Culture

Culture

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

Hugo Shirley

Leipzig and Dresden are both staging Elektra. Which city wins?

Opera

Yet more performances of Elektra, Richard Strauss’s setting of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ramped-up, neurosis-riddled 1903 reworking of Sophocles, are unlikely to force any anniversary-year reassessments of the composer. But the piece’s current ubiquity does reflect the fact that we’re now relatively well off for singers equipped to tackle the fearsome title role. At their head, arguably, stands the German soprano Evelyn Herlitzius. She’s yet to make her Covent Garden debut, inexplicably, but her riveting performance galvanised the opening night of the first high-profile new production of the work in 2014, at Dresden’s Semperoper, where it shocked and awed its first audience 105 years ago.

Peter Hoskin

Is Hollywood finally waking up to the talents of women? Nah

Arts feature

There is, we all know, only one anniversary that matters this year: 20 March 2014, 50 years since The Twilight Zone episode ‘The Masks’ was first beamed into America’s cathode-ray tubes. Bunting will be stretched from television screen to television screen in celebration. Champagne will be spilt over remote controls. After all, ‘The Masks’ isn’t just a particularly fine episode of a particularly fine show. It is also the only episode — of 156, if we don’t count the two revival series made in later decades — to be directed by a woman. Ida Lupino.

Lara Prendergast

Dasha Zhukova’s publicity stunt

We think we’re immune to whatever the art world can throw at us. A urinal here, an unmade bed there, a dead shark to the head. But occasionally we forget our indifference, and become very worked up. Hurrah! Proof we aren’t all suffering from a prolonged bout of cultural nonchalance. Dasha Zhukova – Roman Abramovich’s art-collecting girlfriend, who runs the contemporary gallery Garage in Moscow – has angered people by being photographed on what looks like a black woman leaning back, naked, and with a cushion balanced strategically on her voluptuous bosom. Of course, she isn’t actually sitting on a real black woman with a voluptuous bosom, but rather a polyvinyl sculpture by the Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard.

16 January 2014

Clarissa Tan

After Sherlock, TV will never be the same again

Television

You know the holiday season is over when, instead of being torn between The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing on a Saturday night, you have to choose between The Voice and Splash!. The good news for The Voice is that pint-sized superstar Kylie Minogue has joined its judging panel. In the season opener, competition hopeful Leo Ihenacho (formerly of the band The Streets) picked Kylie to be his mentor, as he used to fantasise about her when he was a boy. The premise of The Voice is that the judges, who have their backs turned to the stage, aren’t influenced by the aspirants’ looks, age or dress. In return, contestants seem to choose as their coach the judge they think is most, well, hot. Anyway, I’m afraid the amateur-diving platform Splash!

Lara Prendergast

Would you have been let in to an ’80s club? 

More from Arts

People will go to extraordinary lengths to get into a nightclub. Nowadays you must wear something tight, and look slinky. But, as Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s at the V&A shows (until 16 February), a handful of Eighties doormen were into something a bit more deviant. The combination of a new London Fashion Week, a vibrant club scene and a coterie of ambitious designers emerging from the London art schools was potent. On Thursdays and Fridays, St Martin’s was deserted. Everybody was at home working on their costumes for the weekend. Over two floors, a mixture of clubbing outfits and catwalk designs are showcased. There is a mirror with the slogan ‘Would you let you in?’ stamped across it.

Kate Chisholm

When did you last hear a news report you could trust completely? 

Radio and podcasts

‘It put a lot upon us,’ said Christopher Jefferies’s aunt. ‘The ripples went on and did not stop for a long time.’ She was talking about the after-effects of the media witchhunt that skewered her nephew after his arrest in connection with the death of the Bristol landscape architect Joanna Yeates in December 2011. Jefferies was depicted as being almost certainly guilty because of his long, hippie-like hair, his bachelordom, his love of poetry and ‘culture’, his brusque refusal to speak to the press. Yet his only link with the crime was that he owned the flat in Clifton where Yeates lived. Saturday night’s Archive on 4 (Radio 4) reminded us of what happened to Jefferies and his family, and of some uncomfortable truths.

Deborah Ross

Fists of cash, hookers and a candle in your bum palls after a while

Cinema

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street will set the cat among the pigeons as a number of films do. 12 Years A Slave set the cat among the pigeons with some critics claiming it was ‘torture porn’ and other people taking to the blah-blah-blah and jabber-jabber-jabber of the Twittersphere to say they had no intention of seeing anything ‘so harrowing’. (Luckily for them, I plan to open shortly a specialised cinema, The Comfort-Zone Cinema, possibly on the Finchley Road, which will never show anything upsetting, and Hello, Dolly! every other Tuesday.) This time out, the blah-blah jabber-jabber will, I imagine, take the following form: does Wolf exult in the excesses it intended to satirise? Does it get off on its own virulent misogyny rather than indict it?

Leanda De-Lisle

The Thomas Cromwell plays would be stronger if they made him weaker 

Theatre

Three things you might not expect of the RSC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels. First, Mike Poulton’s plays have some great jokes. Laugh-your-head-off funny, you might say. Second, although Tom, Dick and Mary tell me they found Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies a more enjoyable read, Wolf Hall is the better play. Finally, the reinvention of the brutal Thomas Cromwell as someone you would have liked is, in the plays, a source of weakness as much as strength. Not that these are weak plays: six hours is a long time to spend on a theatre seat, yet I would happily see these plays back-to-back again tomorrow.

Lloyd Evans

The play to watch if your country is breaking up

Theatre

Of all the West End’s unloved venues the loveliest is the Arts Theatre. It specialises in creaky off-beat plays like Only Our Own by Ann Henning Jocelyn. We’re in Connemara, in the west of Ireland, in the early 1990s. A family of Anglo–Irish toffs are struggling to cope with their status as universal pariahs. Wherever they go they’re out of place. Catholic Ireland resents them. In England, their spiritual home, they feel like aliens. Titania, a narky teenager, is baffled by her parents’ religious prejudices and she merrily announces her involvement with a boozy local bumpkin. He’s Catholic, naturally. This prompts a bombshell of a speech from Titania’s grandmother, Lady Eliza, who witnessed a village insurrection in 1922 when she was just 11.

Andrew Lambirth

Alan Sorrell, oddly original and shamefully neglected (till now)

Exhibitions

Rediscovering the unduly neglected is one of the chief excitements of those who curate exhibitions and write books. And there’s nothing I enjoy more than saluting the achievement of those who bring back to our attention an artist who – for one reason or another – has slipped off the art world radar. Before this exhibition and, more importantly, the book accompanying it, Alan Sorrell was only a name to me, with a few rather vague visual connotations. Now I can put definite images to the name and begin to build a context for his work. For anyone interested in the broader picture of 20th-century British art, the current Sorrell initiative is of real interest and value.

Bernard O'Donoghue

American Night

Poems

All in the half-dark, we watch the dead playing the parts of the living, in roles we have seen before: The Quiet Man, or The Song of Bernadette. A stranger in a blue Thames van came from somewhere to the west as night drew in, to unload the big, flat cans with reels in them and tramp up the unpainted stairs to the organ-loft in the Church Hall. But I don’t remember seeing this film before: which must be right because I can’t recall what happens next, or even whether it has a happy ending.

John Greening

At Kew

More from Books

To Occupation Road again, a whole year nearer my own retirement now. The track slopes down past the Record Office to the river. I am looking for any of the soft fruit canes my grandfather planted, but find instead a stag beetle upside down on the tarmac, struggling like a memory, the feelers at full stretch. Maybugs! she shudders. The pathway ends at the Thames, where I note flood defences, vaguely recall the waterworks, and suddenly they have found me as a train breaks through the overgrown embankment. I want to look up and see my father at the glass, returning, and wave to him.

9 January 2014

Kate Chisholm

Bye-bye Bric, hello Mint — are Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey really the new boom economies?  

Radio and podcasts

New year new ideas as we woke up on Monday morning to find ourselves in Lagos with Evan Davies trying to convince us that Nigeria really is undergoing an economic earthquake. It’s part of a week-long campaign by Radio 4 to make us believe that the next economic leaders among world nations will be Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey. These new Mint countries are destined, we are told, to take over from the Bric countries, now deemed passé after just a decade in the limelight generated by the economist fashionistas. It’s stimulating stuff for this hibernating time of year.

Deborah Ross

Deborah Ross: 12 Years a Slave harrowed me to within an inch of my life

Cinema

Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave goes directly to the heart of American slavery without any shilly-shallying — unlike The Butler, say, or even Django Unchained — and is what I call a ‘Brace Yourself’ film, as you must brace yourself for horror after horror, injustice after injustice, shackles, muzzles, whippings, rapes, hangings. You will be harrowed to within an inch of your life, as perhaps is only right, given the subject matter, but you will not wish to flee your seat. You will recoil. You will flinch. You will say to yourself, ‘Oh no, not again.’ But the story will seize you with such a visceral power you will be rooted to the spot. I know I was and I’m not easy to root. Mind everywhere, usually.

Marcus Berkmann

All I want next Christmas is new Christmas songs 

Music

Three months until spring. Four months until the start of the cricket season. And only nine months until the radio starts playing ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ again. Or have you heard enough of Christmas songs by now? Many of us had heard enough of them by Christmas 1988. Every October they return. The first strains of Shakin’ Stevens emerging tentatively from high street shops. Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl, still bickering. Greg Lake, possibly alone now in believing in Father Christmas. Roy Wood’s enormous beard, wishing it could be Christmas every day. And for three months of every year his wish is granted. Millions of Britons suffer the consequences.

Matthew Stadlen

Lang Lang: You can’t compare Bach and Schoenberg, or Justin Timberlake and The Beatles

Music

As Lang Lang walked from the stage at the Royal Albert Hall in November, a little girl emerged from the audience to embrace him. It was a disarming moment that seemed to symbolise the impact of the 31-year-old Chinese pianist. He has rock star appeal. And then, for Lang Lang, the end was the beginning. Following three Mozart piano sonatas and four Chopin Ballades, he played six encores. After the third or fourth, he asked us, ‘Shall we keep going or shall we go home?’ A Cuban dance, a Chinese piece...When he finally finished with an explosion of Scriabin, thousands rose to their feet in recognition of his virtuosity. I joined them, despite having been disappointed by his Mozart.

Michael Tanner

Overrated Strauss vs underrated Gluck

Opera

This is the first of my more-or-less monthly columns, the idea of which is to report on operatic events other than those that take place at the two major London venues, with occasional trips to those areas (i.e., everywhere other than London) where the annual government grant for the arts is £4.80 per head, while in London it is £69.00. This fact was widely reported a few weeks ago, but while I thought for an hour or two that it might lead to a revolution, there was no widespread articulate reaction to it of any kind, nor, so far as I know, any indication that this gross inequity would be addressed. So if conspicuous consumption is what you’re after, you’ll know where you have to be. That’s not my main topic for this particular column, however.

Andrew Lambirth

Art shows you simply mustn’t miss in 2014

Arts feature

One of the great treats of the exhibiting year will undoubtedly be Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (17 April to 7 September) at Tate Modern. The last phase of Matisse’s productive career was devoted to making extraordinarily vivid images from painted paper cut with scissors, as the physical effort of wielding a paintbrush became too much for him. Matisse’s greatest strengths were as draughtsman and colourist, and the cut-outs combine these skills in abundant measure, releasing a new sense of joyous celebration almost unmatched in the history of art. The largest ever exhibition of the cut-outs, the Tate’s show will feature 120 works, many seen together for the first time. Unmissable.

Anthony Thwaite

Time to Go

Poems

Feeling my age, too soon too tired, Whatever gifts I had no more required, I am a hireling called in to be fired. Time was I was ambitious, heretofore. Not any more, not any more. Ridding myself of papers, pots, coins, books, No longer vain about what had been looks, The broth boiled over by too many cooks. Time was I kept some goods held back in store. Not any more, not any more. Taking my time over this last short walk, Not hearing what I say, or how I talk, Pushing my knife against my trembling fork. Time was I knew when I’d become a bore. Not any more, not any more.

David Blackburn

Why is there no God in the British Library’s latest exhibition?   

More from Arts

Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain at the British Library (until 11 March) would have you believe that the religious life was not a feature of Georgian Britain. God is an invisible force in this exhibition and the viewer has to know a fair amount about the period’s history to see Him at work among the exhibits. Josiah Wedgwood’s famous anti-slavery medallion is shown; but there is nothing about the non-conformist religious tradition that inspired him and other abolitionists. The decision to ignore that religious past means that the viewer cannot learn about the century-long tension between the established Church of England and the other protestant churches; the resolution of which helped to form the basis of our tolerant, liberal society.

William Wootten

Dayshifts

More from Books

The Man in the Moon will come on Tuesday. He will wear his grey hat and be travelling alone. Take his luggage and his staypress suits — and, Should he speak, converse about the ocean, Women or the rush on the delivery wards. I assume he’ll take the Penthouse Suite. Do check the ice-tray in the minibar. Make sure the curtains have been drawn, And say I’m sorry that I could not stay — It’s too long since we both worked the night.

3 January 2014

Liz Anderson

The man who transformed houses

More from Arts

Alec Cobbe is a designer, painter, musician, picture restorer and collector, and has recently donated drawings, photographs and other archives to the V&A, where some of this collection is now on display. Cobbe was born in Dublin and aged four moved to the family house Newbridge, an 18th-century, 50-room country villa designed by James Gibbs, which, he says, was the ‘single greatest influence on my life’. He had an ‘idyllic lamp-lit childhood’ — there was no electricity — where the ‘running water was rainwater, which had to be pumped daily to a tank at the top of the house’.

Kate Chisholm

How radio — and the digital age — help us to remember the first world war

Radio and podcasts

Perhaps the most moving programme of all amid the huge range that will mark the coming centenary of the Great War will be on 28 June, the day when in 1914 Gavrilo Princip shot dead the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie while they were on a state visit to Sarajevo. On that night, Radio 3, along with other members of the European Broadcasting Union, will transmit live from Sarajevo a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, marking that first step on the road to war. But the evening will also inevitably reflect on how the aftermath of 1914–18 led ultimately to another war, this time in Bosnia, and to the three-year siege of Sarajevo (the longest siege of a capital city in modern times).

Clarissa Tan

Is Sherlock starting to suffer from ADD?

Television

Sherlock’s not dead. A good thing, since on New Year’s Day BBC1 launched its third series of Sherlock, and it’d be inconvenient if the three episodes didn’t have Sherlock. Last season, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes stood on a building rooftop, dramatic coat flapping, a tweedy caped crusader. Then he jumped to his death. Only he didn’t. He’s still alive. The Cumberbatch comeback! Hooray. Of course, the detective had some explaining to do. Not only to sidekick John Watson (Martin Freeman) — who grew a moustache as part of the grieving process — but also to the many Sherlock fans who’d taken to the internet in the past two years to post their survival theories.

Will Gore

Interview Naomie Harris: It was hard playing the dark side of Winnie Mandela

Cinema

How do you solve a problem like Winnie Madikizela-Mandela? Perhaps it wouldn’t have legs as a format for a BBC Saturday-night talent show, but it’s a question that Naomie Harris has been trying to answer ever since she agreed to play her in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. I meet Harris at the Soho Hotel in London on the day before the UK première of the film, which tells the story of Nelson Mandela’s struggles against apartheid. It’s also, it transpires, the day before the death of the former South African president is announced to the world. Since his passing so much has been said about Mandela, but during the half-hour I spend with Harris it is his ex-wife who is uppermost in our minds.

Deborah Ross

‘Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom’ is a very, very long walk indeed

Cinema

The biopic Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedom is a timely tribute, and an earnest and respectful and well-meaning one, but it does seem like a very, very long walk indeed. It’s a slog, a plod, a trudge uphill, and of all the things you may have wished to say to Nelson Mandela, given the opportunity, what you will find yourself saying here is: ‘Put your bloody skates on, man. We have homes to go to, and other fish to fry!’ This is not, I’m assuming, what you thought you’d ever most wish to say to Mandela, given the opportunity, but the fact is: you will never have wanted anyone to put their skates on quite so much in your entire life.

Lloyd Evans

Get tickets for Emil and the Detectives, and opera glasses — some of the child actors are tiny

Theatre

It starts with a brilliant joke. We’re in the Weimar Republic in 1929. Little Emil Tischbein is listening to his mother and a moaning neighbour, Mrs Wirth, lamenting Germany’s loss of moral fibre. Mrs Wirth cites a recent gangster film whose depravity shocked her to the core. ‘We saw it three times,’ she adds.  Forewarned about thieves and hoodlums, Emil travels to Berlin carrying a precious cargo of 140 marks. A sinister stranger robs him on the train and he befriends a gang of Berlin school-kids who set off to retrieve his cash. Erich Kästner’s classic is directed with great style by Bijan Sheibani, who captures much of the book’s verve and atmosphere.

Michael Tanner

The state of opera today (it’s not good)

Opera

I’ve been hoping that in this, the last of my weekly columns on opera, I would be able to strike a positive, even cheerful note on the present and future of the art form, but honesty compels me to say that I don’t think it is in very good shape. Not, probably, that it has ever been, or at least only for brief periods. Owing to its mongrel nature, there has usually been a tendency for one or other of its ingredients to lord it over the others, so that the ideal balance of music and drama, spectacle and action, personalised in the collaboration of singers and conductors, stage directors and musicians, has only been rarely achieved.