More from Arts

Saturday

Toby Young

Regime change

It’s quite hard to enjoy Shakespeare’s history plays these days if you have any sympathy for Blair’s decision to throw in Britain’s lot with America in the Iraq war. First, Nicholas Hytner gave us a revisionist version of Henry V in which the young king was portrayed as a shallow glory-seeker willing to embark on a reckless military adventure in order to cement his historical reputation. And now Deborah Warner has directed a version of Julius Caesar in which Brutus has been cast in the Blair role, first attempting to bring about regime change through the judicious use of violence, and then gradually succumbing to the maelstrom of death and destruction he has unwittingly unleashed.

Tom Rosenthal

French connection | 30 April 2005

When I started visiting Barcelona in 1961, its museums were both thin on the ground and impoverished, and the lingua franca between the Catalans and the British was French, without which it was, if one had neither Spanish nor Catalan, hard to survive. Today the city is awash with fine, well-funded museums and, for anyone under 40, English has replaced French as the second language. So it’s good to see that the links with French culture have not been severed and that the spring has brought two major French exhibitions to this intellectually vital city. The Picasso Museum, in addition to its unparalleled collection of his early work, has a wonderful series of galleries for temporary, non-Picasso exhibitions and now has a large retrospective of Jean Hélion (1904–87).

Andrew Lambirth

In love with paint

Peter Coker died in December last year after a long illness. He had been involved in the initial choice of material for this small but representative memorial exhibition, and would I think have approved of the final result, which succeeds in bringing together work from the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s. It’s a commercial show that has been six years in the making, as the gallery’s director, Robert Travers, gradually acquired good examples of the artist’s oeuvre. The most recent find was a superb still-life, ‘Fish with Grill’ from 1954–5, which brought to the show the required gravitas to enable it to go ahead, and was inevitably among the first things to be sold. There are no late paintings here.

Simon Hoggart

Mongolian massacres

Genghis Khan (BBC1, Monday) was a remarkable 60-minute documentary. Normally, something filmed on such a massive scale would be stretched to last several hours over many weeks. I can only assume that the Mongolian extras work for much less than their British counterparts. Mongolians playing Mongolians, eh? In television terms that’s the equivalent of people selling you double-glazing by phone from Bangalore. And the battle scenes were terrific. The standard BBC technique is to have, say, half a dozen chaps on horses filmed from below so that 24 thundering hooves come to symbolise 10,000 warriors. Here we had, well, quite a lot of chaps on horses, sweeping majestically, or at least speedily, across the steppe.

Saturday

Patrick Carnegy

Puppetry of the fairy band

A chill spring day in Stratford for the RSC’s launch of its summer comedies season with a new Midsummer Night’s Dream from Gregory Doran. A production to warm the heart? Certainly, for how could any half-competent staging fail to do so, and anything directed by Doran is usually rather better than that. But where so many are constantly beating a path through the Athenian forest, it’s a task of tasks to find anything new to say. On this score he chalks up few points. On the other hand, there’s perhaps some relief that no alien concept has been imposed, no abhorrent substructure excavated, no relevance insisted upon. A startling beginning will do very well.

Andrew Lambirth

Literary connections

Fate has not dealt kindly with Sir John Everett Millais (1829–96). For those who are not enthusiasts of the Pre-Raphaelites, this founding member of the Brotherhood tends to be categorised as the one who ‘went populist’ with such all-too-memorable scenes as ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’ (now in the Tate) and the notorious Pears Soap advert ‘Bubbles’. Or, if your mnemonic centres function best through the stimulant of scandal, you may recall that it was Millais who stole Ruskin’s wife Effie (Euphemia Gray, who modelled for his justly famous painting ‘Ophelia’), and duly wed her after her marriage to the famous art critic was annulled on the grounds of non-consummation.

Alan Judd

Seduced by Bentley

While Rover sank (it was warned, twice, in this column), another car was launched, in Venice. An amphibian? No, a Bentley. Perhaps because it rarely advertises, Bentley’s car launches are like no other. Each is divided into three- to four-day segments designed for different audiences. The basis is driving and learning about the car, with an emphasis on culture and surroundings for the lifestyle journalists, on the business case for the financial press, on engineering for the hard-core motoring press and on who-knows-what? for the dealer network. It was Cape Town for the flagship Arnage T, Spain for the Continental GT coupe and, this month, the Grand Canal for the Continental Flying Spur, the four-door version of the GT.

James Delingpole

Look and learn

Much as I love the nostalgic idea of the original Ask the Family, the reality was rather different. The questions were way too hard and made you feel thick even when you weren’t (Robert Robinson’s smug avuncularity served mainly to rub salt into this wound), and the families were really freaky, the parents never having had sex since their children were conceived, and the kids being the weirdy, mushroom-cropped kind who aren’t allowed to watch TV, only practise the cello and solve abstruse mathematical problems. Perhaps this is why I didn’t hate Dick and Dom’s Ask the Family (BBC2, weekdays) nearly as much as I hoped I would.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Setting limits

While the ENO Ring was in preparation, and we were seeing semi-staged performances of the dramas at the old Coliseum and the Barbican, there were plenty of grounds for hope. With action reduced to almost a minimum, we could concentrate on the real action, which needs, I have increasingly come to feel, very little in the way of setting and movement to make its crucial points. That view is starkly opposed to contemporary dramaturgical dogma, which is that the production of dramatic works, especially those of Wagner (for assorted reasons), should contain within itself a critique of the work, just in case we get carried away by what is ideologically objectionable, or allow ourselves to wallow instead of thinking as well as experiencing.

Ruth Guilding

Child’s play

Compton Verney House has reopened for its second season, continuing its founder Sir Peter Moore’s aim of bringing art which is under-represented elsewhere in Britain to a new audience. Alongside landscape paintings by the 17th-century Neapolitan artist Salvator Rosa is a larger, thematic exhibition, Only Make-Believe, curated by Marina Warner, who brings to the task a weight of experience. Spread out through several rooms in the house, the show is more about her thoughtful intimacy with the subject than just the simple sum of its themes and exhibits. Its gurus are the child psychologists and educationalists Friedrich Froebel, Melanie Klein and Maria Montessori with their benign interrogation of the psychological and cultural aspects of child’s play.

John Spurling

The Manx factor

Bryan Kneale comes from the Isle of Man and, after winning the Rome Prize from the Royal Academy Schools, was one of the leaders of the British sculptural revolution of the 1950s and 60s. In 1970, against the advice of his friends and fellow-artists, he was the first abstract sculptor to join the Royal Academy. Many others followed, and the RA was saved for a while from its institutional fear of innovators. During the 1980s, Kneale was both head of sculpture at the Royal College of Art and professor of sculpture at the RA.

Andrew Lambirth

Hero of the counter-culture

Robert Crumb (born Philadelphia 1943) is variously hailed as a ‘virtuoso weirdo’, the ‘father of underground comics’ and ‘the Brueghel of the last half of the 20th century’. Robert Hughes is responsible for that final appellation and one can see his point, though Nicholas Garland has called this assessment ‘just silly’, and Crumb himself has refuted it in a cartoon ‘Broigul I ain’t...’ What he is, indisputably, is a draughtsman touched by genius and a no-holds-barred autobiographer of such whackiness as to require the invention of a new category. (Crumby? Crumbist? Crumbonic?

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Passion of Don José

At the Berlin Staatsoper, the evening after he conducted Parsifal Daniel Barenboim conducted Carmen, a sequence that would have had a strong appeal for Nietzsche, who advertised the Mediterranean virtues of the latter’s music over the ‘tragic grunts’ of the former. Whether Nietzsche would have approved of Barenboim’s way with Carmen is more doubtful. Though it wasn’t slow and turgid à la Bernstein, it was performed, orchestrally, in an exaggerated style. Barenboim must be, too, the most ostentatious operatic conductor since Karajan. Sitting in the stalls, one couldn’t avoid seeing his figure high above the orchestra, gesticulating melodramatically and probably unnecessarily.

Andrew Lambirth

The child in time

This is the fourth of the Holburne’s recent exhibitions devoted to 18th-century British portraiture, a series which has done much to put the Museum on the map of enlightened gallery-goers. Previous subjects have been Love’s Prospect (dealing with the marriage portrait), Pickpocketing the Rich (portrait-painting in Bath) and Every Look Speaks (portraits of David Garrick). Pictures of Innocence is a suitably contrasting subject and the first in-depth treatment of this particular aspect of child portraiture. It has been organised in partnership with Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, where you will be able to view a slightly different version of the show from 12 July to 8 October, and the whole project has been made possible by a grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.

Ursula Buchan

Seeds of change

There was a time, half a century ago, when vegetable gardening was the preserve of old boys on allotments and jobbing gardeners in spacious suburban gardens. No longer. These days, the vegetable grower is as likely to be a 30-year-old female social worker with a small urban garden and a Point of View about pesticides on supermarket carrots, or a young family who have escaped the city for the country, or a recently retired couple on an executive housing estate who want to combine flowers and vegetables in an ornamental potager. Vegetable gardening is now as much a lifestyle choice and cultural statement as it is the cultivation of a variety of (mostly) nutritious comestibles.

Michael Vestey

The Prince and the press

When you’ve seen how much vilification Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles have endured from the tabloids and the republican broadsheets over the years, you wouldn’t have been surprised to see or hear the Prince’s muttered comments about the BBC’s royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell in Klosters last week. Witchell, known inexplicably among his colleagues as the ‘poisoned carrot’, is in fact one of the more respectful of the reporters who follow the royals. But the seemingly innocuous question he threw at the three princes — how were they feeling about the forthcoming wedding — was not as bland as it first appeared.

James Delingpole

I was rubbish

Did any of you catch me being rubbish on BBC4 last week? I was one of the talking heads on a series called TV on Trial, where various critic types argued over which of the past six decades produced the best TV. My job was to be rude about the Eighties, with David Aaronovitch defending them. Aaronovitch used to be on my death list because he always comes across as such a po-faced lefty bastard, but as it turned out he was really charming and I liked him a lot. Plus, he was way, way more fluent than me. But, then, he had a much easier job. How do you plausibly argue that the decade which yielded Brideshead Revisited, The Singing Detective, Blackadder, Edge of Darkness and Countdown was TV’s darkest hour?

Laura Gascoigne

Portraits of a fantasy city

There are 13 Canalettos and 19 Guardis in our National Gallery; there are no paintings by either artist in the Rijksmuseum. The Dutch, having been painting landscape views for years, had enough of their own by the 18th century not to bother with Venice: canals were not exactly a novelty to them. So while the English went overboard for Venetian vedute, the Dutch politely ignored them. They can do so no longer, since a Venetian exhibition has opened on their doorstep. Venezia! Art from the 18th Century is the third exhibition at Hermitage Amsterdam, the State Hermitage Museum’s latest European outpost in a converted 17th-century old folks’ home on the Amstel.

Saturday

Charles Spencer

Grateful to the Dead

‘You’re not going to write about them, are you?’ said my wife contemptuously, when I announced that I was going to devote this month’s column to the Grateful Dead. ‘They’re one of the worst.’ As regular readers will know, my wife hates all pop music with a passion, but she especially dislikes the Dead because she has so often been woken by the sounds of their psychedelic classic ‘Dark Star’ playing at maximum volume at three o’clock in the morning. But even people who love rock music hate the Grateful Dead. ‘What does a Deadhead say when he’s run out of dope?’ Keith Richards of the Stones once inquired. The answer to his little riddle was ‘God, this band is shit’.

Michael Vestey

Transatlantic relations

When I spotted that the conservative American writer and wit P.J. O’Rourke was giving two 20-minute talks on Radio Four, the first on Easter Sunday, I rubbed my eyes thinking there must have been some mistake. Or maybe a printing error. How did he get past the Guardianistas at the BBC? Did he slip in the back way disguised as a delivery man? He even gained access to a microphone and spoke into it. Twice! Well, I suppose as listeners we can be tossed the odd crumb or two now and again to keep us quiet. Whether Islingtonian listeners can tolerate it we’ll have to wait to hear in the next Feedback season. O’Rourke was on fine form, too, as he reassessed transatlantic relations. When younger and living in a basement flat in Maida Vale, he admired Britain.