Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Simon Hoggart

Half-hearted satire

Harry Hill’s TV Burp (ITV, Saturday); Hole in the Wall (BBC1, Saturday); Saturday Night Live (NBC); The Sarah Silverman Program (Paramount, Monday and Tuesday); Desperate Housewives (Channel 4, Wednesday) I don’t want to come over as obsessive, but I was delighted to see the return of Harry Hill’s TV Burp (ITV, Saturday). This show, which has huge ratings, assails everything on television that is stupid, shoddy, lazy, contemptuous of the audience and generally rubbish. Last weekend the main target was Hole in the Wall (BBC1, Saturday) which I mentioned a fortnight ago as a terrible example of what happens when the Beeb turns bad. Clearly Harry Hill, or someone on

Kate Chisholm

It takes two

It happened just before the eight o’clock pips on Radio Two on Good Morning Sunday. One of those rare moments when something clicks on air and you’re suddenly so connected to what’s being said that you feel you’re in a private conversation. It’s just you and the voice on the other side of the microphone — but in that same instant you’re also keenly aware that you’re actually in this conversation with lots of other listeners. You’re alone but at one. We’d just heard the Songs of Prophecy Gospel Choir live from the studio — an amazing sound at seven in the morning, light beginning to break across the sky

Wednesday

Michael Tanner

Cast adrift

The Burial at Thebes The Globe Walton double bill Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House What is our best chance of experiencing Greek tragedies as works that are alive and life-giving, as we can sometimes experience Shakespeare? I’m taking it that we don’t understand Greek, but there are major problems even for those who do. Seamus Heaney, like many fine poets, has provided a version of two of Sophocles’ plays, and Dominique Le Gendre has made an opera of his text of Antigone, called The Burial at Thebes in Heaney’s version. The opera received its première at Shakespeare’s Globe last week. Peter Manning, concertmaster of the Royal Opera Orchestra, conducted. It

Lloyd Evans

Acting up

Oedipus Olivier La Clique Hippodrome Here it is. The National’s autumn blockbuster, Oedipus. Of all the plays of classical antiquity this is the best, the most accessible, the least tedious, and Jonathan Kent’s impressive production allows the beautiful and awful symmetry of the storyline to work its magic. Yet Kent and his designer Paul Brown aren’t quite immune to the tempting follies of conceptualism. The set has big ideas. It’s a convex platform,  a sort of upside-down wok, with a steep gradient which makes the actors stand at a tilt, like Charlie Brown and chums on their pitcher’s mound. And it revolves with painful and inexorable slowness, completing a full

Patrick Carnegy

Jesting in earnest

Love’s Labour’s Lost Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon In Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare uses the most transparent of silly plots as a pretext for pyrotechnics with the raw material of his craft. On a sudden whim, a king and three courtiers dedicate themselves to scholarship and celibacy. A princess and her companions arrive and duly scupper this plan. Diversions en route are afforded by a fantastical Spaniard, and a schoolmaster and curate who are living proof of the futility of the courtiers’ aspirations to academe. Much of this looks like parody of such contemporaries as John Florio, Thomas Nashe and Walter Ralegh, but it’s clear that Shakespeare’s also mocking his own facility.

Alan Judd

Sticking it out

Who’d be a car dealer now? With new sales 20 per cent down and dropping, manufacturers moving to four-day weeks, dealerships closing and the used-car market awash with unsold vehicles, they must feel like turkeys being sized up for Christmas. And that’s before anyone has felt next year’s swingeing road-tax increases on post-2001 mid-sized vehicles and upwards. Mark-ups are surprisingly thin — even in the good times there were few real goldmines among main dealerships. A friend who owns a chain calculated that he’d make more and have a far easier life if he sold all his sites for building and invested the money. But that was last year. Who’d

Andrew Lambirth

Independent spirit

It’s possible that my life would have been quite different if I hadn’t met the literary agent Jacintha Alexander at a party in 1985. At the time I was an impoverished researcher and aspirant writer, with a specialism in 20th-century British art. As we chatted of this and that, it emerged that Jacintha had a project that might interest me — working on the memoirs of an artist who’d already written quite a substantial text but needed help to prepare her book for publication. The artist in question was the distinguished surrealist Eileen Agar, and I jumped at the suggestion that I might work with her. I remember our first

Laura Gascoigne

Dashing pair

Jack B. Yeats & Oskar Kokoschka Compton Verney, until 14 December In 1962 Oskar Kokoschka drew record crowds to his Tate retrospective — belated recognition for the Austrian-born artist who had lived in London, on and off, since 1938. Herbert Read blamed the long delay on Kokoschka’s ‘un-Englishness’, so it’s ironic that his latest comeback should be at that most English of galleries, Compton Verney, in a double bill with another un-English artist still awaiting due recognition in this country: the Irish painter Jack Butler Yeats. Oskar Kokoschka: Exile and New Home 1938–1980 comes to Compton Verney from the Albertina, Vienna; Jack B. Yeats, Masquerade and Spectacle: The Circus and

Susan Moore

Shutting up shop

One day, perhaps sooner rather than later, it may be possible to draw a telling analogy between the practices of the world financial markets which propelled the global economy to the brink of recession and those which prompted the phenomenal rise of the international contemporary art market. After all, so many of the players are one and the same. Of course, the contemporary art market has not crashed — its next real test comes with November’s multimillion dollar sales in New York — but only fools’ gold would bet on anything other than what might euphemistically be termed an adjustment. In these more thoughtful times it seems likely that collectors

Roderick Conway-Morris

Sense and sensuality

Correggio and the Antique National Gallery and other locations in Parma, until 25 January 2009 Unlike the other leading artists of the Italian High Renaissance — Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian — Correggio lived a life of provincial obscurity. Unable to find any likeness of him, Vasari was obliged in his Lives of the Artists to leave blank the portrait space in the frontispiece above Correggio’s brief and often inaccurate entry. Born Antonio Allegri in Correggio near Parma in around 1489, he spent his entire career in this out-of-the-way region on the northern plains, dying there in 1534. Yet even during his lifetime he won fame, inspiring artists for generations to

John Spurling

Apotheosis of Caro

Anthony Caro’s Chapel of Light Church of St-Jean-Baptiste, Bourbourg The Barbarians and Clay works Musée des Beaux-Arts, Calais, until 23 February 2009 Paper works and Table sculptures Musée de Gravelines, until 21 February 2009 Steel sculptures Lieu d’Art et d’Action Contemporaine, Dunkirk, until 21 February 2009 There was once a small town called Vence, just inland from Nice on the south coast of France, which few people had heard of. Then, between 1947 and 1951, the octogenarian Matisse transformed a derelict garage, used by local nuns as a chapel, into an architectural work of art which has made Vence one of the landmarks of the modern world. Bourbourg is a

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

A man apart

The great days of cinema are not over: they live on in Terence Davies, writes Peter Hoskin How to write about the cinema of Terence Davies? Words just don’t stand a chance. I could deploy every superlative going, and reduce every one of the three short films and five feature films he’s directed into their constituent parts — a dash of low-key acting here, some liquid camera movements there — but nothing could convey or explain the unique emotional power they have. Quite simply, his films need to be seen and experienced. And preferably on the silver screen, so the magic can really take hold. It’s fortunate, then, that the

Lloyd Evans

Verbal assault

No Man’s Land Duke of York’s Mine Hampstead Slow, fractured, monumental, ineluctable, No Man’s Land lurches at you like a disintegrating ice shelf. The first act opens with two drunks staggering around a Hampstead mansion downing whisky and making oblique statements of self-revelation. Spooner, a broken-down poet, has been invited home by Hirst, a millionaire author on the verge of mental collapse. They appear to be strangers. When Hirst’s two manservants, Briggs and Foster, carry him off to bed they turn on Spooner and try to intimidate him. But Spooner has nothing to lose — ‘I have never been loved; from this I derive my strength’ — and brushes aside

James Delingpole

Treading carefully

The problem with this wretched crisis is that it infects even TV. There I was on Sunday night, trying to enjoy some soothing, mellow quality time with dear Stephen Fry — or ‘Steve’ as he now styles himself in his six-part travelogue Stephen Fry in America (BBC1) — and the whole experience was filtered through a prism of economic misery. At one point he trundled in his black cab to the vast, ugly hotel where the Bretton Woods trade and monetary system was agreed in 1944. ‘Eek!’ I went. ‘That was designed to stop the second Great Depression like the one we’re about to have now!’ But even the bits

Wednesday

Giannandrea Poesio

Brief innovations

Compagnie Beau Geste Parsons Green Toilet Tango Bathstore, Baker Street Stephen Petronio Dance Company Queen Elizabeth Hall Australian Ballet Sadler’s Wells Theatre Manon Royal Opera House The dancing digger and its partner, the exceptional Philippe Priasso, are back in town. Aptly regarded as a highlight of last year’s Dance Umbrella, Compagnie Beau Geste’s Transports Exceptionnels by the choreographer Dominique Boivin has made a triumphal comeback to the joy of all those who had previously missed it and the happiness of those who wanted to see it again. For this is indeed the kind of performance you want to see more than once, as behind the apparent simplicity of the central

Andrew Lambirth

Colour charts

Gerhard Richter: 4900 Colours Serpentine Gallery, until 16 November Lucian Freud: Early Works, 1940–58 Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 38 Bury Street, London SW1, until 12 December At the Serpentine is an exhibition of little squares of colour, randomly arranged in grids. There are 49 paintings on show, each one composed of four panels consisting of 25 squares each. They are painted in enamel on something synthetic called Aludibond, on boards or plates attached directly to the wall. The colour combinations are selected by chance through a specially developed computer programme, and the initial idea for the work was sparked by the industrial colour charts produced by paint manufacturers. Gerhard Richter (born 1932)

Deborah Ross

Angry, icy, goofy and dumb

Burn After Reading 15, Nationwide Burn After Reading, a ‘comedy thriller’, is the latest Coen brothers movie, their first after No Country for Old Men, and it is a very, very hard film to like. I wanted to like it, I tried to like it, I strained to like it with all the fibres of my being bar two — they’ve gone off on a mini-break to the Cotswolds — but I could not, and I think I know why. It’s just not any good. It’s arch, inelegant, lazy, unaffecting and has George Clooney doing that thing he does which involves a great deal of face-pulling coupled with many looks

Michael Tanner

Handel’s oddity

Partenope English National Opera In his introduction to Handel’s Partenope in the programme book of ENO’s new production, John Berry, artistic director of the company, writes: ‘Partenope is full of wonderful music and a perfect vehicle for the gifted director Christopher Alden.’ We see where the priorities are — some dead metaphors are quite interesting, and ‘vehicle’ is among them: for what is, or should be, important is who the vehicle is for, and in this case it’s made clearer than usual that it’s the director who is having the fun, the work itself being what enables him to enjoy himself. Most opera-goers are probably more interested in enjoying themselves

Saturday

Dominic Cooke

An insidious form of censorship

Dominic Cooke on why we must guard against a self-perpetuating climate of fear and timidity Forty years ago, the Theatres Bill removed from the Lord Chamberlain his centuries-old power to censor the British stage. Under a law unchanged since 1843, every work intended for production in British theatres had first to be submitted to, and approved by, his office. Each work came back with a report from one of the censors, who became renowned for their hypersensitive ability to read sex and subversion into the most innocent of dialogue. Kenneth Tynan quotes some choice reports in his famous 1965 polemic The Royal Smut-Hound: the phrase ‘balls of the Medici’ is

Giannandrea Poesio

Choice pickings

Merce Cunningham Dance Company Barbican Swan Lake Royal Opera House Scottish Ballet Queen Elizabeth Hall As if by tacit agreement, Dance Umbrella and the Royal Ballet started their new seasons with classics of their respective dance cultures. A regular Umbrella visitor, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company is a safe choice to kick off with, for it ticks all the right boxes. As an undisputed father of American modern dance, Cunningham, at 89, is one of the most iconic figures of today’s dance world; his choreographic work too, which derives some principles from the classical idiom, has for modern dance followers the same significance that Swan Lake has for the ballet