Arts Archives

Trading places | 25 April 2013

Radio 4’s Front Row is brilliant, witty and eclectic. So why let Tracey Emin spoil it?

Radio and podcasts

Front Row is one of those Radio 4 programmes that it’s too easy to take for granted. It’s on every weekday, all year round, at the same peak listening time (after The Archers), with a team of presenters, John Wilson, Mark Lawson and Kirsty Lang, who have become such a reliable fixture they’re almost like chums. If you’re lucky enough to catch it regularly you’ll know its mix of interviews, reviews and conversations about buildings, books, pictures, poems, galleries, anything that’s remotely creative. Sometimes the reviewers are awfully pretentious, sometimes what’s being talked about is way too weird or winsome, sometimes it’s a reminder of just how silly, time-wasting and empty ‘creative’ art can be.

Clarissa Tan

Television: The United States of Television; The Politician’s Husband

Television

There are two American Dreams — the one that happens in real life and is experienced by people such as Barack Obama, and the one that happens on screens, both silver and small, shared by millions across the world. BBC2’s The United States of Television: America in Primetime (Saturday) traces the history of the latter, focusing on the TV series shown during those magical hours when Americans sit down to dinner after a hard day’s work chasing the former. Only the fittest, finest programmes survive in this slot, where Nielsen ratings mercilessly track the tastes of 300 million people as they chow down and chill out.

Deborah Ross

Cinema: The Look of Love

Cinema

The Look of Love is the biopic of Paul Raymond and although it wants to be a tragedy — I could feel it straining at the leash to go in that direction — it never quite pulls it off, so to speak. Visually, it’s fantastic, with more retro kitsch than you can shake a stick at, should you wish to shake a stick at retro kitsch, and there are exceptional performances from Anna Friel and Imogen Poots, but it somehow lacks emotional heart, or any kind of poignancy. It’s entertaining, but glib and unaffecting, and so astonishingly uncritical it makes posing for porn mags or getting your kit off in some seedy Soho dive seem like the most fulfilling and joyful thing a woman can ever do, which I would dispute. A whole morning in John Lewis, that’s when a woman is happiest.

Lloyd Evans

Theatre: Children of the Sun; The Arrest of Ai Wei Wei

Theatre

They’re back. Howard Davies and his translator Andrew Upton had a well-deserved hit in 2007 with Gorky’s Philistines at the Lyttelton. Children of the Sun, which Gorky wrote in jail in 1905, is a prophetic allegory that foretells the destruction of Russia’s weak, idle and pretentious upper classes. We’re in a country mansion where a mad professor, stuck in his laboratory, conducts daft experiments while rhapsodising about the redeeming power of science. He stands for the tsar, I think. Around him clusters a gang of artists and drifters who settle into a quadrangle of doomed eroticism. This one loves this one but that one loves this one who loves someone else, and so on. Each is too self-involved to respond to a romantic overture.

Michael Tanner

Opera: The Turn of the Screw – review; remembering Sir Colin Davis

Opera

The conducting career of Sir Colin Davis, who died a fortnight ago, more than that of most interpretative artists, had the aspect of a personal pilgrimage. Though I had no personal acquaintance with him, and don’t know much more about his life than can be gleaned from Wikipedia, I did attend his operatic performances from 1956 until 2011. In fact I realised recently, to my surprise, that he conducted far more of the operas I have been to than any other person. I first heard him and heard of him in 1956, when I attended a concert performance of Le Nozze di Figaro which he gave in Cambridge’s Guildhall with the Chelsea Opera Group, of which he was for about a decade the main conductor.

Damian Thompson

Are today’s composers up to the challenge of writing sublime music?

Music

When we describe music as ‘sublime’, what do we mean? For the Romans, sublimis signified greatness beyond measure. In the 18th century, Englishmen looked to The Spectator for clarification. Joseph Addison, in his Essay No. 339 of 1712, suggests that the sublime often achieves greatness without stirring up ‘pathetick’ human passions. The example he gives is Milton’s description, in Paradise Lost, of the Messiah looking down on his new Creation, ‘when every Part of Nature seem’d to rejoice in its Existence; when the Morning-Stars sang together, and all the Sons of God shouted for joy’. Whether a composition is sublime is essentially a matter of opinion.

N. S.

After War

Provincials

24 April 2013

Steerpike

Maria Miller tells the luvvies to take their easels off her lawn

Something had to give for Culture Secretary Maria Miller. She’s not had an easy time since the Leveson report and the subsequent battle over state regulation of the press. Harangued by all and sundry, she’s looking to make friends. In a speech at the British Museum this morning, Miller took the novel step of talking to the luvvies of the arts world as if they were grown-ups living in the real world. Her subject was budget cuts: ‘For honesty’s sake we must be clear about the grounds on which this argument must be had and the points that will get traction, not in the press, but with my colleagues – and with the country at large.’ Translation: Please stop giving beastly quotes about me to those nasty papers.

19 April 2013

Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: what’s worth watching, listening to or going to this weekend

In a week where the news has been filled with stories about a certain ‘strong woman’, Kate Chisholm has found another strong woman to write about. In this week’s radio column, she argues that the radio presenter Sue MacGregor managed to be the only female presenter on the Today programme without the need to deepen her voice or worry about power dressing or pussy-bow blouses. Like Thatcher however, MacGregor ‘has always done things her way’, and her radio programme The Reunion is a prime example of this.

18 April 2013

Frederic Wake-Walker

The future of opera

Arts feature

‘It’s an occult-mystery film opera.’ This is how Michel van der Aa describes his new opera, which opened last Friday at the Barbican (and is reviewed here). I had similar difficulties in describing the nature of many of the shows that I produced at Mica Moca, a performance and exhibition venue in Berlin. Over the course of five months, we produced more than 350 different shows of every genre you could think of and some I’d never heard of (check out Japanese free noise) and yet, by the end, I felt that what we’d actually produced was one huge opera. We’re living in very interesting and exciting times for the world of performance — when boundaries between art forms are breaking down and audience’s expectations are shifting.

Andrew Lambirth

Exhibitions: R.B. Kitaj: Obsessions The Art of Identity

Exhibitions

Nowadays, R.B. Kitaj (1932–2007) tends to be ignored by the critics in this country — like a bad smell in the corner of the room. It was not always thus: for years he was an admired, if somewhat controversial, presence, but then came his great retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1994. A large proportion of the British critical fraternity united to condemn and vilify him, to ‘take him down a peg or two’, as if he were an unruly schoolboy too big for his boots, too clever for his own good. This chorus of complaint (some of which amounted to abuse) was deeply felt by Kitaj, and when his beloved second wife, Sandra Fisher, died suddenly in the midst of what he called his ‘Tate War’, he was heartbroken and his love for England all but extinguished.

Claudia Massie

Champion of the people

Radio: Today; The Reunion

Radio and podcasts

You could say that Sue MacGregor has done as much for women on radio as Margaret Thatcher did for women at Westminster. You might, though, want to add that MacGregor survived for 18 years as the only woman presenter on Today, Radio 4’s chief news and current affairs programme, without finding it necessary to deepen her voice to make it more masculine or worrying about what she should wear. She soon established herself as being as essential to the programme’s character and stature as her colleagues, the late Brian Redhead, Peter Hobday and John Humphrys. MacGregor has always done things her way — by adding a softer, gentler, yet not more pliable, touch to her interviewing technique.

James Delingpole

Television: Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary

Television

In Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary (Channel 4, Saturday) — Martin Durkin’s superb tribute to our greatest prime minister — there was some footage of Harold Macmillan giving his ‘selling the family silver’ speech that made me quite sick. What nauseated me first was the sycophantic laughter from his black-tie Tory Reform Group audience oozing entitlement at some smoky St James’s club; and, second, the noisome cultural assumptions behind Mac’s ineffably grand remark. According to Mac’s Weltanschauung, it was not only right that people of his class should always keep hold of their silver, their Canalettos and Rembrandts, but that everyone else, a notch or two below, should also applaud them for doing so.

Deborah Ross

Cinema: Love Is All You Need

Cinema

Love Is All You Need is a romantic comedy that isn’t romantic or comic or much of anything. It stars Pierce Brosnan as Philip, a widowed, all-work-no-play Englishman working in Denmark whose son is about to get married in Italy. Meanwhile, across town, the mother of the bride, Ida (Trine Dyrholm), a hairdresser who wears a wig because she’s lost all her own hair to chemotherapy, has just discovered her husband is playing away from home with pretty young Thilde from accounts. Films are always full of middle-aged men playing away from home with pretty young Thildes from accounts, but have you ever wandered into a company’s accounts department?

Michael Tanner

Opera: Der fliegende Holländer and Sunken Garden

Opera

Scottish Opera’s new production of The Flying Dutchman, performed in German but advertised in English, is almost a triumph, and very well worth going to see. I reflected, as I travelled by train back from Glasgow to Cambridge, changing only at Edinburgh, York, Peterborough and Ely, that this raw and in some ways crude opera, Wagner’s first to remain in the canon, benefits from the restrictions imposed by a budget as tight as Scottish Opera’s, though I can imagine the participants not entirely agreeing with me. The production, by Harry Fehr with designs by Tom Scutt, is simple and clear. The opera is relocated to Scotland, where Wagner originally set it, as the home of Gothick, and Daland becomes Donald, Erik becomes George; and the time is mid-20th century.

Lloyd Evans

Upstairs, downstairs

Theatre

Never a dull moment at the Jermyn Street Theatre. It’s a titchy venue, the size of a gents’ loo, nestling beneath a cavernous flight of stairs in the nameless hinterland between druggy Soho and tarty Mayfair. The current proprietors, aiming for an air of scholastic amateurism, are on the hunt for ‘unknown and forgotten classics’. The theatre boasts a Resident Academic and an eccentric register of patrons including ‘Victoria Biggs, Euan Borland and the Duchess of Cambridge (pub)’. Currently it’s sifting the 1920s for treasure. Others have prospected here before. Ben Travers’s bourgeois farces no longer entertain us because middle-class morality has changed too much in the past 90 years. Frederick Lonsdale may stand a better chance.

11 April 2013

James Walton

Why David Bowie is still underrated

Arts feature

Is it just me, or is there quite a lot being written about David Bowie at the moment? Of course, there’s the fact that the V&A’s blockbuster exhibition has coincided with the totally unexpected appearance of his first album for ten years. (While putting the exhibition together, the curators could never have dreamed that on the day it opened, a new Bowie album would be number one in 40 countries.) Yet for some cynics on the internet — never hard to find — the recent outbreak of Bowie mania is a simple question of demographics: the media is now run by people who grew up with him, and apparently never get bored of banging on about it. Seeing ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops!

Andrew Lambirth

Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum

Exhibitions

The Reading Room is currently packed with Roman remains and with visitors attempting (or pretending) to look at them. The latest blockbuster at the BM (sponsored by Goldman Sachs) looks set to exceed all other oversubscribed sensationalist exhibitions, with more than 250 objects in a mazy but airy layout. When I first heard about this show, my main concern was how it could possibly compare or compete with the experience of visiting what’s actually left of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in Italy. The principal attraction of this subject for those with some interest in the fine arts must be the famous wall-paintings, and how could these be transported to London? Yet, as is swiftly apparent on entering the display, there is enough here to make even the specialist excited.

Liz Anderson

Nicholas Hytner quits as head of National Theatre…in the wake of a Spectator profile

So, Nicholas Hytner is to step down as director of the National Theatre at the end of March 2015. How canny of Lloyd Evans to review his ten-year reign on the South Bank in The Spectator arts pages on 6 April, the week before his official announcement. Lloyd wrote: ‘Artistic freedom has been the hallmark of his ten-year stewardship….No one guessed how bold Hytner would be. He took the presiding spirit of the theatre, as embodied in its ponderous title, and chucked it in the Thames. Instead of running a museum of official art he created a showcase for his personal inclinations. The National Theatre of Hytner. An astonishing risk. 'And no one noticed how hazardous it was simply because he pulled it off with such aplomb…..

Michael Henderson

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 and podcasts

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.