More from Arts

Saturday

Roderick Conway-Morris

Sins of commission

‘They order, said I, this matter better in France.’ It is the norm at the national pavilions (a record 76 nations are present this year) for a new commissioner to be appointed for each edition, who selects the artist, or artists, to represent their country, or heads a committee that does so. A dozen years ago, France reversed this process, selecting the artist first, who then named their own commissioner. Sophie Calle, this year’s French artist, found hers by advertising in Libération (the Gallic Guardian). Her extensive floor-to-ceiling installation of texts, photographs and videos was triggered by an email from her lover announcing he was dumping her, which ended ‘Prenez soin de vous’ (Take care of yourself), now the title of the show.

Lloyd Evans

Summer froth

Midsummer. Holidays loom. Migrations are being pondered and planned. Right now the English theatre-going middle classes are yearning for August, for Tuscany, for the pine-scented South, and for the sunbeds where they’ll sprawl and doze all summer smeared in perfumed lard and turning the colour of teak. Lovely. The West End is ready for these adjustments and from now until September it’ll provide what the British film industry has to supply all year round — cultural room-service for Americans. You start to wonder why Americans go abroad at all. Perhaps to discover how unadventurous they are, how closely they cleave to the known, the familiar, the homely. This year’s lucrative game of catch-yank begins at the Novello with a Broadway import, The Drowsy Chaperone.

Michael Tanner

Musical grossness

The latest revival of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Royal Opera, in Francesca Zambello’s 2002 production, now directed by Duncan Macfarland, is so bad as to be almost sensational. The production itself was never any good, and although I have now seen it with four largely different casts, in none of them was the title role taken with conviction, not even by such seasoned Dons as Simon Keenlyside. Nor has the conducting, which has included such eminent and long-lasting Mozartians as Colin Davis and Charles Mackerras, ever been better than somewhat disappointing. This time round though is a connoisseur’s item of musical grossness and dramatic nullity.

Simon Hoggart

Redemptive power

Sex, the City and Me (BBC2, Sunday) might just as well have been called ‘All Men Are Bastards — based on a true story’. Sarah Parish played Jess, a horrible person, a fund manager who is better at her job than all the men around her. She was offensive to them, offhand to her husband — a music journalist, which here signifies: ‘When men aren’t being bastards they’re so drippy they’re a waste of space anyway.’ She is rude to waitresses, which, in the simple code used in most television drama, identifies ‘truly horrible’. Then she gets pregnant, and through the redemptive power of motherhood becomes a very nice person with a clear moral purpose.

Saturday

Henrietta Bredin

The man who sheds light on the music

David Belasco was a pioneer in the field of stage lighting, passionate about creating realistic effects, the most famous of which occurred in his one-act play Madame Butterfly, during which the action slowed to an almost total halt for a 14-minute, lovingly rendered dawn sequence. Puccini saw the play in London in 1900 and rushed backstage afterwards to find Belasco and make an immediate bid for the rights so as to turn it into an opera. Being a man much impressed by technical innovation, Puccini was especially struck by the dawn lighting and went on to incorporate the episode in his opera, as the culmination of Butterfly’s night-long vigil, waiting for the return of the faithless Pinkerton.

Andrew Lambirth

More means worse

The Royal Academy Summer Show boasts that it is the world’s largest open submission contemporary art exhibition, but this year it focuses on invited artists and distinguished foreign visitors. Thus it neglects both the Academicians, its real strength and raison d’être, and the until now faithful corps of British artists who submit year in, year out. As more and more non-RAs are rejected — or, possibly worse, are accepted but not hung — and while many of the RAs themselves are sidelined and crowded together, the nature of this exhibition is changing for the worse. It needs to be said from time to time that the Academy would not exist without its RAs.

Kate Chisholm

An age of happy endings

A small but beautifully staged exhibition is now on show in the garret of Dr Johnson’s House in London. It was in this room that Johnson worked on his mammoth Dictionary of the English Language. A large roof-space with eaves and heavily charred roof timbers (the roof was set on fire by the Germans a couple of times during the second world war), it’s been taken over temporarily by the personality of his friend (and former pupil) David Garrick. For almost 30 years, from 1747 to 1776, Garrick as actor-manager was in charge of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, thrilling audiences with his performances as Richard III, or reducing them to helpless laughter as Don Felix in The Wonder (by Susannah Centlivre).

Michael Tanner

A load of old baggage

Nabucco; Pelléas et Mélisande Arriving for the first production in Opera Holland Park’s new season, we were greeted with a reassuringly retro set. Since there is no curtain, what we see is what we’re going to get, and it is a stage full of battered suitcases and nothing else. For the operagoer, this sets bells ringing. Clearly we are in for an evening of tormented refugees, not surprising since this is Verdi’s Nabucco, his first great success, containing the Italian equivalent of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, the plangent chorus ‘Va, Pensiero’. A fresher idea from the designer Yannis Thavoris would have been welcome. The peak period for battered cases was the late 1990s, when they went along with dark glasses and wheelchairs.

James Delingpole

I can’t take Sugar

The other day I had to address a group of media students from Michigan State University on the purposes of TV criticism. I came up with about five, the last of which was: always impress on your audience what a massive waste of life almost all TV-watching is because it’s mostly rubbish, it sucks out your brain and you’re far better off with a book or the wireless. Possibly they thought I was joking but you all know I wasn’t. It’s a variation on an argument I have every week with the Fawn over The Apprentice (BBC1, Wednesday). She thinks it’s antisocial the way I read the newspaper through the longueurs and then head for an early bath rather than wait to find out who got fired.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Lust for life | 9 June 2007

Gillian Ayres and David Bomberg: two painters with markedly different visions of the world, but united in excellence. Interestingly, there is a period of Bomberg’s work — the Spanish paintings of 1929 — when his paint surfaces seem to resemble Ayres’s of the late 1970s and early 1980s in their impacted intensity. But apart from a shared interest and dexterity in paint-handling, in the glorious materiality of the medium, their courses are widely divergent, never more evident than in the extraordinary joyfulness of Ayres’s new paintings. Her current exhibition at Alan Cristea marks a high point in a career dedicated to the celebratory nature of abstract form.

Robert Gorelangton

Thrilling stuff

This season’s they-don’t-make-’em-like-that-any-more offering at the Old Vic is Gaslight. The chief reason for going to see it is that it stars the talented young actress Rosamund Pike. Time spent gazing at the astoundingly beautiful Miss Pike is never wasted. But Gaslight has other attractions as an entertainment. It’s a 1938 three-act thriller set in murky Victorian London, with a married couple, servants, horsehair furniture and a nice juicy vein of psychopathic sadism. Most of us know it from the 1944 film version in which Ingrid Bergman went mildly bonkers and won an Oscar for rolling her eyes. When you read the play, it is startling how unfaithful are the two Gaslight films (an earlier screen version starred Anton Walbrook).

Charles Spencer

Telly addict

Until recently I was one of those insufferable prigs who proudly announces, ‘Oh, I never watch television, it’s all rubbish these days.’ But there was little virtue in my self-restraint, and I had no idea whether there was anything worth watching or not. The fact is that when you are out at the theatre four, five and sometimes, curse it, six nights a week, watching stuff begins to feel like work. My smoking habit also meant that whenever I did want to watch something I’d have to keep nipping out for a quick drag, Mrs Spencer having instituted draconian smoking bans long before the Labour government.

Michael Tanner

Exalted by Beethoven

Fidelio is so full of wonderful music, and its subject matter is so stirring and so perennially relevant, that it should be a frequent feature of any opera house’s repertoire. In fact it is rather rare, and this new production is the first time it has been seen at the Royal Opera for 14 years. To my joy and relief, and a little to my surprise, it is largely a success, and the things that are wrong with it are remediable without drastic alteration — and the cast needs no alteration at all. This production was first seen in New York in 2000, and is by the director of the Salzburg Festival, Jürgen Flimm. That name struck a chill in my heart, but the worst that can be said is that it is mildly eccentric.

Giannandrea Poesio

Provoked and dazzled

Stylistic accuracy is one of the most problematic aspects of restaging dance works. ‘Style’ is a fluidly ambiguous notion encompassing a multitude of factors: the training of the choreographer and dancers, particular aesthetic trends, interpretative choices, and so on. Hence the difficulty of getting it right. Stylistic appropriateness goes far beyond any detailed reproduction of mere technicalities and so it also requires an in-depth understanding of the context within which the works were originally created. Alas, this was not the case with the first performance of the new Royal Ballet’s triple bill last Saturday.

Patrick Carnegy

McKellen’s masterly Lear

The best way to get serious press coverage for your big show is to provoke the hacks by shutting them out from the first night. It’s a high-risk strategy but in the case of the now famous King Lear with Ian McKellen it’s worked a dream. The director Trevor Nunn and the RSC chief Michael Boyd took a fearful caning for slamming the door, but who were they to worry when the show was already sold out? They’re wily enough to know that good publicity has precious little to do with good reviews. If there wasn’t enough mileage in the sad story of the fall from her bike of Frances Barber (Goneril) which caused the closure, there was more than enough in Germaine Greer’s diatribe in the Guardian.

Simon Hoggart

Tasteless memorial

Channel 4’s Diana: The Witnesses in the Tunnel (Wednesday) was, as promised, pretty tasteless stuff, though not for the reasons we were told. There are those who still believe the princess’s death was not an accident, and that the royal family, Lord Stevens and both French and British governments are part of a huge conspiracy to cover up the fact that this lovely, innocent woman was coldly done to death to prevent her from marrying a Muslim. Absolute nonsense, of course. I’ve done some work on why people come to believe irrational but beguiling theories. What these wacky beliefs have in common is an enormous amount of data, a cascade of facts and quasi-facts.

Saturday

Michael Henderson

Arousing a love of England

This weekend, as the orchestras of England celebrate the 150th anniversary of this country’s most celebrated composer, is an appropriate time to review the national monument that is Sir Edward Elgar. Does he continue to speak of and for England? Or was he merely a late-romantic nostalgic, whose music was hopelessly outdated when he died in 1934, and which now offers even less value — or ‘significance’, in the weedy, trivia-obsessed language of our age? If one takes notice of the public pronouncements, it hasn’t been a good year for Elgar. When in March his profile was replaced on the £20 banknotes by that of Adam Smith, some people rejoiced.

Andrew Lambirth

Gormley spotting

I have been dipping into the Modern Sculpture Reader, edited by Jon Wood, David Hulks and Alex Potts, an invaluable compilation of texts produced by the Henry Moore Institute at £20. It’s a hefty paperback tome determined to give sculpture its rightful place in the anthology stakes — so often dominated by painting — and in doing so it tracks the nature and status of the art object in the modern world. It ranges from Adolf von Hildebrand writing in 1893 on the problem of form, to Susan Hiller in 2003 discussing the sculptural legacy of H. Moore himself. In between it stops at many stations from Rilke to Acconci, by way of Eric Gill, Michel Leiris, Tatlin, Gabo and Sartre.

Marcus Berkmann

Staying cool

It’s always a problem, comparing a new band with others who have gone before. Critics have to do it, defining the new in terms of the old, because there has to be some way of describing the indescribable. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been caught, having read somewhere that someone was the new Squeeze or XTC or Nick Drake or Electric Light Orchestra or any of several others. Gullible fool that I am, I believe every word. You buy the CD without pausing to listen to the little 30-second snippet of each song they offer you on Amazon (because you know they never sound right and will only put you off), the CD arrives, you tear it open in a frenzy and it’s just the usual underwritten indie sludge that sounds a bit like The Velvet Underground.

Michael Tanner

Greeting Death with joy

At last ENO has come up with a production which can be greeted almost without reservation, and of a treacherously tricky opera, Britten’s last and for many his greatest, Death in Venice. After a gruelling two weeks in which I have seen major works manhandled beyond bearing at the Royal Opera and at Glyndebourne, I was almost shocked to see a production which couldn’t be faulted in its concentration on realising the composer’s vision with economy, imagination and concentration. When a work is as complex as this, the production team’s first duty is lucidity, and that is exactly what Deborah Warner, with her set and lighting designers Tom Pye and Jean Kalman, has achieved.