Arts Archives

The Hagen Quartet: Bracing Beethoven

TV review: The Secrets of Britain’s Sharia Courts; The Sex Clinic

Television

Sometimes a television programme raises far bigger questions than it actually gives a platform for, which is the case with Panorama’s The Secrets of Britain’s Sharia Courts (BBC1, Monday). Wedged in this half-hour slot are explosive issues such as the sovereignty of British law, the role of religion in arbitrating on marital disputes, and the place of women in Islam. The show adopts a feisty, no-holds-barred approach in this piece of investigative journalism presented by Jane Corbin, yet has strange ellipses at certain points that leave huge questions dangling. At one juncture, Corbin says, ‘The previous government gave up on its attempt to investigate sharia councils. They couldn’t get proper access to them.’ Eh?

Kate Chisholm

Radio review: Sunflowers Behind a Dirty Fence; The Fisherman

Radio

No one writes for radio for the money. Or for the notoriety. You’ll never make mega-bucks or see your name in lights. Yet still they write — because it’s challenging and yet also so much fun. There are no restrictions on the air, no boundaries of time or space, no limits on what a character can do or where they can go, in the space of 30, 45, 60 minutes. The only rules are to speak clearly as the writer, taking your listeners with you, and for the cast to have distinct voices, with immediately identifiable differences in tone and personality. If you have to struggle at any point with working out who’s speaking, the spell is broken, the play won’t work. The playwright Tom Stoppard began his career by writing for radio.

Marcus Berkmann

The brilliant fun of Bryan Ferry’s The Jazz Age

Music

When you can do anything you like, what do you do? In Bryan Ferry’s case, the answer seems to be ‘make a 1920s instrumental jazz record out of some of my old songs’. I have to admit that the mere idea of The Jazz Age (BMG), which is credited to The Bryan Ferry Orchestra, appealed to me not at all, and it seems that I wasn’t alone in this, for the record, released just before Christmas, reached only number 50 in the charts and may end up selling something adjacent to Bugger All. The first time you play it, it’s essentially a parlour game. Which one is ‘Slave To Love’? Is that really ‘Virginia Plain’? What on earth have they done to ‘Love Is The Drug’?

Lloyd Evans

Theatre review: The Low Road and Quasimodo

Theatre

A lap of honour at the Royal Court. Bruce Norris has been one of the big discoveries of artistic director Dominic Cooke, who takes his bow by directing The Low Road. Norris’s greatest hit, Clybourne Park, was a savage and illuminating satire about racism. His next trick is to examine the burning issue of the day, unfettered greed. A great start. But he can’t decide whether he’s for or against the profit motive. And he has no idea where to mount his attack. He time-travels to 18th-century America and imagines an unscrupulous spiv, a bit like Barry Lyndon, who climbs from destitution to wealth and whose life touches American history at various crucial moments.

Deborah Ross

The Place Beyond the Pines – don’t read this review!

Cinema

The Place Beyond the Pines stars both Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper — you spoil us, ambassador! — and is a generational feud film about fathers and sons and legacy. Can anyone be born clean? How do past events reverberate? How might one act of violence play out, years later? It is written and directed by Derek Cianfrance who made Blue Valentine, a remarkably raw and claustrophobic film about a marriage going down the tubes, also starring Ryan Gosling, but with Michelle Williams, and although this is a more familiar genre, it is still blissfully gripping. Certainly, I was gripped, blissfully, which was nice, as I haven’t been held in such a way for a long, long time, although I couldn’t tell you why. I’m up for a blissful grip at any time, just so you know.

Michael Tanner

Richard Wagner at 200

Music

‘The overpowering accents of the music that accompanies Siegfried’s funeral cortège no longer tell of the woodland boy who set out to learn the meaning of fear; they speak to our emotions of what is really passing behind the lowering veils of mist: it is the sun-hero himself who lies upon the bier, slain by the pallid forces of darkness — and there are hints in the text to support what we feel in the music: “A wild boar’s fury”, it says, and: “Behold the cursed boar,” says Gunther, pointing to Hagen, “who slew this noble flesh.” The words take us back at a stroke to the very earliest picture-dreams of mankind.

Will Gore

Lara Pulver interview: ‘People in LA were desperate to meet Irene Adler’

Television

Not many actors have made a name for themselves with quite the same force as Lara Pulver. In January last year more than eight million people tuned in to BBC1 and watched her star as Irene Adler in ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’, the opening episode in the second series of Sherlock. I’m not saying that Pulver’s appearance in one of the early scenes wearing nothing more than a pair of high heels (albeit with some clever camera angles preserving her modesty) was the only reason for the vast amount of attention the episode received. It’s surely no coincidence, however, that her name was almost immediately trending on Twitter and that this particular Sherlock adventure quickly became one of iPlayer’s most watched programmes.

John Mole

Scan

5 April 2013

Steerpike

Newt Gingrich’s Downton downtime

Newt Gingrich has a new love. ‘It's a great study of plot,’ the failed Presidential runner and former Speaker of the House told Slate magazine. He was not referring to a '90s sleaze inquiry, or the reasons why he lost to Mitt Romney. The object of his obsession is our very own Downton Abbey. In what could be mistaken for an interview about his once colorful private life, Gingrich went on: ‘It has about 15 subplots plus four or five that come and go. At any given moment you could list these different developments going on with these different personalities. See, you're never bored.’ Apparently, ITV’s most successful export is ‘sort of MTV, designed into long-form’ and is ‘very intelligently done, and I'm just really impressed.

4 April 2013

Lloyd Evans

Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre: Ten years and a million cheap tickets

Arts feature

‘The house that Ho Chi Minh built.’ That’s how Nicholas Hytner refers to his ample north London home. In 1989, at the age of 34, he was hired by Cameron Mackintosh to direct the musical Miss Saigon. ‘It just felt like a huge lark,’ he said at the time. The show ran for ten years in the West End and on Broadway and the royalties enabled him ‘to do what I wanted to do thereafter. It was a massive stroke of good fortune.’ Artistic freedom has been the hallmark of his ten-year stewardship of the National Theatre. Hytner grew up in a prosperous south Manchester family and his fascination with music and drama asserted itself in early boyhood. Aged nine, he had a season ticket to the local concert hall.

Andrew Lambirth

George Bellows; Sydney Lee RA

Exhibitions

The American artist George Bellows (1882–1925) is best known for his boxing paintings, but as this surprising exhibition reveals, that was only the half of it. We don’t really know his work in this country, apart from the odd picture in a mixed show, but here is indisputable evidence that we have been missing out. Bellows died from appendicitis aged only 42, so this exhibition inevitably offers us work which varies wildly in style and competence, as he tried his hand at different approaches and different subjects. Nevertheless there are at least half-a-dozen paintings of real worth and presence, in addition to the boxing pictures, which I personally find of limited interest, though Bellows’s handling of bodies in dynamic movement is dramatic and convincing.

Radhika Kapila

Weeknd’s world

Noise – A Human History

Radio

You could say that Neil MacGregor revolutionised radio with his mega-series A History of the World in 100 Objects. In each of those 100 programmes he took us on an extraordinary journey of the mind, to show us what we’ve been up to since the first ‘primitive’ reindeer carvings of the Ice Age. He did this not by the usual route for such grandiose series of going on a whirlwind trip through history, but by looking at the small, often tiny details and drawing from them as much meaning as possible. He also transformed the 15-minute radio slot into a brilliant teaching tool, focusing on the minuscule while at the same time building block upon block of knowledge, so that if we listened to the programmes in sequence we came away feeling jolly clever.

James Delingpole

The Village

Television

Everyone’s loving BBC1’s new, Sunday-night period mega-drama The Village (32 episodes long if writer Peter Moffat has his way). It’s taut, spare, grown-up, accomplished, dark, strange and poetic, according to the critics, which I think are all euphemisms for ‘not like Downton Abbey’. And it definitely isn’t like Downton Abbey. There’s a lot more brooding, the dialogue’s more Pinteresque (which is to say it’s more often there to evoke mood or the banality of existence than to carry the plot, amuse you or illuminate character), its view of the past (a Derbyshire village on the eve of the first world war) is much less rosy. But is this necessarily a good thing? Personally, I’m not so sure.

Clarissa Tan

Composition and catharsis: Review of ‘A Late Quartet’.

Cinema

Why the sudden spate of movies about classical music quartets and impending death? Early this year, we had Quartet, about four senior singers in a retirement home. Now we have A Late Quartet, about a string ensemble facing the loss of one of its members. The film industry couldn’t possibly be subliminally associating classical music with ageing and fuddy-duddyness, could they? Shame on them. Perhaps before the year is out we’ll have The Latest Quartet, then we’ll know that classical music has carked it altogether. Anyway, of the two movies (so far), Late is by far the more masterly. It is for all intents and purposes a chamber film — intimate, intricate and with very few players. Built around Beethoven’s ‘String Quartet No.

Michael Henderson

Parsifal at Salzburg Easter Festival

Music

To hear Christian Thielemann conduct the Dresden Staatskapelle in Wagner’s ‘stage consecration play’, in Salzburg at Easter, proved a musical experience that could only deepen anybody’s love of this extraordinary opera. To see it was another matter, as it often is. But let us first praise the musicians who, guided by their conductor, gave it wings. At six minutes under four hours (battle-hardened Wagnerians will appreciate the timings) this was not a long Parsifal.

Michael Tanner

Kafka Fragments at the Linbury Studio; Nabucco at the Royal Opera House

Opera

Yes, well...aphorisms are never easy to deal with, they are a naturally intimidating form of utterance. If you admit that you don’t understand them, you may well be thought thick. If you reject a request for an explanation of one, on the grounds that what it says can’t be put any other way, you may well get away with it. Many aphorisms are intended to shut down a line of thought, La Rochefoucauld’s for instance, while the best of Nietzsche’s say, in his words, ‘what other people would take a book to say, and would still leave unsaid’. Setting them to music sounds a bright idea for certain composers, but mainly aphorisms advertise their self-sufficiency and ward off any kind of expansion or addition.

Patrick Carnegy

Jonathan Slinger’s Hamlet

Theatre

In his ‘Love Song’, T.S. Eliot’s ageing bank-clerk J. Alfred Prufrock protests he isn’t ‘Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be...’. David Farr’s new production sets out to put this to rights. The result is indeed a very strange affair. It is built around Jonathan Slinger, who last season starred memorably as Prospero in The Tempest and as Lenny in Pinter’s The Homecoming. A little further back he’s been Macbeth in a curiously Popish staging by Michael Boyd and Richards II and III in Boyd’s great Histories sequence. A less Eliotian conceit is the director’s notion that Hamlet is about sword fighting or, in this modern-dress interpretation, specifically fencing.

Lloyd Evans

Peter and Alice

Theatre

Inspired writer, John Logan. His 2009 play, Red, delved brilliantly into the gloom-ridden, suicidal mind of the misanthropic modernist painter Mark Rothko. The play’s unflinching and sordid honesty earned the author, and his director Michael Grandage, a bagful of gongs on either side of the Atlantic. The pair have reunited for Logan’s new play, Peter and Alice, which opens with a meeting between Alice Liddell (of Wonderland fame) and Peter Llewellyn Davies, who inspired J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Alice and Peter, now grown up, compare notes about the books they featured in, about the writers who used them as models, about childhood, about adulthood, about this, about that. The writers themselves wander on stage and add to the floaty mood of inconsequential nostaglia.

Peter Phillips

The ideal place to hear classical concerts

Music

What sort of room do you prefer to hear classical concerts in? We have all got used to industrial-strength symphony halls and opera houses, capable of holding 3,000 people, with dry acoustics and omni-look interiors. As with art galleries around the world, once inside you could be anywhere: there is little to tell you which culture any particular one comes from, apart from the signs indicating the lavatories. The general public have come to accept the implicit anonymity of many halls, where individuality has often been sacrificed to size and comfort. Three thousand is a lot of seats, each occupant requiring good sight-lines and good facilities.

Anthony Howell

Grumarí

3 April 2013

Steerpike

Michael Dobbs tight lipped on House of Cards plot

It was a gamble that seems to have paid off. American online entertainment giant Netflix commissioned their first ever original series with a Washington adaptation of Lord Dobbs’s classic, House of Cards. According to its star, Kevin Spacey, the show is today the most watched ever on the service. Season one ended on a cliff hanger that promises to deliver still more viewers. The new House of Cards is sufficiently different from the old to attract a new audience; yet there were enough nods to the original BBC series to keep Westminster loyalists happy.

2 April 2013

Camilla Swift

Introducing Spectator Play: Audio and video for what we’ve reviewed this week

Did you catch Dr Who over the weekend? Clarissa Tan, who wrote our latest TV column, was surprised that the Dr had to contend with ‘something in the wi-fi’. How’s wi-fi for a thoroughly modern enemy? Here’s the prequel to this week’s episode, The Bells of Saint John: Clarissa also watched Rachel Johnson learning to be a Lady. It might sound like a bit of a drag, but ‘what could have turned out to be a rather prissy affair turns out to be a fun watch’. Johnson tries to master riding side-saddle, and ponders why etiquette lessons are becoming more and more popular.

28 March 2013

Andrew Lambirth

Cross examination

Arts feature

As Easter comes upon us in this bitter spring, many of us are drawn to contemplate the mystery of Christ’s passion: his Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension into Heaven. You don’t have to go to church to do this, for reverie or prayer can take place in a quiet landscape or by a cosy fireside, but there are various aids to meditation, and none better than the appropriate visual art. Although we live in an increasingly irreligious age, there have been religious painters of real power in recent years, and perhaps none more so than Craigie Aitchison (1926–2009).

David Platzer

The Angel of the Odd: an exhibition that ends with a satisfying shiver

Exhibitions

To some extent, all Romanticism has its origins in darkness, coming in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that introduced fear into the age of reason. ‘Reason’s Sleep Produces Monsters’ proclaims the opening drawing in Goya’s series ‘Los Caprichos’ (1797–99), which features in this entertaining exhibition. After all the cruelties that man had inflicted on man at the 18th century’s twilight, it was only natural to turn to ghosts and witches for light relief. The exhibition’s title comes from an Edgar Allan Poe story but Goya’s phrase would be equally appropriate. The exhibition starts not with Goya but with F.W.

Peter Hoskin

Caitlin Rose’s The Stand-In: a fantastic album from a fantastic girl

Come together | 28 March 2013

Radio

‘That’s the power of ritual,’ said the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, on Thought for the Day last week. He was thinking particularly of the Jewish festival of Passover with its ritual gathering of the family to eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs as a re-enactment of the experience of exile and slavery. ‘It’s an expression of collective memory and shared ideals...an annual reminder of what it felt like to be oppressed.’ His words were striking precisely because ritual is so often regarded with suspicion these days, signifying rigid, backward, inclusive thinking. Yet these simple acts of representation done in unison (whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim) allow us to become acquainted with loss, bereavement, betrayal.

Clarissa Tan

Dr Who: there’s something in the wi-fi; How to be a Lady; The Mystery of Mary Magdalene

Television

It used to be that when an arch-villain wanted to decimate a community, he’d put something in the water. Now, it’s something in the wi-fi. In the new Dr Who, the Time Lord battles a baddie who runs a group called the Spoonheads, whose mission is to upload and download stuff from the wireless internet. A bit like what I do all day, then. But wait — the Spoonheads are uploading people’s minds, to access all of human intelligence. Then they download them again, for their own evil purposes, while their victims languish in a mindless warp. The episode is called ‘The Bells of Saint John’ (BBC1, Saturday) and plays cleverly on our fascination at and fears about a technology that we cannot touch or see but is all around us.