More from Arts

Saturday

James Delingpole

Reptilian reverie

When I was a boy my father and I used to spend our summer holidays collecting lizards. We’d prop a large bucket at an angle in a suitable spot, grease the rim with butter, put some rotting fruit at the bottom and wait for the lizards to get trapped. It’s the best way, otherwise they panic and shed their tails. Then we’d bring them back in our hand luggage in linen bags, which worked fine till the unfortunate occasion when a stewardess wanted to look inside and they escaped on the plane. We kept our lizards (and snakes and crocodiles) in a shed in our garden — called the Lizard House — and they gave us many adventures. Once, on holiday in Menorca, we discovered that there lived on one tiny, uninhabited island about a mile offshore a melanistic (i.e.

Kate Chisholm

Missing the picture

Why would anyone want to listen to a programme about the Oscars? Surely the whole point is to see those ghastly frocks and gimcrack smiles, effortfully put on for-the-camera-only? And yet Paul Gambaccini was sent over to Hollywood to recreate the ‘magic’ of the Oscars for a new Radio Four series (Saturday), And the Academy Award Goes To...He took us inside the tiny room, in the Roosevelt Hotel, where the very first Oscars were awarded on 16 May 1929; from such small things do Versace glamfests grow. Fascinating enough. But it was just so irritating to hear the sweeping score of Lawrence of Arabia (winner of Best Picture in 1962) without being able to see those stunning images of the desert. There are times when only TV will do.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Grief and groans

Purgatorio Arcola Happy Now? Cottesloe The Lover/The Collection Comedy Purgatorio. Hardly a seductive title and I confess it was curiosity rather than enthusiasm that dragged me to the Arcola in Hackney to see how Ariel Dorfman (best known for his 1992 play Death and the Maiden) had handled the Medea myth. His update transplants the characters to a therapy unit and the play opens with Medea under analysis describing in lacerating detail how she killed her children. Confusingly, her cell is furnished with a kitchen knife which she occasionally brandishes in the analyst’s face. More confusingly, he shrugs the threat aside as if she were waving a lollipop at him. Then the roles are reversed.

Deborah Ross

Pure genius

There Will Be Blood 15, nationwide Juno 12A, nationwide There Will Be Blood (oh, yes) stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, a late-19th-century American oilman whose own view could not be plainer: find oil, beat off the competition, buy the land, drill it, get rich. And that’s about it, not that it matters. It’s the genius — a word that should never be used lightly; which is why I hope you can see I just used it heavily — of Day-Lewis’s performance that will keep you with it. Day-Lewis is, surely, every actor’s actor, even though they all probably hate him at some level. ‘If Day-Lewis is making a movie this year, then I am not.

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Truffling around

Where do you find your music? Yes, I know, you go to the CD rack and there it is. Or, if you are as obsessed as some of us, you go into almost any room in the house and there is a pile of the stuff, because you can’t get rid of any of it, even the long-unplayed mid-period Elvis Costello CDs of everyone’s worst nightmares. But that’s not what I mean. Where do you find your new music, the stuff you haven’t heard before? There’s a vast quantity out there, waiting to be discovered. Where do you go looking for it? If you have very mainstream tastes, of course, you’re fine. The major record labels, although collapsing in a heap around us, persist in launching new artists who they hope will appeal to millions and millions of people.

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Italian treats

A Decade of Discovery Esoterick Collection, 39a Canonbury Square, London, N1, until 6 April This year, as the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art celebrates its tenth anniversary, garlanded with plaudits for the loan exhibitions it has mounted, it is time to focus once again on its greatest asset: its permanent collection. This new display, occupying all six galleries, shows the collection to fine advantage, enabling a group of works by Massimo Campigli to be viewed for the first time, along with a couple of new acquisitions, and further enhanced by works loaned from British and Italian collections, mostly private individuals whose generosity must be applauded. The exhibition starts on the ground floor with a room of the Estorick’s big names — the Futurists.

Deborah Ross

What a monster

Cloverfield 15, Nationwide Cloverfield is tiresome, dumb and horrid, and just in case you didn’t get that I’ll say it again: this film is tiresome, dumb and horrid. Don’t go. Do anything but go. Don’t be swayed, as I was, by the fact that on its opening day in America it grossed $16 million, grossed a further $41 million on its opening weekend — making it the most successful January release of all time — and has since grossed $56 million worldwide. Don’t be swayed into thinking there must be something in it, because there isn’t. It’s a monster movie that not only fails as a monster movie — I’ve been more scared on the teacups at the fair — but also fails at having anything to say.

Lloyd Evans

Teletubby approach

The President’s Holiday Hampstead The Sea Haymarket The Vertical Hour Royal Court There’s no such thing as a great script idea. Ideas are equally good or bad, what counts is how they’re treated. Take the 1991 coup against Gorbachev. Pretty dramatic, momentous and gripping, I’d say. And here’s Penny Gold to dramatise it. She may well be a Russian analyst, an expert on the intricacies of revolutionary politics and a brilliant diviner of the male psyche but she’s decided to give those specialities a rest. Shunting the whole nasty business of the coup to one side, she focuses on the Gorbachev family cooped up in their Crimean dacha surrounded by KGB plotters.

Michael Tanner

Britten surprises

Peter Grimes Opera North Of all Britten’s operas Peter Grimes is the one I have seen most often, and it remains not only the one that I find it hardest to make up my mind about, but also the one which I still don’t feel I know especially well. There are the famous passages, not only the sea interludes but also Grimes’s monologues, ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’ and his big tune, sung first to the words ‘What harbour shelters peace?’, there is Ellen Orford’s touching, rather less famous Embroidery aria in Act III, which is a passage of genuine repose in this restless and often angry score; and there are the famous set choral pieces, ‘Grimes is at his exercise’ and the terrifying shouts of the villagers in hot pursuit of him.

Kate Chisholm

Reasons for hope

‘Pakistan is a dysfunctional state,’ said the writer Martin Amis in a debate about ideologies and ideologues in our post-9/11 world on Start the Week (Monday, Radio Four). He seemed curiously unaware that he was in conversation with a woman lawyer from Pakistan, Asma Jahangir, who has just been released from house arrest after defying her own government; with someone who has actually experienced the real impact of the rise of global Islamism, and who cannot afford to agree that her country is in chaotic freefall. ‘Pakistan is not dysfunctional,’ retorted the formidable-sounding Jahangir. ‘People are so resilient that, despite no gas, no electricity, they are still continuing to do their work.

Simon Hoggart

Cult viewing

Jonestown (BBC 2); Moving Wallpaper & Echo Beach (ITV); Harry Hill's TV Burp (ITV)  ‘Shut up and drink the Kool-Aid’ is an American slang phrase — tart, cynical and funny — used for telling people to get on with something they must do but would prefer to avoid. It refers back to the mass suicide of 909 members of the Jim Jones cult in Guyana in 1978. Jones had plenty of cyanide, but he thought it would sluice down more agreeably if diluted with the nasty but very sweet soft drink mix.

Saturday

James Delingpole

The pity of war

You were probably expecting me to review Ross Kemp in Afghanistan (Sky One, Monday) this week but I’m a bit off Afghanistan programmes at the moment. Not to the point where I won’t watch them all the time to the exclusion of almost all else. Just to the point where, at the end, I feel ever so slightly, ‘Was that it?’ Don’t get me wrong. I have the most enormous respect for the brave folk who make these programmes — still more for the men doing the fighting. But I’ve yet to see the documentary which properly conveys to people who’ve never done it — e.g., me — what it’s like to be involved in a serious firefight. On his tour of Helmand with the Royal Anglian Regiment, Kemp experienced a gun battle of pant-wetting intensity.

Lloyd Evans

Dazed and confused

Tara Arts, a troupe devoted to ‘cross-cultural theatre’, are hauling their Tempest around the country. In a minivan by the look of things. The whole production — cast, cossies and props — could easily squeeze into a Bedford Rascal but, as Mark Rylance has already demonstrated, thrift and The Tempest don’t mix well. Rylance bored the Globe to a standstill doing this play with three actors. Tara sport six and it’s still not enough for the sprawling and fantastical storyline. You’ve got two sets of castaways on different bits of an atoll (three, if you include Prospero and Miranda) and a pair of magical sprites buzzing around like lost milk floats. Confusing enough if it’s your sixth view of The Tempest. Indecipherable if it’s your first.

Robin Holloway

…while you work

It’s been commonplace ever since the widespread dissemination of sound recording, followed by the rapid growth of broadcasting, to deplore ‘the appalling popularity of music’: its inevitable debasement, when available so easily, into something ordinary rather than special, repeatable rather than unique, cursory rather than concentrated, disposable rather than sacral.

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

Drained of colour

After the cheerlessness and brutality of No Country for Old Men, I’m not sure a film about a serial killer is just what you want. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street 18, nationwide After the cheerlessness and brutality of No Country for Old Men, I’m not sure a film about a serial killer is just what you want. I may even be up to here with bloody films about bloodless people. Why not a nice film about nice people doing nice things, like crocheting for the poor? How hard can that be? True enough, Sweeney Todd is a musical, but this doesn’t exactly lighten the mood which, if you are as vigilant and smart as I am, you will spot right from the beginning when slicks of scarlet blood ooze from the opening credits. Hello, Dolly! Now that was a nice musical.

Kate Chisholm

Bach substitute

It’s been really hard getting used to the idea that there’s no more Bach at eight on Radio Three. After 48 mornings, I’ve found myself well and truly addicted. The only way to combat the withdrawal symptoms seemed to be an immersion in something completely different, so I dutifully tuned into Radio Two in the hope of finding a cure. Brian Matthew, Jonathan Ross, Paul Gambaccini...nothing could shift that post-Bach mood of truculent dissatisfaction. Nothing, at least, until eight o’clock on Saturday evening when a wail of anguish cut through the airwaves like a cat out of hell: Janis Joplin, in extremis, singing, or perhaps I should say performing, ‘Take it! Take it! Take another little piece of my heart’.

Andrew Lambirth

Generosity of spirit

Rose Hilton: A Selected Retrospective Tate St Ives, until 11 May Rose Hilton was born Rosemary Phipps in the Kentish village of Leigh, near Tonbridge, in 1931. She grew up the dutiful daughter of parents who were strict Plymouth Brethren, but early on she showed distinct signs of artistic talent. Her parents considered that this might equip her as an art teacher, but Rose had higher ambitions: she determined to be a painter. Force of character combined with innate skills took her from Beckenham Art School to the Royal College of Art in London, where she won prizes and was praised by her tutor Carel Weight for her sense of colour.

Charles Spencer

In the swim

There’s a lovely number by Loudon Wainwright III called ‘The Swimming Song’ that evokes the delights of bathing with both sharp wit and faux-naïf innocence. Kate and Anna McGarrigle covered it on their eponymous 1975 debut album — one of the all-time great records in my view, mixing folky exuberance and wrenching heartache in a manner that never seems to go stale — and in recent weeks I too have been singing ‘The Swimming Song’. ‘This summer I went swimming/ this summer I might have drowned/ But I held my breath and I kicked my feet/ and I moved my arms around,’ sang Loudon and the McGarrigles. To which my reply is, ‘Excellent news, guys, but how wimpish can you get?’ Swimming in summer is easy.

Michael Tanner

Powerful trio of stars

Something I didn’t think was possible has happened this last week: I have been strongly moved by a performance of La traviata. That was due very largely, of course, to the way the title role was performed. Anna Netrebko may not have the perfect voice for the part, her vocal technique might be lacking in this or that respect, but she was amazing, and was recognised by the audience to be so. She got a reception befitting a great artist who had just delivered a classic account of a major role. My surprise is the greater because I find the hype about her, much of it cleverly auto-generated, incredibly annoying, and I was on the verge of relegating her to that category of fairly gifted singers who are ruined by the contemporary celebrity-making machine.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Old hat

La Cage aux Folles Menier Chocolate Factory The British Ambassador’s Belly Dancer Arcola Angry Young Man Trafalgar Studio La Cage aux Folles is a musical based on a classic comedy by Jean Poiret. Terry Johnson’s new version is perfectly agreeable. Nice sets, charming actors and the audience loved it. So what’s wrong? Well, the threadbare storyline for a start: Georges has to persuade his gay partner Albin to absent himself from a dinner party because the guests will find their sexuality shocking. That’s it. Trouble is this dilemma feels at least three decades old and the characters — especially M. Renaud the homophobic conservative politician — seem as quaint and irrelevant as the unicorns and damsels sporting on a medieval tapestry.