The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Fate landed us here by mistake, set us to walk Welsh hillsides with a plodding heart or paddle Essex estuaries under duress, our talk always of somewhere else (tacked to kitchen walls a Swedish lake, a mountain range in Switzerland). See us crouch in living rooms as daylight palls, an old draught trespassing beneath the door, the trick of day too quickly turning night, the radio’s relentless classic serial, that Sunday evening tick of now becoming then.
I Am Nasrine is one of those small, low-budget films showing somewhere awkward on a day and time that probably aren’t ideal but you can’t expect everything in life to be handed to you on a plate, and it’s worth the effort, if you can stir yourself sufficiently. (Can you? Most people I asked said you couldn’t, but I believe in you, as I always have.) Its writer-director, Tina Gharavi, who is Iranian-born but is now a lecturer in Digital Media at Newcastle University, was nominated for a Bafta for most outstanding debut, and although it is one of those films about the immigration experience, and a young woman who flees her home country for one of those better lives that could well turn out worse, it’s not what I would call An Earnestly Grim Wrist Slitter.
We like our artists to be larger than life and preferably bohemian, even if nowadays we’ve had to accept that the ones we hear about are more likely to live in a castle than a garret. Sir Alfred Munnings (1878–1959) began life as an artist in true bohemian style, carousing with gypsies and horse-trainers, living rough and constantly on the road, painting at full-stretch. On form, he was a superb painter of horses and English country life, and although he is denigrated as a reactionary by the current art establishment, his paintings still sell for large sums. He ended up covered in honours as President of the Royal Academy, but remained a controversial figure, publicly damning modern art in a live broadcast from the RA banquet in 1949.
First the good news. Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill has been cut down from five hours to just under three and a half. The action, if you can call it that, begins at 7 p.m. but if you reach the Lyttelton theatre at the more civilised hour of 8 you’ll have missed very little. The first act could be disposed of in six words, ‘my fiancé died in the war’, but O’Neill is such a colossal twaddler that he wastes absolutely ages gabbling on about this and that before plunging into his story. The main character, Nina, is a bourgeois flapper who approaches life in a spirit of cynical pragmatism. In the middle of Act II (at roughly 8.10 p.m., in real time), she marries an impotent jerk whose bloodline turns out to be infested with lunacy.
Technology is turning the human urge to consume information into an unhealthy addiction. Some of this consumption — reading, following the news, exposing ourselves to culture — has obvious merits; I’d have no trouble downloading the entire works of Shakespeare in the time it would have taken someone ten years ago to find their keys before setting off to a bookshop. But with so much around us to consume we seem to have lost the ability to make things ourselves. How can we be creative when every waking moment is spent trying to keep up with the feeds, updates and new releases volleyed at us from all sides? Take, for example, the iPad, that pinnacle of consumption, that manages to fit TV, record store and library into a retina display and a single button.
In Act II of Lohengrin, after the villainess Ortrud has interrupted the procession to the Minster, and sown the seeds of doubt in Elsa’s mind about the provenance of her rescuer, Lohengrin himself appears and comforts Elsa, saying, ‘Come! Let your tears of sorrow become ones of joy.’ That is followed by a solemn quiet passage, only 11 bars long, and unrelated to anything we have heard before or will hear subsequently, but of such grave beauty that it makes you, too, cry. This kind of pathos and nobility permeate Lohengrin, and though each of Wagner’s dramas has its own feel and colour, those of this opera are so wonderful that it’s impossible not to wish that Wagner had continued in the same vein for one more.
He’s gone. Not that anyone apart from Lilian will miss him. But Paul’s been despatched (at long last) to the Land of Discarded Soap Actors, despised, rejected and scorned by most of those who knew him in Borsetshire — and also, I hope, by any self-respecting Archers Addict. I felt nothing, absolutely nothing, at the news of his heart attack in a hotel room in Cardiff, except perhaps relief that we will never again have to listen to his wheedling, self-satisfied tones. How could smart, zappy Lilian ever have fallen for his oleaginous charms? It was clear from his very first words that he was as badly behaved as his half-brother Matt Crawford, but without Matt’s speck of decency that keeps him true to Lilian.
‘I am the wrath of God. The earth I pass will see me and tremble.’ Not my words, Mr Speaker, but those of demented conquistador Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s electrifying Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972). Now back in cinemas nationwide in a restored print that makes its rainforest setting a real feast for the eyes, Aguirre heralds a two-month Herzog season at the BFI Southbank. Five weeks of location shooting in Peru effectively meant the film crew endured the same hardships as the characters: heat, hunger and the unpredictable behaviour of Kinski, scarcely any less a madman than the treasure-seeking Aguirre. The director claims that Kinski only calmed down enough to finish the film after Herzog threatened to shoot the star and then himself.
Have you looked across the Sound? On the other shore life lies. Can you see it over there? The palaces, the esplanade? It only takes a little while to cross, A year or two at most, sometimes just days. In clear weather you’ll see boats leaving the marina, The scarlet awnings of the shops And fortune-tellers on the steps; At night there are restaurant lights And houses glimmering on nameless slopes. Over there are parties you’ll attend, The masques and tattered carnivals And all the long white hours of getting wise. You’ll talk about returning here – You’ll say it’s where your heart is – But, knowing the tides, we won’t expect you.
Everyone enjoys a good conspiracy theory, particularly Alex Jones. His Infowars.com site can explain every single problem in the world through his theories on the rise of the 'New World Order'. I only discovered Jones a few weeks ago and wrote him off as a wacko on the fringe American media. Today, he's arrived on a mainstream BBC programme. In the above video clip, David Aaronovitch of The Times and Andrew Neil try to figure out Jones' big theory on the Bilderberg conference. Instead of explaining, he ranted on topics including 'the SS office Prince Bernard', 'the Nazi German plan' behind the EU to 'hydroflourons in the water'.
William Empson believed that ‘the arts are produced by overcrowding’. But, as 20,000 invited guests and 4,500 accredited journalists surged through the pavilions of the Giardini and Arsenale on the 55th Venice Biennale’s preview days last week, it was more a case of overcrowding being produced by the arts. Over the past 20 years the Biennale has inexorably expanded with every edition. In 1993, 53 countries were represented. This year there are 88, with Angola, the Bahamas, Bahrain, the Ivory Coast, Kosovo, Kuwait, the Maldives, Paraguay, Tuvalu and the Vatican officially appearing for the first time. There are nearly 50 official collateral events and scores of other exhibitions around town.
Paint is but coloured mud, pace scientists and conservators, and it can be said that the human animal comes from mud and goes back to it. Thus are the activities of painting and being human linked at a fundamental level, which can be raised by consciousness to impressive heights. As the philosopher T.E. Hulme wrote, ‘All the mud, endless, except where bound together by the spectator.’ This is an apt description of an exhibition by Leon Kossoff (born 1926). Kossoff paints thickly with much piling up of the mud of paint, which is trenched and seamed and dribbled across the surface of board supports.
No angels listen when you cry out here, but seals rise up to see, and criticize perhaps, as you intone the omega (their favourite vowel) or the medical alpha (sticking your tongue out) for these gods of ocean. Words wouldn’t do. There are no consonants in the mouths of seals. They can appreciate only the modified howl, the growly roar, and perhaps the loudest purr a man can make. It’s not the singing; that just summons them. It’s curiosity that makes them stand in the water on their useless feet, to stare at the creature with two tails, unnaturally split beside its genitals, the loose skin, the weed that seems to be an ornament on the head. But when we sing to them, they hear pure sound without the situation for a howl: we’re standing still.
Behind the Candelabra is Stephen Soderbergh’s film about Liberace, starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, and already you will have heard two things which, naturally, you will need me to confirm so you can move on with your life. These two things are: 1. It is fabulous. 2. The film was ultimately funded by the television channel HBO, as Hollywood declared it ‘too gay’. I will now deal with both: 1. Yes. It is fabulous. No other word for it, unless that word is ‘glorious’. 2. True and, if I had the time, I would go to Hollywood and knock their heads together.
The Tudors have invaded television. Everywhere you look, it’s Henry VIII this, Henry VII that, Anne Boleyn this, Anne of Cleves that. On BBC2 is the continuing drama series The Tudors, whose Henry VIII looks like the lead singer in a boy band who’s stumbled on to the wrong film set. At any moment, you expect him to announce the execution of Anne Boleyn with those jabbing-the-air hand gestures that boy-band members use to semaphore emotion. Lushly soap operatic, The Tudors depicts the royal court not so much as a place of high political intrigue but as a hearth for dynastic family troubles where improbably good-looking people have lots of sex.
First nights at English National Opera are, in the main, matters for a sociologist rather than an opera critic. That emphatically wasn’t the case with Wozzeck, but that is an acknowledged grim masterpiece, though still, nearly 90 years on, enough to put off casual opera goers and trendies. But the succession of vacuous new works that ENO has mounted in the past few years has attracted audiences, at any rate first-nighters, of a kind that one doesn’t see at any other operatic performance. They arrive early to kiss and shout and drink champagne, they trickle into the auditorium very slowly, stopping for many hugs on the way to their seats, and their talk in the interval is about anything other than the performance they are at.
I am suffering, as we all do from time to time, from a shortage of decent new tunes. Of course, ‘suffering’ may be a slight exaggeration here. Very little physical pain has been involved. But research has shown that music obsessives need a constant upgrade of their personal tunebanks in order to perform at full capacity. It’s all very well going back and playing the Electric Light Orchestra’s Out of the Blue at top volume and singing along to every vocal harmony, as I might have done once or twice this past week, but a long-term solution it is not. It’s where to find these new tunes that has become the problem. I try radio station after radio station, and then I try them all again in a different order.
Mamet is back. His 2009 play Race is an offbeat courtroom drama set entirely in a lawyers’ office before the trial begins. Jack and Henry are two hotshot attorneys, one white, one black, who must decide whether to accept the case of a prosperous banker, Charles, accused of raping a black woman in a hotel. Jack and Henry have a young black trainee, Susan, whose ethnicity and gender may help them sway the jury. The case against Charles turns on sequins. The victim swears that her dress was torn off during the attack but a hotel cleaner found no sequins on the floor. Sequinned attire is naturally deciduous, or, as Jack puts it, ‘a sequined dress, you look at it wrong, they start to fall off’.
Coronation Day 1953 could have marked the end of radio as we know it. No one wanted to listen to the commentary from Westminster Abbey. Everyone wanted to see what was going on. Hearing could not, it was thought, be as effective an act of witness as viewing the glittering diamonds, the gleaming satin, the pageantry, the pomp and the extraordinary sight of the weight of royalty, both physical and metaphysical, being bestowed on so slight a young woman. Those who had the money rushed out to buy a Regentone table TV or a Baird Townsman.
Ah! Here comes the girl from the temping agency. That’s my first reaction when I meet Marianne Elliott, director of the global hit War Horse, and winner of this year’s Olivier for her work on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. She’s a trim, attractive fortysomething with a neat blonde bob and she wears a shrill turquoise blouse of the kind favoured by Romford copy typists in the 1980s. Her blue eyes are amazing — huge, screen-goddess orbs, which shine with an exceptional brilliance and clarity. She’s two weeks into the rehearsal period for her next play, Sweet Bird of Youth, at the Old Vic, which stars Kim Cattrall. ‘And how are the actors? Complaining like mad?
An oversized St Bernard’s body masked with a sheep’s head and a regal peacock with penguin feet and flippers punctuate the start and end of Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing at Turner Contemporary, Margate (until 15 September), curated by Brian Dillon. Art and artifacts from around the world represent the glory, revelations and threat of mankind’s inquisitive nature. Thomas Grünfeld’s taxidermy misfits are just two examples of a witty and wondrous collection of objects that we wouldn’t usually have the opportunity to view outside their own dedicated museums or private homes.
Few people under the age of 65 will have heard of the cartoonist Timothy Birdsall, who died 50 years ago on 10 June 1963, having produced his finest work in the last months of his life here in The Spectator and in Private Eye. But had his career not been cut cruelly short by leukaemia at the age of only 27, he would today be revered as one of the outstanding cartoonists of our time. Tim was part of that talented late-1950s Cambridge generation, along with a galaxy of others later to become famous, from Peter Cook to Ian McKellen. On coming down in 1960 he was employed to do pocket cartoons for the Sunday Times, in the tradition that has led from Osbert Lancaster to Matt.
after Goya The hooded penitents have passed – the shackled Nazarenos holding their long candles – and the altar boys, carrying the trappings of the Passion on their pillows: the hammer and nails, the crown of thorns, the chalice and the pliers; the soldiers’ flail, the soldiers’ dice. What shall we give him? The straw man is sick. We’ll finish him off, and beat him with sticks. The pasos have drifted away: statues of full-size wooden Christs and Virgins painted till they came alive – glass eyes, glass tears, eyelashes of human hair, ivory teeth and nails – on floats borne by fifty men, invisible under curtained palanquins. Poor puppet, I think he wants to die. Poor puppet, he wants to die. The bands have dispersed.
There was a gunboat on the river when you led me to your new favourite spot: a home for retired sailors; squat, white, stuccoed, with a golden bell. It could have been a lost Greek chapel, a monument to light, designed to remind the old boys of their leave on Ionic shores among tobacco and fruit trees. Just after rain, sunlight stood between us like a whitewashed wall. You were lit skin, gilt and honey, dressed in olive. No paper trail connects us. No procedure of law would tell you where to stand in your sleek black mourning dress if I die but as you turned towards me the golden bell rang to recognise that I, being of sound mind, will be delivered through orange groves to you, the white church of my days.
Christopher Purves began his musical career playing doo-wop and rock and roll with the band Harvey and the Wallbangers . These days however, the stages of Glyndebourne and La Scala are his new stomping ground. In this week’s magazine, Julian Flanagan chats to the baritone about his transition from pop to opera, the pivotal events of his opera career, and the ambitions he has yet to fulfil. In his latest role, Purves plays Walt Disney in Philip Glass’s The Perfect American at the ENO, which has proved to be a physical challenge for the singer. But ‘I’ve never gone for the easy life’, he tells us. His career path so far certainly corroborates that statement.
You might expect a chief executive of English Heritage to look quite English, and Simon Thurley certainly does. He has the pale eyes, and fine bones, of the English upper classes. He has the clipped vowels of the English upper classes, too. In his nice pink shirt, in his nice white office, in a nice big Victorian building near Chancery Lane, he has the air of a man who lives a nice, quiet, clean, ordered life. He also has a very big job. He looks after, or at least the organisation he runs looks after, more than 400 historical sites. He advises the government on ‘England’s historic environment’, which must mean he has to give an awful lot of advice. And he writes books.
The centenary celebrations for William Scott (1913–89) are well under way, and the retrospective of his work that started in January at Tate St Ives is currently in Wakefield. There are more works in its latest incarnation and more archive material, and the installation looks very impressive in The Hepworth’s riverside galleries. Scott has not always fared well in historical surveys of 20th-century British painting (he was famously excluded from the Royal Academy’s 1987 exhibition), and his reputation does not stand as high today as it might. In his lifetime, he was much acclaimed, represented this country at the 1956 Venice Biennale and enjoyed a significant degree of international esteem.
What a pity. It seems that Dave Goodhart, director of Demos and editor-at-large of Prospect, has made peace with the Hay Festival organisers, who decided against showcasing his new book on immigration on the annual luvvie field trip. Hay Director Peter Florence described Goodhart’s The British Dream as ‘sensationalist’, and apparently told Goodhart that Hay stood ‘for pluralism and multiculturalism' and that he is half-Italian. Goodhart hit back at these ‘ultra-liberal, slightly lefty multiculturalist’ views, saying: ‘it's [the book] probably been more widely reviewed than any non-fiction book so far this year - both favourably and unfavourably, so when my publisher said there was no interest from Hay I was a bit surprised.
‘Write about the best English gardens,’ says the email from the deputy editor, ‘or what makes a good garden?’ That’s a bit like saying, ‘write about the best paintings, or the best music.’ Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and we now behold so many varieties of English garden that it is hard to tell what Englishness is any longer. But it is probably safe to say that the trend is no longer lavender and roses and formal enclosures of yew and box, nor grassy parks with statues and studied references to high learning. When Kent leaped the fence in the 18th century and saw all nature as a garden, the whole world clapped. Pevsner called it ‘by far the greatest contribution England has made to aesthetic theory’.
