Arts Archives

Seeing the light | 21 September 2017

Radio and podcasts

‘You can’t lie… on radio,’ says Liza Tarbuck. The Radio 2 DJ was being interviewed for the network’s birthday portrait, celebrating 50 years since it morphed from the Light Programme into its present status as the UK’s best-loved radio station — with almost 15 million listeners each week. ‘The intimacy of radio dictates you can’t lie because people can hear it.’ She’s absolutely right. As she went on to explain, when you’re driving and it’s just the radio and you, no distraction, ‘You can hear things in my voice that I don’t even know I’m giving away.

Deborah Ross

No balls

Cinema

Borg vs McEnroe is a dramatised account of one of the greatest tennis rivalries of all time — between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe (the clue was always in the title) — that doesn’t hit nearly as hard as it should. It does the job. It gets us from A to B. But it doesn’t dazzle. It doesn’t have the dramatic smarts to lend either surprising tension or excitement to otherwise familiar events, or shed any new light on them. It’s more the pt-pt-pt-pt of a stolid baseline rally and now, you will be thankful to hear, that’s it with the tennis puns. (I only had two anyhow.) The film stars Sverrir Gudnason as Borg and Shia LaBeouf as McEnroe and it all plays out in the lead-up to their most famous showdown.

James Walton

Loose ends

Television

On Sunday night, Holliday Grainger was on two terrestrial channels at the same time playing a possibly smitten sidekick of a gruff but kindly detective with a beard. Even so, she needn’t worry too much about getting typecast. In BBC1’s Strike, she continued as the immaculately turned-out, London-dwelling Robin, who uses such traditional sleuthing methods as Google searches. On Channel 4, not only was she dressed in rags, with a spectacular facial scar and a weird hairdo, she was also living in an unnamed dystopian city, where her detective work relied on a handy capacity to read minds. This was the first and highly promising episode of Electric Dreams, which has set itself the ambitious task of adapting ten sci-fi stories by Philip K.

Michael Tanner

Small wonders

Opera

It has been a reasonably good week for peripatetic opera-loving female-underwear fetishists. In La bohème at Covent Garden Musetta slipped out of her knickers and swung them round, as everyone, except me, mentioned in their reviews; and now, in Leeds, in the first of Opera North’s ‘Little Greats’, what laughter the actors in the drama got was from Tonio and others trying on Nedda’s bra. This new production of Pagliacci by Charles Edwards, sadly under-attended, was possibly too ingenious. It is set in a rehearsal room, and we see the first day of rehearsals and then the final run-through. It kind of works, but anyone unfamiliar with the opera would have found it mysterious, and some of the time I felt I was on shifting sands.

Martin Gayford

Fickle fortune | 21 September 2017

More from Arts

Here’s an intriguing thought experiment: could Damien Hirst disappear? By that I mean not the 52-year-old artist himself — that would be sensational indeed — but the vast fame, the huge prices, the hectares of newsprint, profiles, reviews and interviews by the thousand. Could all that just fade from our collective memory into a black hole of oblivion? The answer is: yes, quite easily. Artists vanish all the time. Take the case of Hans Makart (1840–1884). He was a contemporary of Monet, Manet and Degas, but enormously more acclaimed in his lifetime than any of those. A period of Viennese life was dubbed the ‘Makart era’, a fashionable idiom was named the ‘Makartstil’. One reason for his success was that he was a master of PR.

Laura Gascoigne

Frills and furbelows

More from Arts

Over the winter of 1859–60, a handsome young man could be seen patrolling the shores of the Gulf of Messina in a rowing boat, skimming the water’s surface with a net. The net’s fine mesh was not designed for fishing, and the young man was not a Sicilian fisherman. He was the 25-year-old German biologist Ernst Haeckel from Potsdam searching for minute plankton known as Radiolaria. In February he wrote excitedly to his fiancée, Anna Sethe, that he had caught 12 new species in a single day — ‘among them the most charming little creatures’ — and hoped to make it a full century before leaving. Haeckel had a degree in medicine but no interest in treating patients, whose visits he curtailed by holding surgeries from 5 to 6 a.m.

Daisy Dunn

The icemen cometh

More from Arts

You wouldn’t want to stumble upon the Scythians. Armed with battle-axes, bows and daggers, and covered in fearsome tattoos, the horse-mad nomads ranged the Russian steppe from around 900 to 200 BC, turning squirrels into fur coats and human teeth into earrings. At their mightiest, they controlled territory from the Black Sea to the north border of China. They left behind no written record, only enormous burial mounds, chiefly in the Altai mountains and plains of southern Siberia. Chambers that weren’t looted in antiquity were preserved in the permafrost only to be discovered millennia later. It is thanks to Peter the Great and the expeditions he launched that so many objects have now been retrieved from the ice.

14 September 2017

Tanya Gold

Art of darkness | 14 September 2017

Arts feature

Stephen King, 69, has sold more than 350 million books, and tries not to apologise for being working-class, or imaginative, or rich. The snobbery has ebbed a little, though; in 2003 he won the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and now the BFI is screening a series of adaptations of his novels, which show how versatile he is. Why can’t you write stories like Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, a woman asked him once. I did write it, he told her, but she did not believe him. King has published 59 novels, but he is a recovering addict and can’t remember writing them all. Most of Cujo (1981), a story about a rabid dog and adultery, is news to him.

Martin Gayford

Space odyssey | 14 September 2017

Exhibitions

Rachel Whiteread is an indefatigable explorer of internal space. By turning humble items such as hot-water bottles and sinks inside out — that is, casting the cavities — Whiteread has accomplished one of the traditional tasks of art: revealing structure, beauty and mystery in the everyday. Her work is a remarkable contribution to an overlooked genre: the sculpture of inanimate things or still-life statuary. Nonetheless the large-scale, mid-career Whiteread retrospective at Tate Britain, which ought to be a triumph, does not quite come off. Ironically, since her idiom is derived from minimalism, the exhibition fails to observe the law that less is more.

James Delingpole

Rockies horror show

Television

Tin Star, the latest Sky Atlantic drama, has a comfortingly familiar premise: Jim Worth (Tim Roth), an ex-detective from London with an alcohol problem, heads out to rural Canada with his family to start a new life only to find himself embroiled in crime, violence and personal tragedy far worse than anything back home. It begins well. There’s a lovely establishing scene where Roth walks down the street with his new Canadian sheriff’s badge and everyone greets him, as people presumably do in sleepy Canadian Rockies towns like Little Big Bear, where everyone’s got time for one another. In the police station, his two junior officers have so little crime to solve they’re playing video games.

Richard Bratby

The sound of no hands clapping

Music

‘We’re going to live for ever!’ declares Robert Powell as Gustav Mahler at the end of Ken Russell’s 1974 biopic. We’ve just had the big reveal (Russell said it ‘out-Hollywoods Hollywood’) in which Mahler admits to his young wife Alma that she inspired the lyrical theme in the first movement of his Sixth Symphony. It’s a tale for which the only source is Alma herself, but hey, over the course of the movie we’ve already had exploding garden sheds, interpretative dance and Cosima Wagner in fetish gear. Russell cues the music, and few film-makers have understood better how to cut to a composer’s emotional core. As the credits roll, the first movement of Mahler’s Sixth blazes triumphantly to its close, glockenspiel jangling.

Lloyd Evans

Age concern | 14 September 2017

Theatre

Stephen Sondheim’s Follies takes a huge leap into the past. It’s 1971 and we meet two middle-aged couples who knew each other three decades earlier at a New York music hall. The building faces demolition and the owner is throwing a party for his old dancing-girls. Dominic Cooke’s lavish production of this vintage musical boasts 58 performers, 160 costumes and 200 production staff. Yet it’s a curiously small show that could be performed, with a few cuts, in a pub theatre. There are four main characters and a smattering of cameos. Phyllis and Ben are rich New York grandees, unhappily married. Their chums Bud and Sally are also wealthy and disappointed with life.

Michael Tanner

DIY Bohème

Opera

The Royal Opera’s one production that, it has always confidently been claimed, need never be replaced has been replaced. John Copley, vintage 1974, has given way to Richard Jones, in a production full of his trademark quirkinesses and mischief, though he is respectful enough of Bohème to keep his irony out of sight for the last two acts. Stewart Laing is the designer, with a separate movement director (I thought that’s what directors did) in Sarah Fahie. Snow falls continuously before the curtain rises, but the set of Act One inevitably strikes you as a gauntlet thrown down to Copley. Flat 7b, which is the abode of the bohemians, is nothing more than roof beams, with a single chair, no bed, a tiny stove that produces plumes of smoke emitted from a tall chimney.

Michael Hann

Northern rock

Music

A fortnight ago, the debut album by a young British guitar band entered the chart at No. 6. You might have expected to see this pored over with some interest by the press, for whom the search for the New Arctic Monkeys, the New Oasis and the New Smiths has long been a matter of urgency. Instead, you will scour the daily newspaper arts pages in vain for mentions of the Sherlocks, and you won’t fare much better looking at the specialist music magazines. According to the self-anointed tastemakers of British pop, they might as well not exist.

Deborah Ross

Nut job

Cinema

The film-maker Darren Aronofsky says he wrote Mother! in five days as if in a ‘fever dream’ and, as a general rule, what happens in a fever dream should stay in the fever dream, as the content will be plainly nuts. This is plainly nuts. This is even plainly nuts with an exclamation mark. Plainly nuts! However, it’s never plainly dull, so it does have that going for it. I think. Described as a psychological horror thriller, the set-up has a poet and his younger wife living in a magnificent, isolated house in the countryside that she is doing up. She is Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) and he is Him (Javier Bardem). She is in thrall to Him, and exists only to serve Him, while he is suffering from writer’s block and is distant.

Michael Tanner

Ave, Maria

Opera

Anyone who thinks that an artist’s life is irrelevant to their artistic achievement, and for that matter anyone who thinks that it isn’t, must be given pause by Maria Callas. It is now exactly 40 years since her death and everything she recorded is available on multiple pressings. But of the huge body of material that has appeared about her, only a small percentage concerns itself with the recordings. There are innumerable biographies, memoirs, refutations of memoirs, studies of the influence of her fluctuating erotic life on her singing, her meteoric rise, the Great Decade, the tragic decline, and so on. All of these might be fascinating, but they draw attention away from the only thing that mattered about her: her art.

12 September 2017

Mary Wakefield

Sir Peter Hall (1930–2017) on Harold Pinter, actors and making love

Sir Peter Hall has died at the age of 86. He spoke to The Spectator in 2009: Even at 78 and from a distance, Sir Peter Hall has the look of an alpha male. There he is about 100 or so feet away, advancing towards me across the polished boards of his rehearsal room; head forward, bear-like, with the lonely charisma of a boxing champ. As he passes, the younger members of the Peter Hall Company fall back smiling, deferring. He’s king here, a Lear (act one). He pauses to pat a gamine young beauty on the arm, stroke his beard, pull his plump lips into a roguish grin — then moves on to the table where his lunch and I are waiting. One small sandwich, one large pile of lettuce.

11 September 2017

Melanie McDonagh

The Last Night of the Proms is still an exceptional British party

Wouldn’t you just know it: there’s another row about Last Night of the Proms. Apparently the Scots in their open air Last Night weren’t given the opportunity to sing Jerusalem and Rule Britannia, whereas the Welsh and Northern Irish were. Which just adds to the popular perennial row about EU flags versus Union Jacks at the event. It’s all a bit baffling if you were actually there. I was, and all my little prejudices about it were well and truly seen off. It was the most joyful affair.

7 September 2017

Jasper Rees

Made in Port Talbot

Arts feature

Port Talbot, on the coast of South Wales, is literally overlooked. Most experience the town while flying over it on the M4, held aloft by concrete stilts planted in terraced streets. From that four-lane gantry, the only landmarks are the dockyard cranes and belching steelworks. Over Easter in 2011, National Theatre Wales staged a piece of street theatre that was crafted as a civic resurrection. The Passion of Port Talbot featured Michael Sheen as a Messiah-like teacher who harkens to oral memories. ‘I remember!’ he hollered on the third day, while attached to a crucifix on a traffic island by Aberavon beach, before reeling off a litany of local names: of villages, streets, sweet shops, pubs, clubs, mountains.

Martin Gayford

Silent films

Exhibitions

On 15 September 1888 Vincent van Gogh was intrigued to read an account of an up-to-date artist’s house in the literary supplement of Le Figaro. This described a purple house in the middle of a garden, the paths of which were made of yellow sand. The walls were glass bricks ‘in the shape of purple eggs’. Such aesthetic dwellings were all the rage; Van Gogh dreamed of having one himself in Arles. But as one learns from an exhibition at Leighton House, it was another 19th-century Dutch artist, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who actually inhabited two such establishments — one off Regent’s Park, the other in St John’s Wood. On paper, Van Gogh and Alma-Tadema have a great deal in common.

The Spectator

Books and Arts – 7 September 2017

Richard Bratby

Viennese whirl

Opera

‘First performance: Vienna, October 3, 1880’ declares the programme for Opera della Luna’s new production of Johann Strauss’s The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief. ‘First British Performance: Wilton’s Music Hall, London, August 29, 2017’. They’re not joking: this really is the first full UK staging of the Waltz King’s single most successful (in his lifetime, anyway) operetta. It’s a major event, and the director Jeff Clarke duly follows up with one of those quasi-academic articles that you get in programme books at big opera houses explaining how La bohème predicted Mussolini, or whatever. Still kept awake at night by the liberal reform agenda of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary?

Deborah Ross

Male order | 7 September 2017

Cinema

The starting point for Taylor Sheridan’s crime-thriller Wind River is explicitly stated at the end when the following words come up on screen: ‘While missing person statistics are compiled for every other demographic [in the US], none exist for Native American women.’ A shocking fact that has to be worthy of a film, although whether this film is worthy of that fact, and isn’t just another genre melodrama featuring an American White Man coming to the rescue, has to be up for question. Also, it contains a brutal rape scene, just so you know. (I didn’t know. But wish I had, as I’d have likely steered clear.

Lloyd Evans

Keeping it in the family

Theatre

A new orthodoxy governs the casting process in Hollywood. An actor’s ethnicity must match the character’s. If you extend this decree to Shakespeare, you need Macbeth to be played by a Highlander, Shylock by a Venetian Jew, Richard III by an English hunchback and Cleopatra by an Egyptian who has slept with her brother. As for Hamlet, the play can only be entrusted to a family of incestuous Scandinavians. Gyles Brandreth (whose name means ‘firebrand’ or ‘sword’ in old Norse) has anticipated the trend by staging a production alongside his son and his daughter-in-law. Benet Brandreth plays the Dane while his wife, Kosha, plays Ophelia, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, Laertes and Horatio. Brandreth Snr takes the older roles.

James Walton

Second thoughts | 7 September 2017

Television

I had planned to review David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s new Channel 4 sitcom Back without constantly referring to their last one Peep Show. Not only did it seem too obvious a way to go; it also felt a bit unfair to compare a deservedly revered programme that ran for 12 years with a single episode that went out on Wednesday. But then I saw that single episode. It’s possible, I suppose, that one day Mitchell and Webb may head in a completely different sitcom direction. Mitchell may not play an uptight, well-meaning loser, or Webb a preening, conscience-free charmer. For now, though, it’s pretty much as you were.

Michael Tanner

Bowled over by Bruckner

Music

The two Proms concerts given on consecutive evenings by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra were well planned: a short opening work, and after the interval a long and demanding symphony. Moreover, the big symphonies were by Bruckner and Mahler, to the latter of whom this orchestra has been devoted almost since its foundation. Willem Mengelberg, the orchestra’s chief for 50 years, was the only conductor, Mahler said, that he could trust with his works, and the orchestra has been headed by a succession of distinguished Mahlerians ever since.Bruckner, meanwhile, entered the orchestra’s repertoire in a major way in the 1950s, and has been there ever since.

Kate Chisholm

The listening project

Radio and podcasts

As Classic FM celebrated its quarter-century on Wednesday with not a recording but a live broadcast of a concert from Dumfries House in Scotland — Bach, Mendelssohn, Chopin and Liszt, and the première of a specially commissioned work by the Welsh composer Paul Mealor — Radio 3 has upped the ante by announcing an autumn schedule that promises to be ‘an antidote to today’s often frenzied world’. Its new programming ranges from a special opera season and a series of organ and choral music to ‘an immersive audio impression’ of what it feels like to hang vertically on the side of a mountain, wind whistling through the ears, feet teetering on the edge.

Rod Liddle

The National: Sleep Well Beast

More from Arts

Grade: A– There are plenty of websites where fans try to discern, without any success, what in the name of Christ The National are actually singing about. Thousands of words have been expended on just one — rather lovely — song, ‘Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks’, from the album High Violet. The answer is, they’re more often than not singing about nothing. They’re just nice words that sound good next to each other. It’s euphonious gibberish. The Cincinnati boys are back doing the same stuff with their first album in four years. The lead single is entitled ‘The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness’, which may be the most pretentious and pompous name for a pop song I’ve ever heard — and I remember Yes only too well.

31 August 2017

Robert Gorelangton

Moor and more

Arts feature

In 1824 an ambitious teenage actor fled to England from his native New York where he had been beaten up once too often. He built a career here, being billed as ‘a Most Extraordinary Novelty, a Man of Colour’. What audiences encountered, however, was not the expected comedy of a simpleton mangling the Bard. They got instead an actor of thrilling charisma and deep natural ability. Ira Aldridge soon became the first black actor to play Othello, taking over the part from the brandy-sodden genius Edmund Kean, who died mid-run due to what one obituary called his ‘vortex of dissipation’. Thanks to a slew of highly prejudiced reviews in London, Ira became a classic example of a tour de force who was forced to tour.