Arts Archives

Sculpture Victorious at Tate Britain reviewed: entertainingly barmy

Exhibitions

In the centre of the new exhibition Sculpture Victorious at Tate Britain there is a huge white elephant. The beast is not, I should add, entirely colourless. On the contrary, it has a howdah richly decorated in gold and green, and numerous trappings, and tassels covering its pale grey hide. Its whiteness is entirely proverbial. After all, what can you do with a porcelain pachyderm, standing over seven feet tall? The Victorian period, a text on the wall proclaims, was ‘a golden age for British sculpture’. This is perfectly true, in the sense that a colossal amount of the stuff was turned out during Victoria’s reign.

Paul Mason

Paul Mason’s diary: My Greek TV drama

Diary

It’ll be a Skype interview, says the producer from Greek television, and not live. In TV-speak that usually means not urgent and not important, but I’ve become vaguely interesting to Greeks because of the ‘Moscovici draft’ — a doomed attempt to resolve the crisis, leaked to me amid denials of its existence. The interview goes on a bit and the tone is deferential. At the appointed time, I fire up Greek television to see how many clips they’ve used. Instead of me, a panel of five bearded men in an expansive studio are conducting an earnest preview of my interview.

Julia Hartley-Brewer

Madonna fell off the stage at the Brit Awards and we laughed because we’re sadistic

Go on, admit it, you laughed, didn’t you? When Madonna was yanked off the stage by a dancer pulling her cloak during her finale performance at the Brit Awards, you gasped in horror for one brief moment and then… you laughed out loud. Then you pressed 'rewind' and watched it again. And then once more for luck. Because it’s not often we get to watch a celebrity fall flat on their face – or in Madonna’s case, flat on her back. The fact that we were watching a 56-year-old mother of four fall downstairs and smash to the ground - that this was not normally something we would or should find funny - did not seem to occur to us.

Candy Neubert

Small things in the cathedral

Poems

A place to see the little things between the monuments and tombs. As in the chapel of St Gabriel, a pencil. Here they are, behind the obvious. Next to the chapter house, a cupboard with a bowl, four toilet rolls. How small things quietly wait, make us forgivable. Inside the vestry, just inside the door, an iron.

Mark Hudson

The dos and don’ts of the Russian art scene

The Boy Next Door reviewed: a terrible new J-Lo movie that’s disturbingly enjoyable

Cinema

Stateside critics, who panned Jennifer Lopez’s new film The Boy Next Door on its US release last month, may be unaware of the ability of the British to enjoy a film so bad it’s almost good. I suspect many Brits will shamefacedly delight in this so-called erotic thriller’s camp silliness, its truly dreadful script and its almost mockingly implausible premise. This is a film where a bespectacled Jenny from the Block plays a classics teacher (yes) who receives a pretty copy of Homer’s 3,000-year-old poem ‘The Iliad’ as a gift and quite sincerely exclaims, ‘Wow, is this a first edition?’ How can you follow a gem like that? The answer is with many more inadvertent jokes of a similar ilk, made all the funnier for their intended gravitas.

Lloyd Evans

Muswell Hill reviewed: a guide on how to sock it to London trendies

Theatre

Torben Betts is much admired by his near-namesake Quentin Letts for socking it to London trendies. Letts is one of the few individuals who enjoys the twin blessings of a Critics’ Circle membership card and a functioning brain so his views deserve serious attention. The title of Betts’s 2012 play Muswell Hill shifts its target into the cross hairs with no subtlety whatsoever. Curtain up. Married couple, Jess and Mat, are nervily tidying their yuppie dream home in expectation of supper guests. Jess is a sex-bomb accountant. Mat is a blankly handsome scribbler whose debut novel keeps getting rejected. Then a missile strikes. Mat casually mentions his acquaintanceship with an Australian electrician whom Jess has been secretly entertaining. Tense silence. The doorbell rings.

Ismene Brown

A legendary piece of iconoclastic dance returns. Does the piece still stand up?

Opera North’s Gianni Schicchi and La vida breve reviewed: a flawless double helping of verismo

Opera

Is there a more beautiful aria than ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi? There are more overwhelming moments in opera, to be sure, but few arias can rival it for the way its beauty kicks you in the back of the knees; its gentle rocking motion causes your shoulders to slump while the little floated top notes dilate the music’s gaze, drawing the listener irresistibly into its secret promise of untroubled bliss. Nor does it help that the aria’s whole point is to be irresistible. ‘Daddy dearest, I love him so,’ sings Schicchi’s teenage daughter Lauretta.

Peter Phillips

There’s nothing wrong with getting into Thomas Tallis on the back of Fifty Shades of Grey

Music

Great works of art may have a strange afterlife. Deracinated from the world that created them they are at the mercy of what people think is important centuries later. Nothing shows this more clearly than the contribution that Tallis’s ‘Spem in alium’ has made to Fifty Shades of Grey. In case you are none the wiser, ‘Spem in alium’ is probably the most complex piece of music to come from the 16th century, and just possibly from any century. Written for 40 independent voices, it is unlikely to be sung with every note in place, though any sort of approximation shows just how majestic it is. Whether this was in the mind of E.L.

James Walton

Critical on Sky1 reviewed: a new medical drama where everyone radiates an unusual degree of competence and concern

Television

Sky1’s new hospital drama Critical (Tuesday) can’t be accused of making a timid start. Within seconds, an urgent request had come over the loudspeaker system for ‘the trauma corps’ to head to the emergency department, causing the main members of the cast to sprint down various corridors at impressive speed. Meanwhile, a patient was briskly wheeled to the same department from a helicopter on the roof, pausing only to cough up blood all over the lift. Moments after that, the trauma corps were already exchanging the kind of rapid-fire medical speak — ‘Dullness to percussion on the left side!’— that most viewers mightn’t entirely comprehend but that clearly translates as variations on the phrase, ‘Uh-oh’.

Peter Robins

The pleasures and perils of podcast listening

Radio and podcasts

No phrase is better calculated to tense the neck muscles of a regular podcast listener than ‘We have something special for you now.’ Having your radio shows downloaded to your phone, music player or computer, rather than plucked out of the air the old-fashioned way, immediately grants the listener a great deal of extra freedom: you choose the feeds to which you subscribe, you decide which episodes to hear and in which order. But it also demands from the listener a measure of extra trust, or at least a ruthless readiness to skip, because what a producer puts on a feed can vary much more than in the scheduled-to-the-second world of broadcast radio.

Paul Deaton

Daffodils

25 February 2015

Steerpike

House of Cards creator reveals rift with BBC over ‘insensitive’ Margaret Thatcher plot

The third series of the American adaptation of House of Cards, which stars Kevin Spacey, will see the programme go in a different direction to the political trilogy on which it is based. Despite this, the House of Cards author Lord Dobbs is confident that he will be happier with the end product than he was with the BBC adaptation, which aired in the nineties. Speaking to the Radio Times, Dobbs says that he fell out with the production team during the final series over their treatment of the death of Baroness Thatcher. Dobbs was so appalled by the BBC's changes to his political thriller that he asked for his name to be removed from the end credits. 'It bore so little resemblance to my book; in fact I don't think my book had anything to do with it.

23 February 2015

Francesca Steele

Oscars 2015: Neil Patrick Harris took it too far

Birdman soared past longtime favourite Boyhood at the 87th Academy Awards, as Alejandro González Iñárritu's hilarious Hollywood satire unexpectedly took both of the top prizes - best picture and director - and joint top number of awards overall, in a slightly awkward ceremony where many of the host's razor-edged jokes drew clear disapproval from the audience. While many were predicting a slightly irreverent evening, Neil Patrick Harris, a veteran host of the Tony Awards, arguably took his jokes at the podium too far.

19 February 2015

Ismene Brown

Will the real Swan Lake please stand up

Arts feature

It is the end of an era — the Royal Ballet’s extravagant Fabergé-egg Swan Lake production by Anthony Dowell is on its last legs. When this 28-year-old production finishes the current run on 9 April, that will be it for one of the most controversial classical productions of the past half-century. It’s the one set in Romanov Russia, festooned with ribbons and golden squiggles, with swans in champagne ball-gowns rather than pristine white feathers. Hallucinatory, glamorous and opulently symbolist? Or hectic, fussy and tatty? Adjectives divide between the adoring and the withering for Yolanda Sonnabend’s Gustave Moreau-esque designs and for Dowell’s hyperactive staging.

Martin Gayford

Sargent, National Portrait Gallery, review: he was so good he should have been better

Exhibitions

The artist Malcolm Morley once fantasised about a magazine that would be devoted to the practice of painting just as some publications are to — say — cricket. It would be filled with articles extolling feats of the brush, rather than the bat. ‘Well painted, sir!’ the contributors would exclaim at an especially brilliant display of visual agility. ‘Fine stroke!’ If such a periodical had existed in the late Victorian and Edwardian ages, no one would have been heaped with more praise than John Singer Sargent (1856–1925). Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends at the National Portrait Gallery is filled with mesmerising displays of his skills. There are so many, indeed, that to list them would be to describe just about every picture on view.

John Mole

Annie’s Fish

Poems

It hangs, a mobile in the stairwell, always in motion however slight. Each silver scale as it sparkles there a neighbourly lodestar guiding us home to where we shall meet for ever in friendship beyond the darkness of your loss. Nothing you made that did not shine, nothing you dreamed can leave us now. And so we give thanks for this precious gift as it swims through the air to the sound of your laughter.

William Cook

The Heckler: how funny really was Spitting Image?

UKIP: The First 100 Days, Channel 4, review: a sad, predictable, desperate hatchet job

Television

Just three months into Ukip’s shock victory as the party of government and already Nigel Farage’s mob are starting to show their true colours: morris dancing has been made compulsory for every able-bodied male between the age of 30 and 85; in ruthlessly enforced union flag street parties, brown-skinned people are made to show their loyalty by eating red-, white- and blue-coloured Battenberg cakes until they explode. And what is that acrid smell of burnt fur now polluting Britain’s hitherto gloriously carbon-free air? Why it is all the kittens that Nigel Farage and his evil henchmen are tossing on to beacons from John O’Groats to Land’s End in order to demonstrate that Ukip are the masters now.

Adam Sweeting

Why Putin is even less of a human than Stalin was

Radio and podcasts

LBC likes to tell us it’s ‘Leading Britain’s Conversation’, though in the case of weekday pre-lunch presenter James O’Brien you’ll have to sit through a series of bombastic monologues from the host before any punters get a word in edgeways. O’Brien knows everything, and he doesn’t mind telling you. Still, I understand that running a talk show is no job for timid introverts who might burst into tears if callers start giving them a hard time. The trick is pretending to listen sympathetically while being ready to drop the guillotine without compunction (after all, these people aren’t your friends, they’re just statistics for the business plan).

Lloyd Evans

How to Hold Your Breath, Royal Court, review: yet more state-funded misanthropy

Theatre

‘We hate the system and we want the system to pay us to say we hate the system.’ The oratorio of subsidised theatre rises, in triumphant blast, at the Royal Court whose current empress Vicky Featherstone has chosen to direct an interesting new play by Zinnie Harris. I’d call it a quasi-symbolist extraterrestrial tragicomic chicklit road-movie spoof with Chomsky-esque anti-corporate neo-collectivist socioeconomic textual underpinning but I fear this may lend it a clarity of purpose, and a firmness of character, which it doesn’t quite possess. We start with Dana, a chippy frump on the last lap of her sex life, bedding a UN drudge named Jarron who claims to be ‘a demon, a devil, a god’.

Deborah Ross

Fifty Shades of Grey, review: ‘Use a condom!’ my sister shouted

Cinema

And so, in the end, I went with my sister, Toni, to see Fifty Shades of Grey and we saw it at noon on Valentine’s Day at the Odeon in Muswell Hill. In the audience on that particular day at that particular time there were eight other women, all around our age, and all on their own. The Fifty Shades phenomenon has been described as ‘soft porn for middle-aged housewives’ and it’s said as an insult, but it sounds rather good to my sister and me. Indeed, after what feels like a lifetime of pairing socks and putting meals on the table and basically performing the role of main drudge at Drudge Central we feel we deserve a little soft porn and who knows, if we like it, we could work our way up to hard porn?

Colm Toibin

La Donna del Lago, Metropolitan Opera, review: Colm Toibin on a night of masterful singing

Opera

La Donna del Lago, based on a poem by Sir Walter Scott, is one of the nine serious, dramatic operas that Rossini wrote for Teatro San Carlo in Naples between 1815 and 1822. At the time the opera was produced he had at his disposal not only a great soprano, for whom he wrote with considerable flair, but two expert tenors and a contralto taking the part of the young male lover. In the first-ever production at the Met in New York that has just opened, the colours move from the sultry sky of Scotland in the first act to the starkness of a field after battle and then the sumptuous golds in King James V’s palace in the second act. Something like this happens too in the vocal writing, which ranges from the stunningly beautiful to tones that are darker and more restrained.

18 February 2015

Steerpike

Dippygate: Natural History Museum’s diplodocus sacrificed on the commercial altar

There was outcry last month when it was announced that 'Dippy the Diplodocus' is to be removed from the Natural History Museum's vast Hintze Hall, where he has been greeting visitors for the last 35 years. Instead a giant skeleton of blue whale will be suspended from the ceiling, in what they spin as an 'important and necessary change'. Officially, 'the blue whale symbolises' the museum's 'desire for people to be completely engaged in current issues about humans’ impact on the natural world and our chance to build a sustainable future.' Or so a spokesman of the museum says. However, a source tells of a more cynical explanation for the departure.

Colm Tóibín

La Donna del Lago, Met Opera, review: Colm Tóibín on a night of masterful singing

This is an extract from this week’s magazine, available from tomorrow. La Donna del LagoMetropolitan Opera, New York, in rep until 14 March La Donna del Lago, based on a poem by Sir Walter Scott, is one of the nine serious, dramatic operas that Rossini wrote for Teatro San Carlo in Naples between 1815 and 1822. At the time the opera was produced he had at his disposal not only a great soprano, for whom he wrote with considerable flair, but two expert tenors and a contralto taking the part of the young male lover. In the first-ever production at the Met in New York that has just opened, the colours move from the sultry sky of Scotland in the first act to the starkness of a field after battle and then the sumptuous golds in King James V’s palace in the second act.

17 February 2015

Michael Tanner

Iolanta/Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, Met Opera Live, review: enterprising take on two masterpieces

Iolanta / Duke Bluebeard's Castle Met Opera Live The Met's antepenultimate relay of the season was an enterprising pairing of two operas, one of which we should see more often, and both of them done with intelligence and care. Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, his last opera, inconveniently lasts about 100 minutes, so is especially hard to find a partner for. It is a strange, touching piece, though it has few of the characteristics we associate with him. There is hardly a memorable melody in it, and little that is overwrought, indeed the colours are pastel. Iolanta is a princess, blind from birth, but skilfully kept in ignorance of her condition, and surrounded in this production by bored maids who treat her sweetly and otherwise bitch.

12 February 2015

William Cook

Where Van Gogh learned to paint

Arts feature

In December 1878 Vincent Van Gogh arrived in the Borinage, a bleak coal- mining district near Mons. He was 25 years old. He’d failed to become an art dealer. He’d failed to become a schoolteacher. Drawing was just a hobby — an artistic career was the last thing on his mind. He’d come here as a preacher, full of evangelical fervour, yet he proved a failure at that too. The problem was, he was far too pious. He gave away everything he owned. These miners didn’t know what to make of him. They called him ‘the Christ of the coal mines’. After six months, he was fired. With nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, during the next 18 months Vincent taught himself the rudiments of draughtsmanship, anatomy and perspective.

Paul Morley

The future of the album lies in the gallery

Exhibitions

The album is not what it was. It still exists, in record collections, as part of the torrential streaming of everything, and in the sentimental memories of those who lament the loss of what once seemed a permanent fixture and the most exciting, unimpeachably authentic way of capturing and keeping music. Many musicians refuse to relinquish the idea — length, number of songs, conceptual framework, illusory two sides, solidity, sound — of the album. It remains worth hearing what a musician like PJ Harvey might have to say about the album, because it is where she has worked for 20 years, and so she has built up enough momentum to make her next one intriguing. She’s one of the last rock artists where this is truly the case.