Arts feature

Roger Ebert believes not, and that its use in films is an annoyance and a distraction Has it really come to this? I read in Variety, the film industry journal, that ‘Mark Thomas of Elsinore Films is producing a 3-D musical Hamlet targeting the Harry Potter and High School Musical market’. I am not concerned for Hamlet, which has been kneaded into so many preposterous shapes and survived. What horrifies me is the prospect of seeing the film in 3-D. Variety helpfully explains: ‘Hamlet lends itself to a 3-D treatment. The producers hope to include a ghost that hovers in front of the audience’s eyes, cannon fire that flies into the auditorium and a sword fight that appears to happen all around viewers.

Old operatic conventions will no longer do, says Igor Toronyi-Lalic: no more parking and barking Caricatures are often instructive. Those that acquire legs will offer a crystallised version of the truth. The hoary send-up of opera, for example — the lardy singers, the stilted poses, the outstretched arms — is representative of a historic reality. Opera singers did once park and bark. Character was once illustrated through stock gesture and semaphore. The presumed impossibility of mastering both the singing and the acting meant consigning half the art form to the dustbin. ‘How can you act if you have to hold a sustained note for six measures in the middle of an emotional climax, with your eyes glued on the conductor?

Andrew Lambirth talks to the sculptor Anish Kapoor on the eve of his major new exhibition at the Royal Academy I interviewed the sculptor Anish Kapoor (born 1954) while preparations for his major new exhibition at the Royal Academy were nearing conclusion. The galleries were busy with technicians so we talked in the Members’ Room (Kapoor has been an RA since 1999). I last interviewed Kapoor 11 years ago, on the eve of his last big museum show in London, when he had the whole of the Hayward Gallery. Now he has been given the grand rooms which comprise the entire main floor of the Academy. Our talk was inevitably concerned with his new show. Was it a retrospective?

Roderick Conway Morris talks to Peter Greenaway about creating a ‘painting with a soundtrack’ Peter Greenaway is standing against the backdrop of Paolo Veronese’s enormous ‘The Wedding at Cana’ in the Palladian refectory of the Venetian monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore and is in rhetorical mode: ‘When we put art and cinema in the balance, what do we have? At least 8,000 years of painting and a miserable 114 years or so of cinema. Nothing in cinema has not already been essayed in still images in painting at one time or another. So I think it a very good idea to have a dialogue between painting and cinema.

Henrietta Bredin talks to David Pountney about running the Bregenz Festival Back in the days when David Pountney was director of productions at English National Opera, his so-called office was a tiny broom cupboard of a space carved out of a backstage cranny of the London Coliseum, with a single grubby window overlooking a narrow passageway known as Piss Alley for obvious and strongly smelling reasons. He now, as artistic director of the Bregenz Festival in Austria, occupies a lavishly appointed sort of control tower, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out across Lake Constance and giving a direct hawk’s-eye view of the stage built out into the lake, which is the festival’s major attraction.

Lloyd Evans goes in search of culture on the rain-soaked streets of Edinburgh The crunch. That damn credit crunch. It hurt Scotland hardest of all. A worldwide reputation as a financial powerhouse? Gone. Dreams of independence? Severely truncated. Last year the Edinburgh Festival bore prophetic signs of imminent poverty, of homelessness, of doom. Free shows abounded. Bribes of wine, whisky and sandwiches were being proferred to choosy punters. This year I’m here on an austerity awayday, a recession quickie, a pared-down and stripped-back three-day in-and-outer. My accommodation meets the brief superbly. I’m in a dive, of the deep-sea variety. You have to hold your breath. The showers are communal. So are the loos. There’s no lift, not even one that’s broken.

Sean Rafferty tells Henrietta Bredin how an abbot persuaded him to make his first recording Six minutes to go before the daily live broadcast of BBC Radio Three’s In Tune goes on air and the atmosphere is full of a sort of supercharged alertness, of tension expertly controlled by a small team of people who all know exactly what they are doing. The producer asks about a recording of a Handel aria she wants to play later in the programme — it’s not here yet, and may only be available on DVD, but it’s being looked for, and if it fails to materialise, she’s got an alternative as back-up. Two minutes to go and presenter Sean Rafferty ambles into the studio, having been talking to the programme’s first two guests in the Green Room next door.

Lloyd Evans celebrates Tennyson’s miraculous musicality ‘He had the finest ear of any English poet,’ said W.H. Auden. ‘He was also, undoubtedly, the stupidest.’ This famous jibe aimed at Tennyson (whose bicentenary falls on 6 August) is revealing in its shrill and almost triumphant bitchiness. Every age rejects the one before and it’s no surprise that Auden, a gay, left-wing, pacifist democrat, was keen to advertise his contempt for the uxorious, High Church, monarch-loving imperialist. But the severity of his scorn and its blatant falsehood (Tennyson knew half a dozen languages and was famed for the brilliance of his conversation) suggest that Auden’s real feelings may have been more complex than he liked to admit.

Michael Henderson has been to 100 operas by Wagner. He wasn’t always an admirer of the music When sceptics ask how I ‘found’ the music dramas of Richard Wagner there is an obvious, contrary answer: I didn’t; he found me. As a young music-lover I was certainly no Wagnerian in the making. Although I had always had a love of the orchestra, and slipped easily into the initially perplexing world of opera, I had little knowledge of Wagner, and no desire to find out. If anything I felt hostile. A master at prep school had entertained some of us 12-year-olds one Sunday afternoon, and popped on an LP called, improbably, Wagner’s Greatest Hits. One day, he counselled, as we tittered, we would grow out of pop, and open our ears to other kinds of music.

Henrietta Bredin talks to Ruth Wilson about her role as Stella in the Donmar’s Streetcar If Ruth Wilson doesn’t very soon become a major force to be reckoned with, as an actress, director, producer, screenwriter (probably all four), I’ll eat my entire, quite extensive collection of hats. She is bursting with talent and possesses a gleefully voracious appetite for a challenge. This is probably just as well as she is about to take on the role of Stella at the Donmar Warehouse in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. ‘I love Stella,’ she says, leaning back in her chair and gulping a mug of tea. ‘I think she’s quite an opportunist, very modern and forward-thinking.

Was television in Seventies Britain that good? Is today’s better? James Walton investigates On the weekend of 2–3 December 1978, two ambitious drama projects began on television. One was the BBC Shakespeare — which seven years later had finally carried out its promise to make TV versions of the entire canon. The other took rather less time, but these days is perhaps even harder to imagine. ITV (yes, ITV) gave over the first of six Saturday nights to a series of new and sometimes experimental plays by Alan Bennett. In late 1978, the solid cultural fare didn’t end there. The weekend before, BBC1’s long-running Play of the Month (in the slot recently occupied by such shameless heart-warmers as Lark Rise to Candleford or The No.

Henrietta Bredin talks to Janis Kelly about her role in Rufus Wainwright’s first opera, Prima Donna Anyone less like the clichéd idea of a prima donna than Janis Kelly would be hard to find. She is known and loved as a singer and consummate actress with a conspicuous lack of airs and graces who will throw herself into anything, the more challenging and off the wall the better, imbuing performances with her own particular brand of intense musicality and grace. Lucky Rufus Wainwright, then, who has cast her to perform the title role in his first foray into writing opera, Prima Donna, which will be given its world première at the Manchester International Festival on 10 July.

Futurism Tate Modern, until 20 September The centenary of Marinetti’s ‘First Manifesto of Futurism’ is a wonderful excuse, if excuse be needed, for a celebration and perhaps re-assessment of a movement that attacked the past in the name of all that was modern. Today, Futurists would be execrating any movement as old and as passé as themselves, but we may look more calmly at their frenetic attempts to capture in paint and sculpture the dynamism of modern life. The large show at the Tate aims to do two things: to gather together as many as possible of the works that were shown in the first Futurist exhibition in London, at the Sackville Gallery in 1912, and to demonstrate how Futurism related to (and influenced) the other radical art movements of the time.

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.

Stephen Pettitt on how Sir Roger Norrington and others started the debate about ‘authenticity’ In the late 1970s, the conductor Sir Roger Norrington, at the time in charge of the late and lamented Kent Opera, created the London Classical Players. With this act Norrington, who has just turned 75, joined a small group of musicians regarded by the wider profession as, to put none too fine a point on it, rather nutty.

Dan Jones on how the Armada tapestries, destroyed by fire, are being recreated Anthony Oakshett points to a palette and shows me a colour called ‘sea-monster grey’. The tall and genial artist is guiding me around his cool, airy temporary studio in an outhouse at Wrest Park, the Bedfordshire country house. Around us stand six vast canvases depicting scenes from the failed attack of the Spanish Armada in 1588. There are indeed a number of sea monsters in various stages of completion, their terrible mouths yawning and their tails thrashing as English and Spanish ships give battle around them. Oakshett is the artist leading a two-year project to recreate the Armada tapestries, a largely forgotten glory of the pre-Victorian House of Lords.

Henrietta Bredin finds out what it is that draws actors to the gruelling one-man show Judi Dench says she’d never do it, Roy Dotrice didn’t do it for 40 years but started again in 2008, Joanna Lumley says that managing to do it while looking at her own reflection in a mirror made her feel afterwards as if she could handle pretty much anything. Let’s do it, it’s the one-man, or one-woman, show. Stepping on to a stage or in front of the camera to perform requires a particular brand of courage but how much more focused and intense is that experience if you undergo it entirely on your own?