Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Charles Moore

The great David Ekserdjian deserves a museum of his own

Ever since Mr Blair’s New Dawn of 1997, the dominant idea in public policy towards public collections has been ‘access’. The doctrine is more than half-right: art, antiquities etc paid for by the public are not doing their work unless we can see them. But it has promoted the heresy that the person chosen to run every museum must be a communicator rather than a scholar. Actually, both is best. True, some learned persons are interested only in objects and cannot communicate with the human race, but the best evangelisers for a museum or gallery are the people who really know its contents. The best-known current example is Neil Macgregor, at the British Museum.

7 August 2014

Martin Gayford

‘They took me in like I was their son’: Wynton Marsalis on jazz’s great tradition

Arts feature

At the end of his performance at the Barbican with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Wynton Marsalis made a little speech. The next piece, he announced, was a number that Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers used to play. Marsalis then recalled how he himself had played with the Jazz Messengers as an 18-year-old trumpet prodigy. He described how much he had learned from the drummer, who was then approaching 60, and especially about ‘the sacrifices you have to make to play this music’. Then the band roared into ‘Free for All’ by Wayne Shorter. A couple of days before, I had met Marsalis for a chat — it wasn’t precisely an interview because I’ve interviewed him so many times over the years we’ve turned into friends.

Andrew Lambirth

A lost opportunity to show John Nash at his best

Exhibitions

John Northcote Nash (1893–1977) was the younger brother of Paul Nash (1889–1946), and has been long overshadowed by Paul, though they started their careers on a relatively even footing. The crucible of WW1 changed them: afterwards Paul became an art-world figure, cultivating possible patrons, quietly forceful and ambitious, deeply involved in the theory and practice of Modernism. John retreated into his love of nature (in particular gardening and fishing) but continued to paint with an almost classical refinement and orderliness. His art stayed close to nature yet stood back from it, while the Romantic Paul was consciously experimental, adopting a poetic approach that was unexpectedly graphic until the great paintings of his final years.

Lloyd Evans

3,000 acts and no quality control – why the Edinburgh Fringe is the greatest (and patchiest) arts festival in the world

More from Arts

And they’re off. The mighty caravan of romantic desperadoes, radical egoists, stadium wannabes, struggling superstars and vanity crackheads is on its way to Edinburgh. This year’s Fringe sponsor is Virgin Money, which must be some kind of in-joke because most performers spend August watching their life savings being ritually despoiled by landlords, press agents and venue owners. Five years back the Fringe was ready for a gastric band when it grew to more than 2,000 productions. This year it glides past the 3,000 mark and it seems determined to maintain its place as the most cluttered congregation of twits and pipe-dreamers on the planet.

James Delingpole

Gomorrah is gangsters without glamour – but it’s still not as scary as Dance Moms

Television

Gomorrah (Sky Atlantic, Monday), the new, must-see Mafioso series, started promisingly. We met two hoods — one young, shaven-headed, good-looking; one weary, brow-beaten, middle-aged — filling up at a petrol station in Naples, an unfamiliar (to me anyway) setting that looks promisingly like a cross between Vegas and downtown Gaza. Clearly they were up to no good. Meanwhile, in a decrepit apartment block, an elderly mamma was preparing her beloved, twentysomething son a rather delicious-looking pasta dinner. She chastised him for smoking at the dinner table. The son tried explaining, to no avail, that this was an E-cigarette, not a real one. Mamma wasn’t having it. She said grace and her nicely brought up if wayward boy crossed himself piously.

Lloyd Evans

Sorry, Gillian Anderson, but you’ve caught the wrong Streetcar

Theatre

Streetcar. One word is enough to conjure an icon. Tennessee Williams’s finest play, written in the 1940s, is about a fallen woman trying to salvage her reputation before madness overwhelms her. All its horror and tension rely on the Victorian code that required a single woman to appear morally pure or to face ruin in the marriage market. The 1960s destroyed those conventions and this modern-day version feels like a lawsuit being pursued by a stammering counsel interrogating a corpse. The questions are baffling, the answers non-existent. Director Benedict Andrews trusts his own instincts far too much and the author’s not at all. To evoke the lush, exotic heat of Louisiana, he goes for Danish minimalism and clean white surfaces.

Giannandrea Poesio

Romeo and Juliet: a Mariinsky masterclass

More from Arts

According to some textbooks, one thing the fathers of Soviet choreography hastened to remove from ballet was that awkward-looking language of gestures generally referred to as ‘ballet mime’. Which explains why most Russian versions of Swan Lake lack familiar mime dialogues. And when it came to creating new ballets that required silent acting, such as Lavrosky’s 1940 Romeo and Juliet, the early Soviet dance-makers opted for a more naturalistic form of expressive gestural solutions. Yet, as is often the case with theatre practices, what was once innovative and naturalistic now looks as trite as 19th-century pantomime.

Deborah Ross

Allergic to blockbusters? See Wakolda

Cinema

Wakolda is not a sunny film for a sunny day, just so you’re aware, but as there is so little else around — August is a hopeless month for films; August is a dumping ground for the sub-par — you are going to have to take that on the chin, bear it as best you can, and while this is not sunny it is, at least, masterfully made. Set in Argentina in 1960, it’s a fictional imagining of how a German doctor insinuates himself on a family, and how that doctor turns out to be Josef Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death’ from the Nazi concentration camps. It’s not a thriller exactly. Instead, it is an unsettling, atmospheric, mood-driven piece, which, I should add, just so you’re aware, also features creepy dolls. That’s how un-sunny it is.

Hugo Shirley

Jonas Kaufmann’s illness, a muddled production – nothing can stop Bavarian State Opera’s La forza del destino

Opera

Rather than brave the boos and the first reprise of Frank Castorf’s half-hearted Ring at Bayreuth, I decided to pay a visit to Munich and catch the last two days of its annual opera festival. Less of a festival, as one usually understands the term, than a ramping-up of activity in the final month or so of its regular season, it mixes new stagings with starrily cast revivals. I caught one of each: a new production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, with Christian Gerhaher in the title role, and a revival of La forza del destino that was rendered a little less starry by the last-minute illness of Jonas Kaufmann — that’s destino for you, I suppose.

Marcus Berkmann

My daughter wants to know why you haven’t heard of the Jayhawks

Music

One of the many delightful aspects of having children is that you can get them to do things you are too old, lazy or important to do yourself. My disinclination to attend any sort of music festival, owing to a distaste for tents, chemical lavatories, mud and other people, has happily not passed down to my daughter, aged 15. Last month she went with a group of like-minded 15-year-olds, and large quantities of cider, to Latitude, which everyone says is much nicer than Glastonbury, if only because it doesn’t sprawl across several counties like a giant upper-middle-class shantytown. (The Guardian published an aerial photo of Glastonbury this year. It looked like Mexico City, only with a higher incidence of red trousers.

John Greening

Two Roads

More from Books

There are the fast people who check their emails hourly, engage with Twitter and multi- task their way through the day. And there are the slow ones who never reply even to your third request, and almost miss meetings and prefer pencil. The first — the fast — will be up to advise the worm, to value the cup, to out-tweet all competitors, whatever. The last (the least hurried), nevertheless, and surprisingly it has to be said, will, as in fact it turns out, succeed just as well, catching what the others were moving so quickly they missed: the prize deep-feeders.

5 August 2014

Niru Ratnam

I take my kids to galleries to demonstrate my cultural superiority over the masses

Jake Chapman, one half of the YBA duo the Chapman Brothers, has been rude about taking children to art galleries. He told the Independent that 'it's as moronic as a child' to expect a child to understand complex modern artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko as 'children are not human yet'. His forthright views have elicited a predictable response. Stephen Deuchar, the director of the Art Fund (who seems to be angry on a regular basis about some latest insult to the noble visual arts), countered on the Today programme that children can indeed appreciate a work of art deeply. Anthony Gormley told the Times that art is there to be experienced not understood.

31 July 2014

Kate Chisholm

Home Front: Radio 4’s first world war drama will fight out the full four years

Arts feature

In a studio in Birmingham, there’s an air of excitement. Jessica Dromgoole and her team are recording new scenes for Home Front, Radio 4’s specially commissioned drama commemorating the first world war. They know that they’re about to launch on to the airwaves the boldest, most creative and enterprising venture yet heard on the station. The years of planning, of making endless decisions about how to do it, what to focus on, where to set it, which real stories to fictionalise, which to abandon, have paid off. A random scene between a volunteer at a makeshift hospital and a wounded soldier is being recorded. There’s no preamble, no explanation, just two people having a conversation.

Andrew Lambirth

Why did it take so long to recognise the worth of British folk art?

Exhibitions

British folk art has been shamefully neglected in the land of its origin, as if the popular handiwork of past generations is an embarrassment to our cultural gurus and the kind of supposedly hip commentators who sneer at morris dancing. Last May I reviewed the archive display at the Whitechapel Gallery of Black Eyes and Lemonade, which re-visited the 1951 Whitechapel exhibition of the same name, a survey of vernacular art in Britain curated by the artist Barbara Jones; but that show, more than 60 years ago now, was probably the only specifically folk art exhibition in a major museum or public gallery to take place in recent years.

Michael Tanner

I think I’ve found the new Maria Callas

Arts feature

Some of my most enjoyable evenings, when I reviewed opera weekly for The Spectator, were spent at the Royal College of Music, in the tiny but elegant and comfortable Britten Theatre. The performers, onstage and in the pit, are mostly current students of the RCM, led by one or another expert but puzzlingly little-known conductor. Repertoire is reasonably adventurous, but Handel, Mozart, Britten are perhaps the backbone. One of the pleasures of those performances is spotting the singers that one is sure will go on to big operatic careers, if they choose to. I spent a lot of time doing that, and almost always got it wrong. You have to remember that voices that sound well there may not prosper in Covent Garden or other theatres of comparable proportions.

Toby Young

Want to be a neglectful parent? Come to a festival and learn

More from life

I spent last weekend at Port Eliot in Cornwall. This is supposed to be a literary and music festival and my reason for being there was to talk about my new book What Every Parent Needs to Know. In reality, though, it’s just an excuse to go camping with old friends, drink plenty of alcohol and stay up late. You’d think this would be difficult with four children in tow, particularly children as young as mine, but Port Eliot is an object lesson in benign neglect. By the end of the three days I had been taught more about parenting by the festival--goers than I’d managed to teach them. Caroline and I are quite relaxed with our kids — at least, that’s what I used to think.

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

If the Edinburgh Fringe thinks it’s fine to give in to bigots, I might have to give up on the Edinburgh Fringe

When is a great international arts festival not a great international arts festival? When it can’t uphold even the most basic principles of free speech. Last night a play by an Israeli theatre company was forced to cancel its run at the Edinburgh Fringe as the result of the barracking of a group of anti-Israeli thugs. The show, The City, is now homeless and on the hunt for a new venue. Where exactly would they like these Israelis to perform, I wondered? Outside the walls of the city possibly? Would that be more conducive to their medieval vision of the world? Owing simply to their nationality - owing simply to their race - a theatre company is being silenced. What does the artistic community have to say about this capitulation? They're rather in favour of it actually.

Sarah Wardle

Making

Poems

On these long, fruitful days, the Rioja which captures the sun of other Julys, is relaxing us, as is the summer, into this unwinding and earthy wine, into sex on the hoof, on the sofa, the Persian rug on the sitting room floor, in the hall, the kitchen by the cooker, up against the fridge, by the cupboard door, so I turn down the steaks as they sizzle and prevent potatoes boiling over, just as we turn up the heat, then simmer, get down to some sugar-icing drizzle, as if the baby we’re trying to make were spontaneous as a lemon cake.

Sarah Drury

A history of remembrance

More from Arts

One fight that seems to have been won is that spearheaded by the War Memorials Trust to preserve the thousands of memorials — monuments, statues, plinths, tablets — erected across the country to honour our war dead. Through conservation grants and hard graft, and a clampdown on the scrap-metal trade, many decaying and vandalised memorials have been rescued. Inventories are being compiled, guides published, and now English Heritage is staging an exhibition atop Wellington Arch (until 30 November) that explores the history of six London memorials in its keeping. Two are visible from the arch: Jagger’s Royal Artillery masterpiece (above) and Derwent Wood’s more controversial David, commemorating the Suicide Club, aka the Machine Gun Corps.

Kate Chisholm

Glasgow and the Commonwealth go back a long way; Radio 4 explores a murky past

Radio and podcasts

What’s been missing from the schedules during the Commonwealth Games has been a straightforward reminder about who makes up the roster of nations and why. When, for instance, did it suddenly become OK to talk about the Commonwealth without that frisson of embarrassment about its origins in empire? How come there are now 53 independent member states (although for some strange reason the Glasgow Games are boasting athletes from 71 nations and territories)? Surely there were never that many colonies flying the British flag? It’s a bit of a missed opportunity because this could be the good news story we’ve all been looking for in these weeks of relentlessly bad and worsening news.

James Walton

Barbie dolls? This girl aims for the head

Television

Channel 4’s Kids and Guns (Thursday) began with an American TV advert in which a young boy’s eyes shone with gratitude when his parents gave him a large gun, proudly marketed as ‘My First Rifle’. And just in case that seemed a bit macho, the ad also pointed out that My First Rifle is available in pink. Next, we met the real-life Gia, who at the age of nine already has quite an arsenal — thanks to her dad Spyder, a firm believer in the old Texan motto that ‘If you know how many guns you have, you don’t have enough’. ‘Wouldn’t it be more usual to buy her Barbie dolls?’ asked what couldn’t help but sound like a rather prissy British off-screen voice.

Deborah Ross

Moon Indigo: an all-you-can-eat buffet for the eyes – but your brain will feel famished

Cinema

Your enjoyment of Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo may entirely depend on how much visual whimsy you can take, what your threshold might be, whether you can go with it or whether it wears you out and brings you to your knees. There’s animated food and little mice that zip around in cars and eels wriggling out of taps and rubbery human limbs that elongate and doorbells that scuttle like frenzied cockroaches — sit on that, Wes Anderson! You too, Terry Gilliam! — but it may be whimsy at the expense of coherence, feeling, story. My threshold is not that high, I now know.

Lloyd Evans

Let’s face it, Greek tragedy is often earnest, obscure or boring. Not this Medea

Theatre

Carrie Cracknell’s new version of Medea strikes with overwhelming and rather puzzling force. The royal palace has been done up to resemble a clapped-out Spanish villa that seems to date from about 1983 if the kennel-sized TV set is anything to go by. (Weren’t TVs massive then? And always brown.) The villa’s peeling wallpaper and suppurating marble edifices form a balcony that straddles an eerie little copse, which manages to look both indoors and outdoors at once. These warring effects — villa and forest — do little to elucidate the play’s simple story: jilted Medea avenges herself on love rat Jason by murdering their two sons and bumping off his new sex-bunny.

Michael Tanner

In Norwich, a director is caught trying to murder Wagner’s Tannhäuser

Opera

Seventeen years ago the Norwegian National Opera staged two cycles of the Ring in Norwich’s Theatre Royal, performances that have remained vividly in the minds of anyone who saw them. Now Theater Freiburg has visited Norwich with two performances each of Parsifal and Tannhäuser. I was hoping to see both, but transport problems meant that I was only able to go to the second performance of Tannhäuser. I shall have quite a few criticisms to make, but all told it was a triumph, and was warmly received by a far from capacity audience. There aren’t many chances to see this problem child of Wagner’s, and this was the finest account I have seen in several decades, much more moving than the Royal Opera’s production of nearly four years ago.

Peter Phillips

Was Elgar’s The Kingdom an attempt to write a religious Ring Cycle?

Music

To go from the second day of the England v. India Test match at Lord’s to the Albert Hall for the opening night of the Proms was to make a journey that a chosen few might find enviable. Nonetheless, different though the two activities are, there were some similarities. For example, the arena at the Albert Hall, where the Promenaders stand, fills up more or less to capacity before the seats around it attract a single occupant, these seats being taken at the last possible minute before the start of the concert. Exactly the same thing happens at Lord’s: the pavilion is filled while the rest of the ground remains empty until seconds before the start of play.

Kate Bingham

Rosa Wedding Day

More from Books

More than a thousand buds have arrived in the garden. Yesterday I looked and there were none. Tangled into a slump of sullen green and bursting with sap they’ve over-run the armandii buddleia jasmine vine and cluster by cluster flick their swollen thumbs or sit on their fingers waiting to open, point their beaks up at the little sun. Their copper thorns will not be soft for long and something like a feather in a lung unfurls its spine inside their inside skin. A feeling wonders what it might become and daylight budges up, slips in between as if there were enough for every one. Rain or shine they will be flowers soon and by their own extravagant over-production lost in a scented commotion of white then gone: hips where their heads were, this year’s growing done.

25 July 2014

Fisun Güner

Cultural boycotts are ineffective and wrong

Scotland’s national poet Liz Lochhead has been at it again. Two years ago she was petitioning against a dance company from Tel Aviv, this year it’s an Israeli theatre company that’s set to play the Edinburgh Fringe. Both companies are 'guilty' of being in receipt of state funding. So, we have another letter and another long list of high-profile signatories calling for boycott. However, we all know – as Lochhead must know – that a boycott won’t, of course, happen (it’s about being seen to take a 'principled stand', d’oh). The nature of Incubator Theatre’s production is irrelevant – I gather it’s some 'film noir-type hip-hop musical'.

24 July 2014

Andrew Lambirth

Malevich: Are Tate visitors ready for this master of modernism?

Exhibitions

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) is one of the founding fathers of Modernism, and as such entirely deserves the in-depth treatment with which this massive new Tate show honours him. But it should be recognised from the start that this is a difficult exhibition, making serious intellectual and emotional demands on visitors, as art enters the realm of pure thought, utterly divorced from the comforting world of appearances. Malevich was one of the first great revolutionary practitioners of abstract art, a pioneer who made work of singular beauty and resonance, but his path is not always easy to follow. Perhaps with this in mind, the exhibition starts with a room of early, mostly figurative work, in which Malevich is shown experimenting with different ways of depicting.

Giannandrea Poesio

Natalia Osipova interview: ‘I’m not interested in diamond tiaras on stage’

Arts feature

‘I am not interested in sporting diamond tiaras on stage, or having my point shoes cooked and eaten by my fans,’ muses Natalia Osipova, referring to two old ballet anecdotes. ‘Ballet has evolved and the ballerina figure with it. The world around us offers new challenges, new stimuli and new opportunities, and I believe that it is the responsibility of every artist to be constantly ready to respond to these. There is simply no reason, nor time, to perpetuate century-old clichés, such as the remote, semi-divine figure of the 19th-century ballet star.’ Osipova, now a Royal Ballet principal, is still remembered by many as the Bolshoi Ballet’s soloist, who, only a few years ago,  dazzled dance-goers all over the world.