Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Liz Anderson

Sculpture trail

More from Arts

William Turnbull died last year. And if his name is not as familiar as those of his friends Giacometti and Paolozzi, it should be: an exhibition at Chatsworth in Derbyshire may help put this right. Turnbull was born in Dundee in 1922; he left school at 15, and went to work as an illustrator for the comic-book publishers D.C. Thomson, before enlisting in the RAF in 1941. It was his experience when serving in the Far East that gave him a lifelong interest not only in Asian artefacts but also in space and spatial perspective: a pilot’s view of the landscape beneath. Turnbull was both a painter and a sculptor, but it is for his sculptures that he is best known.

James Delingpole

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 and podcasts

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

More from Arts

A room filled with glowing fog; shadowy figures among glittering LEDs and warm ‘breathing’ columns of light. Welcome to the trip that is Light Show (until 28 April), the Hayward Gallery’s latest exhibition exploring how artists have used the medium of artificial light over the past five decades. With side effects of disorientation, slight panic and hallucinatory visions, this exhibition is an intoxicating sensory cocktail, plunging visitors into a world that is recognisable and unfathomable at the same time. With sculptures and installations that visitors can step into, Light Show is a fitting title for something that is, in many ways, more spectacle than ‘exhibition’.

Kate Chisholm

The Archers should carry a health warning

Radio and podcasts

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

More from Books

for Michael Donaghy, 1954-2004 Parking near St Pancras long before light, it wouldn’t spook if you peered from a shop front or popped from a grille — remembering the night we arranged a rendezvous at the Elephant, you like a meerkat in-and-out of the subways on the traffic island, head cocked but hesitant when I called A Mhíchíl through the sodium haze — who already must have felt in your brain a faint alert above the chug of the Riesenrad… I observed the scared look but never imagined you’d be panicked or with a farcical skip be gone: feral, too soft you were, but glad in your heart as you eyed up the sky, quickened your step of a sudden, and gave me the slip.

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

More from Arts

It takes a special sort of talent to turn a good act into a great one, and without John Ammonds, who died last month, aged 88, it’s quite possible that today’s couch potatoes never would have heard of Morecambe & Wise. As their BBC producer, he transformed them from jobbing comics into a national institution. The seven series he made with them still stand as the acme of Light Entertainment television. When Ammonds teamed up with Eric and Ernie, their double act was two-dimensional. Viewers liked them but they didn’t warm to them. Ammonds reconnected them with their theatrical roots, filming them on a raised stage with wings and curtain.

Kate Chisholm

After Saddam

Radio and podcasts

‘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.

James Delingpole

Bluestone 42: Dad’s Army it isn’t

Television

The thing that always used to bother me about M*A*S*H as a child was the lack of combat. You’d see the realistic film of choppers at the beginning and, obviously, the plotline would quite often include casualties coming in from recent scenes of action. But the exciting stuff always seemed to happen offstage, a bit like in Shakespeare where some character strides on and tells you what a terrible battle there’s just been and you’re going, ‘Wait a second. Did we just skip past the most exciting bit?’ This clearly isn’t going to be a problem, though, with BBC3’s new sitcom about a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan, Bluestone 42 (Tuesday).

Deborah Ross

Robot & Frank

Cinema

Robot & Frank is about a robot, and Frank, and I’d like to say it is as charmingly irresistible as you might suppose from the cute posters all around town, but hand on heart?  I cannot. It’s OK, I guess, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough, and, in the end, settles for what I most feared it would settle for: sentimentality. A pity, as the set-up is brilliant, and the questions it throws up — are you still you, once your mind starts to fail?; who is going to look after all our old?  — so worth asking, but it never properly gets to grips with any of them.

Michael Tanner

Mozart magic

Opera

It was some time since I’d been to a performance of Mozart’s greatest though not his deepest opera, Le Nozze di Figaro, one of the works of which I can’t imagine ever tiring. And it is, despite some heavy vocal demands, an opera which normally suits students at the music colleges well. There weren’t any obvious grave shortcomings in the first night’s performance of it at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, but it annoyingly failed to achieve lift-off. Nerves may well have a lot to do with that: the playing of the Overture had enough problems of intonation among the winds, which later played beautifully, to suggest that.

Lloyd Evans

Aversion therapy

Theatre

It’s been a while, I have to say, but last week I saw a show that thrilled me to the core. Trelawny of the Wells, the Donmar’s latest offering, is a tribute to the theatre written by actor-turned-writer Arthur Wing Pinero. A simple set-up. Gorgeous young luvvie, Rose Trelawny, has forsaken the greasepaint to marry a greaseball called Arthur Gower. He’s loaded. Rosie’s actor chums treat her to a farewell bash complete with antique gags, tuneless ditties, snatches from half-remembered dramas and long-winded orations consisting entirely of in-jokes. (You’ll have spotted that this is not the show that thrilled me to the core.

Paul Ibell

Transatlantic traffic

Theatre

There has been a lot of discussion recently, prompted by the start of President Obama’s second term, about the ‘Special Relationship’ between the United Kingdom and the United States. What seems to have been overlooked in the analysis of politics, economics and diplomatic relations is that the strongest and most culturally important link between the two countries is their shared passion for theatre. For all the razzle-dazzle of Broadway, the London of Elizabeth II remains, as it has since the rule of Elizabeth I, the world capital of the stage. Transferring from London to New York is a huge buzz for British actors, but it is a chance to sample the delights of Manhattan rather than a cultural pilgrimage.

Marcus Berkmann

If David Bowie really has returned to form, I’ll cry

Music

I haven’t heard the David Bowie album yet, but the Amazon order is in and Postie has been alerted as to the importance of the delivery. How often these days do any of us feel so excited about an imminent release? The ten-year gap between Bowie albums might have something to do with it, but the 30-year gap between decent Bowie albums is probably more relevant. And all this is down to the excellence of the single. Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet wept the first time he heard ‘Where Are We Now?’, and I was blubbing well into the song’s third or fourth week on Radio 2.

Robin Robertson

Port na h-Abhainne

More from Books

We walked the cliff of Portnahaven listening to the grey seals sing on Orsay and Eilean Mhic Coinnich across the little harbour. Were they singing for the love of being here in this place, like us, far from griefs — and were they also singing, as we were, to each other?