confessional — towards diaries, letters and autobiographies — and that she should collect paintings on a similar theme. To this end, she wrote to a