More from Arts

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

Erratic behaviour

Telstar 15, Key Cities Telstar is a biopic about the ‘ground breaking’ 1960s song writer and independent record producer Joe Meek, but unless you know a lot about Joe already — and, I confess, I didn’t — you’re never that clear about what ground he broke exactly. If you fancy seeing this film, I would even recommend you look up Mr Meek on Wikipedia before you go. Some people distrust the site but I don’t. As it is, it currently has me down as a journalist and a part-time lingerie model, and you know what? I am a part-time lingerie model. Generally, I don’t like to talk about it, as it always seems like boasting, but I do have a great figure.

Peter Phillips

Moving on

In the current anniversary-fest the musical world has awarded itself there is an omission which dwarfs the lot of them. This is the invention of what many people still call ‘modern music’. For it was in 1909 that Schoenberg wrote his Five Orchestral Pieces and the monodrama Erwartung. These were early atonal works which used such a fantastic variety of harmony, rhythm, and colour, and took place at such an intense emotional level, that they first justified the use of the term ‘expressionist’. Roger Fry had just coined this term, also in 1909, in order to establish a contrast with the passivity of Impressionism. The term modern music is still indelibly associated with the early experiments of Schoenberg; and it was an invention.

Saturday

Patrick Carnegy

Blood will have blood

Julius Caesar Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Romulus and Remus, at least in the flesh, aren’t usually numbered among the dramatis personae of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The famous sculpture of the she-wolf suckling Rome’s founding twins is a not unfamilar sight in modern productions. It’s also favoured by Lucy Bailey as an iconic image for launching her terrific directorial debut for the RSC. As the audience assembles, the lupine sculpture presides over two athletic young men in grubby loincloths wrestling together: at first it is playfully, then ever more violently. Following a crescendo of grunts and shrieks, the bloody corpse of Remus is left upon the stage, the lights go down and the play can begin.

Giannandrea Poesio

In praise of Diaghilev

I wish I had been at the Châtelet Theatre in Paris on the evening of 18 May 1909 for the dress rehearsal of the new Saison Russe, organised by Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, or ‘de’ Diaghilev as he liked to be called. I wish I had been at the Châtelet Theatre in Paris on the evening of 18 May 1909 for the dress rehearsal of the new Saison Russe, organised by Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, or ‘de’ Diaghilev as he liked to be called. That evening, the notable audience invited to the exclusive event were to see ballet as they had never seen it before. Gone were the pretty ladies in frilly skirts, conventional backdrops and purely ornamental choreography.

Michael Tanner

Blank canvas

Lulu Royal Opera House It’s not often that I have felt so disinclined to write a piece about the past week’s opera-going, especially when it was an occasion I had looked forward to so much: Berg’s second opera Lulu, one of the strangest works in the repertoire, but even if not a masterpiece — it’s very hard to say what it is — a work of enduring fascination. However, if you had the misfortune to encounter it for the first time in the Royal Opera’s new production by Christof Loy you would be entitled to wonder whether it was a work of any fascination at all, and not just a long-winded and perhaps unsavoury bore.

Charles Spencer

Electric guitar heaven

Like most addicts I have become accustomed to smuggling stuff into my own house. In the old days it was bottles of Scotch or wine. More recently it has been a couple of hundred quid’s worth of CDs after a binge in HMV.  The trouble with CDs is that they take up so much space. Wandering round Cargo in Wimbledon the other Saturday I noticed a splendid chest of drawers for a mere £40 that would offer safe and stylish storage for some 400 discs. It was the work of a moment to snap it up and put it in the car. It was only when I arrived home that I realised the flaw in my plan.

Kate Chisholm

Access all areas

‘Visualisation’ is the latest buzzword at BBC Radio. ‘Visualisation’ is the latest buzzword at BBC Radio. ‘Audiences,’ announces the press release, ‘will be able to watch some of their favourite radio shows being broadcast.’ (Note the use of the word ‘audiences’; we’re no longer thought of as mere listeners.) There’ll be ‘glanceable’ content, webcam streams, ‘enhanced’ online versions of staple ‘consoles’ (or rather programmes), and ‘a mobile version of the console’ (for the uninitiated, a roundup of the best bits of the programme that can be downloaded anytime, anywhere).

Simon Hoggart

Fantastical joke

‘Hi, my name is Kröd Mändoon, and I’ll be your liberator this evening!’ says the hero of Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (BBC2, Thursday) as he bursts into a dungeon. ‘Hi, my name is Kröd Mändoon, and I’ll be your liberator this evening!’ says the hero of Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (BBC2, Thursday) as he bursts into a dungeon. It’s a funny line, imposing the formulaic talk of an American waiter on to a medieval, fantastical, witches and warlocks ersatz epic of the type dreamed up by lonely schoolboys in their bedrooms. I laughed, or chuckled inwardly. But it didn’t quite work.

Ursula Buchan

Show stopper

You have probably idly wondered, as you stood in a queue for the loos at Chelsea Flower Show, why the Royal Horticultural Society stages its greatest flower show of the year in the week before the Whitsun Bank Holiday. Late May is good for irises, Oriental poppies, alliums, hardy geraniums, seed-raised verbascums, lilacs, wisteria and viburnums, but it is too late for tulips and too early for roses and most summer perennials. That is why so many of the plants seen at Chelsea have either been forced into premature growth or retarded. It becomes clear if you know that Chelsea used to be called the Great Spring Show, in the days when the RHS was mainly run by gardeners with woodland gardens on acid soils in the south and west.

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Celebrating diversity

Summer Exhibition Royal Academy, until 16 August Every year the Summer Exhibition arrives with promises of innovation and difference, every year it’s much the same. People gamely ask ‘what’s it like this year?’, and the imaginative struggle for a novel way to describe it. Yet its great strength is its unchangeability — the extraordinary (occasionally preposterous) juxtaposition of the international avant-garde, establishment figures and amateurs from the Home Counties and beyond. Nowhere else can such diversity and potential richness be found. The Academy continues to try to tame this leviathan, to modify its rules, or to dedicate a whole gallery to some lately trendy off-shoot of art such as film and video.

Lloyd Evans

Brooding Prince

Hamlet Wyndhams Arcadia Duke of York’s ‘No one can do the definitive Hamlet. It’s too big for that. But you can do an enormous amount.’ Wise words. Jude Law’s as it happens. All Hamlets fail and it’s a great tribute that Law’s fails remarkably little. His stage presence is thrilling, intense and highly athletic, and he has no trouble capturing the pace and rhythm of the verse. What he misses is any hint of humour or warmth. There’s very little ordinary likeability about the Prince. Instead we get a brooding, frustrated outsider full of scorn and bile, and with a strain of impatient mockery that hints at priggishness and even cruelty. His treatment of Ophelia is coarse and violent.

Deborah Ross

Poster hero

Looking for Eric 15, Nationwide Looking for Eric is Ken Loach’s latest film, and while one worships Ken Loach generally and his early work in particular — Cathy Come Home; Family Life; Kes; all of which will still blow your socks off today — I’m just not at all sure about this. I mean, it’s fine, and it’s good-natured enough, and it has its moments but it just seems disappointingly unoriginal; a sort of cross between The Full Monty and Play It Again, Sam leading to a finale that is so sentimental it goes beyond mawkish and may even be the full mawk. Listen, I can do the full mawk. I can take it. Didn’t I cry at the end of Marley & Me and didn’t I cry buckets? I suppose that, in this instance, I just expected something more truthful.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Musical treat

Così fan tutte English National Opera After many productions of Mozart’s bleak comedy Così fan tutte, there has been a hiatus, welcomely brought to an end by ENO, which brought the first operatic production of the great Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami from Aix-en-Provence. Denied a visa by the imbecilic British embassy in Tehran, he had his work restaged by Elaine Tyler-Hall. I have no idea what it was like originally, but it is hard to believe that it was quite as blank as what we saw at the Coliseum, which really was not a production at all, but merely costumed characters strutting around in the way they would if there was no one to tell them what to do. The staging, however, was a treat to look at.

Giannandrea Poesio

Fluid fusion

H3: Bruno Beltrão and Grupo de Rua Sadler’s Wells Theatre Regardless of the unbearable media hype surrounding the few highs and many lows of Britain’s Got Talent, I am pleased that Diversity, an exciting street dance group, won the competition. The award somehow gives public recognition to an art form that has long struggled to establish itself outside the boundaries of an urban phenomenon by entering, though not always successfully, the theatre arts arena. Within the past ten years there have been many examples of ‘theatricalised’ street dance, and a number of good performances too.

Kate Chisholm

Between the lines | 6 June 2009

I caught it by chance while stuck in traffic on the Bank Holiday weekend, but it turned out to be one of those programmes that really alters the way you think about something you’ve never questioned before in such detail — in this case, the actual construction of classic songs such as ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’, ‘Leader of the Pack’ and ‘I’m So Tired of Being Alone’.

James Delingpole

Not bowled over

‘Shh! Cricket!’ my grandfather Ken Delingpole used to say whenever the cricket came on the wireless. ‘Shh! Cricket!’ my grandfather Ken Delingpole used to say whenever the cricket came on the wireless. It was a family joke, indicative of just how boring Delingpoles all found the world’s most boring game. But then my father bred with a Price and the Prices are the exact opposite — county squash and tennis players, decent golfers, sporting nuts.

Alan Judd

Out of control

The elderly lady in the little Skoda reversed cautiously in the supermarket car park, then sharply accelerated into the car behind. Next she accelerated sharply forwards into the car adjacent to the space she had left. She repeated her reverse manoeuvre into a third car, then her forward manoeuvre — this time while trying to turn — into a fourth. Bouncing off that, she maintained forward momentum until finally halted by collision with a passing Discovery. The Discovery was mine, under temporary command of my wife who, hearing bangs and seeing people running for cover, slowed and looked round in time to see the Skoda torpedo streaking towards her port beam. Damage to the Discovery was slight — a bent rear panel and cracked bumper — to the Skoda, significant.

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Visual delights

Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur British Museum, until 23 August Part of the Indian Summer season of events sponsored by HSBC I don’t know when I last enjoyed an exhibition more. I had an idea from the publicity material what I might be seeing, but the reality of it is a thousand times lovelier. Many of us are familiar with Indian miniatures, but this exhibition consists mostly of large paintings done between the 17th and 19th centuries. Made for the northern Indian court of Jodhpur (the royal capital of Marwar), none of the 54 paintings on show has ever been seen before in Europe.

Lloyd Evans

Bon appetit

Amongst Friends Hampstead Taking Sides/Collaboration Duchess Who wrote the first ‘dinner party from hell’ drama? Shakespeare had a couple of stabs with Titus Andronicus and the banquet scene in Macbeth where Banquo’s ghost arrives to ruin a perfectly good evening. Ovid told of Procne who killed her son, Itys, and served him up in a pie to her husband Tereus. And it was Aeschylus, as I recall, who originated the genre with Prometheus Vinctus in which the main character is also the main course. The latest attempt, Amongst Friends by April De Angelis, is set in a yuppie dream-home which a tabloid hack and her ex-MP husband are keen to show off to their old chums; one’s a cancer nurse, the other an addiction counsellor with a serious addiction.

Marcus Berkmann

Loving and dying

Even music isn’t immortal. Even music isn’t immortal. For each of us, a little bit dies every day. I was in the pub with my friend Bob when on the jukebox came ‘Please Please Me’. You couldn’t ignore it: this pub operates its jukebox at full Spinal Tap volume to deter the uncommitted. ‘I love this song,’ Bob said — or, rather, screamed at the very extent of his lung capacity. And I thought, I don’t any more. In fact, almost all early Beatles, the music I grew up with, is dead to me now. I can hear nothing in it I haven’t heard before, and what I have heard before no longer incites any response.