Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Musical treat

Così fan tutte English National Opera After many productions of Mozart’s bleak comedy Così fan tutte, there has been a hiatus, welcomely brought to an end by ENO, which brought the first operatic production of the great Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami from Aix-en-Provence. Denied a visa by the imbecilic British embassy in Tehran, he had his work restaged by Elaine Tyler-Hall. I have no idea what it was like originally, but it is hard to believe that it was quite as blank as what we saw at the Coliseum, which really was not a production at all, but merely costumed characters strutting around in the way they would if

Giannandrea Poesio

Fluid fusion

H3: Bruno Beltrão and Grupo de Rua Sadler’s Wells Theatre Regardless of the unbearable media hype surrounding the few highs and many lows of Britain’s Got Talent, I am pleased that Diversity, an exciting street dance group, won the competition. The award somehow gives public recognition to an art form that has long struggled to establish itself outside the boundaries of an urban phenomenon by entering, though not always successfully, the theatre arts arena. Within the past ten years there have been many examples of ‘theatricalised’ street dance, and a number of good performances too. Yet the social, cultural and political imprint associated with that dance form has frequently prevented

Kate Chisholm

Between the lines | 6 June 2009

I caught it by chance while stuck in traffic on the Bank Holiday weekend, but it turned out to be one of those programmes that really alters the way you think about something you’ve never questioned before in such detail — in this case, the actual construction of classic songs such as ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’, ‘Leader of the Pack’ and ‘I’m So Tired of Being Alone’. I caught it by chance while stuck in traffic on the Bank Holiday weekend, but it turned out to be one of those programmes that really alters the way you think about something you’ve never questioned before in such detail — in this

James Delingpole

Not bowled over

‘Shh! Cricket!’ my grandfather Ken Delingpole used to say whenever the cricket came on the wireless. ‘Shh! Cricket!’ my grandfather Ken Delingpole used to say whenever the cricket came on the wireless. It was a family joke, indicative of just how boring Delingpoles all found the world’s most boring game. But then my father bred with a Price and the Prices are the exact opposite — county squash and tennis players, decent golfers, sporting nuts. As a result I’ve spent my whole life being torn apart by contradictory genes: crap at throwing, hitting, kicking and catching, but always well up for a game of tennis, footie, badders, squash, ping-pong, rounders…;

Alan Judd

Out of control

The elderly lady in the little Skoda reversed cautiously in the supermarket car park, then sharply accelerated into the car behind. Next she accelerated sharply forwards into the car adjacent to the space she had left. She repeated her reverse manoeuvre into a third car, then her forward manoeuvre — this time while trying to turn — into a fourth. Bouncing off that, she maintained forward momentum until finally halted by collision with a passing Discovery. The Discovery was mine, under temporary command of my wife who, hearing bangs and seeing people running for cover, slowed and looked round in time to see the Skoda torpedo streaking towards her port

Thursday

Matthew Dancona

A <em>Hamlet</em> to forget

Was I at a different production of Hamlet to that described so rapturously by the critics today? The Donmar’s West End season began with a sublime Ivanov, in which Kenneth Branagh, gave a never-to-be-forgotten performance. Branagh was meant to direct Jude Law in the fourth and final play in the quartet, but pulled out, leaving Michael Grandage to do the honours. Now, I am a huge fan of both Grandage and the Donmar, but I have to say that this Hamlet was, to my eyes at least, nothing short of a stinker. The Prince of Denmark should be frangible and ill at ease, not posturing and poised. You have to

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Visual delights

Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur British Museum, until 23 August Part of the Indian Summer season of events sponsored by HSBC I don’t know when I last enjoyed an exhibition more. I had an idea from the publicity material what I might be seeing, but the reality of it is a thousand times lovelier. Many of us are familiar with Indian miniatures, but this exhibition consists mostly of large paintings done between the 17th and 19th centuries. Made for the northern Indian court of Jodhpur (the royal capital of Marwar), none of the 54 paintings on show has ever been seen before in Europe. The large format

Lloyd Evans

Bon appetit

Amongst Friends Hampstead Taking Sides/Collaboration Duchess Who wrote the first ‘dinner party from hell’ drama? Shakespeare had a couple of stabs with Titus Andronicus and the banquet scene in Macbeth where Banquo’s ghost arrives to ruin a perfectly good evening. Ovid told of Procne who killed her son, Itys, and served him up in a pie to her husband Tereus. And it was Aeschylus, as I recall, who originated the genre with Prometheus Vinctus in which the main character is also the main course. The latest attempt, Amongst Friends by April De Angelis, is set in a yuppie dream-home which a tabloid hack and her ex-MP husband are keen to

Marcus Berkmann

Loving and dying

Even music isn’t immortal. Even music isn’t immortal. For each of us, a little bit dies every day. I was in the pub with my friend Bob when on the jukebox came ‘Please Please Me’. You couldn’t ignore it: this pub operates its jukebox at full Spinal Tap volume to deter the uncommitted. ‘I love this song,’ Bob said — or, rather, screamed at the very extent of his lung capacity. And I thought, I don’t any more. In fact, almost all early Beatles, the music I grew up with, is dead to me now. I can hear nothing in it I haven’t heard before, and what I have heard

Deborah Ross

Scare tactics

Drag Me To Hell 15, Nationwide Although there is much I don’t understand about people generally — why do some take so long at the cashpoint, for example? What are they doing? — one of the main things I don’t understand is why anyone enjoys horror films. The last time I actually saw one at the cinema it must have been when I was 13 and bunked into the Golders Green Odeon to see The Exorcist and, even now, I’m still pretty sure the devil is coming to possess me. He’s taken his time, I admit, but who knows what else he has had on his plate? The fact is,

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Ricky Jay & Susan Boyle

Ricky Jay has an op-ed in today’s NYT on the Susan Boyle phenomenon. It’s interesting – there may not be many people alive who know more about the history of freak shows and public oddities than Jay – but it’s really just an excuse to point you towards Mark Singer’s terrific New Yorker profile of Jay. It begins: The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher Taffirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar ofthe Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened: Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was per- forming magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a

Monday

Alex Massie

Oprah: The Queen of Snake-Oil

Michael Kinsley has a very entertaining take-down of the “new” Newsweek in this week’s edition of the New Republic*. However, I doubt the “old” Newsweek would have dared publish this very entertaining, even brutal, demolition of Oprah Winfrey. In fact, it’s the sort of piece one might imagine appearing in TNR. So, whatever the merits of Kinsley’s piece and whatever the future may – or more probably does not – hold for Newsweek, anything that exposes Oprah’s weird combination of sappy new age snake-oil and shameless hucksterism is no bad thing. If nothing else, it’s worth being reminded that Oprah peddles the anti-MMR nonsense that, if its supporters have their

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

When poem meets image

Andrew Lambirth talks to Douglas Dunn and Norman Ackroyd about their latest collaboration Illustrated books are one of the glories of a library. Looking over my own shelves I find assorted delights ranging from The Story of My Heart, the unorthodox vision of the naturalist Richard Jefferies fittingly partnered with woodcuts by Ethelbert White, to David Gascoyne’s poems decorated rather sombrely by Graham Sutherland, and ‘The Traveller’ by Walter de la Mare, accompanied by colourful landscapes by John Piper. The pairings of writer and artist are often intriguing: Wyndham Lewis and Naomi Mitchison, William Beckford and Marion Dorn, Samuel Johnson and Edward Bawden. One of my favourites is an anthology

Lloyd Evans

Playing Ibsen for laughs

A Doll’s House Donmar The Observer Cottesloe Amazing guy, Ibsen. Still scribbling away at the age of 181, the Norwegian genius has teamed up with under-rated Spooks writer Zinnie Harris to create a new version of A Doll’s House. They’ve shifted the setting from 19th-century Norway to London in 1909 and promoted Thomas from the provincial bourgeoisie to parliament. Odd choice. Putting the play at the heart of the British Empire adds not one ounce of dramatic weight, and if Thomas is a leading democratic statesman his unworldly Puritanism seems bizarre and incredible. The good news is that Harris has helped her co-author discover a knack for comedy he never

Robin Holloway

Chabrier’s treasure

Irresistible, the allure of a snatched weekend in Paris to catch a rare, adored opera, Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui. Irresistible, the allure of a snatched weekend in Paris to catch a rare, adored opera, Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui. This glorious cornucopia of intoxicating invention has ‘enjoyed’ a history of bad luck: the delirious imbecility of the plot — ‘a negative tour de force, to invent such a confusing story with so few characters’ — has occasioned two comprehensive overhauls (most recent the brave rewrite mounted by Opera North in the mid-1990s). Maybe to revert to the original, embrace the absurdities, and enjoy the music for all it’s worth,

Kate Chisholm

Hare on the move

‘Consider the depth of despair,’ suggested the playwright David Hare in his half-hour reflection, Wall, on Monday evening (Radio Four). ‘Consider the depth of despair,’ suggested the playwright David Hare in his half-hour reflection, Wall, on Monday evening (Radio Four). It is extraordinary how Israel’s construction of a 486-mile barrier along its eastern border, at a cost of £2 billion, has been so rarely discussed, let alone acknowledged, by the wider world. Twenty years after the celebrations that greeted the tumbling down of the Berlin Wall, there’s another blot on the earth’s landscape, built so deep, so wide, so high that it can be clearly seen from space and has

Simon Hoggart

Mixed messages

So it could be that ITV is saved not by a cigar-chomping, hot-shot show-biz executive but by a spinster from a Scottish village. The appearance of Susan Boyle in the first semi-final of Britain’s Got Talent (ITV, all week) was greeted with adoration — and audience figures — that would have been apt if Maria Callas had returned from the dead. Miss Boyle looked rapturously happy, and it was impossible not to feel delighted for her. She has had an unsung life of some difficulty; now, thanks to the internet, she is famed and celebrated around the world. Jay Leno, the American late-night talk-show host, sang dressed as her. There

Wednesday

Michael Tanner

Half measures

Falstaff Glyndebourne There was an interesting, startled article in the Independent a couple of weeks ago in which the writer recorded that, contrary to the expectations of everyone in ‘the media’, as the credit crisis squeezes harder, its victims, instead of turning to ever more feather-brained sources of enjoyment and consolation, are bewilderingly trying an escape into seriousness, with ‘heavy’ plays and operas, long taxing books, etc., being what they are headed for, rather than the jolly irrelevant frolics that they might have been expected to favour. Really that should have come as no surprise, since seriousness or anyway a plausible imitation of it is so much more absorbing, and

Henrietta Bredin

Grecian jewel

I am sitting in the town square of Hermoupolis, capital of the Greek island of Syros, when I am approached with great courtesy by a gentleman carrying a bundle of papers, on the top of which I can make out the words Notenbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach. I am sitting in the town square of Hermoupolis, capital of the Greek island of Syros, when I am approached with great courtesy by a gentleman carrying a bundle of papers, on the top of which I can make out the words Notenbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach. It is the island’s Head of Cultural Affairs, Nikos Almpanopoulos, due for his weekly piano lesson

Tuesday

Henrietta Bredin

Godot time

Get home from the theatre to find my laptop flashing a notice at me saying: ‘Godot: overdue’. Which indeed he was, patiently, achingly, endlessly waited for in an extraordinary performance by Messrs Stewart, McKellen, Callow and Pickup. Difficult to single out particular moments but possibly the best piece of advice for all of us in these topsy-turvy times is Pozzo’s: ‘Dance first, think later; that’s the natural order of things.’