Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

All aboard

The Art of the Poster — A Century of Design London Transport Museum, Covent Garden Piazza, WC2, until 31 March The first thing to say is that this is not an exhibition of posters. It is, in fact, an exhibition of the original art works from which were made some of the last century’s best LT posters. There are more than 60 exhibits, and many of the finest were commissioned by Frank Pick (1878–1941), a founding member of the Design and Industries Association and managing director of LT. He was one of those enormously influential background figures — like Jack Beddington at Shell — who was responsible for LT’s publicity

Lloyd Evans

Clinical analysis

Woman in Mind Vaudeville On the Waterfront Theatre Royal, Haymarket The Stone; Seven Jewish Children Royal Court Blistering, searing, cracking, scorching. I’m describing the performances of Janie Dee and Stuart Fox in Woman in Mind, Alan Ayckbourn’s comedy about senile dementia. Smouldering, blazing, torrid, incandescent. There’s a few more. But a show can only take so much heat before it buckles and breaks. Janie Dee’s Susan is a frustrated upper-class sex-pot whose grip on reality is weakening and whose marriage to Gerald, a chortling musty vicar, has all but expired. Outstanding as the performances are they make the relationship seem pretty incredible. Janie Dee has too much sophistication, intelligence and

Giannandrea Poesio

New ideas

Les Ballets C de la B Sadler’s Wells Theatre Jérôme Bel Lilian Baylis Studio at Sadler’s Wells Within the past two weeks Sadler’s Wells played host to two memorable modern dance performances: Pitié! and A Spectator. They could not have been more different, and yet they both showed how, in an arts world plagued by unimpressive imitations and continuous regurgitations of old ideas, there are still those who can break stale moulds and make an impact. Neither Alain Platel and his Les Ballets C de la B, nor Jérôme Bel are everyone’s favourites. Their controversial works have often irritated dance-goers. Still, their provocations are synonymous with artistic vibrancy, creativity and,

Simon Hoggart

Layman’s terms

I often drone on about how there are television programmes made with love and there are those that are knocked out cynically, to win ratings and advertising, or because the programme makers are just too lazy to come up with anything new, challenging, informative or even entertaining. Hole in the Wall is obviously cynical, as is I’m a Celebrity. On the other hand, Strictly Come Dancing might be as camp as a drag act at Pontin’s, but it is at least made with craft and dedication. You may not care for the show, but somebody plainly cares about getting it right. A classic instance of getting it right is Iran

Ursula Buchan

Winter drifts

What is it with snowdrops? Why do people make so much fuss about them, when they are so small and relatively insignificant? These are questions that mystify people each February, as they view yet more images in newspapers or gardening magazines of chilly, brilliant white, droopy flowers on short stalks. I have, in the past, been equally stumped. However, gradually, two or three positive aspects of snowdrops have dawned on me, not all of which have anything to do with the flowers themselves. The first thing to note is that they flower (in the public mind, at least) mainly in January and February when there is not much else flowering

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Why now?

January was a fierce month for celebrity life expectancy, especially if you are in your late forties and feel you grew up with these people. John Updike. Bill Frindall. Patrick McGoohan (‘I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered’). Ricardo Montalban (‘from Hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee’). Tony Hart and Sir John Mortimer and David Vine. But not John Martyn, please no, tell me that’s a mistake. True, he wasn’t in the best of health. Having drunk enough for two alcoholics and taken enough heroin to floor an elephant, he had his left leg lopped

Peter Phillips

Spiritual awakening

People make assumptions about how other people think, and then influence the zeitgeist by broadcasting their findings. There is a circularity to this rule of thumb which is ultimately sterile, but which takes some deconstructing. One of the current such verities is that sacred music in worship is of no wide cultural relevance, either because it’s too clever and boring (polyphony), or too stupid and boring (folk masses); anyway it can be of no interest to anyone except fanatics. This is not a thought about the secular achievements of groups like the Tallis Scholars, but of the gradual revival of good singing in the Catholic Church in recent years. Two

James Delingpole

Eastern promises

Iran And The West (BBC2, Saturday); Terry Pratchett: Living With Alzheimer’s (BBC2, Wednesday) Just in case you needed another reason to loathe and despise the French (I mean, as if Olivier Besancenot wasn’t enough), there was a corker in Norma Percy’s characteristically brilliant new documentary series Iran And The West (BBC2, Saturday). It concerned the Lebanese hostage crisis of the 1980s when the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia (‘practitioners’ as Jon Snow would no doubt call them) kidnapped dozens of Westerners, among them American journalist Terry Anderson, Archbishop’s envoy Terry Waite, and various Frenchmen and seemed determined to hold them indefinitely. Our then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was adamant on how to

Thursday

Martin Bright

Ask the artists

Sadly I had to miss the Channel 4 political awards last night. But it was worth it to be at a reception at No 11 to celebrate young British artists and the not-so-young Young British Artists, if you get my drift. Hosted by Alistair Darling and his wife Maggie, it was a great occasion. Andy Burnham even got a few laughs from a potentially difficult audience. The event also allowed me to pitch my idea for a New Deal of the Mind. It struck me that the phenomenally successful YBAs left college straight into the last recession and are therefore as well-placed as anyone to advise the government about how

Wednesday

Mary Wakefield

‘I decided to give it a go’

It’s a little awkward, standing nose to nose with strangers. Here, inside a lift the size of a train loo, are two young actresses, a PR man, one actor on the brink of proper stardom (Rory Kinnear) and me, all inching down through the body of the bustling, gossipy National Theatre. We’ve been silent for two floors and there’s a hint of desperation in the air, so Rory, being a pro, steps into the breach. ‘Did you hear about the reading they sent me to last week?’ he asks. PR man says no. ‘I was told to bring along my favourite book to read a chapter to an audience, but

Andrew Lambirth

High spirits

‘The Roundhouse of International Spirits’: Arp, Benazzi, Bissier, Nicholson, Richter, Tobey, Valenti in the Ticino Kettle’s Yard, Castle Street, Cambridge, until 15 March ‘I turned it into a palace’: Sir Sydney Cockerell and the Fitzwilliam Museum Fitzwilliam Museum, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, until 17 March The Ticino is the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland, home to Lakes Lugano and Maggiore. In the early 1960s, it played host to a number of artists who were drawn by its natural beauty and the presence of other artists and intellectuals. It is the focus and reason for this immensely enjoyable exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, which is well worth making a trip through the snow to

Lloyd Evans

Indefinable charm

Enjoy Gielgud Entertaining Mr Sloane Trafalgar Studio A View from the Bridge Duke of York’s How does he get away with it? The main target of Alan Bennett’s 1980 comedy Enjoy is disability. Ageing Connie has pre-senile dementia and her husband Wilf is partially paralysed and prone to blackouts. Their condemned terraced house is about to be flattened by their progressive council who’ve sent in a sociologist to record the slum-dwellers’ behaviour for posterity. Shaken from their habitual indolence, Connie and Wilf blunder about the house bickering ignorantly while the mute observer takes notes. Bennett’s game-plan here seems to be to mock penniless, narrow-minded, crippled northerners for the amusement of

Michael Tanner

Romantic squalor

La Bohème English National Opera The Demon Barbican Of all the most popular operas of Puccini, La Bohème is the one that has attracted least critical fire, and that, even during the long period when highbrows were required to despise him, was exempted from the general interdict. Even though the heroine dies a harrowing death, at least it is from natural causes, she is surrounded by people who love her, and her brief happiness earlier in the opera is set to the most gorgeous, and two of the lengthiest, arias that Puccini ever wrote. So the element of sadism that is so disturbing in several of the other operas is

Deborah Ross

Love, actually

Vicky Cristina Barcelona 12A, Nationwide In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen’s latest film, a character asks in an opening, theme-setting scene: ‘Why is love so hard to define?’ which is daft, really, because as anyone who knows anything about cinema knows and has known since 1970: love means never having to say you’re sorry. What, did Ali MacGraw die for nothing? But here is Woody, and here is all his existential despair and, actually, it’s OK. This is a slight film, a minor Allen film, a bit of a footnote, but it’s warm and engaging and isn’t Matchpoint, Scoop or Cassandra’s Dream, which has to be a mercy. Yes, it’s

Tuesday

Martin Bright

Escape from the Village

Patrick McGoohan’s character never made it out of “the village”. But I’m back in London after a six hour journey from Portmeirion, where the series was filmed and don’t seem to have been followed by a giant white inflatable ball. I’ve just watched the first episode of The Prisoner again and it really is as brilliant as I remember: tight script, unfussy acting and shot with plenty of sixties zoom shots that went out of style with the Nouvelle Vague. As an examination of the totalitarian mentality it’s pretty stunning stuff for mainstream TV. It’s difficult not to identify with “No.6” as he becomes ever more mystified by the softly-softly authoritarianism

Alex Massie

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three: Take Two

Did you know that Tony Scott is filming a remake of Pelham One Two Three? If you think that sounds as though it must be a bad idea wait until you learn that the Robert Shaw part will be played by, yes, John Travolta. Seriously. Obviously. As Ross Douthat says, this is an entirely pointless exercise doomed to failure. You might as well remake Get Carter or The Wicker Man… Ross agrees with Peter Suderman who fears that matters Hollywood are likely to get worse, not better. But I am worried, to an extent, about the way Hollywood is trending towards recycling its properties. Yes, Tinseltown has been peddling recycled

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

‘Basically, I’m a spineless wimp’

Steven Berkoff admits to Lloyd Evans that, despite his reputation, he’s not tough at all On the waterfront. This, literally, is where I meet Steven Berkoff to discuss his stage adaptation of the classic Fifties movie. Berkoff’s east London office is a sumptuous, spotlessly clean apartment with wraparound views of the grey-green Thames. He strolls in, direct from rehearsals, wearing dark loose baggy clothes. I’d expected a brash, superconfident whirlwind but Berkoff is softly spoken, pensive, hesitantly friendly. He even asks if I mind him smoking a roll-up. ‘Of course not.’ But he doesn’t have one. Instead we sip coffee at a vast polished black table. There’s something melancholy in

Giannandrea Poesio

Keep it cool

Triple Bill Royal Ballet, Royal Opera House ‘Saucy’ and ‘funky’ are not terms one would normally expect to hear in relation to a ballet performance. Nor is the irritatingly ubiquitous ‘cool’, which is what my young(er) date uttered last Saturday at the end of the Royal Ballet’s triple bill. Yet they all suit perfectly well a programme that edges provocatively on the borders of dance-theatre and postmodern dance, and stands out for being highly entertaining as well as refreshingly amusing. Indeed, a baritone in drag, shouting Spaniards, sleazy motels and bars and a kind of butch, cigar-smoking Carmen might not be everyone’s idea of ballet. Still, this not-so-traditionally-classical evening is

Simon Hoggart

Setting the tone | 7 February 2009

Nationwide tribute (BBC 4, Thursday); Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares USA (Channel 4); Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life (BBC1, Sunday) Nationwide began 40 years ago, and on Thursday BBC4 showed a tribute. The show ran nightly up to 1983, and was always the cheekie chappie of BBC programming. In the early 1980s I did a series of jokey sketches for them from the party conferences, and we ran an item about Denis Thatcher signing autographs for a disabled charity. ‘Good old Denis,’ I said, ‘helping legless people everywhere.’ That would be far too bland for Mock the Week or HIGNFY now, but back then we had a long discussion which