More from Arts

Saturday

James Delingpole

Bottling out

Quite the most upsetting thing I saw on TV all week was Bob Geldof on the Jonathan Ross show (Friday), talking about all the dead Africans who are found washed up on the shores of Lampedusa, between Libya and Sicily. So many, he said, that the mayor of Lampedusa complained that he had ‘literally’ no room anywhere left to bury them. Now, obviously, Africans dying en masse is a bad thing. But I’m afraid what upset me far, far more was the fact that Ross allowed Geldof to get away with this lachrymose homily (which got a huge cheer from the audience, unfortunately) on a show normally characterised by its flipness, brazenness and irreverence. ‘Yeah, yeah, St Bob, save that guff for Parky,’ Ross might have said had he been on form.

Michael Vestey

Force for change

It was something of a shock to hear the first episode this week of Radio Four’s adaptation of BBC television’s popular 1950s series Dixon of Dock Green (Wednesday). Were policemen ever like the bluff, wise, shrewd and avuncular constable George Dixon? As a child watching the series, I thought they were, and we expected them all to bend their knees and say, ‘Evenin’ all.’ Audiences also believed it, as the series, written by Ted, later Lord, Willis, ran for 21 years. By the time Jack Warner, who played Dixon, retired, he was 80 and hardly looking like a police constable, let alone being able to bend the knees. Even if Dixons really did exist, they certainly don’t today.

Mark Glazebrook

Singular dualism

Mark Glazebrook applauds Gilbert & George’s latest work at the Venice Biennale When I was learning some art history by teaching it, at Maidstone College of Art some 40 years ago, there was a student who invariably raised his hand after each lecture, no matter what the subject or period. ‘Excuse me, sir, but what is art?’ he used to ask. I appealed to his common sense, but to no avail. I referred him to the Oxford English Dictionary, which leads with ‘skill as a result of knowledge and practice’, but without success. ‘Try thinking of it as what is produced by those who are called artists at any given moment in history,’ I hazarded, but this did not satisfy him either.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Wasted talent

A collaboration between Jean Cocteau and Philip Glass, even though it necessarily had to be posthumous, sounds like a bad idea, and so it proved to be in an admirable production by the Royal Opera of Orphée at the Linbury Studio. This two-act opera played continuously for 100 minutes, so there was no escape. I think it is the only work of Glass’s that I have sat the whole way through, and I don’t intend to repeat the experience. During Glass’s operatic heyday — I take it that has now passed — I went to a couple of his operas at the Coliseum, but left relatively early on in each of them, convinced that there would be only more of the same. It seemed to me to begin with that Orphée was surprisingly charming, if at the same time irritatingly fey.

Lloyd Evans

Bumping along

Hard to know where to start with On the Shore of the Wide World. The title, maybe: a sweet, rambling, lyrical phrase made up of vacuous and seductive borrowings. Like the show. We open with Susan, played by Susannah Harker, waddling on stage, apparently up the duff. Her aggrandising tum operates as a sort of clock during the action. At two o’bump she is flirting with her builder, Peter. By five o’bump one of Peter’s sons has left home. By eight o’bump Susan seems on the brink of beginning an affair with him. But at nine o’bump the prodigal returns, Peter makes it up with his wife and the family gathers for a big cosy hug and a nice bag of chips. That’s about it.

Andrew Lambirth

Crowd control

‘Times have changed,’ I was told by one disgruntled Academician. Once the members were guaranteed to have their work hung ‘on the line’ (i.e., in pride of place at eye-level), and non-members would get the remaining positions if they were lucky. This year John Hoyland’s large paintings have been ‘skied’, and one of Craigie Aitchison’s screenprints (he refuses to send in paintings because the summer show is such a ragbag) has been hung ‘on the floor’. Jeffery Camp has declined to show anything at all because he’s fed up with his pictures being hung too high to be properly seen.

Simon Hoggart

Picture perfect

There are weeks when I even feel privileged to be a television critic. You’re vaguely aware that out there somewhere people are watching Celebrity Love Island (though not very many), those dreary Saturday-night dancing contests, and Your 100 Favourite Embarrassing TV Animal Moments on Channel 4. Then along comes a clutch of shows and you realise that there are still a few people in the industry who care about making good television. You want to find out where they live, and go round to give them a great big hug and a box of Black Magic. For example, I expected David Dim-bleby’s A Picture of Britain (BBC1, Sunday) to be annoyingly whimsical — beautiful scenery spoiled by having David Dimbleby stand in front of it. I was wrong.

Marcus Berkmann

Station to be cherished

Like every red-blooded male, I do like a gadget, and the latest pointless item of electrical flummery to adorn our absurdly small flat is a digital radio. What a wonderful machine it is. The excellence of the sound quality, the ease of use, and the fact that Radio Two is no longer blotted out by some teenage pirate halfwit broadcasting grimecore out of his bedroom to an audience of eight (all of them actually trying to find Radio Two on the dial) have all justified the purchase, and I now find myself listening to music radio more than I have done for years. Terry Wogan, Ken Bruce, Jeremy Vine, Steve Wright and Johnnie Walker: it’s a surprisingly varied menu, although ennui does creep in when the new Coldplay single has been played one time too many.

Alan Powers

Draughtsman of genius

C. R. Cockerell RA (1788–1863) The Professor’s Dream is the title of a small exhibition (until 25 September) in the Tennant Room at the Royal Academy, a relatively new space that links with the John Madejski Fine Rooms, formerly the piano nobile of old Burlington House. Who was this professor, and what was his dream? For an architect of extraordinary ability, Cockerell seems destined to be overlooked, while some of his contemporaries, including Soane and Pugin, have entered the consciousness of the art-loving public. He was a designer and draughtsman of genius, the finest classical architect to work in the Victorian period.

Saturday

Toby Young

Pleasures denied

Well, it wasn’t quite the theatrical event of the year I was expecting. Theatre of Blood is an adaptation of the 1973 cult film in which a disgruntled actor murders a group of drama critics and I was hoping that members of the current crop, like the Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh, would be instantly recognisable. That way, I could watch them squirm in their seats as their proxies on stage met with a succession of gruesome deaths. Alas, there are no such low pleasures to be had. Funnily enough, the only person on stage who reminded me of a critic was Jim Broadbent, who plays the disgruntled actor Edward Lionheart. As he lumbered around like a wounded bear, nursing his injured pride, I instantly thought of Sheridan Morley.

Michael Tanner

Rossini subdued

Glyndebourne began in what is now the traditional manner: high winds and driving rain. This year there was the further discouragement of being kept out of the theatre until 15 minutes after the performance should have begun, which seemed wantonly unprofessional. Then the overture to Rossini’s La Cenerentola began, and we were in whatever kind of paradise it is — a decidedly equivocal one — that Rossini provides. Vladimir Jurowski conducted with sovereign skill throughout, the rhythms gloriously crisp, the actual sounds of the piece often disconcertingly modern, every witty comment from the orchestra pointed but never overstressed.

Andrew Lambirth

‘How various he is’

The first question: why isn’t this Reynolds show at the Royal Academy, of which Sir Joshua was so famously the founding father? The short answer is that the RA mounted its own Reynolds exhibition nearly 20 years ago, in 1986, and thankfully doesn’t hold the monopoly. It’s certainly time for another in-depth look at him, and the Tate has never shown him solo. The second question is more troubling: what on earth is the Tate playing at? The press release has this to say: ‘He was a brilliant portraitist but also an impresario, a skilled networker, and a master of spin.’ Is this supposed to be a commendation? Does it not occur to the management team of Tate Incorporated that such a description can only demean Reynolds?

James Delingpole

Glimmer of hope

To be honest, I haven’t been watching an awful lot of TV lately. It gets in the way of bedtime reading and an early night. You think you’re safe watching a programme at 9 p.m., which is when all the best ones are on, but that means you can’t start your pre-bed countdown (lights; cat; front and back doors; nocturnal slug-/snail-killing session; dishwasher; bath; teeth; floss; four-year-old-daughter-weeing; semi-supine-lying-down-exercise-because-your-back’s-knackered; lost-book-finding; herbal-sleeping-pill-taking, etc.) till 10 p.m. at the earliest, which means lights out not much before quarter to midnight. Which, if you’re planning on getting up for your 6.30 a.m. swim, isn’t ideal. Or am I getting old?

Saturday

Michael Tanner

The more the better

It seems a strange way to celebrate the centenary of Michael Tippett’s birth, as many people have remarked, to have multiple productions of his third opera The Knot Garden, while neglecting the more approachable first two, though the Royal Opera will be mounting The Midsummer Marriage next season. Yet for those who have been to each of the productions of The Knot Garden, the first by Scottish Opera, the second by Music Theatre Wales, and now the third, a one-night ‘concert staging’ at the Barbican, all of them excellent in quite different ways, the work is likely to have grown in stature, and I for one would welcome the chance to see it several times more in the near future.

Tom Rosenthal

Serious wit

Visiting this large (172 works) retrospective for Max Ernst (1891–1976) at the Metropolitan was in a way a sign of the times.

Andrew Lambirth

Outstanding trio

George Rowlett’s new paintings have wonderfully tousled, wind-rucked surfaces, the paint stirred and whipped up in moving emulation of the effects of the elements on water and landscape — his principal subjects. He paints the Thames and the seashore of east Kent; he also records the passage of the seasons on the landscape around Deal where he has a studio. In his latest solo exhibition, the groundfloor gallery of Art Space is dominated by a large and splendid painting called ‘Ramsgate from the Tidal Flats, Pegwell Bay, January’.

Simon Hoggart

Buffeted by unkind fates

The most affecting programme of the week was Lost in La Mancha, a film shown as part of the Storyville series on BBC 2 (Sunday). It was about Terry Gilliam, who used to do the cartoons for Monty Python and who now has a reputation for being a ‘maverick’ director. This means that sometimes he works outside the Hollywood system successfully (Brazil) and sometimes disastrously (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen). He often refers to the catastrophe of Munchausen. We all have events that define our sense of ourselves; how awful it must be when the central incident in your life was a devastating failure. But Gilliam can never do anything the easy way. He wanted to make a film of Don Quixote but he couldn’t let even this huge story speak for itself.

Russell Chamberlain

Sicilian treasure

Throughout a newly affluent Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and under the spur of a technological revolution, people — country people, in particular — began to throw out their artefacts of wood and metal and natural fabric in favour of the exciting new plastic that never wore out and rarely needed cleaning. Newly-weds could have furnished their homes for a pittance from what, in Britain, were known as ‘junk shops’ — if they could face the embarrassment of living with somebody else’s grandmother’s chaise-longue or somebody else’s grandfather’s armchair. Horse and cart gave way to the internal-combustion engine. Children’s table games gathered dust as the family clustered round the television screen.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Power play

The distinction between operas and oratorios in Handel’s output is to a large degree an academic affair, depending on such contingencies as whether a work could be staged at a certain point in the ecclesiastical calendar. Glyndebourne showed that Theodora, an oratorio, could be staged with spectacular success, thanks to Peter Sellars’s intermittent genius. A couple of years ago, Welsh National Opera mounted Jephtha, Theodora’s immediate successor, to great acclaim, and that production, by Katie Mitchell, has now reached the Coliseum. If it hasn’t been changed much, I am at a loss to understand why it made such a strong impression in Wales, for it seems to be fundamentally and pervasively flawed in both conception and execution.

Toby Young

Miscast playboy

I walked into The Philadelphia Story with a real spring in my step. Admittedly, I’d never seen this play before, but how bad could it be given that the film — surely one of the two or three greatest romantic comedies ever to come out of Hollywood — was so closely based on Philip Barry’s 1939 hit? With Kevin Spacey in the Cary Grant role, Jennifer Ehle playing Tracy Lord and Broadway veteran Jerry Zaks at the helm, it couldn’t fail, could it? Alas, what I’d expected to be a long, tall glass of vintage champagne turned out to be vin ordinaire. The play is much more of an ensemble piece than the film and requires a degree of integration among the cast that the performers in this production don’t come close to achieving.