More from Arts

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

Behind the scenes

It sounds like a really bad idea — Lenny Henry, the black comedian, devising a set of radio sketches to celebrate (oops, I should have said ‘commemorate’) Abolition. You can imagine the scene. Early one morning in late November 2006. An emergency Radio Four planning meeting high up in Broadcasting House on Portland Place. Big table. Lots of coffee. A group of worried-looking producers, scriptwriters, the sound-effects team, all wielding spring-clip noteboards covered with last-minute scrambled ‘ideas’. ‘Tony Blair’s just reminded us that we’ve got this 200-year anniversary coming up next March. It’s going to be really big. A march from Hull. Questions in Parliament. A service in Westminster Abbey.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

High-table comedian

Rory Bremner is in a hurry. The controversial impersonator surges into his production office a few minutes late for our meeting. ‘So sorry. Did they tell you? We overran,’ he says in his light, energetic voice. ‘Won’t be a sec. Got to go to the loo. Ooh! Too much information.’ A few minutes later he reappears and sits patiently while I fiddle with the wrong buttons on the tape machine. ‘Quick soundcheck?’ ‘Testing, testing,’ he says helpfully. And we begin.

Andrew Lambirth

Scraping the barrel

Here are two of the big hitters of Impressionism, both represented by shows which only investigate very particular aspects of their work. Monet and Renoir are names guaranteed to provide good box-office returns, but will the public be satisfied by the choice of work attached to their brand labels? Of course the RA and NG need to generate income from exhibitions in these increasingly expensive times, though both have managed to secure sponsors to help defray the costs of their shows. The RA exhibition comes with a vast doorstop of a catalogue, stuffed full of worthy scholarship, making the art-historical case for the importance of Monet’s hitherto largely unknown pastels and drawings.

Richard Cork

Shock and awe

At the age of only ten, Leon Kossoff undertook a momentous journey across London on his own. He travelled from his family home in the East End to Trafalgar Square and, having mounted the steps, entered the National Gallery. At first, the early Christian art he encountered inside filled the boy with fear. But after a while, trepidation gave way to awe. Discovering the existence of paintings was a total revelation, and he subsequently ensured that the works displayed there became an indispensable part of his life. Today, 70 years after that initial childhood visit, the National Gallery is saluting the intensity of Kossoff’s commitment. For he has made hundreds of unbridled drawings from pictures in the collection, and a selection of these images now becomes a galvanic exhibition.

Susan Moore

Rich pickings

Forget London, Paris and New York. For any serious collector of art and antiques there is just one unmissable event: The European Fine Art Fair at Maastricht. No one could have predicted 20 years ago that this once modest fair in a small Dutch town few had heard of before the eponymous treaty would become the greatest art and antiques fair in the world. Against all the odds — not least the unbeguiling ring-road venue of the town’s conference centre (not a natural habitat for the international über rich) — it has established itself as the pre-eminent professional marketplace. Unlike all its glamorous counterparts, this event has nothing to do with being seen, charitable good works or bella figura. It is a place where business is done.

Deborah Ross

Sex and slaves

I Want Candy is a British sex comedy, which should already sound alarm bells, but I will plough on heroically, as is my nature. It’s about two lads from Leatherhead — wannabe producer Joe (Tom Riley) and earnest auteur Baggy (Tom Burke) — who are still at film school yet are desperate to break into the big time. Frustrated by their arty film teacher (Mackenzie Crook) they head to London to sell their script, Love Storm. Eventually, they encounter a porn producer (Eddie Marsan) who says, OK, I’ll give you the money so long as you up the hard-core element and get porn queen Candy Fiveways (Carmen Electra) for the starring role, which, amazingly, they duly do. They then proceed to film Love Storm in Joe’s suburban house while his mum and dad are at work. Funny?

Lloyd Evans

Something nasty

‘I’m not a snob. Ask anyone. Well, anyone who matters.’ The author of this self-knowing gem is Simon LeBon and I read it on a freesheet discarded on the bus that took me to see Martin Crimp’s state-of-the-nation play, Attempts on her Life. Amazingly, this tossed-aside gag was the high point of my evening. Mr Crimp, a busy playwright with the resources of the National Theatre at his disposal, failed to produce anything as perceptive or entertaining as LeBon’s throwaway quip. Crimp’s play is a restless self-important plague of words and video-images, scruffy, impressionistic, ill-shaped and rambling, rather like this sentence, going everywhere and nowhere in particular.

Michael Tanner

Intense emotions

The first revival of Thomas Adès’s The Tempest showed that, impressive as the first series of performances had been, three years ago, they were sketchy compared with what we see and hear at Covent Garden this time round. Certainly it sounded far more exciting this time: the opening deluge of sound was both more overwhelming and more interesting in its details, and led more naturally, after the opening cry from the shipwrecked Court, into the scene between Miranda and Prospero. One of the few changes of cast from the first run is the recasting of Miranda. Excellent as Christine Rice was last time, Kate Royal has a more suitable voice for the role, and looks just as lovely.

Giannandrea Poesio

Fire and water

It is not surprising that Baroque operas have long attracted the interest of contemporary choreographers. Apart from the numerous dance passages that punctuate these works, their classically inspired plots, rife with political, cultural and social metaphors, are inexhaustible and stimulating sources of inspiration for any modern-day artist. Not to mention the fact that a radical and often intentionally irreverent take on much-revered ‘important’ masterworks is a well-established trait of post-modern dance-theatre making. Sasha Waltz’s 2005 staging of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is one of the most recent additions in the long series of choreographic translations of early operas and oratorios.

Kate Chisholm

Acoustic journey

I wonder whether Cameron and co. in their attempts to stir up worries about climate change, carbon emissions and the future of the planet ever spend much time listening to nature in the raw. Of course, to understand what’s happening on a global scale might well require expensive flights to the far reaches of the planet. But there are other, cheaper ways of appreciating and understanding what’s going on in what’s left of our green and verdant land. A few hours doing nothing, absolutely nothing, in the company of warblers and wigeon, pike and teal, godwits and hairy dragonflies, just watching the weather and tuning in to the antics of these alternative communities, can restore not just goodwill but also a sense of perspective on the scale and impact of human endeavours.

Saturday

Robert Gorelangton

In the mood

The Hound of the Baskervilles first appeared on stage 100 years ago in Berlin, presented by Ferdinand Bonn. Herr Bonn was dead keen on realism and decided that his wife’s huge, beloved black dog would be the star of the show. Every night she would wait in the wings ready to produce a lump of German sausage, the idea being that, as Stapleton lured Sir Henry Baskerville on to the moor, the dog would belt across the stage and leap at the dangled bratwurst. For a spectral effect, the brute had lamps attached to its head; its savage howling was produced by a man backstage yodelling into a gramophone horn. What became of the dog’s showbiz career remains a mystery. But even as Arthur Conan Doyle was writing the stories, Holmes was appearing on stage and silent film.

Andrew Lambirth

Gruesome twosome

A courier staggered up the stairs to my flat bearing Gilbert & George: The Complete Pictures with an essay by Rudi Fuchs (Tate Publishing, 1,200 pages, 1,500 full-colour illustrations, £39.99). It’s a two-volume hardback which comes in its own carrying case, but I was glad not to have to bring it home myself as it weighs over a stone on the bathroom scales. It is the season of G&G overload, for that much-exhibited, much-publicised and over-played pair have been given the signal honour of a grand exhibition of 18 galleries at Tate Modern. A whole floor is devoted to their asininities, which is nothing short of a disgrace. Never have I been to so empty and arid a major exhibition, the most overweening display of narcissism ever to have been mounted.

Michael Tanner

Lost in translation

Which language should students at a music college perform an opera in for the public? I’d have thought that, though it’s no doubt very good for them to learn to sing in various non-native languages, it’s at least as important that they practise singing as communicatively as possible. Which does not mean that they should stand squarely at the front of the stage and sing to the audience. The three operas I saw this week, two at the Royal Academy and one at the Guildhall School, were sung in their original languages, two in Italian and one in Russian. The standard of pronunciation was high, especially for Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, and there were surtitles, of which I am an ardent supporter.

Lloyd Evans

Prophet warning

Happy birthday to The Entertainer. The ultimate state-of-the-nation play is 50 years old. I’ve never quite bought the idea that Archie Rice, a failed music-hall comedian, is supposed to represent Britain’s decline as a superpower. A clapped-out comic to symbolise the death of a military hegemony? Don’t get it. But at the time this revolutionary play fomented a new kind of ambition for the theatre. A play was no longer just a play, it was a spiritual testament that reached beyond the foyer and into the streets, into the minds of the theatre-shunning majority, and captured the mood of the country.

Deborah Ross

Beyond belief | 17 March 2007

In this film Sandra Bullock plays Linda Hanson, wife of dishy Jim Hansom (Julian McMahon), mother to two adorable little girls, Megan and Bridgette, and one of those blissfully contented stay-at-home moms who — even though this is very much horses for courses — still make you want to puke a little. It’s a happy, Hanson family, all right. ‘Why don’t you take the girls out and have some fun?’ Linda suggests to Jim one Sunday morning. ‘Sure, that’s a great idea,’ he replies, as if she’s just come up with the internal-combustion engine. He’s a great catch, dishy Jim. Most dads would say: ‘What? All on my own?’ Or even: ‘Children? Since when?

Kate Chisholm

War on the web

The pity of war has been well documented ever since we as rivalrous, destructive human beings developed pen and paper. But this latest British conflict against Iraq is the first in which the new possibilities of internet communication have really taken off. Blogs, emails, the YouTube and MySpace websites have given the soldiers out in Basra and Fallujah an unprecedented opportunity to tell not just us back home but the whole world exactly what it’s like to be out there, almost as it happens. Just switch on your computer, key into Google and type ‘Iraq soldier blogs’ and you’ll come up with any number — bootsonground.blogspot.com, justanothersoldier.com — or at least you could until a number of them were shut down by the military authorities.

Saturday

Henrietta Bredin

A natural approach to Chekhov

Joanna Lumley bears a distinct resemblance to the delectable Mrs Algernon Stitch in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, who, while still in bed of a morning, supervises the painting of a mural, fills in the crossword, offers useful advice on matters of state, attends to pressing correspondence, corrects a child’s construing of Horace and deals with a friend’s emotional and financial problems, before bowling merrily into the London traffic in ‘the latest model of mass-produced baby car, painted an invariable brilliant black’. Her modern-day equivalent tends not to run her life from bed but is capable of juggling quite as many and as varied tasks simultaneously, from filming and producing to writing and working unshowily for key charitable causes.

Andrew Lambirth

Forgotten giant

It’s always a pleasure to visit Pallant House. At the moment, it seems particularly good value: three separate exhibitions plus the permanent collection, not forgetting the restaurant and excellent bookshop. William Roberts (1895–1980) is one of those forgotten giants of British Modernism who has been crying out for reassessment, and now here’s the perfect-sized exhibition to showcase him. Meanwhile, Art for the Classroom: School Prints 1946–9 documents an inspired initiative which brought colour lithographs by leading British and European artists into the schoolroom.

Michael Tanner

Torments of love

Handel’s Orlando, apparently one of his greatest operas, is much more impressive in the first revival of Francisco Negrin’s production at the Royal Opera than it was at its first outing in 2003. Though my visual memory is most unreliable, I remember it as revolving dizzyingly, with characters whipping through door after door as the tripartite set sped round. There seemed then, too, to be far too much business going on during the da capo arias, as if Negrin didn’t trust Handel to command the audience’s attention unless they had something adventitious to watch.

Lloyd Evans

Lower the volume, please

‘How I hate!’ is the first line of Torben Betts’s new play. Not a promising start. A teenage Goth with a scowl like a squashed spider crouches in her bedroom ranting against her smugger-than-smug parents. A revolution erupts. The Goth cheers and is then raped by a mad soldier. The civil war ends and order is restored, and in the closing tableau the stupefyingly complacent parents spout bourgeois platitudes while their pregnant daughter is assaulted afresh, with their connivance, by her rapist. Clearly this is a Big Idea production which seeks to mount a blistering attack on Western values. That’s why it feels so dated. And yet there are good things here.