Arts Archives

Trance: not Danny Boyle’s finest hour

Cinema

Obviously, we all love Danny Boyle and want to have his babies — I’d like at least two of his babies — but his latest film, Trance, is a horrid mess. A psychological take on the art-heist film, it is miscast, iffily acted, confusing, implausible (to the extent I never fully understood what was happening) and is interspersed with bouts of horrible, ill-judged violence. In one instance, for example, a man gets shot in the penis. This need not be a dealbreaker necessarily but at some point, possibly before we’ve even had the first child, and to prevent such nonsense going any further, I will have to sit him down and say: ‘Danny, love, this shooting at penises has to stop. We’re going to be parents. Why not gardening? Or golf?

Lloyd Evans

The Book of Mormon is toothless, jokeless, plotless and pointless

Theatre

Impossible, surely. The Book of Mormon could never live up to the accolades lavished on it by America’s critics. ‘Blissfully original, outspoken, irreverent and hilarious,’ was a typical review. The three authors are formidably gifted. Trey Parker and Matt Stone gave us South Park, while Robert Lopez is the co-writer of Avenue Q. As a fan of both shows, I was fearful that Mormon would turn out to be as much fun as underwater paintballing. So, up goes the curtain. A posse of geeky Yanks in crisp white shirts are being dispatched to Mormon missions around the world. We focus on two characters, a big handsome jock and a fat needy blob. Their destination is revealed: Uganda. Everyone is shocked and sad.

Lloyd Evans

‘In the beginning was breath’

Theatre

Declan Donnellan is riding high. His acclaimed production of the burlesque classic Ubu Roi has confirmed his membership of the elite group of British directors who enjoy renown across Continental Europe and beyond. The critics cheered his French-language production of Alfred Jarry’s anarchic satire when it reached Paris earlier this month. The show, created by Donnellan’s company Cheek by Jowl, is currently bunny-hopping between venues on either side of the Channel. It arrives at the Barbican on 10 April where it forms part of the Dancing around Duchamp season. I meet Donellan in a Hampstead café. ‘My local,’ he says as two cappuccinos are clattered down in front us.

Candy Neubert

search party

21 March 2013

Andrew Lambirth

When Picasso was a boy wonder

Arts feature

Exhibitions are only as good as the loans that can be secured for them, as was seen at the Royal Academy’s Manet exhibition recently. The exhibits at Burlington House were thin on the ground because in some cases promised loans were rescinded, and other items were simply not available. Whatever one thinks of that controversial figure Norman Rosenthal, for so many years exhibitions secretary at the RA, his ability to seek out and obtain loans amounted to genius, backed by two important characteristics: audacity and tenacity. When I first saw the Courtauld’s Picasso show, I immediately thought of a painting of the artist’s friend Casagemas on his deathbed, lit by a flickering candle.

Tanya Harrod

Shades of Gray | 21 March 2013

Exhibitions

The Anglo-Irish designer Eileen Gray keeps on being rediscovered but she remains a puzzle. The nub of the Gray ‘problem’, which her last large retrospective at the Design Museum in 2005 failed to answer, is this: how did the author of some of the most sensual, disturbing interior design and furniture of the 1910s and 1920s become an uncompromising modernist whose preferred materials were tubular steel, aluminium, plywood and celluloid? Of course artists do reinvent themselves — designers and architects more than most. Careers have odd trajectories that upset linear histories of art.

Clarissa Tan

Bankers: I like them — somebody has to

Television

I like bankers. They’re an honest lot. All of us like money, but only they are upfront about it. I once witnessed a conversation between three financiers that started with them comparing their cars, then their houses, then their helicopters. None of the shilly-shallying you find at a society cocktail party, where people slyly suss out your income on the basis of your profession, your postcode, your accent and the school you went to — these bankers went straight to unvarnished one-upmanship. Such frankness can be refreshing. I like bankers because, these days, somebody has to. The second episode of Bankers (Wednesday), the BBC2 three-part documentary that’s just ended, started off in such a mean-spirited way I actually felt sorry for financial traders.

Liz Anderson

Sculpture trail

Lost in space | 21 March 2013

Television

On 28 January 1986 the Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after launch, killing all seven crew. What made it worse was that one of the victims, Christa McAuliffe, was a teacher, so of course all the children in her class were watching it live on TV. I remember it well. For the first few seconds after the shuttle blew up, you weren’t quite sure whether or not what you’d just seen was meant to happen: perhaps all those swirls of white vapour were jettisoned boosters or something. Then, you heard the gasps and groans from the crowds standing at the launch site and finally you knew. Up until 9/11 I think it was the most shocking event most of us had ever witnessed on TV. What I hadn’t been properly aware of, till The Challenger (BBC2, Monday), was the back story.

Kate Chisholm

Assault on the ears

Radio

Does anyone ever listen to Radio 4’s Moral Maze on Saturday nights? It is only the repeat edition (the live discussion happens on Wednesday nights), but even so why broadcast such a deliberately discomfiting programme at almost bedtime on the most mellow night of the week? It’s such an odd mismatch. There you are, winding down, daring to relax as you clear the last bits of washing-up before going to bed, only to find yourself blasted into thoughts you’d rather not have by the testy, tetchy tones of Melanie and Michael debating (with their presumably willing victims) the whys and wherefores of private schools, Nimbys, or gastric-band surgery on the NHS. This week the team (under Michael Buerk’s baton) were looking at ‘the morality of poverty’.

Lloyd Evans

Juvenile delinquency

Theatre

Study the greats. That’s the advice to all budding playwrights. And there are few contemporary dramatists more worthy of appreciative scrutiny than Bruce Norris, whose savage and hilarious comedy, Clybourne Park, bagged the Pulitzer Prize in America before transferring to the West End where it stunned audiences with its macabre revelations about bourgeois attitudes to racism. But an apprentice writer analysing such an accomplished work will probably be overawed by its self-confidence and polish. Far more interesting to study Norris in an earlier phase of his development. Purple Heart, from 2003, was the first of his plays to be performed outside the United States. The date is 1972. The setting is a crummy house in the Midwest occupied by a trio of trailer-park losers.

Deborah Ross

No questions asked | 21 March 2013

Cinema

Compliance is a small film that says big things rather than one of those big films that say very little, if anything. It’s written and directed by no one you have ever heard of, and stars no one you have ever heard of (I know!; be brave!) yet takes such a rivetingly clear-eyed look at the dark truths of human behaviour and the consequences of accepting authority without question that I don’t think I will ever get it out of my mind. It’s not an easy watch, which is kind of the point, and I’m not even sure what genre it is. Psychological horror? Thriller? But it will haunt and resonate. I saw it a week ago with my husband and we are still discussing it, which, for a pair who ran out of things to say to each other years ago, is quite something.

Michael Tanner

Reason over passion

Opera

This year’s London Handel Festival got under way, as usual, with an opera production at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre. Imeneo, a late opera of Handel, is unusual in several respects. While it is concerned with amorous intrigue and frustration, there is no dynastic or other political dimension, a welcome change, and one that results in the work’s lasting only two hours. There seems, too, to be an element of self-parody: in Act III the central female character Rosmene, with whom both the chief male characters, Tirinto and Imeneo, are in love, manages to avoid responsibility for her choice between them by feigning madness, singing randomly and swooning.

Peter Hoskin

The future of arts broadcasting

Television

Under the stewardship of John Reith, the BBC was godlier than it is today. In fact, when Broadcasting House was first opened in central London, Director General Reith made sure to dedicate the whole thing to Him up there. An inscription was chiselled into the wall of the building’s foyer, which began: ‘To Almighty God, this shrine of the arts, music and literature is dedicated by the first Governors in the year of our Lord 1931’. The words that followed included ‘decency’, ‘peace’ and ‘good harvest’. It’s not really the sort of epigraph that Auntie would put her name to now. But, reading that inscription again, it’s not so much the G-word that stands out as the A-, M- and L-words: arts, music and literature.

14 March 2013

Robert Gorelangton

Book of Mormon – religion hits the West End

Arts feature

Hitchhiking through Salt Lake City as a student in 1976, I asked a local man, who was out shopping, directions to the nearest Salvation Army hostel. Rightly assuming I was down on my uppers, the man gave me his huge bag of groceries and walked off with a ‘bless you’. Say what you like about them, Mormons in my book are lovely. In several days spent in the most boring city on earth, I never met a nasty one. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is now the subject of the much-hyped The Book of Mormon, which is finally about to open in the West End after a year of total triumph on Broadway.

Andrew Lambirth

Barocci exhibition review: is he better unfinished?

Exhibitions

The press release blithely informs us that Federico Barocci (1535–1612) is ‘beloved by artists and art historians throughout the ages’, but I must beg to differ. Not by me, nor by any of my considerable range of friends and acquaintances in both fields, has he been loved or even much known. Barocci is one of those artists who has slipped under the general radar, partly, I suspect, because his work often looks like a sweet and sentimentalised version of Raphael. Raphael is a great genius, but there are a number of paintings by him I find hard to take, particularly when he descends to sickly emotionalism.

Laura Gascoigne

Free spirits

Exhibitions

‘Gypsies seem to have been born into the world for the sole purpose of being thieves,’ Cervantes begins his story of The Little Gypsy Girl. ‘They are born of thieving parents, they are brought up with thieves, they study in order to be thieves, and they end up as past masters in the art of thieving.’ But despite their thieving reputation, the bands of gypsy travellers who appeared in western Europe in the 1420s — from Egypt thought the English, from Bohemia thought the French — were a source of fascination. They came and went like the wind, they predicted the future and their costumes and dancing were the definition of exotic. Their appeal to artists was irresistible.

Martin Bright

The Creative Employment Programme: a genuine ‘what works’ policy

Around the country, a roadshow is taking place that could transform the way young people are employed in this country. Bear with me, we are about to enter the strange world of mystifying acronyms and quango jargon, but it just might be worth it. The Creative Employment Programme (or CEP to the initiated) aims to create up to 6,500 employment opportunities across the country. The road show has so far visited Birmingham, Sheffield, Gateshead, Cambridge and Southampton to encourage employers to sign up. Using money from the National Lottery, Arts Council England has set up a £15 million fund to create thousands of apprenticeships, traineeships and internships in the arts and culture.

Radhika Kapila

Hayward Gallery’s Light Show is intoxicating, disorientating, panic-inducing and hypnotic

The Archers should carry a health warning

Radio

The drums roll, hollow and ominously persistent. Then come the trumpets, in a minor key, sepulchral, eerie, penetrating. ‘Just imagine,’ interrupts Donald Macleod, ‘the sense of shock mingled with a kind of disbelieving horror of those who performed that music in November 1695.’ Macleod was introducing his Composer of the Week, which as part of Radio 3’s Baroque Spring has been Purcell. It was a startling way to begin. Purcell was only 36 when he died, very suddenly, the cause unknown and variously suggested as TB, flu, or food poisoning — perhaps after eating some tainted chocolate. He had composed the music that was played at his funeral only eight months earlier, for the funeral of Queen Mary, which took place in the same venue, Westminster Abbey.

Clarissa Tan

Mimics, pagans and pilgrims on TV

Television

What would you do if you had a quite extraordinary talent in impersonating everyone, from Al Pacino to Barack Obama to just any random Irish bloke? In TV land, you are probably rather baffled by it all, and unsure what to do about it as you languish in an unfulfilling half-life, until a Series of Events comes along to show you what a gift you have. This is what happens to The Mimic’s Martin Hurdle, whom we first encounter in his car stuck in traffic, entertaining himself by putting on the voice of Terry Wogan, true to it in texture and timbre, if not in spirit (‘It’s mornings like this, that I wish I was back in Phuket, bouncing a ladyboy on each knee!’).

Deborah Ross

Get a life

Cinema

Welcome to the Punch is a British crime action thriller and here is why you may wish to see it: it is set in a night-time London so magnificently lit even I wanted to visit, and I live there. And now, ten reasons you can skip it, get on with your life and save 99 minutes, whether those minutes are precious or not. My time isn’t particularly precious, but it may be different for you. Here you are. 1. Although it has a top, top cast (James McAvoy, Mark Strong, Andrea Riseborough, David Morrissey) it only goes to prove the following old saying: the best cast in the world cannot save a poor script/story, try as they might. The fact I’ve just made up this old saying doesn’t make it any less true, for now or all time. 2.

Michael Tanner

Written on Skin review: sex, murder and cannibalism at the Royal Opera House

Opera

George Benjamin’s Written on Skin is a work of compelling fascination, all the more so in that it is elusive and possibly wilfully puzzling. I want to see it again as soon as possible, and of how many new operas can that be said? Actually, of three that have been premièred at the Royal Opera in the past decade — Adès’s The Tempest, Birtwistle’s The Minotaur and now this, though it has already been performed in Europe. Three apparent masterpieces of opera from England in a decade is impressive, indeed unprecedented. And they are all quite different, with Skin being the most opaque, though the experience of sitting through it, just over an hour and a half, mercifully without an interval, may be the most intense.

Lloyd Evans

The Audience review: Helen Mirren leads a Mike Yarwood show with Oscar-level talent

Theatre

Peter Morgan has extracted more cash from the royal ‘brand’ than the Buckingham Palace giftshop. He’s at it again with The Audience, a fictional dramatisation of the weekly conversations between the Queen and her first ministers. This is a smart idea carried off with intelligence and plenty of style. Morgan dispenses with a linear parade of PMs and leaps to and fro across the decades. A youthful Harold Wilson bustles in full of self-confidence and jokes. The Queen takes to him immediately. Barely ten years later, the Yorkshireman has dwindled into a broken figure and his legendary memory is fading fast. But as he shrinks, the bond of affection between himself and the monarch grows. It’s one of the play’s few attempts at emotional depth.

Damian Thompson

Beethoven at dinner parties: how to bluff it

Music

I’ve just been reunited with a man whose pungent and patronising views on great composers have haunted me for more than 30 years. His name is Gervase Hughes, and I’ve discovered from Wikipedia that he was an upmarket travel agent who died in 1984. I had no idea, because I knew him only through his book Fifty Famous Composers, published as a Pan paperback in 1972, which mentions his short career as an opera conductor but not his main source of income, which was apparently ‘offering European tours in Rolls-Royce cars’. I lent Fifty Famous Composers (an expanded edition of The Pan Book of Great Composers, 1964) to a friend when I was at university, explaining that it was the wittiest and wisest introduction to the classical canon ever written. He promptly lost it.

Maurice Riordan

The Cuckoo Clock

7 March 2013

Andrew Lambirth

How Roy Lichtenstein became weighed down with superficiality

Arts feature

On both sides of the Atlantic there are still heated debates about who invented Pop Art, the Americans or the British, but it seems much more probable that concurrently each initiated their own brand in response to the zeitgeist of post-war consumerism. Certainly, the American Roy Lichtenstein (1923–97), after near-abstract beginnings, started in 1961 to paint large freehand versions of comic-strip frames, complete with speech bubbles, and exhibited them in New York in the first Pop Art shows. He moved on a bit from comic strips to Disney, advertising and the ordinary objects of the modern environment, and developed a style of measured drawing and stencils that broke up colour into what looked like the Ben-Day dots of mechanical reproduction familiar from newspapers.

William Cook

The man behind Eric and Ernie

After Saddam

Radio

‘The problem is why,’ said the health project officer of a British charity working in the marshlands of southern Iraq close to Basra. ‘No one answers why?’ He was talking to the BBC journalist Hugh Sykes about the state of Iraq, ten years after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He agreed that the Americans and British had done ‘a good job’ in getting rid of the dictator but said that this had changed nothing in Basra, whose economy had been destroyed by Saddam as he drained the marshes, turning a landscape that was vivid green into burnt ochre. We also heard from the farmers who in the hours after Saddam’s fall set out with a JCB to destroy the dams and redig the ditches to bring back the water.