More from Arts

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Lexical trivialities

A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky Lyric, Hammersmith, until 5 June Counting the Ways Oval House The Lyric theatre in Hammersmith has an eccentric approach to the dearth of writing talent. Unable to find a good playwright, it has commissioned three bad ones to showcase their talentlessness in a single work. One assumes that the three men were jesting when they described their collaborative method as ‘writing scenes on rolls of wallpaper and passing one pen between us’. Or maybe they were being candid. The play is flawed at every level. Narratively, the script is so dense that the drama can never achieve lift-off. Four brothers must meet and be reconciled before the fifth brother, suffering from cancer, expires.

Deborah Ross

Fun with Herzog

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans 18, Nationwide My dears, whatever else you are doing this week you must set aside time to see this film, which is lunatic but also extraordinary and riveting. It’s directed by Werner Herzog and stars Nicolas Cage and if it is of a known genre, it is not a genre known to me. Is it a police procedural? A mystery thriller? A dark comedy? It doesn’t look or sound or behave like any other movie. It’s out on its own, and it’s wild and, if it is messy, it is always exhilaratingly messy. I am no Herzog expert — except on bank holidays, weather permitting — but I’ve always felt that many of his previous, fictional films haven’t been that interested in communicating with an audience.

Simon Hoggart

Emotional ties

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. There is so much demand that the past is constantly creeping nearer to the present. The BBC is running an Eighties season in which it celebrates events that seem pretty close to most of us. Soon it’ll be looking back, misty-eyed, on early 2010, distant days when Lady Gaga was top of the ‘hit parade’, Gordon Brown was prime minister and you could get a pint for £3.75. This week they showed Worried about the Boy on BBC2 (Sunday) on the early life of Boy George. This was an intriguing programme; neither an old-fashioned biopic (‘Hey, tell you something, that kid can sing!’) nor a rags-to-rags story of a star descending into a heroin hell.

Kate Chisholm

Vote of confidence

I might have to eat my hat, having declared not so long ago that BBC 6 Music would not be much missed if it were cut from the schedules. Recent audience figures from Rajar (Radio Joint Audience Research) have revealed a huge jump in listeners in fewer than three months from just over 600,000 to one million and rising. It’s an astonishing vote of confidence for the station, not to say a convincing majority, won by the ardent campaigning of its DJs and followers, including our own Marcus Berkmann and a cohort of Spectator bloggers. A coalition with Five Extra or even One Extra should not now be necessary. Coincidentally, the station’s most celebrated DJ, Jarvis Cocker, in the same week won a coveted Sony Award as the Rising Star of the radio world.

Ursula Buchan

Chelsea challenge

As you make your sandwiches and get out your comfortable shoes ready for a day at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show next week (24–29 May), do spare a thought for the 600 exhibitors of show gardens, plants, floral arrangements, educational exhibits and sundries. As you make your sandwiches and get out your comfortable shoes ready for a day at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show next week (24–29 May), do spare a thought for the 600 exhibitors of show gardens, plants, floral arrangements, educational exhibits and sundries. Theirs is not an especially happy lot.

Saturday

Dan Llywelyn-Hall

Figuring it out

Being a figurative painter today is probably no more challenging or rewarding than it has ever been. When immersed in the business of putting paint on a surface you are faced with the same problems: colour scheme, composition, gesture and the task of communicating the idea. Although it can help in finding the right audience for my work, I am slightly uncomfortable with being typecast as a figurative painter — i.e., someone who makes paintings with obvious references to the real world — principally because of the connotations: the idea that figuration means accurate photographic representation. I don’t hold with that reverence for accuracy; there has to be room for the artist’s interpretation.

Roderick Conway-Morris

Caravaggio the confessor

Caravaggio’s paintings were inextricably bound up with his life and provide a virtual narrative of his turbulent development, a story fraught with ambiguities and alternative readings. Caravaggio’s paintings were inextricably bound up with his life and provide a virtual narrative of his turbulent development, a story fraught with ambiguities and alternative readings. This almost confessional aspect of his works, along with the immediacy and extraordinary power of their emotional impact, have surely contributed to his current popularity. His documented career spanned only about 15 years, ending with his lonely death on the seacoast at Porto Ercole on 18 July 1610.

Harry Mount

Classic treasure

The Greek and Roman Collections Sculpture Promenade 2010 Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 28 January 2011 Virgil was wrong — don’t be afraid of Greeks bearing gifts, particularly if you’re a British regional museum. While our government has cut its grant to the Fitzwilliam by two per cent, Greek zillionaires have stepped admirably into the breach to subsidise the renovation of Cambridge’s heart-stopping Greek and Roman gallery, untouched since the Sixties. The Greek Ministry of Culture has chipped in, too; it may want the Elgin Marbles back but it’s happy to pay for Cambridge’s classical treasures to stay put, even while the Greek economy is on the skids. Its prized euros have been well spent.

John McEwen

Scottish clash

Highlands and Islands: Paintings and Poems Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, W1, until 5 June Pictures are usually exhibited with closed-shop segregation from the other arts, so it is a joy to find the bounds broken by this exuberant celebration of one of the oldest and most beautiful places on earth. The show announces the publication of Highlands and Islands (Eland, £8.99), a poetry anthology (mostly 20th-century, not all by Scots) from Beccan mac Luigdech of Rum (died 677) to the present, selected and annotated by Mary Miers, the architectural historian and authority on Highland and Island culture. Her family home is on South Uist, so she brings a native passion to her subject.

Michael Tanner

Elegant evening

Juan Diego Flórez Barbican It was an ideal way to spend the evening after Polling Day: a relaxed recital, undemanding and not too long, by one of the most individual of present-day singers. At the same time there was an element of risk: Juan Diego Flórez, the young Peruvian who created a stir singing the comparatively small role of Rodrigo in Rossini’s Otello at Covent Garden, and has since achieved enormous popularity there in bel canto roles, performed a series of songs and arias from the 18th and 19th centuries, with only one solo from his accompanist Vincenzo Scalera. The risk was in exposing the limitations of his voice and of his stage personality.

Deborah Ross

Into the woods

Robin Hood 12A, Nationwide Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood is ‘the untold story of the man behind the legend’, and if it had remained untold I do not think it would have been a tragedy. At nearly two and a half hours it is horribly long. (If they ever ask me to give a talk at a film school, the first thing I would say to the students is: kids, if you can’t tell a story in 90 minutes, go open a kebab shop.) The dialogue is often mumbled and unfathomable, which may be in its favour, but how would I know? It is serious to a fault. Russell Crowe, as Robin, lacks warmth and charisma and wit but at least makes up for it with...nope, nothing.

Lloyd Evans

Harmless fun

Dirty White Boy: Tales of Soho Trafalgar Studio 2, until 22 May Holding the Man Trafalgar Studio 1, until 3 July Blogs and blogging, bloggers and bloggery. What’s it all about? At first sight blogomania looks like an entirely new literary form. A second glance reveals that it’s the oldest genre of the lot: oral history. A few years back, Clayton Littlewood opened a menswear shop in Soho and when business was slow he amused himself by writing an internet journal about the loafers and oddballs who popped in for a cigarette and a moan. Blog became book. Book became play. The material is rather like the novelty jockstraps Littlewood sells to passing woofters: it’s harmless fun and there’s not much of it. The characters preen and mince in predictable fashion.

Giannandrea Poesio

Contemporary crackers

Triple Bill Royal Opera House, last perf. 15 May There was a time when the thrill of a ballet première could be sensed the moment you entered the theatre. Today, the disillusioned public, tired of the high percentage of choreographic garbage it is frequently subjected to, takes little or no notice. It’s a pity, for I think that Liam Scarlett’s Asphodel Meadows deserved a buzzier atmosphere than the one that greeted its opening last week — even though there were a good number of ovations and calls at the end. Set to Poulenc’s bubbly Concerto in D minor for two pianos and orchestra, the new ballet is a visually enticing example of outstanding choreographic composition, in which the classical idiom is cogently manipulated, though never betrayed.

Kate Chisholm

Word power

It’s like entering another country, listening in to the BBC’s World Service, and such a relief to escape for a while the interminable chattering about what’s going to happen in Westminster. It’s like entering another country, listening in to the BBC’s World Service, and such a relief to escape for a while the interminable chattering about what’s going to happen in Westminster. On the half-hourly news bulletins, the Eurozone, elections in the Philippines, a mass grave in Serbia take the lead, while our very own British muddle almost disappears. On The Strand this week, the daily arts programme, Harriet Gilbert introduced us to the new Writer in Residence at Bush House, the World Service’s centre of operations in the heart of London.

James Delingpole

Tales of the unexpected | 15 May 2010

The closest I’ve come to seeing a ghost was a few months ago when we went to stay in a haunted house. The closest I’ve come to seeing a ghost was a few months ago when we went to stay in a haunted house. We had a deeply uncomfortable night during which it was cold and hard to sleep, and in the small hours my wife was awoken by a mysterious pressure on her chest, almost as if she was suffocating, and which may have been the tortured spirit of whoever it was who had died horribly there or which might have been the heavy quilt. Dunno. Couldn’t say. I’m itching to have a 100 per cent, cast-iron ‘Yes I saw a ghost and it was definitely a ghost’ experience, but this wasn’t it. Otherwise, this intro would have been more exciting.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Out of time

Aida Royal Opera House, in rep until 16 May Powder Her Face Linbury Studio, in rep until 12 May In the programme for the Royal Opera’s new production of Aida, George Hall tells us that ‘the total number of complete or substantially complete recordings of Aida, made either live or in the studio, currently stands at over 250’, a statistic that shook me, hardened discomaniac as I am. There can’t be more than one or two other operas which achieve such a tally. What adds to my surprise is that Aida is so far from being Verdi’s finest opera, and that it does urgently need seeing as well as hearing.

Marcus Berkmann

Air head

As fashions change in music, so does the vocabulary. There are no groups any more, only bands. Even boy bands call themselves bands, although they don’t play any instruments. Come to think of it, are there boy bands any more? Take That look like newly retired footballers. When I started this column a thousand years ago, I wanted it called ‘pop’ music rather than the then-standard ‘rock’: a prescient move, it turns out, as ‘rock’ now sounds hopelessly sweaty and arthritic. In dance music the terms change so quickly that you haven’t even found out what they mean before they have gone, which at least saves you the bother of finding them out in the first place. One thing I do know, though: no one uses the word ‘chillout’ any more.

Andrew Lambirth

A world apart

John Tunnard: Inner Space to Outer Space until 6 June St Ives and Beyond until 31 May Pallant House Gallery, Chichester John Tunnard (1900–71) is one of that shamefully extensive body of distinguished 20th-century British artists whose work is largely unfamiliar today. For reasons best known to itself, the Tate doesn’t see it as its duty to bring such artists before the public for reassessment, so the job is left to others. Thankfully, there are smaller museums in this country with the necessary initiative and interest, notably Pallant House in Chichester, currently mounting the first museum show of Tunnard in more than 30 years.

Deborah Ross

Damp squib | 8 May 2010

Four Lions 15, Nationwide Four Lions is Chris Morris’s comedy — comedy of terrors? — about a group of home-grown Muslim suicide bombers, an idea so thrillingly audacious that, when I first read about it, I thought, as you probably did: where is Mr Morris going to hide? In Salman Rushdie’s sock drawer? But while thrilling and audacious on paper, the film itself never properly gets going in any truly risky or satirical way, which is fair enough — what if Rushdie’s sock drawer were full, and Mr Morris had to hide in Rushdie’s pants drawer; would you like to hide out among Mr Rushdie’s pants? — but it feels like a missed opportunity all the same. Morris is an incendiary talent.

Lloyd Evans

Tangled threads

Women Beware Women Olivier, in rep until 4 July Hair Gielgud, booking until January 2011 Women Beware Women deserves a subtitle: spectators beware seldom revived classics. Thomas Middleton’s 1622 play is set in the duke’s court at Florence, where greed, lust, incest and the hunger for power are running rampant. Middleton is much admired, little adored. He’s one of those dramatists who sends actors, directors and literary professors into rhapsodies but who doesn’t attend to the basics of entertainment. There’s no central character in this play just a grand human theme, corruptibility. He wraps up the script in great cobwebby entanglements of interrelated storylines.