Arts Reviews

Die tote Stadt Royal Opera House The Queen of Spades Barbican At last, after 88 years, Erich Korngold’s almost impressive opera Die tote Stadt has reached the UK in a handsome production, and in every respect the Royal Opera does it proud. If it isn’t quite a major work that’s because it vertiginously occupies a tiny gap between being incredibly derivative from the Strauss of Ariadne auf Naxos, and the sheer sickening over-ripeness and pretentiousness of Korngold’s next operatic effort Das Wunder der Heliane. There are too many times when its predecessors are recalled, and some when one senses Korngold teetering on the brink of being the last word in

Be Near Me Donmar Complicit Old Vic Here’s the odd thing about the Donmar, the country’s pre-eminent theatrical power-house. Its productions are nearly always stunning and rarely (very rarely) atrocious. They don’t do so-so. But here we have it, an OK sort of show done with tremendous affection and commitment but with numerous elementary flaws. Be Near Me, adapted by Ian McDiarmid from the novel by Andrew O’Hagan, passes the first test of art. It has integrity and sincerity. Everyone involved in the production clearly gave it their best shot. So what’s wrong? Well, the storyline advances with all the pace and vigour of a snail having a heart attack.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button 12A, Nationwide The most curious thing about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is that it could receive 13 Oscar nominations when it is such tedious schmaltz, and not just any tedious schmaltz. This is the worst kind of tedious schmaltz; the kind that doesn’t even have the decency or good manners to go on for only 90 minutes or so. This tedious schmaltz is 165 minutes. This tedious schmaltz should have been taken outside and given a good talking to within the first five minutes. (Just pack it in, will you?) The story, here, is all to do with time not behaving as

Surprisingly (for it seems so against the odds) these have been good — even great — times for that apparently most elitist medium, the string quartet. Surprisingly (for it seems so against the odds) these have been good — even great — times for that apparently most elitist medium, the string quartet. Longer-established groups have flourished and matured alongside the emergence of plentiful younger ones, sometimes of outstanding calibre. The inexhaustible extent of this incomparable repertoire has been, and continues to be, marvellously served by its current exponents. Among whom the Endellion, just embarking on their 30th anniversary season, are not least. They cover the whole classic range from Haydn

Revolutionary Road 15, Nationwide Revolutionary Road is Sam Mendes’s adaptation of the celebrated 1961 novel by Richard Yates and it may be too faithful to the book — big chunks of dialogue have been directly lifted — although, on the other hand, if it were less faithful then everyone would say it isn’t faithful enough, which proves what I would have said all along if I hadn’t just thought of it: literary novels are buggers to film. But here it is, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet starring as Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple in 1950s America who, when they first marry, believe they are special and destined

I’m sorry, really I am, but I don’t love The Wire as much as I know I should. I’m sorry, really I am, but I don’t love The Wire as much as I know I should. It’s not that I can’t see that it has huge amounts going for it. I love McNulty’s cheeky chimp face and that the actor playing him went to Eton; I like the lesbian; I like the way one quickly becomes so well informed on the nuances of drug-dealing in the Baltimore projects that one could easily set up shop there oneself; I sort of like the fact that only about 50 per cent of

Frost/Nixon 15, Nationwide Frost/Nixon is a properly terrific, dramatised account of the television interview between David Frost and disgraced former American President Richard Nixon which, broadcast in the summer of 1977, achieved the largest audience ever for a news programme in the history of American TV with 45 million viewers. As I don’t remember much about it — I was 16 at the time and therefore much too busy shoplifting in Chelsea Girl (or Snob or Biba; I wasn’t that fussed) — I can’t comment on the historical accuracy, but can say it feels powerfully authentic and, even if it isn’t, who cares? It’s a tight and absorbing trip to

La Bayadère Royal Opera House I have often wondered what it is that makes the 1877 La Bayadère such a popular ballet. Certainly not the flimsy, derivative and highly unbelievable plot, as full of sensationalist twists as any mass-oriented 19th-century feuilleton; nor the music, a concoction of fairly uninspiring catchy tunes by the well-known 19th-century ballet composer and note-monger Ludwig Minkus. And certainly not the choreographic layout, which is for more than two thirds a hotchpotch of superfluous character dancing, lengthy mime scenes, endless waltzing for the corps and circus-like bravura for the principals. True, the so-called ‘Kingdom of the Shades’ act remains the one example of pure choreographic genius

It’s funny how much television depends on repetition. Daytime, especially. The same house is always being auctioned, the same chinoiserie discovered in the attic, the same boxes being opened on Deal Or No Deal. Even the new Countdown has eschewed new letters. It might have been fun if they added a few Greek ones. This repetition is comforting, and it only applies, so far as I can see, to television. The last film I saw was The Reader, and somehow I doubt we’ll ever see The Reader II. Even the James Bond franchise goes in for variety — for example, Casino Royale was very good, whereas Quantum of Solace was

Oliver! Drury Lane Roaring Trade Soho A show with an exclamation mark in the title has a lot of promises to fulfill. Oliver! opens on a magnificent note. The dark, silkily lit workhouse teems with the figures of stooped orphans who crawl up through the floorboards and march around the shadows like sad doomed little robots. And Julius D’Silva’s Mr Bumble has exactly the right mixture of gravity and silliness. Then things dip sharply. The funeral parlour scenes are marred by gosh-I’m-funny acting and the flimsy set is a sawn-off afterthought. Oliver’s big solo number ‘Where Is Love?’ comes out querulous and underpowered, possibly because somebody asked Harry Stott to

Skin Deep Opera North Verdi’s Requiem Barbican It takes a brave person, or more likely couple, to attempt an operetta which effectively satirises contemporary fads, and the more obvious the target the more difficult to pull off the satire with the requisite degree of scathingness. David Sawer and Armando Iannucci have taken cosmetic surgery, and while they are about it have intelligently enlarged the matter to prolonging rejuvenated lives (this is a co-commission of Opera North, the Bregenz Festival and the Royal Danish Opera). Skin Deep is set, for the first two acts, in the Swiss Alps, and concerns the practices of Dr Needlemeier, so I take it that the

I had a letter from my friend Leo the other day, one of the most interesting men I have ever met. The son of a navvy and a cleaner, he won an exhibition to Balliol to read English and when he arrived in Oxford his Geordie accent was so strong that he was often incomprehensible to mollycoddled posh kids from the south like me. At that stage, Leo was determined to become a bullfighter, and I will never forget the astonished horror on my Anglo-Saxon tutor’s face when Leo announced that he had been unable to write an essay on ‘The Seafarer’ that week because he had been talking on