More from Arts

Saturday

Ursula Buchan

Precious jewels

A feature of the gardening world, which probably strikes me rather more forcibly than it does you, is the number of amateur plant specialists there are. These are experts in one area of plantsmanship, usually, who aggregate in groups in order that they can exchange technical talk, test their skills in competition and learn from their fellow-enthusiasts. Although hidden from general view (unless you become an expert yourself and start looking for them), these people add much to the sum of our understanding about plants, whenever their expertise leaks out of learned journals and into the popular prints. The layman may find their conversation mystifying, even sometimes tedious, but it is pleasing to know that it goes on.

Lloyd Evans

Arms control

Questions are easy, answers less so. That’s the conclusion of Joe Penhall’s new morality play and it won’t come as a surprise to anyone brighter than a hedgehog. A brilliant but unstable missile scientist has invented a gizmo that will give Britain military superiority for a generation. Professor Brainiac then suffers an attack of conscience and announces that he wants personal control of the export licences. (Does that sound likely? On stage it seems so loaded with improbabilities that it’s hard to see the play over the top of the pile.) Prof. B. is worried that his gizmo may fall into the hands of nutcase states like (who else?) the US and Israel. Instead he suggests handing the innovation to the European Union. Hmmm. Imagine the EU trying to fire a new weapon.

Michael Tanner

Brutalising Russia

I caught up with Welsh National Opera’s production of Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina only in Birmingham, the last performance of its first run. I hope it’s revived soon, since an account of it as intense as the one I saw, without longueurs, is just what this work needs to lift it from the status of masterpiece-but-also-bore to simply that of masterpiece. It is done in Shostakovich’s orchestration, and with Stravinsky’s setting of the final chorus for the Old Believers (or call them Fundamentalists to get them in perspective). With David Pountney as director, one expects the action to be updated, and the sets, variants on a single collection of intimidating props, suggest 1920s architecture and painting.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Beyond the ordinaire

Show time at the V&A: the latest in its series of survey exhibitions brings us Surrealism in all its faded glory and sempiternal intrigue — a gallery of the visually fickle and macabre, the once-disturbing and the lastingly chic. The exhibition starts well with a de Chirico stage set for Le Bal (1929), a couple of gorgeous drawings for it close at hand. Masson’s designs for the ballet Les Présages (1933) are not nearly so stunning, but with Miró we strike a return-to-form with a costumed figure actually pirouetting and film clips of Jeux d’enfants and the controversial Romeo and Juliet (designed with Ernst) showing nearby. In the second room, however, is the real justification for this exhibition — a collection of Surrealist objects.

Charles Spencer

Thank you, Humph

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks sharing my life with some malignant bug that has left me feeling weak and pathetic on those relatively rare occasions when I’m not rushing to the loo. It’s not exactly been a barrel of laughs, apart from the long sleeps which have been accompanied by excitingly strange and vivid dreams. They’ve been a bit like being on drugs. Also, the cat Nelson has been a brick, spending much of the time on the bed curled up at my feet, a true friend and companion in time of need. I’ve written before about how music doesn’t seem to work when you are suffering from depression. I’ve now also discovered that it’s not much use when one is more generally unwell.

Lloyd Evans

German triumphs

No question about it. If you had to name the 500 brightest periods in the history of human creativity, you wouldn’t include West Germany in the 1970s. What did they give us, those occidental Heinrichs and Helmuts? The Volkswagen Golf, the Baader-Meinhof gang, Boney M and a team of hyperefficient donkeys who fluked the World Cup in 1974. But with the passage of time one star begins to shine more brilliantly in the firmament. You probably haven’t heard of Franz Xaver Kroetz (b. Munich 1946). His work is elusive, undemonstrative and highly subtle and he specialises in unglamorous family dramas. His method was experimental back in the 70s. He interspersed lengthy dramatic scenes with sudden brief snapshots of his characters in revealing attitudes.

Patrick Carnegy

Courting the computer

Back in the 1920s someone complained there wasn’t a play on the London stage that didn’t have a telephone in it. While it’s the lifeblood of theatre to move with the times, a mania for modish contemporaneity can only get you so far. The danger is especially endemic in theatre troupes dedicated to outreach and to widening access. New York’s ‘Theatre for a New Audience’ is plainly one of these and it was the final visiting company contributing to the RSC’s Complete Works Festival. (Injury has sadly postponed the official opening of King Lear with Ian McKellen, the RSC’s own final contribution on which I hope to report later.

Simon Hoggart

Cooling off

Lots of new comedy this week. Mitchell and Webb are a puzzle. They had a successful sketch slot, which followed the first runs of Peep Show. Then they turned up in the ads for Apple computers. One of them (I forget which) is supposed to use an Apple Mac and the other a boring old PC. Apparently, Apple users are free, artistic, untrammelled by the petty rules of others. PC users are wage slaves, crawling their dreary way towards retirement. Some people who think themselves cool regarded this as the single least-cool commercial campaign ever. It was held to have demolished Mitchell and Webb’s own carefully burnished image of cool. Even at my advanced years, I could see that it was terminally naff.

Kate Chisholm

Shocking women

It was not so extraordinary in September 1946 when the Third Programme began broadcasting that its schedule should include a weekly discussion of the ‘visual arts’, kicking off with the then director of the National Gallery in conversation with the painter William Coldstream. Radio was still the Queen Bee of the BBC and television a young upstart whose potential was not yet fully understood. The ‘alert and receptive’ listeners of the Third Programme were expected to pay attention and work at their listening so that they could conjure for themselves flickering images of what was being talked about on air.

Saturday

Henrietta Bredin

Repetitive strain injury

What is it like for an actor, after the stimulating exploratory process of rehearsal, followed by the high-voltage excitement of opening night, to go on performing the same piece over and over again, night after night? A long run of a show makes it a banker for its producers and is therefore in many ways highly desirable. Indeed a big musical has to run for some months before it even begins to recoup its production costs. It is not, however, an easy ride for the actors concerned. There is a range of different challenges to face, from becoming jaded and disenchanted by endless repetition, to being physically and mentally exhausted by the emotional challenges a piece may present.

Andrew Lambirth

Singular sensation

Prunella Clough; Harry Thubron: Collages and Constructions 1972–1984 It was a privilege to be a member of the jury that gave Prunella Clough (1919–99) the Jerwood Prize for Painting in 1999. On the one hand, we wanted to draw attention to the fact that she was an immensely distinguished painter who had remained largely unknown and publicly unrewarded during a long career, and on the other we wished to recognise the high quality of her latest work, some of the finest she’d ever done. In many ways, Prunella was her own worst enemy, being of a modest and self-effacing temperament, much given to doubting her very real achievements.

Michael Tanner

Sheer perfection

L’Heure espagnole; Gianni Schicchi; Ariodante The trouble with perfection, on the extremely rare occasions one encounters it, is that it leaves one discontented with anything less. Now that I have seen Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole in Richard Jones’s new production at the Royal Opera, I only want to see these singers under this conductor repeating it. There aren’t many chances to see this opera, and when I have seen it in the past I’ve felt it to be a bit of a long-winded joke, with too-discreet music, demanding a lot from its performers, without big rewards.

Lloyd Evans

Narcissistic posturings

Too much artist and not enough art. That’s one problem with Total Eclipse, Christopher Hampton’s play about the titans of French 19th-century poetry. Another is presentation. The show is done ‘in the round’ on a raised slipway between two banks of seats irradiated by the glare reflected from the stage. This is bonkers. The reason house lights are dimmed during a show is to create an atmosphere of anonymous intimacy in which every member of the audience can half-imagine that they’re watching the play alone. Doing it in the round kills that subtlety. You have to stare, through the shapes of the perambulating actors, at a wraparound panorama of unfamiliar faces.

James Delingpole

Vicious propaganda

The thing I really don’t get at all about The Mark of Cain (Channel 4, Thursday) is how the people involved could bring themselves to do it. I mean, I’m quite skint at the moment and in need of attention and acclaim and a better career. But I promise — no matter how much they paid me or how many column inches I might expect to generate or Baftas I might hope to win — that never in a zillion years would I do what this documentary has done to the British army. I’m not saying it wasn’t gripping viewing. Artistically, you could scarcely fault it. Militarily, I wasn’t quite convinced by the scene where a few insurgents armed with AKs and another with an RPG cause a British army section completely to fall to pieces.

Saturday

Bryan Rostron

Chasing Getty’s ‘Youth’

In August 1964, after a series of severe storms, Italian fishermen dragging nets along the bottom of the Adriatic hauled out a life-sized bronze statue encrusted with nearly 2,000 years’ worth of barnacles. Thirteen years later, after a labyrinthine trail of greed, betrayal and smuggling, the masterpiece, ‘Statue of a Victorious Youth’, was bought by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for $3.98 million, then the highest price ever paid for a statue. Now this saga has erupted again. Last November negotiations broke down between the Italian government and the J. Paul Getty Museum over the possible return of 52 objects, among them the statue. The Museum announced that it would not hand over its prize exhibit.

Andrew Lambirth

Boundless curiosity

A New World: England’s first view of America; Italian Prints 1875–1975 John White is one of the mysteries of English art. We don’t know exactly when he was born or died, we have no portrait of him and his name was a sufficiently common one to cause problems of identification in the surviving documents of the period. Yet we have an incomparable wealth of paintings by him, all 75 of which reside in the British Museum and which form the core and justification for this fascinating new exhibition. Being watercolours they are fragile, so get shown only once every 30 or 40 years. White was a gentleman adventurer who was also an artist, and between 1584 and 1590 he made five journeys to America.

Angela Summerfield

Shifting impressions

Abstract art in Britain, in its widest sense, is currently enjoying a revival of interest among collectors, art dealers and curators; a time span which runs from the 1960s to the latest recipient of the Turner Prize, Tomma Abts. Callum Innes, still only in his mid-forties, is Scotland’s premier abstract painter. He is represented in leading public collections and by commercial galleries in London, New York and Dublin; he was awarded the Jerwood Painting Prize 2002 and showed at Tate, St Ives in 2005. The current show, organised by the dynamic Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, features a selection of small and large-scale paintings created over the past 15 years.

Michael Tanner

Rare delight | 31 March 2007

Camacho’s Wedding; Poro An opera by Mendelssohn? It sounds unlikely, but not because you can’t imagine him writing one, as you can’t with Bruckner or Brahms. You’d expect someone with Mendelssohn’s particular gifts to be able to write fine operas, but you’d also expect to have heard about them. And now it turns out that he did write at least one most attractive piece, which has acquired a small reputation as being a mistake. It took University College Opera to put us right about that. They staged four performances of Camacho’s Wedding, a full-length Singspiel, that is to say sung numbers separated by spoken dialogue. Mendelssohn created it when he was 14 to 17, and writing the most astonishing music ever composed by someone of that age.

Robin Holloway

Chez Chausson

Every eager collector of books and scores has their special searcher, primed to keep an eye open for long out-of-print rarities at reasonable prices. Mine, like Jesus’ blood, ‘never failed me yet’. Her latest triumph is to have procured a copy of Ernest Chausson’s opera Le roi Arthus, posthumously produced in 1903, four years after his death at 44; never yet staged in this country, though there was a memorable concert performance at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago. I’d been on the lookout for the music for ages, and its eventual arrival brought down from the shelf the fraying tape of a previous recording dating back to 1987, to listen again to a work of rare nobility.

Lloyd Evans

A touch of magic

As soon as she arrives everything falls apart. Dame Maggie Smith’s appearance in Edward Albee’s 1980 play The Lady From Dubuque marks the point when it all goes wrong. This isn’t her fault. She’s the most watchable and effective thing on stage and even now, on the fringes of old age, her lazy twangy sexy drawl still has a touch of magic. But her part is a dud cheque. We’ve spent the first act watching a group of drunken sophisticates swapping caustic banter. Sam’s wife Jo is suffering from some lethal disease which frees her from all social constraint and prompts an enjoyable, if undemanding, hour of drawing-room comedy. Enter Elizabeth.