Arts Archives

Baroque opera shows vicious people can sometimes be happy — and we’re glad they are

Opera

Visits by English Touring Opera are always to be looked forward to, but this autumn it has surpassed itself with three baroque works, two of them masterpieces and the third a fascinating rarity, all performed by casts of astonishingly high calibre, and produced helpfully, resourcefully, with simple elegant sets, which are all that is needed, though they probably cost a thousandth as much as the eye-catching splurges that we often see in London. First up, anyway at the Arts Theatre Cambridge, was the rarity: Cavalli’s Jason (intelligent to translate the titles where possible, since all the operas are sung in English). Apparently, it was the 17th century’s most popular opera, though that must be hard to determine.

Lloyd Evans

Finally — a play about insomnia that cures insomnia

Theatre

Athol Fugard is regarded as a theatrical titan but I usually need a microscope to find any trace of greatness in his work. The Island is set in a South African prison camp in the 1960s. Two banged-up lags, John and Winston, are toiling in the noonday heat. The governor torments them with a Kafka-esque prank. They’re placed at opposite ends of a sandpit and given shovels and wheelbarrows. Each must amass a dune of gravel, which his colleague is forced to deplete. This backbreaking futility is supposed to grind their spirits into nothing. It fails. Released from punishment at sundown, they retreat to their cells where they express themselves with abandon. They amuse each other with frolicsome monologues. They swap reminiscences about good old chums from home.

Clarissa Tan

Why doesn’t Doctor Who travel far from Britain?

Television

If I could go back in time, I’d watch Doctor Who from the very first episode. I wasn’t born in Britain, and with the 50th anniversary of the series hurtling towards us like an Earth-bound Tardis, I’m wondering if I might understand this cultural touchstone better if I’d grown up in the country, along with the show. But Doctor Who neophytes are in luck, because there’s a tiny loop in the time-space continuum whereby we can quickly catch up on Time Lord lore. To celebrate the 50th, the BBC has commissioned a host of programmes, many setting out to explain Doctor Who’s place as a British icon. This week there’s An Adventure in Space and Time (BBC2, Thursday) and The Ultimate Guide to Doctor Who (BBC3, Monday). Whoosh! Off we go then.

Claudia Massie

Weaving the colours of music

Opera

One loom, six metres in length, currently dominates the great, light-filled weaving hall of Edinburgh’s renowned tapestry workshop, Dovecot Studios. At its side sits Master Weaver Naomi Robertson, threading yarn from countless dangling bobbins between and around taut vertical strings, each dabbed with tiny, code-like markings. The tapestry, which is growing slowly upwards from the base of the loom, forms a spread of pinks, reds and golds, shifting horizontally through rich tonal ranges. The subject is as yet unclear. Given the intensity of the colour in this tapestry, it may seem surprising that its architect should be the painter Alison Watt, known for her bleached-out portraiture and paintings of white cloth.

Kate Chisholm

What Jackie did after JFK was assassinated

Radio and podcasts

A surfeit of anniversaries this week reminded us that on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, C.S. Lewis (born 1898) and Aldous Huxley (born 1894) also died. Three such different figures are hard to imagine — Kennedy, the wily politician, Lewis, the tortured academic, Huxley the cool intellectual. Lewis is the one whose image and personality don’t fit; a man who appears cast from a different age from Kennedy and also from Huxley, who you can well imagine wielding an iPod and Twitter account. Yet it’s the pipe-smoking, tweed-suited Lewis who has been given the celebrity treatment this week, while the coolly cynical Huxley has been silenced, with not a feature or reading to be heard.

David Blackburn

Mass destruction in an age of mass media

Dining with a Picasso

15 November 2013

Emma Hartley

One Great Thing gets embarrassing for the Yes campaign in Scotland

Big Country's song ‘One Great Thing’ is an anthem for the Scottish Yes campaign: it was soaring in the background during an item recorded at a ‘Yes’ rally on the Today programme the other day. And since Big Country's bagpipe-sounding guitars were one of the joys of my adolescence and I've been partial to a check shirt ever since, my heart soared along with it. ‘Yes,’ said Jim Lafferty from the Yes campaign's communications office, appropriately enough, when I rang to ask how it had come about. ‘It was suggested by Jim Downie and Will Atkinson of the creative team.’ I understood that they had not, however, spoken to the band, having gone straight through to the record company about the rights.

14 November 2013

Niru Ratnam

Do you think this painting is worth $48.4 million?

Arts feature

Earlier this year a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, depicting two figures stoned on the hallucinogenic drug PCP, was offered for sale at Christie’s in New York. ‘Dustheads’ was given an estimated sales tag of $25–35 million. In the end, the hammer came down at $48.8 million, a sum that easily broke the previous record for the artist, $26.4 million, which was achieved last November. It was the fourth time in 12 months that Basquiat’s record price had been smashed, and confirmed the artist’s dominance of the contemporary market. Such record-breaking at auction tends to elicit valedictory statements from auction houses and Christie’s Loic Gouzer duly obliged: ‘“Dustheads” is pure, concentrated energy, freedom and honesty.

Andrew Lambirth

The painter of poetry

Exhibitions

The famous court case in which Ruskin accused Whistler of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’ continues to rumble through the public response to art in this country. The man in the street, the man on the Clapham Omnibus and most of the men who drive black cabs all like their art to be recognisable. (Perhaps women are less hidebound.) Their definition of skill is the ability to paint with photographic fidelity, and they prefer art to tell a story. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), leading exponent of ‘art for art’s sake’, painted pure visual poetry rather than the hard facts of detailed realism. His paintings are supremely atmospheric: subtle and allusive, they suggest rather than state, evoke rather than describe.

Lara Prendergast

‘Miley Cyrus vs Lily Allen’ is not a worthy battle for feminism

If ever there was reason to believe that feminism has lost its way, then it is found in the current debate about bottoms. It all began with twerking – the sexualized dance that no one had heard of until popstar Miley Cyrus squeezed into some PVC underwear, and twerked to Robin Thicke’s song Blurred Lines. The term entered the Oxford Dictionary of English in August. Bottoms are now all over the place. Last night was the annual Victoria’s Secret show - and, much to the delight of news desks, there were bottoms aplenty. It has become increasingly difficult to open a paper without seeing news about belfies (bum-selfies), bum implants and of course, twerking.

Alan Brownjohn

Nevertheless

Poems

Like the machine the day had churned in dark circles, But when at last I came back the whole contraption Had stopped too soon, all its baggage had halted In a stubborn wish to stay there and nowhere else. I wouldn’t know when this had happened, Maybe some time in the first half-hour while I Was abroad it had issued a rap, a shudder, A shake, and a stillness. Its red warning Stayed alight on the closed door. Its water Wasn’t going to break into any outlet, Its porthole gave onto a darkness that refused Any sound or movement, and I found myself Looking out for comfort at a clear night sky. It hadn’t stopped.

James Mumford

The sickeningly talented Johnny Flynn

Theatre

‘I am walking in some mountains’. That’s the out-of-office that pops up when I email Johnny Flynn to request an interview. The folk star and West End actor is on holiday. But he’s not doing the Three Peaks Challenge. No, he’s tracing St Paul’s third missionary journey across southern Turkey, a 30th birthday present from Bea, his wife and teenage sweetheart. ‘I’m obsessed with pilgrimages,’ Flynn says. He’s also done the Way of St James, which finishes in Santiago de Compostela. ‘I love following old routes, imagining the consciousness of those who walked them.’ When he’s come down from the mountains we sit down to talk about the recent release of his third album, Country Mile.

Deborah Ross

The Butler, about a black domestic in the White House, is too painfully obvious

Cinema

The Butler tells the story of an African–American butler at the White House who served eight American presidents over three decades and it plays as a ‘greatest hits’ of the civil rights movement, along with whatever else they decided to throw in, like Vietnam, apartheid, and Lyndon B. Johnson on the can. (Actually, Lyndon B. Johnson on the can was rather the highlight.) It is heavy-handed, predictable, bland and so contrived in its sentimentality I sniggered at what should have been the moments of emotional impact. However, all was not lost, as I did have a nice little doze, which, as it was a morning screening, set me up quite nicely for the rest of the day. So there was that, but only that, alas.

Lloyd Evans

‘Keeler’ is not just about Tory bigwigs chasing nymphettes around the pool

Theatre

It’s an unlovely venue, for sure. Charing Cross Theatre, underneath the arches, likes to welcome vagrant plays that can’t find a home elsewhere. The dripping exterior, opposite a gay love-hub named Heaven, feels as if it’s paved with tears. The foyer is scented with mildewed chip fat and the ink-black auditorium looks like a closed-down fleapit from the 1950s. Perhaps this air of neglect explains why few of its productions win rave reviews. Keeler, starring Paul Nicholas, got an unfair monstering. The play is an absorbing docudrama, which explores the relationship between Stephen Ward and his protégée Christine Keeler. Their flatshare was a complex and unusual set-up. Ward was multitalented, socially ambitious, intelligent, charming and articulate.

Michael Tanner

The ENO’s Magic Flute ignores everything that makes Mozart’s opera great

Opera

A new production of The Magic Flute is something to look forward to, if with apprehension. How many aspects of this protean masterpiece will it encompass, and how many will be neglected or distorted? The answer, in the case of Simon McBurney’s effort at the Coliseum, is that almost everything that contributes to the work’s greatness is ignored or reduced, so that an evening that should be spent in a state of growing elation merely induces irritation deepening to rage, with patches of life-draining boredom. Not that the first-night audience shared my view, to judge from the roar of applause that greeted the final curtain, and the frequent guffaws and outbursts of clapping during the work.

Giannandrea Poesio

The Royal Ballet’s triple bill was danced to perfection

James Delingpole: Is the fight against environmentalism the new Cold War?

Television

Gosh it isn’t half irksome when someone who went to the same school as you but is considerably younger than you ends up doing dramatically better than you. But hats off to Dominic Sandbrook: his new series Cold War Britain (BBC2, Tuesday) is an absolute delight. Sandbrook has that rare gift of making things you thought you knew pretty well already seem startling and fresh. Take Churchill’s Fulton, Missouri speech. ‘Ah,’ I said expertly to the Fawn, a good five minutes before the programme reproduced the famous recording, ‘From Stettin in the Baltic...’ But what Sandbrook does is both put it in context and give it a human dimension that brings the whole business alive.

Kate Chisholm

Radio 4’s All In The Mind is a perfect example of why we still need the licence fee

Radio and podcasts

Best line of the week came on Monday from the composer John Tavener, and was given added poignancy by the announcement the following day that Tavener had died. He told us, ‘Life is a creeping tragedy; that’s why I must be cheerful.’ It’s a sankalpa, or inner resolution, he held on to especially in his last years as he endured an illness that stopped his heart four times and once kept him in intensive care for six months. For a while the experience of near-death shut down his creativity completely. He had, he told us, ‘no sense of that other life which until then had enriched him’. Tavener was talking on Start the Week, which on Monday welcomed back Andrew Marr after his remarkable recovery from catastrophic illness.

Liz Anderson

The Discerning Eye show is full of great art pieces. I know because I chose them

Paris: Parc life

Features

Autumn in Paris has been immortalised in one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s most poignant poems. Having left his wife in Berlin, Rilke moved to Paris in 1902 where he wrote ‘Herbsttag’ (Autumn Day). ‘Whoever is alone now, will remain so for long. He will stay up late, write long letters and wander restlessly in the avenues as the leaves drift.’ If you have ever taken a solitary walk in the gardens of Versailles as the sun glints coldly on the bright autumn colours, you will know that feeling. For four months of the year, from December to March, living in Paris is like being trapped inside Tupperware. The grey skies are more immovable even than in London. So if you are planning a trip, go in October or November when an Indian summer can produce wonderful effects.

7 November 2013

Robert Gorelangton

‘You can’t handle the truth!’ — the greatest courtroom dramas of all time

Arts feature

Our legal system is pure theatre and always has been. Many barristers stand accused of being failed actors and vice versa. Judges love the dressing-up box and a chance to give their gavel a good bang. With murmuring galleries, shocking verdicts, swooning witnesses, cries of ‘all rise’ and ‘take him down’, the flummery and drama of the courtroom has always supplied a rich genre for film, theatre and telly. Now there’s a chance to see one of the more serious courtroom classics in the West End. Twelve Angry Men — originally written for the screen and directed by Sidney Lumet — is about a grumpy New York jury deciding on the fate of an ethnic kid accused of stabbing his father. If guilty, it’s the electric chair.

Andrew Lambirth

How China’s Bayeux Tapestry differs from ours

Exhibitions

The V&A’s remarkable survey of Chinese painting begins quietly with a beautiful scroll depicting ‘Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk’, from the early 12th century, which, with its bright colours, shallow space and lack of setting, invites comparison with a western masterpiece of a similar date, the Bayeux Tapestry. The crowded urgencies and narrative drive of the English/French embroidered cloth couldn’t be further from the refined intervals and sophisticated relationships of the Chinese scroll, and yet both tell much about the cultures that produced them. However, neither should be read simply as historical documents: both offer rare aesthetic pleasures of quite different distillations.

John Spurling

What my addiction to Chinese painting made me do

Exhibitions

My addiction to Chinese landscape painting began in 1965 at the V&A, in a travelling exhibition of the Crawford Collection from America. The catalogue entries were supplied by the doyen of Chinese art historians in Britain, Michael Sullivan, who died aged 97 just a month before the opening of this latest exhibition of Chinese painting at the V&A. His particularly well-written and stimulating books on Chinese art, especially Symbols of Eternity, published in 1980, kept my addiction smouldering until at last I felt I had to do something about it and wrote a novel, The Ten Thousand Things. Its central character is a 14th-century Chinese landscape-painter, Wang Meng, whose ‘total absorption in the language of painting’ reminded Sullivan of Cézanne.

Lloyd Evans

British empire? What British empire?

Theatre

Here’s a tip for play-goers. When the curtain goes up on a garden, prepare for some feeble plotting. The glory of gardens, for the playwright, is that the characters can enter and leave without reason. The rites of welcome and valediction, the physical opening and shutting of doors, the declaration of motive are all abandoned. Anyone can wander in and out of a backyard. But that freedom of action is denied to a character who enters, say, a palace or a travel agents or a bedroom. Shaw is fond of gardens. Ayckbourn quite likes them too. Shakespeare used them more than once (but he’s forgiven) and David Storey sets his 1970 classic Home in a garden where two elderly bores bump into each other on a warm autumn day. They seem to be acquainted.

Marcus Berkmann

Morrissey can’t even moan properly — here’s a frontman who can

Music

There is much to be said for Schadenfreude. (If it was edible, it would be a meal in a very expensive restaurant, for which someone else was paying.) So it’s probably inadvertently that Morrissey has added to the gaiety of nations this past fortnight with the publication of his autobiography, winningly titled Autobiography. So catastrophically bad does the book turn out to be that Morrissey-loathing critics have queued up to give it (and him) a damn good thrashing. It has been a long time coming. While it has always been clear that The Smiths were every bit as good as we thought they were at the time, it is even clearer now that Morrissey’s symbiotic working partnership with Johnny Marr was the reason why.

Deborah Ross

Ryan Gosling couldn’t play Taki better than Taki

Cinema

Seduced and Abandoned is both a satire on film-making and a love letter to film-making and a joy. A documentary made by the director and writer James Toback, in cahoots with his friend the actor Alec Baldwin, it follows the two as they work their way round the Cannes Film Festival, trying to raise financial backing for a film inspired by Last Tango in Paris. They schmooze. They lunch. They cajole. They beg. And in the process meet, among others, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci and Ryan Gosling as well as the billionaire shipping heir and journalist Taki, who writes the High life column in this magazine, and whom they try to tap up for $20 million. Taki plays himself, but you know what? He’s so great, he may have a future in it.

Michael Tanner

Keith Warner’s Wozzeck doesn’t make me as angry as it used to

Opera

When Keith Warner’s production of Berg’s Wozzeck was first produced at the Royal Opera, nine years ago, it made me more angry than any that I had ever seen. At its first revival in 2006, my response was milder, though still outraged. Now, on its third outing, I mind it even less, partly because the musical performance is so strong. Warner has returned to oversee this revival, which, if memory serves, is little different from the last one, so he still regards Wozzeck as the portrayal of an experiment, with Wozzeck as the guinea pig, and the rest of the cast, with minor exceptions, as his tormenting experimenters. Most of the stage is a huge white room, suggesting a nightmare hospital or a morgue, and containing four large vitrines, with huge toadstools, etc. in three of them.

Clarissa Tan

Come to the Spectator office, Gareth Malone, and hear our ‘Carmina Burana’

Television

They’re now televising proceedings from the Court of Appeal. Great. As if I didn’t have enough to do already, keeping tabs on Strictly Come Dancing and EastEnders, I now have to monitor what’s happening within the hallowed judicial temples of the land. The broadcasting of court cases has been much debated, with people fussing about whether it will influence the meting out of Justice, and the implications for Law and Order once these are exercised in front of the cameras, and other high-minded issues. My own worry is about my job scope. Everything is televised these days, which means everything can be reviewed.