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Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Fizzing with charisma

Morecambe Duchess Red Donmar Peter Kay: ‘I’ve never met a person who didn’t at the very least love Eric Morecambe.’ Hello? Peter? Over here. I remember Eric and Ernie during the 1970s and they were as entertaining as a power cut. Perfunctory, passionless mother-in-law jokes. Semi-funny puns pouring out like weak tea. Nursery-rhyme repetition everywhere. The catchphrases. The trick with the paper bag. Eric slapping Ernie’s cheeks. Endless jibes about Ernie’s hairy legs and his playwriting ambitions, even though both gags were non sequiturs: we couldn’t see Ernie’s legs and we knew for sure he wasn’t a playwright because he was too busy being the country’s richest unfunny stand-up.

Saturday

Robin Holloway

Building bridges

December 2009 — the final month in the bicentennial of the great composer (obit. 1809) once dubbed by Tovey ‘Haydn the Inacccessible’. December 2009 — the final month in the bicentennial of the great composer (obit. 1809) once dubbed by Tovey ‘Haydn the Inacccessible’. No longer! His vast protean output has never been more widely available nor more highly esteemed. Father technically and spiritually to Mozart and Beethoven, revered by Brahms and (unexpectedly) by Wagner, beloved of Stravinsky, Britten and Ligeti, Haydn was something of a well-kept secret, but is now a universal possession, treasured as equal with the highest.

James Delingpole

Territorial imperative

Ever since I gave up watching TV over Christmas and New Year I have become much, much happier. The reason Yuletide TV is so depressing is that — as with those tantalising presents under the tree — it’s fraught with a level of expectation it can never possibly fulfil. You think, ‘At last: I’m free. Free to slob; free to watch without having to worry about going to bed and getting a good night’s sleep so I can be fresh for work tomorrow. So, go on, TV: entertain me!’ I’m not even sure that it’s TV’s fault. I think it’s the problem with Christmas generally. The whole season reminds me of a slightly dodgy Ecstasy pill. ‘Am I up yet?’ you keep asking yourself. ‘When’s it going to happen? When do I peak?

Kate Chisholm

Listen with mother

‘Television makes your eyes go square,’ reports Will, one of my three nephews, avid listeners all. ‘Television makes your eyes go square,’ reports Will, one of my three nephews, avid listeners all. They’ve already got the radio habit (having had, of course, absolutely no pressure from their interfering aunt). They’ve discovered for themselves that listening to Sherlock Holmes’s ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ is far more scary than watching Doctor Who. Radio, pipes up Tom, lets you paint the pictures in your head. Television just tells you ‘that’s how it’s got to be’. To get any pleasure from radio, though, you have to make an effort, focus attention, follow the plot. You have to learn how to listen.

Ursula Buchan

Talking heads | 19 December 2009

The days are short, there is no light for gardening after work, and local horticultural societies are halfway through their winter programme of illustrated talks. All over the country, gardeners are gathering, in spartan village halls and echoing church rooms, on every first Tuesday in the month to listen to a ‘speaker’. These talks are designed to entertain, enlighten and generally see gardeners through until the spring, when allotments beckon, and garden visits and flower shows can once more be organised. All towns and most large villages have a horticultural society, which is impressive in an age when people increasingly refuse to join things.

Robin Oakley

Tales from the track

For me little that is memorable, and even less that is sheer fun, has been penned about football, apart from Gary Lineker’s definition of the game as ‘Twenty-two men chasing a ball — and in the end the Germans win’. For me little that is memorable, and even less that is sheer fun, has been penned about football, apart from Gary Lineker’s definition of the game as ‘Twenty-two men chasing a ball — and in the end the Germans win’. Horseracing, though, has always attracted both purple prose and anecdotage. Sea The Stars’ winning of the 2000 Guineas, the Derby, the Coral Eclipse, the Juddmonte International, the Irish Champion and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe has made it a special year for racing books.

Monday

Andrew Lambirth

‘All must be safely gathered in’

Andrew Lambirth reflects on Stanley Spencer’s ‘Study for Joachim Among the Shepherds’ Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) is a rare figure of international standing among British 20th-century artists. As the painter and critic Timothy Hyman has observed, Spencer can be ranked alongside Munch, Bonnard, Kirchner, Beckmann and Guston for his extraordinary work exploring the relationship between the self and the world. He was a wonderfully original and inventive artist whose work has paradoxically suffered because of his unconventional private life.

Olivia Glazebrook

Film

There is one day in the year when it is acceptable for anyone, of any age, to lie on the sofa all day and for much of the night. The blinds remain legitimately lowered; the telly can stay switched on. One hand will grasp the remote control; the other might leaf through a jumbo box of After Eights. It will probably be raining; you may be feeling more than a little sick; the trousers you were given yesterday feel a size too small today, and Granny has just announced she will be staying another night. It’s Boxing Day. Traditional feelings — disappointment, torpor, lassitude — can be kept at bay as long as one remains glued to the sofa, deaf to all interruptions and with one’s gaze fixed firmly on the flickering screen.

Michael Tanner

Equivocal masterpiece

Der Rosenkavalier Royal Opera House Der Rosenkavalier is the most self-conscious of comedies, as well as being largely concerned with self-consciousness. It has two kinds of joke: one, the broad practical jokes indulged in at enormous length at Baron Ochs’s expense; the other, the sophisticated humour of youthful illusions being dashed, while others rapidly spring up to replace them. Rosenkavalier is subtle enough, just, to have counterpoises to these deflationary devices. So Ochs, though an impoverished randy aristocratic lout, also has genuine dignity, moments of thoughtfulness where the thoughts aren’t about how irresistible he is to young girls.

Deborah Ross

Dual control | 14 December 2009

Nowhere Boy 15, Nationwide from 26 December Firstly, the year in review — it was good, thanks — and now on to Nowhere Boy, the surprisingly conventional first feature-length film from visual artist Sam Taylor Wood. It is perfectly accomplished, and pleasing enough, but it’s not going to blow your socks off, even though the combination of Ms Taylor Wood and such a compelling story would give you every reason to think it might. That said, having your socks blown off is rather overrated. Or, as one man told me, ‘My socks blew off in 1976 and I’ve yet to find them. They were nice socks, too.’ So there is something to be said for not having your socks blown off, I suppose. The story?

Lloyd Evans

Christmas cracker

Sweet Charity Menier Pajama Men: The Last Stand to Reason Soho Shocking. Absolutely shocking. My state of preparedness for Sweet Charity at the Menier was so poor that we nearly had a critic-doesn’t-know-what-he’s-talking-about scandal on our hands. I’d never seen the show before. I’d missed the film version. I hadn’t the foggiest who the star, Tamzin Outhwaite, might be, although her name, with that funkily off-beat zed nestling provocatively in its midriff, had crossed my consciousness at some point. I arrived with no expectations whatever (though, of course, I’m quietly proud of the fact that musicals and soap actresses lie outside the daily scope of my intellect and its exacting preoccupations). And guess what? The show’s a blinder.

Alan Judd

Back-seat driving

Seven hundred miles now in the borrowed Bristol 410 and I’ve loved every yard of it. Seven hundred miles now in the borrowed Bristol 410 and I’ve loved every yard of it. It’s poised, tolerant, powerful and very comfortable, now that I’ve removed the sunroof windshield that was threatening to scalp me. The elegantly understated lines make you feel you’re driving your club, appreciated by those who know, unrecognised by those who don’t (fortunately it handles rather better than the club would). In fact, the handling continues to surprise, partly because the wide, old-fashioned wheel makes you more conscious of steering, while the naturally aspirated 5.2 Chrysler V8 burbles and hums with unstressed power.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Rising to Verdi’s challenge

Otello Barbican Die Zauberflöte Royal College of Music Verdi’s Otello has almost become a rarity since Domingo gave up singing the title role, so its inclusion in the LSO series of concert performances under Sir Colin Davis was most welcome, and all the more so when it was announced that, at extremely short notice, the young New Zealand tenor Simon O’Neill had taken over from the ailing Torsten Kerl. My first exposure to O’Neill was as Florestan at the Proms this year, where he electrified the proceedings with his intense and accurate singing and vocal acting. Otello demands even more than Fidelio, and he rose to all the challenges, from a quite magnificently authoritative ‘Esultate!’ onwards.

Giannandrea Poesio

Engaging conversation

Carlos Acosta Sadler’s Wells Theatre Jerome Robbins, the undisputed, though often unsung, father of modern American ballet, was one of the few dance-makers who could successfully choreograph to Bach’s music. Undaunted by the morass of cultural, historical and artistic biases that still surrounds the compositions of the baroque master, Robbins approached Bach with an intriguing mix of respect, in-depth musical understanding and modern-day wit. In his ‘Bach’ creations, the dance idiom is never a mere translation/adaptation of the music, but an ideal complement to the same, which highlights the scores’ linear complexities by responding to the music’s incessant inventiveness with a seamless outpouring of ideas.

Lloyd Evans

Slice of life

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Novello The Stefan Golaszewski Plays Bush Revolutionary republics, like the USA and Soviet Russia, never really get rid of royalty. They just appoint surrogates. America’s yearning for icons has accorded the actor James Earl Jones a rank somewhere between Richard the Lionheart and John the Baptist. The producers of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof approached him on bended knee (‘You don’t audition James Earl Jones,’ gushed one) and begged for the royal assent. Good King James was probably giggling behind his hand as he boomed out an affirmation with the famous Darth Vader rumble. I bet he was thrilled to smithereens to be offered a lead role on Broadway as he approached his 80th year. His voice is a marvel.

Deborah Ross

Less is more | 12 December 2009

Where the Wild Things Are PG, Nationwide Here is what you most need to know about this film: it isn’t a patch on the book. Usually, I wouldn’t put it like that. Indeed, as I have said before, and wouldn’t need to say again if only I could trust you had paid attention the first time, a film should stand or fall on its own merits, regardless of the source material, but I can’t seem to let it go with this one. Perhaps it’s because I’m just too close to this particular book. I grew up on Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, which was first published in 1963, as did my own son, who insisted I read it to him nightly for about a year. I didn’t mind.

Charles Spencer

Light in the dark

God, I hate this time of year. Getting up in the dark in the morning, setting off to work in the dark in the late afternoon, then spending the evening sitting in the dark in the theatre are bad enough. But then there’s the cold, angular rain, stinging my face as I sit cowering in the porch nursing a roll-up, the office on the phone wanting yet another piece to fill the vast open spaces they so much dread between Christmas and the new year, and even dear Liz, this magazine’s saintly arts editor, wanting early copy because she’s already up to her ears with the yuletide bumper issue. It’s enough to make a cat spit and a theatre critic snarl. But my role in this column is not to moan.

Peter Phillips

How early is early?

The demise of the magazine Early Music Today (it will henceforward be published as part of Rhinegold’s Classical Music) begs the question once again: what is the contemporary need for the term ‘Early Music’? The demise of the magazine Early Music Today (it will henceforward be published as part of Rhinegold’s Classical Music) begs the question once again: what is the contemporary need for the term ‘Early Music’? Recently the music which has fallen within the ‘early’ bracket has been so late (Brahms, Strauss, even Stravinsky) that my grandmother could have attended the first performances, and possibly did.

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Portrait of a working artist

Edward Bawden Bedford Gallery, Castle Lane, Bedford, until 31 January 2010 In these days when museums seem to think it acceptable to sell off the charitable gifts of past ages to feed contemporary vanities, I wonder who will be tempted to donate works of art without binding them securely in protective red tape? In the last eight years before his death, the artist and illustrator Edward Bawden (1903–89) gave a vast archive of his work to the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery in Bedford. It was, effectively, the contents of his studio, representing nearly every period of his career, and it numbers more than 3,000 items.

Kate Chisholm

Word perfect | 9 December 2009

If you haven’t spoken to anyone at all for 24 hours, not even the newsagent or supermarket assistant, it can be odd trying to find the right words, and the right voice, to make a human connection. If you haven’t spoken to anyone at all for 24 hours, not even the newsagent or supermarket assistant, it can be odd trying to find the right words, and the right voice, to make a human connection. It’s as if you can get rusty with audacious speed, and that without continual usage the habit of conversation begins to degenerate, like the muscles of a marathon runner who stops running. Radio, though, is a good way of pretending; of imagining yourself in a conversation even if there is no one else in the house.