Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Charles Spencer

Nanny knows best

Although I waste a lot of time these days gazing longingly at advertisements for luxury cruises in the Daily Telegraph, I don’t think I could ever leave England for good. Although I waste a lot of time these days gazing longingly at advertisements for luxury cruises in the Daily Telegraph, I don’t think I could ever leave England for good. A three-month cruise chasing the sun would be as long as I could bear to be away from home, and only then if I could take the cat Nelson with me as a cabin companion. But if anything ever does drive me into exile, it will be the irksome British

Robin Holloway

A unique acoustic

Robin Holloway on the unique orchestra layout that produces the Festspielhaus’s unique acoustic There was no space in my report last month, on a first visit to the Bayreuth Festival, for what was in retrospect its most exciting quart d’heure, a privileged informal investigation of the unique orchestra layout that produces the Festspielhaus’s unique acoustic. This, I was kindly permitted to explore one afternoon. Impossible to imagine from the auditorium the precarious peculiarity of this astonishing construction, steeply raked downward from the conductor’s chair at the summit, semi-circles of hell before the air-conditioning denied to the audience was installed to relieve the sweating players (though invisibility allowed them to dress,

Simon Hoggart

Other people’s lives

There was a sad moment in The Family (Channel 4, Wednesday) this week when Dad, the very long-suffering Simon Hughes, is inspecting his daughters’ bedroom, and doesn’t like what he sees. He has been assured that the room is neat and clean, so he responds with a blast of sarcasm. ‘Oh, look at this tidy, tidy, tidy room, oh crumbs, how tidy it is, all this stuff doesn’t exist, it’s a figment of my imagination…’ I felt a blast of pity for him. Most dads, like me, would have given up long ago but he goes onward, ever onward, in the quest for orderly bedrooms. Sisyphus had it easier with

Alan Judd

Sense of occasion

The first Rolls-Royce I drove was a 1960s Shadow, across the Cairngorms on the glorious A939 to Tomintoul. It was a memorable drive, clear skies, snow-capped mountains, little traffic. When we returned to his Speyside house the owner suggested I try his Jaguar XJ6, which he thought a better drive than the Shadow. It was: even by XJ6 standards, the Shadow’s steering and suspension, geared for the American market, were too light and soft. But there was still something special about effortless stately progress behind that wonderful Spirit of Ecstasy. Shadows got better as they got younger and I suspect the subsequent Spirit was better still. But my next truly

Wednesday

Edie Lush

The parable of The Golden Calf

Edie Lush attends the record-breaking Sotheby’s sale of Damien Hirst’s artworks, and wonders whether it is all a metaphor for the recent madness of financial markets Last Monday was a historic day. Lehman filed for the biggest bankruptcy in history; the insurance giant AIG teetered on the brink; the Dow had its worst day since 9/11 — and in Mayfair an extraordinary event occurred at which seemingly few of those present had even heard of the credit crunch. Buyers and gawkers queued outside Sotheby’s to get in for the historic evening’s sale of works by Damien Hirst. Minutes after it began, auctioneer Oliver Barker’s hammer went down on the first

Andrew Lambirth

Man as machine

Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970 V&A, until 11 January 2009 It’s difficult not to admire the ambition of the V&A in mounting exhibitions which summarise and explain the great historical movements in design. There have been notable successes in the past, particularly with their surveys of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, but the closer the organisers approach our own times, the more fraught with complication is the enterprise. It’s almost impossible to locate and maintain any degree of objectivity about very recent happenings — we have no historical perspective on them and find it difficult to view them except in terms of personal preference. Of course, like and dislike have

Lloyd Evans

Peak performance

Ivanov Wyndham’s Theatre Now or Later Royal Court Rain Man Apollo Great directors have the power to alter taste. Michael Grandage’s avowed aim with this revival of Ivanov, which opens the Donmar’s year-long residency at the Wyndham’s, is to secure the play a permanent place in the repertory. But even a director as sure-footed as Grandage can’t overcome the script’s shortcomings. Dashed off in ten days by a 27-year-old Chekhov, it feels glib and careless, its imitative homages to Hamlet creaky and self-conscious. Ivanov is a country landowner, his debts climbing, his marriage sinking, infatuated with a neighbour’s young daughter and with a peculiar taste for philosophical ramblings. All of

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Way Down in the Hole

The last ever episode of The Wire was (finally) broadcast in Britain last night. Not, to their shame, on the BBC or Channel 4 but on the obscure, little-watched (hell, little-known) FX channel. A quiet end then. Coincidentally, the end came as, for the fifth time, the clowns who divvy up the Emmys failed to recognise The Wire’s genius. In five years the show secured a paltry two nominations and didn’t win once.

Henrietta Bredin

Something a little different

There’s an intriguing performance coming up at the Purcell Room on London’s Southbank next Tuesday. Façade, the collection of poems by Edith Sitwell set to music by William Walton, will be recited by another Sitwell (William, also known as editor of Waitrose Food Illustrated and Food Spy for the Evening Standard) for the first time since Edith herself astonished audiences with her sonorous, incantatory delivery (it has to be said that she also made some of them giggle uncontrollably). He’ll be accompanied by singer Pippa Longworth who, thanks to the family connection, has been given permission to rummage in Edith’s dressing up box to borrow some of her fabulously elaborate

Sunday

Alex Massie

Rural life

No blogging for the rest of the day, I suspect. Why? Because I* just unloaded and stacked 200 bales of hay. Best cold beer of the summer being enjoyed right now. *OK, other people helped.

Saturday

Henrietta Bredin

Poetry in motion

Henrietta Bredin talks to Peter Manning about taking risks and creating opportunities There is an almost palpable forcefield of energy around Peter Manning. You expect a crackle of static to explode when he shakes your hand or wraps you in an enthusiastic hug. Concertmaster of the Royal Opera House orchestra, founder of the eponymous Manning Camerata chamber orchestra and now music director of Musica Vitae in Sweden, his relish for a challenge, for fresh stimuli, is voracious. He is a violinist, a conductor, and now a galvanising producer and artistic director. His current, most pressing preoccupation is with a fabulously multi-layered and ambitious project, the performance of a new opera

Kate Chisholm

A simple horror

The BBC World Service’s drama department has been drastically cut back over the last few years and plays, squeezed out by news and current affairs, are difficult to find. But they’re usually worth looking out for on the website, or listed in ridiculously tiny print in the Radio Times. There’s often something a little bit different about them, an outside-the-box atmosphere, created for an audience that might not, for instance, quite understand what the NHS stands for in the United Kingdom, and the traumatic impact of the case of The Good Doctor (broadcast this Saturday evening and repeated on Sunday). It’s ten years since Harold Shipman was arrested on suspicion

Deborah Ross

One-trick pony

Tropic Thunder 15, Nationwide Unrelated 15, Selected Cinemas Tropic Thunder is an action comedy which stars Ben Stiller, is produced by Ben Stiller and is directed by Ben Stiller, from a story by Ben Stiller and a screenplay by Justin Theroux…and Ben Stiller. So if, after this movie, you don’t feel properly Stiller-ed, I can’t think where you would go from here. I would also like to ask: how much Stiller-ing do you need? Whatever, it’s a send-up of Hollywood which starts rather dazzlingly — at last, a funny film that’s actually funny! — but then droops horribly, even becoming a victim of all the absurdities and excesses it is

Ursula Buchan

Raking up the past

The best enterprises look to the future but honour their past, which is why it was encouraging that the Royal Horticultural Society should last week have returned to the Inner Temple gardens to hold a show, almost a century after the last time it did so. The Great Spring Show was staged there from 1888 to 1911, until it outgrew the site and moved to the Chelsea Hospital grounds where it has remained ever since. This year’s show, a ‘Floral Celebration’, was appropriately enough, supported by the City firm of solicitors, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and it attracted 16,000 people over three days. Its staging should have cheered all those who

Lloyd Evans

First honk, then applaud

Turandot Hampstead Theatre Do You Know Where Your Daughter Is? Hackney Empire Eurobeat Novello Why the long wait? Brecht completed his last play, Turandot, in 1953 but only now does it receive its British premiere. This spirited, finely acted production provides the answer. The script is all wonky. Taken from the commedia dell’arte fable that inspired Puccini’s opera, this is a laborious political allegory about an impotent Chinese emperor, his spoiled eldest daughter and a rambling public conference that pitches two symbolic groups against one another, ‘the clothesmakers’, (standing for the Social Democrats), and ‘the clothesless’ (the Communists). The issues Brecht is examining are lost in the past and located

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Audacity of Hirst

Clive Crook is on good form today: I am a huge admirer of Damien Hirst. Not of the art, which is rubbish, but of the sheer productivity and exuberance he brings to his life’s work of fleecing rich idiots. “Oh Damien, you’re a genius. Screw me over again.” “Why not,” he says, munching a bacon butty. Quite so. And why not indeed?

Wednesday

James Delingpole

When I am King

Earth: The Climate Wars (BBC 2); Amazon (BBC 2); Tess of the d’Urbervilles (BBC 1) A Church of England official has issued an apology to the descendants of Charles Darwin for the Church’s ‘anti-evolutionary’ fervour towards his Origin of the Species. I wonder if in about 150 years’ time the BBC — presuming it still exists which I won’t let it do, I promise, once I’ve become your emperor — will make similar amends for having been wrong about absolutely everything from Israel, Europe, Islamism and multiculturalism to women, children, animals and, above all, global warming. ‘God, what a bunch of complete and utter ****ers we all were,’ their apology

Andrew Lambirth

Force of nature

Ancient Landscapes — Pastoral Visions: Samuel Palmer to the Ruralists Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, until 19 October Don’t be misled by the title: although in its entirety this is a wide-ranging exhibition, it was organised by Southampton Art Gallery (and thus draws heavily on that remarkable permanent collection) and was originally intended for a much larger musem. In Bath, restrictions of space mean the show had to be cut in half — but like an earthworm, both halves have continued to flourish. Part 1 dealt with the historical context, the Samuel Palmers, the Graham Sutherlands and the Paul Nashes, and Part 2 comes up to date with the Brotherhood of

Michael Tanner

Missing the magic touch

Don Giovanni Royal Opera House La Rondine Peacock Theatre This latest revival, for which the opening night received a great deal of publicity, and which began with Tony Hall, the Royal Opera’s chief executive, welcoming Sun readers and bidding them to come again — but at what price? — sported as distinguished a cast as any the production has had during its six years, and Charles Mackerras in the pit; yet it failed to achieve any momentum, and if it had succeeded, it would have lost it shortly after acquiring it. I’d be interested to know to what extent the revival director Duncan Macfarland got the singers to develop their

Saturday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

‘Booming, beaming waves of noise’

Igor Toronyi-Lalic looks back to the early 20th century when organs were in their heyday ‘As in England, in America the organ is King,’ wrote the French organ-composer Louis Vierne in 1927, following a phenomenally successful three-month tour of America and Canada. His 50 recitals had drawn in around 70,000 obsessed fans, including some 6,000 at the Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia alone, home to the world’s largest organ. There was a time, not so long ago, when the organ and its practitioners were at the top of the musical pile. Virtuosos like Louis Vierne or Edwin Lemare packed out municipal halls, football stadiums and shopping malls with hordes of