Arts Archives

The comfort of strangers

Blink and you would have missed it, but Wednesday was World Radio Day, devoted to celebrating radio ‘as a medium’. You might think the BBC would welcome this Unesco initiative ‘to promote freedom of expression over the airwaves’ and ‘improve international co-operation between broadcasters’, but there’s nothing in Radio Times about it, and nothing on the various network websites. It’s as if radio has become such an established part of British life there’s no need to give it special treatment, to celebrate its existence as a way of ensuring its survival.

Christina Dunhill

The Scarf

Poems

I saw Christine Lagarde outside The Wellcome Trust with a trolley case. She was wearing my scarf — the scarf I had when I was thirty two: a scarf with white dots on royal blue, or should I say French navy? — the very essence of what a scarf should be, which, in red, would be the scarf of the swagman or children’s book burglar but in blue remains jolly while suggesting tradition. Now, I admire Christine Lagarde and I support her policies. I believe the life of Christine Lagarde is something worth aiming for. I admire Christine Lagarde, but that is no reason to confer on her my scarf — the best scarf I ever had, the perfect scarf, which I have looked for ever since. You have taken a liberty, Christine Lagarde, guardian, lawmaker.

Lucy Vickery

Kraftwerk at Tate Modern

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Quite what it was that was so spellbinding about a quartet of middle-aged German blokes in skintight bodysuits standing at neon-lit consoles is difficult to articulate. They didn’t even seem to be doing very much up there on stage. But the audience of 1,000 for round two of Kraftwerk’s eight-night retrospective in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall were mesmerised for two hours solid. The high priests of electronica, whose bittersweet retro-futurism sowed so many of the seeds of modern pop music, performed their 1975 album Radio-Activity against a backdrop of 3D visuals (specs provided) that were always engaging and occasionally jaw-dropping.

Olivia Glazebrook

Schoenberg in shorts

Television

For anyone who missed The Sound and the Fury (Tuesday, BBC4) here is a reason — one of many — to catch it on your iPlayer: footage of a fierce, frowning and elderly Stravinsky, sitting in the empty stalls of the Théâtre des Champs Elysées and recalling the ‘near-riot’ which greeted the first performance of The Rite of Spring in 1913. ‘It was full — ’ (he gestured crossly around him) ‘ — of very noisy public. Very ’ostile public. I went up — when I heard all this noise — and I said, “Go to hell! Excuse me, Messieurs et Dames, and goodbye!

Michael Tanner

Double vision | 14 February 2013

Opera

This week has featured new productions at the Royal Opera and English National Opera of staples of the repertoire, both subjected to drastic rethinking. Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is the first production at the Royal Opera of the new Director of Opera, Kasper Holten, and on this showing I very much hope it will be the last. It has been reviewed coolly on the whole, but I haven’t read anyone being sufficiently abusive — adequately, that is, to the experience of sitting through a flawed but moving masterpiece that is systematically, though I’m sure involuntarily, slaughtered from the opening moments to the wretched close. This is an opera that Holten loves, and he has made clear that he learnt Russian to get to the heart of it.

Lloyd Evans

Fatal flaw | 14 February 2013

Theatre

A new play about the banking crisis at the Bush. Writer, Clare Duffy, has spent a year or two badgering financiers and economists with questions about ‘the fundamentals’. ‘What is the value of money?’ she asks. ‘What do we want and need money to be?’ Her play has lots of zing and energy, and opens as a TV game show. The audience is divided into teams and individuals are hauled out of their seats and asked to engage in sporting contests with a big stash of 10,000 pound coins that gleam in coppery piles on the stage. Then the show becomes a drama. We’re in 2007. Two bankers, Queenie and Casino, hatch a scheme to short the American housing market. A tiny investment of £5 million will net billions, should the bubble go pop.

Peter Hoskin

Mid-life crisis | 14 February 2013

Cinema

This is 40. Or perhaps I should say, is this 40? I haven’t yet reached that rounded age myself, so don’t have much of a frame of reference. But a quick spin around Wikipedia reveals that the film’s writer-director Judd Apatow (45) and its two stars, Leslie Mann (40) and Paul Rudd (43), all have the requisite number of years on them. They must know what they’re talking about, mustn’t they? Mann and Rudd play Debbie and Pete, a married couple who first appeared in one of the best comedies of the last decade, Apatow’s Knocked Up (2007). And their relationship is summed up by the film’s poster: Pete squats on the toilet, iPad in hand, while Debbie looks on askance through the bathroom mirror.

Connie Bensley

Painting the Fence

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For the first coat she started at the house end, he at the garden gate. They worked towards each other meeting fondly in the middle. For the second coat they began in the middle and worked outwards; he abstracted, murmuring, tweaking his phone with a painty forefinger. By the shrubbery he put down his brush and the garden gate groaned, clicked shut. Now the tin offers her its tedious advice For a perfect finish, apply a third coat. The days pass. The paint hardens.

7 February 2013

Alasdair Palmer

Medieval mystery

Arts feature

Medieval castles are generally dark and forbidding places that look as if they were built to prove the proposition that ‘form follows function’: the function was to be impregnable, and their high walls, crenelated and machicolated battlements, and slits for firing arrows instead of windows suggest that everything was subordinated to that dour defensive purpose. Castles are gloomy, intimidating buildings that sink the spirits. They were meant to intimidate and depress the population, and they succeeded. They still do. But we may have the wrong idea about castles. Recent research suggests that, in Italy at least, far from being solidly monochrome blocks, they may have been a riot of colour.

Andrew Lambirth

Finding beauty in junk

Exhibitions

Although Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) did not invent the technique or theory of collage, he was one of the greatest practitioners of it, raising it in his work to the level of an independent art form. The Cubists may have made art out of collage first, but for them it was intricately allied with painting, whereas Schwitters made collages for their own sake. They are some of the finest things in this rich and varied exhibition, which focuses on his years in Britain (1940–8), though the full range of his work, including a fascinating selection of paintings and sculptures, is also indicated in this typically large Tate display. Viewing it is a potentially exhausting experience, so best to be selective in what you choose to study.

Erica Mcalpine

Peonies

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On an impulse, you could eat these flowers up the way they’re floating, stemlessly, side by side like scoops of ice cream in a crystal cup. White and softly drizzled with syrup (almost creeping down from the top) and shyly turning inward still, each closed bud leaks red along the seams and gleams like a hot sundae. What puzzles is how quickly these petals fan out, brown, flip, and fray along the edges. If only they’d stay put — if you could just keep peonies shut. Open, they frazzle.

Peter Hoskin

Hall of mirrors

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At first glance, Holy Motors is all about one astonishing performance — or several, depending on how you look at it. The performance in question is by Denis Lavant, who plays M. Oscar, a blank page of a man who scribbles over himself with make-up and wigs to portray a succession of different characters. At the film’s outset he is a Parisian businessman, leaving his home in a limousine to do battle with the markets. Soon after, he is an old beggar woman, a sex robot sheathed in rubber, a gangster, a father and more. We never really know why he does this beyond — in his own words — ‘the beauty of the act’. But then, look closer, and there’s more going on. Is it any coincidence that M.

Kate Chisholm

The sex test

Radio and podcasts

‘We hear women’s voices differently from men’s,’ concluded Anne Karpf at the end of her search back through the radio archives to seek out the first women newsreaders on the airwaves. In Spoken Like a Woman (Radio 4, Saturday night), she decided this was the reason why it took so long for women to make it up through the plummy-voiced ranks to the heady heights of the newsroom. In 1922 when radio broadcasting began from 2LO on the Strand, there were plenty of female executives (such as Hilda Matheson, Olive Shapley and Mary Somerville) organising schedules, booking talent, coming up with ideas for programmes. Yet very few of them were allowed behind the mike for that all-important job, reading the news.

Deborah Ross

What kind of film does ‘Hitchcock’ think it is?

Cinema

Hitchcock is one of those films which would have been much better off if it had taken a moment to sit down and decide on its own sensibility. Before a camera had even rolled, it should have pulled up a chair and asked itself: am I a film about Hitchcock’s marriage, or am I a film about his psyche, or am I a film about one of his films, or am I an inside-Hollywood comedy, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins lumbering about in a fat suit and perving at blondes? If it had asked itself, it might have settled on the one, and retained its focus, and told us something. But it didn’t, so it doesn’t, and it tells us nothing. It’s not awful. It’s just not much of anything; the kind of film you will walk away from with a ‘so what?’ and a shrug. ‘So what?

Michael Tanner

Blank canvas | 7 February 2013

Opera

I approach any production of Mozart’s last opera, La clemenza di Tito, in a state of acute trepidation: it’s not pleasant sitting bored through nearly three hours of one of your favourite two or three composers, one whom you regard as perhaps the most astonishing artist who ever lived. But that is how La clemenza di Tito has nearly always affected me — first, before it was revived in theatres, on a dodgy old Nixa recording, then, fairly often since, in various opera houses, its having now become a repertoire piece, something which was inconceivable only 40 years ago. Still, despite its canonisation, its defenders — its admirers still, significantly, regard themselves in that way — tend to strike one or another defiant or uneasy note.

Lloyd Evans

English eccentrics

Theatre

Quartermaine’s Terms is a period piece within a period piece. It’s set in that part of the early 1960s which was still effectively the 1950s. St John Quartermaine, a shy bumbler, is the oldest and most useless teacher at a Cambridge language school. All his colleagues are lovable freaks. There’s the Jesus-worshipping spinster shackled to her ailing mum. There’s the caravanning dad who takes calamitous holidays in rain-swept Norfolk. There’s the wannabe novelist ditched by his wife while writing a particularly heartfelt chapter about marital bliss. And there’s the boss, a fogeyish queen, who has no idea the school is heading for the buffers.

Ed Rex

Making music

Music

Since the birth of the peer-to-peer file-sharing service Napster in the late 1990s, the record industry has been the unwilling poster child for entire businesses being overthrown by the march of technology. The major labels, once all-powerful, now stand Ozymandias-like, looking out over their barren empires; an ailing HMV, long ago diagnosed as terminal, is finally in its death throes; and it looks increasingly unlikely that music will ever be paid for again. An industry that’s resorted to The X Factor is an industry in trouble. Michael Breidenbruecker is the co-founder of the music streaming and recommendation service Last.fm, one of London’s big tech success stories. ‘When we started in 2000,’ he says, ‘there was no market.

Marcus Berkmann

Why can’t the British pop industry launch new acts that last?

Music

It’s all been happening in the pop world since I was last here. David Bowie released a new song, arguably his best in several decades. Wilko Johnson announced that he had terminal cancer, and a lot of men in their fifties wept for their own lost youth. HMV went belly up, and I ripped my £5 HMV voucher into shreds, hours before they decided they would honour the damn things after all. Is it my imagination, or have prices for CDs risen ever so slightly on Amazon these past few weeks? For them, I suppose, the job is done, and monopolistic practices can now creep in and grab hold of the market by the throat. A music lawyer I know is very pessimistic about the future of recorded music, not least because if there is no more money to be made, she won’t be making any either.

Giannandrea Poesio

From Russia with love | 7 February 2013

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If you want to know what’s so great about John Cranko’s choreography, look at the opening phrase of the final duet in Onegin (1965). The male dancer encircles the ballerina in an embrace that is not reciprocated, and then falls at her feet; she lunges forward to walk away from him, but her motion is counteracted by the downward and backward pull he performs while crouching on the stage behind her. It is sheer simplicity and sheer genius. The basic game of opposition and the use of gravity — at odds with ballet’s traditional aerial nature — encompass a unique range of emotions.

Catherine Ormell

Small Chat

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I have no experience of small boys, I tell my son, driving him home. Well only you. He sits there pertly. They lose things, he chirrups. You must know that. Encouraged by this opening, I warm-up a mother’s inside info. So why did Jago kick Beastly? I quiz and, why did Ant fix his key-fob to his fly? His silence counts each snowflake; he is as secret as Switzerland. His strength gathers itself, cracks open his shoes, skitters through his jacket’s seams. Only his hands furl, last token of infancy, these he bunkers in his pockets.

31 January 2013

Andrew Lambirth

Thoroughly modern Manet

Arts feature

There can’t really be many people who look at art with any regularity who continue to confuse Manet with Monet. But there are those who still think that Manet was an Impressionist, because so many of his friends and contemporaries were members of the group. In fact, Manet kept his distance and steadfastly refused to exhibit with them. His was an urban, studio-based art, not given to plein-air effects of atmosphere and local colour. He looked instead to the dazzling bravura of Franz Hals’s portraits, and the sombre and often majestic originality of Velázquez and Goya.

Kerry-Lee Powell

Ship’s Biscuit

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After Mother scarpered It was ship’s biscuit With shrapnel sparkles. It was hot spurts and gristle And cold snaps with a wet towel For stealing a puff from Dad’s fag Or sneaking a peek at his titty mags. But we buggers deserved no better. It was us that made her run off, With our bickers and our bungles. It was our bloody cheek. It was his bleeding knuckles.

George Hull

Time Travel

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Merrily We Roll Along (Menier Chocolate Factory, until 9 March) lets you escape the winter cold to a showbiz party in a Bel Air beach house. Still, despite its summery setting, Stephen Sondheim’s musical has a stock-taking feel that suits it to a run at the changing of the years. ‘How did you get to be here?’ the opening chorus asks Hollywood mega-success Franklin Shepard (played with charisma by Mark Umbers), who has alienated his friends and lost the will to live. George Furth’s book answers with a stepwise journey back in time from 1976, putting meticulous reverse engineering to touching effect. A wistful tune Franklin picks out on the piano turns out to be from his first hit — before he sold out.

Kate Chisholm

‘My country first’

Radio and podcasts

It’s not unusual for Kirsty Young’s castaways on Desert Island Discs to choose music that reminds them of people who are important to them. But Aung San Suu Kyi must surely have been the first politician-guest to ask her friends and family what she should take with her to that solitary isle, instead of carefully stage-managing her selection to present a particular view of herself. Who, for instance, would have expected to hear Tom Jones belting out ‘The Green Green Grass of Home’ on Sunday morning? But there he was, as cheesily sentimental as ever, chosen for Suu Kyi by her Burmese PA. She even confessed that she hadn’t listened to the song before the interview (which took place at her home in Naypyidaw) and said she had no idea whether she liked it or not.

Olivia Glazebrook

Ordinary people | 31 January 2013

Television

There was little reason to be curious about David or Jackie Siegel at the beginning of Queen of Versailles (Monday, BBC4): he is the King of Timeshare and she is his Beauty Queen; they are building a palace in Florida, and modelling it on Versailles; it will be the biggest private home in America, when it is finished, and the Siegels will squeeze into it with their colossal fortune, their fleet of staff, their eight children and their bouquet of powder-puff dogs. ‘My husband deserves this house,’ says Jackie. ‘It’ll be like a lifetime achievement.’ There didn’t seem a whole lot more to find out. But then, after 30 minutes of screen time, came the crash: September 2008.

Deborah Ross

A Cirque to irk

Cinema

Just as Les Mis was soaringly monotonous, Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away (3D) is soaringly pointless. No point to it whatsoever. I looked. I looked everywhere for a point, even under my cinema seat. (That’s how desperate I was.) But I came up empty-handed. It’s 90 minutes of sheer, total, utter pointlessness, as written and directed by Andrew Adamson (who directed the first two Shreks and the first two Chronicles of Narnia) and produced by James Cameron, who has made some good films, and Titanic. God knows what they were thinking of when they embarked on this. And boredom doesn’t even come near it. I experienced the sort of boredom that is also a seething rage spread thin. What am I doing here? When’s it going to end? Why did anyone imagine this was even a film?

Michael Tanner

Addicted to myth

Opera

The revival of Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Minotaur is the most significant artistic event at the Royal Opera since its première, almost five years ago. Unlike Thomas Adès’s more immediately accessible The Tempest, The Minotaur has not gone on to have an international career, though it unquestionably deserves one. With its ideal cast and direction, this production should tour the world’s major opera houses, demonstrating that at irregular but not too large intervals a new masterwork can still be forthcoming in this form, whose decline and decease has often been announced.

Stephen Bayley

Mauvais goût

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It was dinner at a prize-winning hotel in Burgundy. I looked, stupefied, at an awkward arrangement of trapezoidal plates, unaccommodating to food and unergonomic to both eater and plongeur. There was a water glass of triangular section and silly cutlery that would bring even Philippe Starck’s most empurpled morphological fantasies into the arena of commonsense. I thought wistfully about the simple charm of the old Duralex glass. The timelessly perfect round-shouldered Burgundy bottle’s unaffected handsomeness only served to make its table-top companions look all the more ridiculous. Modern France is in a terrible state as far as design is concerned. Renault’s peerless record of ingenuity is gone: it has not produced a worthwhile innovation for nearly 20 years.

Robert Gorelangton

Unacceptable faces

Theatre

A play called Rutherford & Son gripped audiences in London 101 years ago. Set on Tyneside, it was the David Hare-style leftie hit of its season. It depicted the unacceptable face of capitalism, a face that belonged to John Rutherford, who rules the family glassworks by fear, hated by his workers and his children alike. It’s still a fresh, brutal-up-north story of a monstrous control freak devoted to work and money and nothing else. The show has a terrific twist at the end and it was an instant hit in London, went to New York and was widely translated. But it became a big news story when the unknown author, K.G. Sowerby, was revealed to be a woman. Women did not write plays back then.