More from Arts

Wednesday

Mary Wakefield

‘I decided to give it a go’

It’s a little awkward, standing nose to nose with strangers. Here, inside a lift the size of a train loo, are two young actresses, a PR man, one actor on the brink of proper stardom (Rory Kinnear) and me, all inching down through the body of the bustling, gossipy National Theatre. We’ve been silent for two floors and there’s a hint of desperation in the air, so Rory, being a pro, steps into the breach. ‘Did you hear about the reading they sent me to last week?’ he asks. PR man says no. ‘I was told to bring along my favourite book to read a chapter to an audience, but when I got there all I could see were children. There was literally no one over ten. And as I waited for the kids to leave, I gradually realised that this was my audience.

Andrew Lambirth

High spirits

‘The Roundhouse of International Spirits’: Arp, Benazzi, Bissier, Nicholson, Richter, Tobey, Valenti in the Ticino Kettle’s Yard, Castle Street, Cambridge, until 15 March ‘I turned it into a palace’: Sir Sydney Cockerell and the Fitzwilliam Museum Fitzwilliam Museum, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, until 17 March The Ticino is the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland, home to Lakes Lugano and Maggiore. In the early 1960s, it played host to a number of artists who were drawn by its natural beauty and the presence of other artists and intellectuals. It is the focus and reason for this immensely enjoyable exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, which is well worth making a trip through the snow to see.

Lloyd Evans

Indefinable charm

Enjoy Gielgud Entertaining Mr Sloane Trafalgar Studio A View from the Bridge Duke of York’s How does he get away with it? The main target of Alan Bennett’s 1980 comedy Enjoy is disability. Ageing Connie has pre-senile dementia and her husband Wilf is partially paralysed and prone to blackouts. Their condemned terraced house is about to be flattened by their progressive council who’ve sent in a sociologist to record the slum-dwellers’ behaviour for posterity. Shaken from their habitual indolence, Connie and Wilf blunder about the house bickering ignorantly while the mute observer takes notes.

Michael Tanner

Romantic squalor

La Bohème English National Opera The Demon Barbican Of all the most popular operas of Puccini, La Bohème is the one that has attracted least critical fire, and that, even during the long period when highbrows were required to despise him, was exempted from the general interdict. Even though the heroine dies a harrowing death, at least it is from natural causes, she is surrounded by people who love her, and her brief happiness earlier in the opera is set to the most gorgeous, and two of the lengthiest, arias that Puccini ever wrote. So the element of sadism that is so disturbing in several of the other operas is wholly absent here, and for all the cold and hunger and illness the drama and the music conjure a prelapsarian world.

Deborah Ross

Love, actually

Vicky Cristina Barcelona 12A, Nationwide In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen’s latest film, a character asks in an opening, theme-setting scene: ‘Why is love so hard to define?’ which is daft, really, because as anyone who knows anything about cinema knows and has known since 1970: love means never having to say you’re sorry. What, did Ali MacGraw die for nothing? But here is Woody, and here is all his existential despair and, actually, it’s OK. This is a slight film, a minor Allen film, a bit of a footnote, but it’s warm and engaging and isn’t Matchpoint, Scoop or Cassandra’s Dream, which has to be a mercy.

Saturday

Giannandrea Poesio

Keep it cool

Triple Bill Royal Ballet, Royal Opera House ‘Saucy’ and ‘funky’ are not terms one would normally expect to hear in relation to a ballet performance. Nor is the irritatingly ubiquitous ‘cool’, which is what my young(er) date uttered last Saturday at the end of the Royal Ballet’s triple bill. Yet they all suit perfectly well a programme that edges provocatively on the borders of dance-theatre and postmodern dance, and stands out for being highly entertaining as well as refreshingly amusing. Indeed, a baritone in drag, shouting Spaniards, sleazy motels and bars and a kind of butch, cigar-smoking Carmen might not be everyone’s idea of ballet.

Simon Hoggart

Setting the tone | 7 February 2009

Nationwide tribute (BBC 4, Thursday); Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares USA (Channel 4); Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life (BBC1, Sunday) Nationwide began 40 years ago, and on Thursday BBC4 showed a tribute. The show ran nightly up to 1983, and was always the cheekie chappie of BBC programming. In the early 1980s I did a series of jokey sketches for them from the party conferences, and we ran an item about Denis Thatcher signing autographs for a disabled charity. ‘Good old Denis,’ I said, ‘helping legless people everywhere.’ That would be far too bland for Mock the Week or HIGNFY now, but back then we had a long discussion which ended with the line being broadcast.

Kate Chisholm

Front man

At the cinema the other night to see Frost/Nixon, at least five minutes of the commercial break were devoted to selling Radio Four. It was such an odd experience. Nothing to watch, just a blank screen, with Paul Merton and co. telling a few jokes in Dolby sense surround. But we’d bought tickets to watch something on screen, not tune into something aural. And although Merton is the sharpest wit on the station, I’ve never thought that stand-up works on radio. You need to be there, on the spot, with a drink in your hand to really get the joke. In the dark, echoey cinema the disembodied voices were lost amid the crackle of popcorn and clicking of fingernails on keypads.

Alan Judd

Get things moving

With Ford posting losses of over $10 billion, Honda shutting its Swindon factory until June and fields full of unsold cars, we might be excused for thinking that doom and gloom is here to stay. But we shouldn’t, and we can start changing it now. Probably you’re not thinking of buying a new car today, but what could change your mind? Price. If Ford or Honda were to offer 50 per cent reductions on cars bought in February, more of us would dare to spend. And if they offered 0 per cent finance for the same period (like Citroën and Toyota, on selected models), that would help. Most people, after all, are still employed and will remain so, particularly those in our huge public sector.

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Open your eyes

Palladio: His Life and Legacy Royal Academy, until 13 April In a truly civilised society, a basic understanding and appreciation of architecture would be taught in schools. After all, most of us spend a large portion of our lives in buildings. Yet you only have to look around you to see that architecture is dishonoured and despised in England. How have we come to this? We have a good share of fine buildings scattered about the land, and even poor desperate built-upon London retains quite a few architectural marvels. Why then are we prepared to accept almost without comment acres of disfiguring ugliness? I refuse to believe that the English have no visual sense — though this is often said of our triumphantly literary nation.

Michael Tanner

City of dreams

Die tote Stadt Royal Opera House The Queen of Spades Barbican At last, after 88 years, Erich Korngold’s almost impressive opera Die tote Stadt has reached the UK in a handsome production, and in every respect the Royal Opera does it proud. If it isn’t quite a major work that’s because it vertiginously occupies a tiny gap between being incredibly derivative from the Strauss of Ariadne auf Naxos, and the sheer sickening over-ripeness and pretentiousness of Korngold’s next operatic effort Das Wunder der Heliane.

Lloyd Evans

Caledonian whimsy

Be Near Me Donmar Complicit Old Vic Here’s the odd thing about the Donmar, the country’s pre-eminent theatrical power-house. Its productions are nearly always stunning and rarely (very rarely) atrocious. They don’t do so-so. But here we have it, an OK sort of show done with tremendous affection and commitment but with numerous elementary flaws. Be Near Me, adapted by Ian McDiarmid from the novel by Andrew O’Hagan, passes the first test of art. It has integrity and sincerity. Everyone involved in the production clearly gave it their best shot. So what’s wrong? Well, the storyline advances with all the pace and vigour of a snail having a heart attack.

Deborah Ross

Still stood time

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button 12A, Nationwide The most curious thing about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is that it could receive 13 Oscar nominations when it is such tedious schmaltz, and not just any tedious schmaltz. This is the worst kind of tedious schmaltz; the kind that doesn’t even have the decency or good manners to go on for only 90 minutes or so. This tedious schmaltz is 165 minutes. This tedious schmaltz should have been taken outside and given a good talking to within the first five minutes. (Just pack it in, will you?) The story, here, is all to do with time not behaving as it’s supposed to and I’m telling you, an hour in you are going to think time has actually stopped. I know I did.

Saturday

Robin Holloway

Journey with Beethoven

Surprisingly (for it seems so against the odds) these have been good — even great — times for that apparently most elitist medium, the string quartet. Surprisingly (for it seems so against the odds) these have been good — even great — times for that apparently most elitist medium, the string quartet. Longer-established groups have flourished and matured alongside the emergence of plentiful younger ones, sometimes of outstanding calibre. The inexhaustible extent of this incomparable repertoire has been, and continues to be, marvellously served by its current exponents. Among whom the Endellion, just embarking on their 30th anniversary season, are not least.

Deborah Ross

Ordinary people

Revolutionary Road 15, Nationwide Revolutionary Road is Sam Mendes’s adaptation of the celebrated 1961 novel by Richard Yates and it may be too faithful to the book — big chunks of dialogue have been directly lifted — although, on the other hand, if it were less faithful then everyone would say it isn’t faithful enough, which proves what I would have said all along if I hadn’t just thought of it: literary novels are buggers to film. But here it is, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet starring as Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple in 1950s America who, when they first marry, believe they are special and destined to be, as she puts it, ‘wonderful in the world’, but, seven years and two children in, where are they?

James Delingpole

No accounting for taste

I’m sorry, really I am, but I don’t love The Wire as much as I know I should. I’m sorry, really I am, but I don’t love The Wire as much as I know I should. It’s not that I can’t see that it has huge amounts going for it. I love McNulty’s cheeky chimp face and that the actor playing him went to Eton; I like the lesbian; I like the way one quickly becomes so well informed on the nuances of drug-dealing in the Baltimore projects that one could easily set up shop there oneself; I sort of like the fact that only about 50 per cent of the dialogue is comprehensible, which must mean it’s edgy and echt and cool. But here’s my problem: it makes me fall asleep.

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

January round-up

The abstract painter John McLean celebrates his 70th birthday this year, and the enterprising Poussin Gallery (Block K, 13 Bell Yard Mews, 175 Bermondsey Street, SE1) has mounted a show of his recent prints in recognition (until 14 February). McLean is an inventive printmaker and when paired with a master craftsman, as he is here — work produced at the Cambridge studio of Kip Gresham — the results are first rate. McLean’s introduction to the little catalogue accompanying the show is a fascinating and lucid account of his techniques, which range from screenprinted monoprints to carborundum etchings via drypoints and woodcuts.

Michael Tanner

Leave well alone | 28 January 2009

The Beggar’s Opera Linbury Studio The Magic Flute Coliseum Is there any good reason for reviving The Beggar’s Opera now? None of the mercifully few productions I have seen has given any reason for answering yes (I don’t count The Threepenny Opera). The new production at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Studio emphatically doesn’t. Originally to have been conducted by Richard Hickox, the City of London Sinfonia was in the hands of Christian Curnyn, and on the musical side things went smoothly. It was done in Britten’s realisation, which has points in its favour, but several against, too.

Lloyd Evans

Shorter, please

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Novello Thriller — Live Lyric Too long. Too long. Way, way too long. Is it just me or is A Midsummer Night’s Dream twice the length it should be? No, it’s not just me. It’s everyone. It has to be. And I blame the movies. Billy Wilder reckoned a comedy should last no more than an hour and a half. ‘Every minute over 90,’ he said, ‘counts against you.’ Obviously, films aren’t plays but we’ve been schooled unwittingly in the celluloid aesthetic and we can’t park it in the cloakroom, we bring it to the auditorium.

Kate Chisholm

Sound and vision

A tale of two dramas, both from the city and of our time but very different in execution. Déjà vu is the first bilingual radio play on the BBC, written in French and English, and produced in a new collaborative project between Radio Four and Arté, the internet-only TV and radio station. It goes out on air in the traditional way next Wednesday in the Afternoon Play slot on Radio Four, but the following day it will go ‘live’ on the internet on artéradio.com, where you will be able to listen to it whenever you like, and as often as you like, over the next five years. It’s a totally new kind of listening experience; not embedded in a moment of airtime but deliberately created to float in the atmosphere, available for playback at any time.