Arts Archives

Theatre review: Wonka will create enough kiddie glee to guarantee its survival. What a pity it isn’t good!; Four farces: two weak; two excellent

Theatre

Off to Wonka. With no preconceptions either. I’ve never seen this story on stage, page or screen and it strikes me as a dysfunctional hybrid of Oz and Twist. The show kicks off with a cartoon history of chocolate which — whoopsidaisy! — omits to mention sugar as an ingredient. We meet Charlie Bucket, an angelic drudge, who must win a prize in order to rescue his whining, crippled parents from impoverishment. He visits Willy Wonka’s candy emporium along with four surpassingly obnoxious child-rivals. There are two grotesque beauty queens (one is slaughtered early on in an industrial accident). There’s a Bavarian fatso who scoffs garbage non-stop and belches into the microphone.

Deborah Ross

Film review: I was right: a British thriller starring Jason Statham is to be avoided

Cinema

Hummingbird is a British thriller starring Jason Statham which may be all you need to know to keep away and if it is, can’t say I blame you. Statham is the actor who rose to fame as one of Guy Ritchie’s entourage and now plays bad-ass, hard-boiled action heroes of the kind who can take on whole armies and crack open all their heads and emerge breathless, admittedly, yet with only one small graze. I normally avoid his films and films of this type as they are just not my thing — you’d think anyone who could take on whole armies and emerge with just a single graze would be interesting, but not so much — yet I was seduced into giving it a shot. It looked promising.

Michael Tanner

Opera review: Britten’s Gloriana may be a failure but it still manages to shock

Opera

The most surprising thing about Benjamin Britten’s coronation opera Gloriana, for me, is that it merely fell rather flat at its first performance. The composer, we read, had insisted on its virtually official status as part of the coronation proceedings, and it seems to have been his major bid to be accepted as an establishment figure, and not merely as the most significant of the younger generation of composers. But to have chosen, at the suggestion of the Earl of Harewood, the nearest relation to the royal family with any serious pretensions to being artistically cultivated, Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex, with its characteristically world-weary deflating view of human affairs and affaires, was surely a piece of ill-judged mischief at least.

Damian Thompson

The syphilitic sound of Schumann’s violin concerto is part of its genius

Music

Robert Schumann met a wretched end. He died in a lunatic asylum where he thought the nurses were feeding him human faeces. Meanwhile he drove his fellow residents mad by sitting at the piano and bashing out nonsense-music until he had to be dragged away — a grotesque indignity for the creator of the most bewitching quicksilver fantasies in the history of the instrument. After Schumann’s death in 1856, the violinist Joseph Joachim hid away the strange concerto that the composer had written for him in 1853 because it showed evidence of softening of the brain. Clara, Robert’s widow, agreed. That became the conventional wisdom.

Kathryn Simmonds

Hotel Pool

21 June 2013

Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 21 June 2013

In this week’s lead feature in the Arts section, Tom Rosenthal explains just why he thinks the Lowry retrospective at Tate Britain is so long overdue. Lowry is one of our most popular artists – and it is exactly this that has been his downfall. ‘Can one disapprove of someone merely because he popular? Clearly one can’, writes Rosenthal. The lack of Lowry in London only highlights ‘the fashionable dislike of Lowry’s art’. But, finally, Lowry has made it to the walls of Tate Britain. Should his work be there? Andrew Lambirth will be reviewing the exhibition in a future issue of The Spectator, but for now you can make your own minds up.

20 June 2013

Tom Rosenthal

At last! The snobbish Tate has finally overcome its distaste for L.S. Lowry

Arts feature

One day in Berlin, I saw the rerun of the RA’s Young British Artists exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin’s equivalent of Tate Modern. After that, I saw a superb retrospective of Lyonel Feininger at the Neue Deutsche Galerie. In the evening, I ran into the onlie begetter of the YBA show (which, with the exception of Ron Mueck’s amazing sculptures, had not given me much pleasure), my (unrelated) namesake Norman. I had no wish to discuss Norman’s pride and joy, the YBA, so turned the conversation to Feininger and asked whether Norman had seen it. ‘Ah,’ said Norman, ‘what a bore; I won’t waste my time on him.

Andrew Lambirth

One leaves the Patrick Caulfield exhibition longing to see more

Exhibitions

In the wake of the Roy Lichtenstein blockbuster at Tate Modern comes Patrick Caulfield at Tate Britain, and what a contrast! Where Lichtenstein looks increasingly like a one-trick pony, an assessment driven home by the excessively large show, Caulfield emerges as fresh, witty and visually inventive. Undoubtedly this impression is fostered by the size of the exhibition: Tate Britain’s Linbury Galleries have been divided between Caulfield and Gary Hume, allowing each enough space for a highly focused solo exhibition. There are thus only 35 paintings by Caulfield spanning his entire career, and one leaves his show wanting to see more, not suffering from the usual museum overkill.

Ariane Bankes

Exhibition review: The charm and dexterity of Sir Hugh Casson

Exhibitions

It is nothing short of a miracle that this aptly titled exhibition could be shoehorned into just two rooms at the Royal Academy, such was the range of the irrepressible Hugh Casson’s work and influence during his lifetime. Architect, artist, designer and writer, he was a fireball of energy and a fount of ideas. He was described by one friend as ‘the golfball on an IBM typewriter’. Not the least of his multifarious talents was, indeed, making friends with anyone, from the casual visitor queuing for the RA’s latest exhibition to the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, for whom he worked discreetly but tirelessly for many decades on a series of royal apartments, unaltered to this day.

Kathryn Simmonds

Nocturne

Poems

Midnight for the squirrels and the drunks, midnight for you dear and your chest hair too, put your pen down pet and rest here. Midnight swallowing the mirror whole, swallowing my mother in her pale blue slippers, and my brother, my big brother in his too small bed. Bed, the longed for stopped short sound delivering us at last from sense-making. The trains are empty, the magnolia trees are still, the tower block has lost another dozen yellow squares but they’ll fill up and we’ll fill too, and in tomorrow’s morning we’ll awake, washed up again among the bills. Meanwhile, the stars are queuing up to get behind your lids. Come, give me your hand.

Clarissa Tan

Television review: Channel 4’s mating season

Television

Channel 4 is deep into its summer of love. It’s having a Mating Season and — unusually for the network — it’s not all about sex. Instead, it’s about those fluttery butterflies that occur before the birds and the bees come in, when two people meet for the first time and get to know each other. Not mating then, but dating, which is scarier. When you watch Dates, it seems scarier still. The drama series is about ‘the social minefield’ of modern dating, and what a minefield it is. Ex-escorts, closet gay bankers, Cantonese lesbians — there’s the lot. The first episode, about two very different people on a blind date, was quite intriguing. But I got sidetracked. The female character, Mia, looked disconcertingly like Samantha Cameron.

Peter Hoskin

Film review: Before Midnight is a perfectly crafted movie

Cinema

To quote the watch adverts, here’s a timepiece that will last a lifetime: the Doomsday Clock. And the reason it will last that long? Because when it stops, so will your life. This is the figurative clock that has been maintained by a bunch of Chicagoan atomic scientists since 1947. The closer its hands are to midnight, the closer we are to nuclear annihilation. It started off at seven minutes to midnight. But now, as any paranoiac will tell you, it is two minutes further on. We are, in this one specific sense, five minutes away from The End. Did Richard Linklater have this in mind when he named his new film Before Midnight? Probably not. This isn’t, in truth, a film about death by fission and fusion, but a simple middle-aged love story.

Michael Tanner

Opera review: Deborah Warner’s production of Death in Venice is everything that a production should be, Lohengrin

Opera

Thomas Mann, Gustav von Aschenbach, Benjamin Britten, united in a common interest, one the expression of which is still taboo, yet which Mann succeeded in writing a bestseller about, and Britten his last testament. Mann surmounted the interest, just, by fantasising and remaining amazed that people actually ‘do it’, if his reaction to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar is anything to go by. Aschenbach is so enthralled that he dies rather than separating from his pubescent beloved, and never has the courage to speak to him. About Britten things are still a bit unclear, and are likely to remain so.

Lloyd Evans

Theatre: James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner is dazzlingly funny. Kim Cattrall is a revelation in a monstrous role

Theatre

Good and bad at the National. The Amen Corner by James Baldwin is a wryly observed comedy drama written for a studio theatre. It’s an excellent small play. The director Rufus Norris pumps it full of steroids and tries to turn it into a great American epic like Streetcar or The Crucible. His staging suggests the finale of a country-house opera festival. Costly baggage impedes the script’s sprightly flow. On-stage jazzmen snivel through trombones and hack at double basses. Preening choirs warble and sway. Spare actors hang out of windows trying to look cool and indolent. The running time reaches a Napoleonic 155 minutes. Megalomania infects the furniture too. Baldwin asked for two cheap sets, a ramshackle kitchen and a dingy meeting-room.

Ed Rex

Laura Marling at Secret Music: a concert without croquet is a concert not worth attending

Which television chef would you most like to see throttled in a restaurant?

Columns

Which television chef would you most like to see throttled in a restaurant? I have to say, Nigella Lawson would be well down the list for me, as I’ve always rather liked her. It’s true that some of her recipes are a little precious, especially all that fairy cake stuff, but surely not to the point that one would wish to strangle her, or witness her being strangled? Gregg Wallace, perhaps? He’s the one from Masterchef who looks like a badly boiled egg which is permanently on the cusp of ejaculation. Obviously Gordon Ramsay — that’s a given, as they say — but I’d also like to make a case for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who once served guests a pate made of placenta.

19 June 2013

Kathryn Simmonds

Nocturne

Midnight for the squirrels and the drunks, midnight for you dear and your chest hair too, put your pen down pet and rest here. Midnight swallowing the mirror whole, swallowing my mother in her pale blue slippers, and my brother, my big brother in his too small bed. Bed, the longed for stopped short sound delivering us at last from sense-making. The trains are empty, the magnolia trees are still, the tower block has lost another dozen yellow squares but they’ll fill up and we’ll fill too, and in tomorrow’s morning we’ll awake, washed up again among the bills. Meanwhile, the stars are queuing up to get behind your lids. Come, give me your hand.

14 June 2013

Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 14 June 2013

Sir Alfred Munnings lived his life in true bohemian style, ‘carousing with gypsies and horse-trainers, living rough and constantly on the road’. Summer in February is based on his early life living in Cornwall, with Munnings played by Dominic Cooper: ‘Irrepressible as an electric eel, and twice as dangerous’. But does the film live up to Munnings’ art – and, of course, to the hype? The problem with films about artists is, says Andrew Lambirth, the art. But Summer in February is ‘as vivid and visually complex as a Munnings masterpiece’ – in fact, almost as good as the book.

Steerpike

Hollywood and oligarchs descend on Art Basel

The art world has descended on the almost attractive city of Basel in Switzerland this week, for the annual art fair. And where the art world goes, glamorous collectors follow. Leonardo di Caprio appeared to be in the mood for some serious shopping when I glimpsed him, casting his eye over a Warhol or two. He may have looked at the Alexander Calder, or perhaps he saw the Edmund de Waal or the exquisite pair of Peter Doig etchings. And there’s this chap called Picasso; mark my words, dear readers, he’s going to be big. Di Caprio had competition from one Roman Abramovitch, who sloped by a few Edvard Munchs, as one does. Cate Blanchett was a radiant study in concentration as she perused the stalls of the finest galleries in the world.

13 June 2013

Leanda De-Lisle

Royal bling with the Tudors at the Queen’s Gallery and the V&A

Arts feature

As soon as the battle of Bosworth was won, Henry VII’s politically astute mother sent him appropriate clothing for his state entry into London. A king was expected to look like a king, having ‘a prerogative is his array above all others’. Sumptuary laws policed the system under the Tudors, with everyone — in theory — wearing only as much glitter and flash as their rank permitted. You really were what you wore. The Great Wardrobe Accounts of Henry VII and Henry VIII offer numerous unexpected insights into contemporary events. One sinister detail I spotted during my research on the period is a warrant issued in November 1498 for black damask to be made into doublet for the pretender Perkin Warbeck, then a prisoner in the Tower.

Andrew Lambirth

To survive the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, don’t linger — just scan and pounce

Exhibitions

The Royal Academy’s biggest annual prize is the Charles Wollaston Award, worth £25,000, for the most distinguished work in the Summer Exhibition, this year won by the Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui (born 1944). Although his preferred media are clay and wood, El Anatsui has taken to making installations from found materials woven together like cloth, and has done rather well with them around the world. He was invited to make a hanging for the façade of Burlington House for the duration of the Summer Exhibition, and this junk curtain (composed inter alia of aluminium bottle tops, printing plates, copper wire and roofing sheets) now obscures or ornaments — depending on your taste — the Academy’s noble brow.

James Delingpole

Television review: The Returned is the finest, purest heroin

Television

With the possible exception of Game of Thrones, The Returned (Channel 4, Sunday) is the best series you will see on TV all year. I caught some early previews about a month ago when I was on The Review Show (BBC4). Normally the reviewers don’t agree on much but on this we were unanimous: we all felt like newly made addicts who’d been introduced to the finest, purest heroin — only to be suddenly denied our next fix. When was the rest of the series going to be broadcast? When? WHEN? Well, now, finally it has made it on to Channel 4 and I hope you’ll all be as hooked as I am. It has been variously billed as a zombie thriller and a successor to Twin Peaks, but neither does justice to its intelligence, subtlety and eerie beauty.

Kathryn Simmonds

The Reluctant Natives

Poems

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.

Deborah Ross

Review: Stir yourself — I am Nasrine is far from an Earnestly Grim Wrist Slitter

Cinema

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.

Andrew Lambirth

Film review: Summer in February: as vivid as a Munnings masterpiece

Cinema

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.

Lloyd Evans

Theatre review: Despite the wordiness and monstrous plotlines, Strange Interlude is gripping

Theatre

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.

Ed Rex

We should be teaching kids to make programs like Word, not how to use them

Opera review: Crying with the heroine in WNO’s Lohengrin

Opera

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.

Kate Chisholm

Radio review: The Archers — Soapland’s response to our post-9/11 world

Radio and podcasts

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.