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Saturday

James Delingpole

Crime watch

Oh. My. God. Can it really be, like, 16 years since it was 1993? I very much fear it can and the reason the thought is so bothersome is that I remember thinking, even back then, ‘Blimey, I really am getting on a bit. Can’t do pills nearly as often as I used to. The yawning grave beckons. Etc.’ This all came back to me while watching Murderland (ITV1, Monday) in which Robbie Coltrane plays someone a bit like Fitz from Cracker — only with most of the vices (drinking, chain-smoking, gambling) removed. Coltrane has denied there’s any connection, pointing out that this new character is a detective, not a criminal psychologist, and that the new series is more multiple-viewpoint psycho-drama than police procedural.

Tiffany Jenkins

The case for the defence

The past ten years have been peculiar times for the arts. Under the Labour government pots of money were thrown at culture. But strings came with this funding, requiring art to serve political ends. While there has been cash it has been less for culture and more for schemes promoting social inclusion, community issues and urban renewal. Rather than rebel against these demands the Arts Council has been at the vanguard. As a consequence, artists needing support have had to jump through hoops asking more about their sexual identity than about the art form. This has contributed to high-profile failures, as the purpose of projects became disorientated.

Wednesday

Michael Tanner

Lovelorn masterclass

Werther; The Adventures of Mr Broucek Opera North The Truth about Love Linbury Studio Massenet’s Werther is a tricky opera, in fact may well not be susceptible of more than a production which leaves you feeling that you could easily live with its not very numerous highlights. One of its chief problems is highlighted in Gerald Larner’s incisive notes to the new Opera North production: ‘The problem with a Werther opera is that no libretto, unless it completely traduces Goethe’s original, can compensate for the obvious disadvantage that, because Charlotte is either engaged or married to Albert and is determined to give Werther no encouragement, there can be no mutual declaration of love, no full-scale duet for the two protagonists.

Lloyd Evans

No laughing matter

Comedians Lyric, Hammersmith Liberace, Live from Heaven Leicester Square Theatre They gushed, they cheered, they purred, they sighed. When a young Richard Eyre read Trevor Griffiths’s new play Comedians in 1975 he prounounced it ‘great’ on the spot. ‘Trev,’ said Rich, ‘you’re knocking on Chekhov’s door.’ Eyre’s production was picked up by an equally thrilled Peter Hall who transferred it to the National and from there it leapfrogged to Broadway. The director of this star-studded revival, Sean Holmes, read the play at 17 and he, too, was smitten. But were the crimson crushes of youth really justified?

Andrew Lambirth

Living in the moment

Frank Auerbach (born 1931) is flavour of the month. A museum exhibition of his early paintings has opened at the Courtauld (until 17 January 2010), a substantial monograph by William Feaver has just been published (Rizzoli, £100) and a commercial show of recent paintings at Marlborough Fine Art runs until 24 October. Meanwhile, the notoriously retiring and work-obsessed artist has been seen at Private Views and has even granted one or two interviews. Does this mean that Auerbach is relaxing the habits of a lifetime? Not really. He still works seven days and five evenings a week, gets up extremely early and puts in long hours in the same smallish studio he has occupied since 1954.

Interconnect

The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts

Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts is the V&A’s latest exhibition (until 17 January 2010). It sets out to explore the lives of India’s princes from the 18th century to the end of British rule in 1947. In the first room, a life-sized model elephant in all its finery — silver earrings, necklace, harness and howdah — stands ready to lead a royal procession. What else? Well, necklaces, belts and bracelets with rocks to make your eyes pop: look out for a dazzling turban ornament from the mid-18th-century.

Olivia Cole

Celebrating extremes

Robert Mapplethorpe: A Season in Hell Alison Jacques Gallery, 16-18 Berners Street, London W1, until 21 November Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1985 self-portrait with little devil’s horns is one of the most instantly recognisable self-portraits in modern photography. Short-haired and cherubically handsome, his face turns back to the camera, an inappropriately appealing daemon, complete with a ‘devil-be-damned’ look in his eye. It’s half full of wit, half haunted by an almost childlike vulnerability. It’s one of three brilliant self-portraits here in this retrospective, A Season in Hell, which takes its title from Mapplethorpe’s photographs of 1986 which he produced for a new translation of Rimbaud’s poem.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Crash, bang, wallop

The Power of Yes Lyttelton My Real War 1914–? Trafalgar Studios Here comes Hare. And he’s got the answer to the credit crunch. His energetic, well-researched and richly informative new work opens with an actor playing the writer himself (curious frown, Hush Puppies) as he sets out to discover why the markets jumped off a ledge last autumn. The result is less a play and more a commission of inquiry. Over many a lingering lunch Hare has leaned his inquisitive ear towards senior bankers, top journalists and leading economists. He then distilled their testimony into this fact-crammed pageant. The City’s major players saunter across the Lyttelton stage, their silk-lined suits softly whistling, to deliver gobbets of wisdom and insight. Gradually, the picture takes shape.

Giannandrea Poesio

Moving pictures

Dance Umbrella Cloud Gate Theatre of Taiwan, Barbican Theatre Cabane P3, University of Westminster Cloud Gate Theatre of Taiwan is not new to the UK dance scene. Yet, as stressed in an inflated, self- celebratory programme note, Wind Shadow marks a neat move away from the performance formulae seen in their previous productions. Created in 2006 by Lin Hwai-Min in collaboration with the visual artist Cai Guo-Qiang — who played a significant role in the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics — the work strives to be an example of ‘moving installation art’. As such, it comes across as a series of moving pictures that both surprise and shock the viewer with moments of incomparable lyricism and powerfully unsettling imagery.

Simon Hoggart

Ferocious fauna

Two things puzzle me about vegetarians. Whenever they come to visit us, we always provide a vegetarian dish for them. But if you go to a vegetarian’s home, no one says, ‘I know you won’t like this lentil and halloumi lasagne, so we’ve cooked you steak and chips.’ Never. As for those who don’t eat meat on moral grounds, what’s their response to those animals who eat their comrades in the struggle against oppression? And they don’t mess around with battery farming either. Life (BBC1, Monday) had some of the most powerful images of ferocious fauna that have ever appeared on our screens.

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Mixed message

Turner and the Masters Tate Britain, until 31 January 2010 Professor David Solkin, this exhibition’s curator, opens his introductory chapter in the catalogue (a substantial tome, packed with scholarly exegesis, special exhibition price £19.99 in paperback) in the following way:  The first 15 words of that quote should be emblazoned over the lintel of every art school in the land, though it would mean that the teachers therein would have to be capable of demonstrating its truth; tragically, I’m not convinced that many of them are capable of doing so.

Michael Tanner

Plazas in pain

Letters of a Love Betrayed Linbury Studio Carmen Royal Opera House Wozzeck Royal Festival Hall A hectic operatic week, three down and two (to be reviewed next week) to go, began lamentably with what I’m in danger of coming to think of as the archetypical Linbury experience. That hideous place, a kind of operatic Nibelheim under the Valhalla of the Royal Opera, has seats so cramped and uncomfortable that I can only think that their point is to ensure one stays awake, as one witnesses another première which seems destined to be also a dernière.

Deborah Ross

Bottom of the barrel

Couples Retreat 15, Nationwide Couples Retreat and, if you have an ounce of sense, so too will you. Retreat from this movie, and retreat as fast as your little legs will carry you. I didn’t actually intend to see this film this week. I intended to see Terry Gilliam’s Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, but events conspired against me, or it was the Gods, who haven’t liked me ever since I put a red T-shirt into a wash with my one good white shirt and then shook my fist at them. (It was quite a fist; it was my only serious white shirt.) I rather expected Couples Retreat to be bad, just from having seen the poster — ‘it may be paradise, but it’s no vacation’ — but this bad?

Peter Phillips

Best place to be

Someone somewhere recently asked me in a public forum whether I would prefer to be a singer, the conductor or a member of the audience at the concerts we give. He himself was of the opinion that he would rather be a singer, saying that the music we do is so complicated that only someone on the inside of it can appreciate exactly what the composer has achieved. If he’s right, the audience don’t stand a chance. I rushed to my own defence, saying that the guy out front has the best of all worlds, as one would expect if he is to control the performance. He is receiving the sound without distortion, so placed that the voices will come to him equally strongly.

Kate Chisholm

Yiddish vitality

Schmooze, schlep, schlock — all words that have such an evocative, onomatopoeic meaning and all from Yiddish, a language without a country, an army or a navy, which refuses to die even after one-third of its native speakers were annihilated by the Nazis. Schmooze, schlep, schlock — all words that have such an evocative, onomatopoeic meaning and all from Yiddish, a language without a country, an army or a navy, which refuses to die even after one-third of its native speakers were annihilated by the Nazis.

Ursula Buchan

Sinking morale

The Royal Horticultural Society is like the Church of England. It seems always to have been there, a fixed, reassuring point in a changing world. Even to those who do not belong to it, it seems a Good Thing and it is hard to imagine national life without it. Among those who know it, it inspires affection and exasperation in about equal measure and, like the C of E, it is troubled. In early September, the director-general of the RHS, Inga Grimsey, suddenly resigned and will leave next January. The resulting media attention alerted the world to the fact that the directorate was halfway through a ‘restructure’, cutting 10 per cent of salary costs, a loss equivalent to 80 full-time posts.

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Easy romp

Zombieland 15, Nationwide Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee 15, Key Cities I can’t say I care much for zombies — that is, film zombies; I’ve never met a real one — but the horror-comedy Zombieland is quite fun and does feature such a delicious cameo from Bill Murray it almost makes up for all the overlong scenes in which the zombies groan and stagger and spew black bile and haemorrhage blood and generally do what zombies do. I don’t think I even get zombies. OK, they’re the living dead, but what do they have against the living living? What have the living living ever done to them? Why do they always want to barricade them in a single room? Why do they want to eat human flesh?

Michael Tanner

Musical triumph

Tristan und Isolde Royal Opera House Tristan und Isolde is a masterpiece that can be given widely different interpretations, since even by Wagner’s standards it is permeated by ambiguities. He may have intended, as he wrote in that famous letter to Liszt, to write ‘a monument to that most beautiful of dreams’, that is, completely fulfilled love, but is that what he achieved? Whatever the answer, a performance that fails, in the first place, to leave you shattered, and in the second to make you think very hard about what you think passionate love is and whether you really want it, is a failure. Glyndebourne’s recent production left one in a kind of purple daze, mesmerised by its anodyne beauty. No one could accuse the new production at the Royal Opera of that.

Charles Spencer

Take Two

A few weeks ago I was in Chichester, reviewing a fine revival of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables and suddenly experienced a great ache of nostalgia for the period immediately before my birth. A few weeks ago I was in Chichester, reviewing a fine revival of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables and suddenly experienced a great ache of nostalgia for the period immediately before my birth. Rattigan’s play, first staged in 1954, portrays a post-second-world-war England in which emotions are essentially private, polite small talk largely prevails, and upper lips are worn stiff — in public at least. Of course, the dramatist was in many ways critical of this.

Giannandrea Poesio

Star quality | 10 October 2009

Scottish Ballet: 40th Anniversary Season Sadler’s Wells Theatre Scottish Ballet has been frequently praised for its stylistically impeccable and theatrically superb renditions of George Balanchine’s works. It is thus more than fitting that the company’s 40th-anniversary programme kicks off with Rubies, the sparkling central section of Jewels, his acclaimed 1967 triptych. Rubies, which is often performed on its own, highlights and encompasses the best of the Balanchinian choreographic aesthetic. Dazzling, jazzy ideas, representing the American culture that the Russian-born dance-maker wanted to embrace, develop rapidly from traces of the old classical tradition which encapsulate Balanchine’s reverence for his own past and for that balletic idiom he never refuted.