More from Arts

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Sister act | 13 March 2010

Private Lives Vaudeville, until 1 May Party Arts, until 13 March This isn’t right. This can’t be happening. She’s over 50. Quite a bit over. In fact, she’s 53 and she’s playing the 29-year-old heroine in one of the finest comedies in the repertoire. And she’s doing it in London. And she isn’t even English. What possessed Kim Cattrall to imagine she could play Amanda in Private Lives? The answer turns out to be, supreme self-possession. From her first entrance, her starry grace communicates itself to the entire auditorium. The age question resolves itself straight away. She appears half-naked in a bathrobe. Her soft bare arms are plump and tanned and show none of the sinewed graininess of the gym or the bench press.

Patrick Carnegy

Storm still within

King Lear Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in rep until 26 August At the prospect of every fresh attempt on the summit that is King Lear, one’s heart begins to sink — the bleak, bleak vision, the convoluted subplottings of son against sibling and father, of sister against sister, the merciless length of the play. It seems only yesterday that Ian McKellen triumphed in Trevor Nunn’s Stratford staging. But here’s the RSC with a new production, this time with Greg Hicks in the title role. For him it’s the culmination of a run of major roles in which his wiry physique and nervous intensity have always been memorable. Caesar and Leontes suited him less well than Coriolanus, but it’s as Lear that he’s delivering the performance of a lifetime.

Marcus Berkmann

Buggles are best

Hooray for the one-click purchase. Reading one of the music monthlies, I saw that the Buggles’s second album from 1981, Adventures in Modern Recording, had been released on CD, digitally remastered, with ten extra tracks I clearly had to hear. A mere week or so later, the package came through the letterbox, slightly battered but still just about recognisable as a CD. Anyone who suggests that Amazon has taken away the joy of shopping simply has no soul. I did have the album, once, long ago. When you lend someone an album that you don’t much like or that is easy to replace, they always return it promptly and in good order. I’m not sure who had Adventures in Modern Recording but if they aren’t dead by now they bloody well should be.

Deborah Ross

From the Gothic to the Goth

Shutter Island 15, Nationwide The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 18, Nationwide. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island is really rather outrageous. Thunder! Lightning! Crazies! Cliff drops! Creepy scientists! Nazis! It’s a madhouse thriller that plays like a wildly cranked-up B movie which, being Scorsese, must mean he intended it to play like a wildly cranked-up B movie. I can’t imagine he set out to make a deep, dark, intricately plotted mobster movie and this came out instead. What would he have said when he saw the final cut? Would he have slapped his head and exclaimed, ‘Bloody hell, where’s my mobster movie? This is a cranked-up B movie! I’m a schmuck!’? So, no, I think we can assume this is what Scorsese was aiming for, and?

Kate Chisholm

One true voice

‘The BBC is a part of public space because the public themselves have put it there,’ suggests the BBC’s DG, Mark Thompson, at the beginning of the report which is recommending, among other things, that Radio 6 Music and the Asian Network be shut down. ‘The BBC is a part of public space because the public themselves have put it there,’ suggests the BBC’s DG, Mark Thompson, at the beginning of the report which is recommending, among other things, that Radio 6 Music and the Asian Network be shut down. The report is all about this virtual concept, ‘the public space’, and claims that it’s an ‘open and enriching experience’, and that ‘in public space, everyone’s as important and valuable as everyone else’.

Simon Hoggart

Guilty pleasures

I am, I hope, still too young to watch daytime television, but conversation can be slow in the care home where I visit my parents every week. Having something bland wittering on in the corner is a help. In the middle of the afternoon we have antique shows. Endless antiques. Just as we are soon going to run out of cooks, so that nobody will be able to have friends round if there isn’t a camera crew, so we must be getting short of antiques. They’ll have to start recycling. ‘Has this lovely piece been in your family for long?’ ‘Yes, my father bought it at a televised auction, ooh, at least five months ago…’ What most of them do is take the formula of the Antiques Roadshow and, cleverly, add real money.

Alan Judd

Mr Bond’s favourite

Bond had no need for thought. He’d seen it as a concept in Detroit and Geneva in 2006. Now that it existed, he wanted it. He spoke once more, ‘Get it.’ Then added, very quietly, ‘Please.’ Bond was right to insist. When I first saw designer Marek Reichman’s concept Rapide in Geneva, I thought it possibly the most beautiful four-door car on the planet. We weren’t allowed to touch it, let alone drive it, and if Ford still owned Aston Martin we’d probably still be waiting for it. But the marque’s new owners gave it the green light and the result is — well, possibly the most beautiful four-door car on the planet, as well as one of the fastest (188mph, 0–60 in 5.1).

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Shape shifter

Henry Moore Tate Britain, until 8 August Even some of the greatest artists go in and out of fashion, though market forces are grimly determined (in the short term) that this should not be so. Death often brings a lull in interest, or conversely a revival. An artist who has been overrated may be for a time forgotten, until someone starts the process of reassessment and perhaps a more balanced appraisal is reached. The reputation of Henry Moore (1898–1986) has had its ups and downs — he was first displaced from critical pre-eminence by his one-time assistants Anthony Caro and Phillip King and the revolution in abstract, coloured sculpture in the 1960s — but now his standing is deemed in need of revision.

Michael Tanner

Meditation on Gandhi’s life

Satyagraha English National Opera, in rep until 26 March When Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha was first put on by ENO in 2007, I found it intolerably tedious, to the point where I felt that if I didn’t leave the theatre I might start to scream. Yet I came across quite a few people, some of them serious non-trendies whose views I share over a wide range of artistic and other matters, who found it compelling, moving, thought-provoking. So I felt that I needed to go back when it was revived last week for seven performances, having been by far the most successful contemporary opera that ENO has mounted. Obviously I was dreading the occasion, obviously I hoped I would change my mind. And I did change my mind.

Deborah Ross

Taken for a ride

Alice in Wonderland PG, Nationwide Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland is kind of a joy but it is not a fully-fledged joy, hence the ‘kind of’, in case you were wondering. Mixing live action with CGI, it is sensationally gorgeous to look at — beautiful! Ravishing! Dazzling! — and it does have its wonderfully inventive moments but I was not transported. I wanted to be transported, I longed to be transported. I thought: never mind ‘eat me’, never mind ‘drink me’ just transport me, but it did not happen. I accept it may be my limitation. I never enjoyed Lewis Carroll’s Alice books as a child: a rather dull girl; a succession of weirdos; no proper narrative, and creepy, creepy, creepy.

Charles Spencer

Sleep deprivation

My word, you Spectator readers are an education, and a delightfully idiosyncratic bunch to boot. To celebrate this 100th ‘Olden but golden’ column I invited you to send in your all-time top tens, and three dozen entries have arrived so far, some from as far afield as the US and Australia. In 2002, we confined ourselves to rock and pop. This time classical music and jazz and indeed any other musical genres were actively encouraged, and favourite singles as well as albums were permitted as well. I particularly like the bloody-minded independence of Spectator readers.

Lloyd Evans

Inner beauty

Ghosts Duchess, until 15 May Off the Endz Royal Court, until 13 March Ghosts is the most Ibsenite of all Ibsen’s plays. In a sub-Arctic backwater two pairs of lovers pursue doomed romances while outside it drizzles constantly. Oswald can’t marry his mother’s serving-girl because his brain is being attacked by syphilis. Meanwhile, Pastor Manders’s ardour for Mrs Alving is smothered by his inflexible Calvinistic ideals. And outside it’s still drizzling. The external plotting of this great emotional thriller is unusually clumsy. Early on we’re told, in very specific terms, that a brand-new orphanage (made entirely of wood and not covered by buildings insurance) is being overseen by a notoriously clumsy carpenter who drinks too much.

Kate Chisholm

Focusing the mind

You can see how difficult it must be for the powers behind BBC Radio. On the one hand, the Corporation is still pumping out programmes that we could have heard 60 years ago. The list is endless but try The Archers and Desert Island Discs for starters, brought together on Sunday (Radio 4) when June Spencer, who plays Peggy Woolley, was Kirsty Young’s guest. (She’s been in the series since the very first episode 60 years ago, when the broadcasts were live and the scripts changing even while they were on air, the producer tiptoeing up to the microphone, seizing the script and cutting lines with a pencil.) Can you imagine the outcry if either of these stalwarts were bumped off the airwaves?

James Delingpole

Why us?

I have been depressed lately and Why Did You Kill My Dad? (BBC1, Monday) wasn’t what I needed at all. I have been depressed lately and Why Did You Kill My Dad? (BBC1, Monday) wasn’t what I needed at all. In it award-winning film-maker Julian Hendy interviewed the families of some of the 100 innocents who are randomly murdered each year by psychopaths. Hendy’s dad was one of them. It was all so sensitively, movingly done, and the ‘Why us?’ testimonies of the bereaved parents, wives and children were so heartbreaking that it made you want to cry. The villain of the piece was the psychiatric establishment.

Robin Oakley

Hero or zero

The refusal of Manchester City footballer Wayne Bridge to shake the hand of his former Chelsea team-mate John Terry in a dispute over the favours of a lingerie model received roughly the same attention in the media last Saturday as the outbreak of a new war in the Middle East. Racing hardly got a look-in, even on the sports pages. But the sporting moment I relished was the high five — well, actually, it was more of a low five — as a mud-spattered Paddy Brennan slipped from the saddle of Razor Royale after the Racing Post Chase and slapped his hand into the open palm of an immaculate Carl Llewellyn, business partner to trainer Nigel Twiston-Davies. That and the grins which passed between them told a whole story.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Cheapening the currency

Here come the Oscars. Even people who rarely visit the cinema can’t resist the world’s greatest awards ceremony. The collision of extremities makes it compulsive viewing. It’s a sort of morality play where the seven deadly sins, and their contrary virtues, are paraded in dumbshow. Greed, hope, vanity, despair, jubilation, pride, joy, envy and a dozen other maxed-out sentiments are let loose. Moderation is banned. Temperance, decency and any restraining impulse must take the night off so that excess and all its spiritual allies can frolic and cavort. We know what will happen. The winners, clutching the pepper pot-sized statue, will sob their gratitude to the world and claim that the gilded midget means more to them than all the money they will ever earn.

Michael Tanner

Class act | 27 February 2010

Ruddigore Opera North, touring What is wrong with me? I kept asking myself that question as I endured the two hours and 40 minutes of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore in the Grand Theatre, Leeds, while most of the audience rocked with laughter and regularly burst into delighted applause. I hadn’t originally intended to go, but the reviews were so unanimously ecstatic that I finally decided that I’d better make the effort. This show has been compared to Jonathan Miller’s famous Mikado at ENO, and that is something I see whenever I can and enjoy enormously — but the musical merits of that work apart (they are very high), Miller’s production is a brilliantly sly commentary on the piece, while in no way reducing its stature.

Giannandrea Poesio

Trial and error

Royal Ballet Triple Bill Royal Opera House The nurturing of home-grown choreographic talent has always played a central role in the history of the Royal Ballet. Undaunted by the possible ups and downs of the experimental approach, Ninette de Valois, the company’s founder, set up a unique platform for budding dance-makers. True, not everything was a success and not everything stood the test of time; but, had it not been for her risk-taking, modern-dance history would have suffered a great deal. Against the pressures and the fashionable trends of today’s ‘artistic globalisation’, which prescribes the import/export of a universally adaptable prêt à porter kind of choreography, the company has long remained faithful to the principles of its creator.

Robin Holloway

Glorious Gershwin | 27 February 2010

The prospect was so inherently unlikely — Nikolaus Harnoncourt fulfilling in the latter days of his career the dream of a lifetime conducting Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess — that I tuned in to Radio Three with low expectations, though with curiosity on high alert. The prospect was so inherently unlikely — Nikolaus Harnoncourt fulfilling in the latter days of his career the dream of a lifetime conducting Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess — that I tuned in to Radio Three with low expectations, though with curiosity on high alert. Coming to it as a doubter, potentially to mock, I was riveted at once, stayed the course and ended an enthusiast. The opera itself needed no such gyrations.

Lloyd Evans

Marital infidelity

Serenading Louie Donmar, until 27 March Measure for Measure Almeida, until 10 April Genius detectors, busy in America, want us to meet the playwright Lanford Wilson. He hasn’t made much impact here possibly because his talent is so vast it can’t be hauled across the Atlantic. His 1970s play Serenading Louie focuses on marital infidelity in the suburbs, and English audiences are entitled to make comparisons with our home-grown chroniclers of bourgeois disenchantment. Wilson doesn’t stand much chance, I’m afraid. His static, pain-strewn narrative has none of the fun or sparkle of English suburban drama. And where Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, Alan Ayckbourn and Mike Leigh could manage one good line every couple of minutes, Wilson manages one every hour.