Arts Archives

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week

The Tate Britain has recently undergone a ‘sorely needed’ rehang, which Andrew Lambirth explores in this week’s Spectator. As a ‘welcome return to the great tradition of the chronological hang’ might have its detractors, but the BP Walk Through British Art is, overall, a fantastic display. Here’s the director of Tate Britain, Penelope Curtis (who was in charge of the reorganisation) talking about her highlights from the display. And here are Andrew Lambirth’s own highlights. Has sod you architecture finally ‘put on a lounge suit’ asks Stephen Bayley. That, at least, was the dress code that Richard Rogers applied to the opening of his new retrospective, Inside Out, at the Royal Academy.

25 July 2013

David Blackburn

A secret gallery at Hyde Park Corner

More from Arts

A rare jewel sits in the middle of the Hyde Park Corner roundabout. The Quadrant Gallery, run by English Heritage, occupies the Wellington Arch. The gallery is showing a series of exhibitions to mark the centenary of the 1913 Ancient Monuments Act, a landmark in conservation. The present show (until 15 September) examines efforts to protect Georgian Britain during the early 20th century. The Luftwaffe (see Holland House library after an air raid, 1940, above) was nothing compared to rapacious British developers. Photographs show sledgehammers being taken to Adelphi Terrace, from which Robert Adams’s striking doorframe was salvaged.

James Delingpole

What was the point of Burton and Taylor?

Television

Watching Burton and Taylor (BBC4, Monday) I felt a bit like I do when I go to the theatre — or, more often, when friends have kindly taken me to the theatre. ‘Are you enjoying it?’ someone will ask. ‘Oh, yes. Very much,’ I’ll lie. For the truth is, no matter how well done it all is, I’d still so much rather be doing other things. Catching up with the latest episode of the infinitely more gripping The Returned (Channel 4, Sunday), for example. At the end I found myself wondering ‘Why?’ Not just ‘Why didn’t I switch off earlier?’ and ‘Why couldn’t I maybe have chosen to review that David Starkey series on royalty and music instead?

Deborah Ross

At last, a film about proper women who aren’t just drippily searching for love

Cinema

Frances Ha will make many spit ‘Frances...Bah!’ but I won’t be among them. Yes, it is rather kooky, and highly self-conscious, with its New Wave references and its Woody Allen influences (it’s a serious, black-and-white, Manhattan comedy), but it’s also sweet, endearing, touching, and features proper women you can actually believe in, and who aren’t just drippily searching for love, which is something of a novelty. Plus, it comes in at under 90 minutes, which is totally great. I was over the moon about that. You know, when I am appointed Professor of Film Studies somewhere, as is still only a matter of time, the first thing I will tell my students, once we’ve dealt with the New Waveyness of the New Wave — Goddard: he was a one!

Lloyd Evans

The National Theatre of Scotland has done more to demean Scotland’s cultural reputation than anything I can think of

Theatre

West End producers are itching to get their hands on the new show at the Bush. Mama Mia’s director, Phyllida Lloyd, takes charge of a script written by the Torchwood actress Cush Jumbo about the world’s first black female celebrity. Josephine Baker was born to wow the crowds. A child cabaret artiste from St Louis, she performed as a chorus girl in New York and then leapt the Atlantic to become the toast of Paris in the 1920s. Aged 19, she was one of the biggest theatrical stars in Europe. She married an Italian count, adopted 12 children, bought a château, went bankrupt, fought for the Resistance during the war, returned to America in the 1950s and became a heroine of the civil rights movement. Cush Jumbo brings a formidable range of skills to the role.

Andrew Lambirth

Modernist Marxists skew the Lowry exhibition

Exhibitions

There has been much positive comment about the rehang of the Tate’s permanent collection, which sees a welcome return to the great tradition of the chronological hang and thus gives the visitor a chance to see the development of British art from 1545 to today. At last we are permitted a rest from themed displays and given a proper educational arrangement that maps out our artistic heritage — at least in part. (Most of the larger movements are covered.) This is not a conservative stratagem: there is still plenty of room for discussion and controversy in the various inclusions and omissions (particularly noticeable when we reach the 20th century).

Stephen Bayley

Is Richard Rogers still a rebel?

More from Arts

‘Lounge suit’ is normally a reliable signifier of supine gentility. But there it was on the invitation to Richard Rogers’s 80th birthday retrospective. Can this be the same architect once praised by a president of RIBA for his admirable ‘sod you’ approach to the public? The same man the Parisians sniffily called an ‘English hippie’ when working on the Centre Pompidou? Surely not the architect who had to buy a cheap suit and borrow a tie to visit his new client, Lloyd’s of London? And there he was at the head of the receiving line. Balsamic brown face, steel-grey buzzcut like a Florentine cab-driver, baggy grey cargo pants, signature violent-green collarless shirt and DayGlo pink sneakers with some sophisticated ventilation thing going on.

Damian Thompson

Why has nobody heard of the miraculous Czech composer Zelenka?

Music

When I was in my late twenties I discovered the joy of drinking alone. Well, perhaps ‘joy’ is putting it too strongly. I’d been thrown out of the flat I shared with one of my closest friends from university after a series of drunken rows about his social-climbing girlfriend. I was living in a converted gardener’s cottage in west London. It was painted pink, for some reason (‘a pink cottage — just right for you,’ harrumphed my ex-flatmate), and furnished so miserably that it didn’t seem worth the effort to throw out the empty wine bottles or bother with ashtrays. Now I could binge-drink and, just as important, binge-listen. The late Beethoven quartets, in virtuosic but slightly unhinged performances by the Lindsays, suited my mood.

Lloyd Evans

Interview: David Haig on King Lear and The Wright Way

Arts feature

David Haig is one of those actors who can’t escape the visual identity of his characters. He’s the sad suburban salaryman. He’s the pasty-faced petty bureaucrat. He’s the bungling office curmudgeon with a volcanic temper. He just looks that way. Except that he doesn’t. I barely recognise the suntanned Bohemian figure who strolls up and shakes me by the hand. With his summery shirt and his trim grey beard he looks like a rakish Cretan sailor ready to pour himself a double ouzo and start reminiscing about the mermaids. He’s rehearsing Lear, at the Theatre Royal Bath, when we meet. ‘It’s an addiction,’ he says. ‘Any actor, past a certain age, wants to do it.

John Greening

Walking

Poems

One moment basking in the sun, the next knee-deep in snow astonished at the way these tracks must have filled to the top of their dry-stone walls during the April blizzards. To walk has been the idea since we were small, and so we go on along new paths and old, the way our parents led us, listening for a curlew, looking at a weird extended ash, checking our watches for the train, stopping for elevenses among the sheep-droppings. It is a rhythm that we require, that speaks of essences and immortality; not a pilgrimage because there is no aim, the route is circular, but a stay against age, climbing edge after edge, then out across the moor above Eyam, that hostel you think you stayed in once.

Kate Chisholm

The BBC bows to celebrity

Radio

The licence fee is both a blessing and a curse for the BBC. The clue is in that nickname — Aunty — both affectionate and slightly patronising. Aunty implies that the corporation is a friendly family affair, middle-of-the-road and just a teeny bit desperate to stay in favour, like grown-ups attempting the dance moves of the next generation. The Beeb may have an unfair advantage over its commercial rivals because of the fee but its reliance on taxpayers’ funding also makes it dependent on the goodwill of whichever political party is in government. That means it has to be seen to be a vote-earner, or rather not a vote-loser, if it wants to retain its fee-supporting status. It must cater for all tastes, and keep up (and in) with the popular mood.

Michael Tanner

A formidable cast for Covent Garden’s Capriccio

Opera

Richard Strauss’s operatic swansong Capriccio made an elegant and untaxing conclusion to the Royal Opera’s season. It was done in concert, but there was a fair amount of acting, more from some of the participants than others. Renée Fleming as the Countess, who feels she has to choose between a poet and a composer, wrung her hands, strode around as much as her fabulous silver and black gown allowed, and in the final scene smote her brow in best distraught Joan Crawford manner; the others huffed and flounced and strode off into the wings, and there was, as much as there can be in this strange opera, a sense of people interacting rather than just singers doing their thing.

Lisa Brockwell

Waiting for the Train

22 July 2013

Rod Liddle

What has happened to the deluge of Romanians?

Snoring in the sunshine down Park Lane, in London, last week was the latest gift to Britain from the Great God of Multicultural Diversity, sixty-odd snaggle toothed Romanian gypsies. I went to speak to them for a film I was doing for the Sunday Times. The only English the vast majority knew was ‘grwnka’, which they barked at me while pointing at their mouths. This is apparently their approximation of: ‘Do you possibly have a cigarette to spare, my good man?’ Some didn’t even say Grwnka, they just pointed at their mouths and looked at my cigarette. There are very serious fears that these new arrivals will unfairly compete with honest British pickpockets and beggars, being more adept and with lower overheads.

19 July 2013

Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week

Wadjda is the first feature-length film to come out of Saudi Arabia, and was shot by the country’s first female director - but those aren't the only things that are great about it, says Deborah Ross. It's also ‘fascinating, involving, moving, and an entirely excellent film in its own right’. The story might be simple, but it’s the glimpses of how life might be for a woman living in Saudi Arabia make it ‘wonderful’. Deborah’s second film this week is the The World’s End, an attempt to be humorous that despite its cast (which includes Martin Freeman, Rosamund Pike and Simon Pegg) is completely unfunny, and ‘just boring’. Even the zombies fail to make it more exciting...

18 July 2013

Lucy Vickery

Bear hunting on Shaftesbury Avenue

More from Arts

Shaftesbury Avenue might not be traditional bear-hunting territory, but young adventure-seekers would be well advised to beat a path this summer holidays to the Lyric Theatre where Michael Rosen’s much-loved classic We’re Going on a Bear Hunt has been imaginatively translated to the stage by Sally Cookson (until 8 September). The story follows an intrepid family who surmount various obstacles — long grass, oozy mud, a deep, cold river, a swirling snowstorm and a big dark forest — in their quest to find a bear. When they finally track him down in a gloomy cave, they take one look at his shiny wet nose and goggly eyes and scarper, hotfooting it back the way they came to take refuge at home under a large pink eiderdown.

Clarissa Tan

If you’re craving some Kiwi bush angst, Top of the Lake fits the bill

Television

I sincerely hope you’re not watching television. With the glorious summer sun we’re having, you should be having picnics and swims, not sitting in front of a screen. So this is my recommended viewing for the week: nothing. Get out. Still, if you must look for something, why not look for shows about looking? There are quite a few of them about. In the new sitcom Family Tree (Tuesdays, BBC2), Eeyore-faced Chris O’Dowd plays Tom Chadwick, a recently cuckolded, jobless single who’s inherited an old photo of someone he believes to be his great-grandfather. Tom embarks on a search to know more about his ancestors, discovering ever more exotic and esoteric branches of his genealogy.

Deborah Ross

Wadjda is Saudi Arabia’s first feature-length film and is shot by a woman

Cinema

Wadjda is the first feature-length film to come out of Saudi Arabia, and was shot by the country’s first female director, and although people will talk about how it breaks boundaries and how pioneering it is, that’s not what you most need to know. What you most need to know is that it’s fascinating, involving, moving, an entirely excellent film in its own right and, therefore, rather unlike The World’s End, which isn’t. It also has a few good jokes in it, which is rather unlike The World’s End, too. And it treats women as worth more than a quick shag in a toilet, which The World’s End doesn’t, just so you know.

Michael Tanner

Opera review: Longborough’s tiny stage takes on the Ring – and wins

Opera

There are no two ways about it: Wagner’s Ring cycle, the biggest challenge that any opera company can face, has been mounted with triumphant success in Longborough, and now presumably has been laid to rest. Nine years ago, at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, I saw the first attempt to stage it, in Jonathan Dove’s drastically cut version, and with skeletonic orchestration, and though there was some decent singing, on the whole I was unimpressed.

Andrew Lambirth

A Crisis of Brilliance makes the trek to Dulwich worthwhile

Exhibitions

This exhibition was dreamt up by David Boyd Haycock, a freelance writer and curator, following the success of a book he published with a similar title in 2009. The Crisis of Brilliance book focused on the early career of five Slade-trained artists and their relationship with the first world war. When I reviewed it at the time, I felt that Dr Haycock was simply retreading rather familiar ground, however agreeable his text, as all of the artists he chose to highlight had already been extensively written about. To the five artists of the book a sixth has been added for the exhibition: David Bomberg. This enables the show to include two large canvases by Bomberg that contribute considerably to the impressiveness of the display.

Lloyd Evans

A cast of celebs fails to bring any oomph to The Ladykillers

Theatre

The Ladykillers is back. Sean Foley’s adaptation of the classic Ealing comedy introduces us to a crew of villains who stage a train heist while lodging in the house of a sweet old lady. She discovers their crime and when they try to bump her off she proves indestructible. The 1955 movie makes a huge effort to manage the plot’s credibility. The audience is never quite sure if this is a criminal gang in a comic predicament or comic gang in a criminal one. Sean Foley abjures such nuances and gives us a bunch of clowns in a two-hour slapstick routine. This approach deprives the tale of all its subtlety and shadowy strangeness. Michael Taylor’s complex, expressionist design adds to the sense of artifice. A cast of celebs compete to get the most laughs.

Michael Prodger

When a smartphone gallery is better than the real thing

Arts feature

The best way to view some of the world’s greatest works of art is to go nowhere near them. Like other celebrities, the most famous paintings are hard to get close to and there are few less spiritual experiences than being cattle-prodded as part of a crowd through an overpacked exhibition. You may visit in the hope of communing with legendary art but, as often as not, gallery-going is anti-contemplative. While there is no way of replicating the experience of standing in front of a masterpiece, technology can at least allow you your personal space. Take Google Art Project, for example, a collaboration between the omnivorous internet search company and 151 museums, galleries and collections in 40 different countries.

John Whitworth

Outplacements

Poems

He said, it’s a structural workforce imbalance and I thought where’s the scope for a man of your talents? He said, it’s retargeting personal goals and I thought yet all human resources have souls. He said, it’s a preplanned executive cull and I thought you’ve a horrible shape to your skull. He said, it’s a labour pool surplus reduction and I thought I could pop out your eyeballs by suction. He said, it’s transitioned vocational severance and I thought that’s my cods in the mincer, your reverence. He said, it’s downsizing, dehiring, decruiting and I thought also strangling and stabbing and shooting. He said, you’re redundant, you’re done for, you’re dead and I thought same to you, squire, and cut off his head.

Kate Chisholm

Radio review: At last! A proper Book at Bedtime

Radio

It had begun to look as if Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime had been taken over by the zealous publicity-hungry PRs of publishing. For the past few months we’ve had nothing but the latest John le Carré, Neil Gaiman, Mohsin Hamid and Jami Attenberg. Books that would sit better in the morning Radio 4 slot as Book of the Week have been foisted upon us at 10.45 p.m., just when we want to start winding down from the hectic day, to escape from the traffic and fumes of the internet-bound life into which most of us have sunk. What we need post washing-up, dog walk, news, last texts, tweets and blogs is not bracing new writing, stuffed full of our worst imaginings and post-9/11 fear and loathing.

Daniel Hardisty

Siempre

14 July 2013

Camilla Swift

The View from 22 debate special: too much immigration, too little integration?

This May, David Goodhart’s latest book, The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration, earned him the title of ‘too hot for Hay’ when he was ‘shunned’ by the literary festival. The festival director, Peter Florence, went on to describe the book as ‘sensationalist’ and ‘not very good’. But all was not lost. As event chair Andrew Neil put it: ‘What the Hay festival missed, The Spectator brought to you’, with a special panel on immigration last Tuesday, 9 July. Goodhart was joined on the panel by the Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens, former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission Trevor Phillips and The Huffington Post’s Mehdi Hassan.

13 July 2013

Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 13 July 2013

Deborah Ross reviews two films for us this week. The first is Pacific Rim, a ‘giant monsters v. giant robots’ film, and to be perfectly honest, that’s about all she has to say on the matter. If you do want to find out more, here’s the trailer: Her second film this week is ‘The Moo Man’, which is almost the opposite of Pacific Rim. ‘Instead of being a big, noisy film with nothing to say, it’s a small, quiet film with quite a lot to say’. A documentary following a dairy farmer around his East Sussex farm, it is ‘beautifully and lovingly and discreetly filmed’, it says everything it has to say about British agriculture, in its own quiet way. The inside of our British palaces used to be almost a state secret, .

11 July 2013

Daniel Grant

Are rugs becoming the new must-have art objects?

More from Arts

Tapestries once had a place of honour in fine art, but that was during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Oil paintings, for a time, were viewed as the poor man’s tapestry. Now, that equation may be turning round. ‘Tapestries serve a lot of purposes,’ said Donald Farnsworth, president of Magnolia Editions, which has produced tapestries for artists such as Chuck Close, April Gornik, Alex Katz, Ed Moses, Gerhard Richter, Kiki Smith, William Wiley and others. ‘They absorb sound and add warmth to a room.’ But can they also be taken seriously as works of art? They are certainly priced like them.

Kate Chisholm

Radio review: Malcolm Gladwell’s masterclass on listening

Radio

Out and about in Surrey on Sunday I happened upon a scene that could have been played out 77 years ago. It was mid-afternoon on that glorious sunshiny day. Lunch just about over. The pub had a large garden with tables neatly shaded by leafy pergolas. A family group had finished their meal but were still huddled round the table, on which in pride of place, amid the empty plates and half-filled glasses, sat a green-and-cream Roberts, aerial aloft. They’d taken the chance (the village pub had no TV) that from words and sound alone they’d not miss a forehand slice or backhand volley.