Culture

Culture

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

Kate Chisholm

Carry on broadcasting

Radio

By some strange, freakish coincidence, just as the biggest story to hit the BBC in recent years was about to cut through the airwaves on Saturday night, Radio 4 was discussing the question, Who’s Reithian Now? It was as if, by some act of God, Lord Reith, the corporation’s creator, was speaking to us direct from the upper ether (or maybe the lower furnace?) and reminding us of why the BBC was set up as a licence-funded organisation in 1927, and what it is supposed to do in a crisis: carry on broadcasting. The Archive on 4 programme (produced by Karen Pirie for the independent company Whistledown Productions) replayed clips of Reith himself, proudly boasting that when he was director-general he used to read, and approve, every news bulletin before it went out on air.

Deborah Ross

Everlasting love

Cinema

Michael Haneke’s Amour is about love as we near the end of life and is so painful it isn’t a film to ‘like’ or ‘enjoy’ but is one you do have to see. It’s amazing. It is, effectively, two hours and seven minutes of watching someone die, but it is riveting, and I’m still jangling from it. Haneke has taken the ordinary — getting old; dying; happens to us all; no exceptions — and has transformed it into something so literate, powerful, terrifying, intelligent and extraordinary. I’m still jangling from it, and expect to jangle until at least next Wednesday, if not Friday week. Actually, that’s overoptimistic. This is one of those films that, I suspect, is going to stay with me for life, and I’d best get used to it.

Michael Tanner

Slow progress

Opera

As usual on the rare occasions when Vaughan Williams’s last and largest opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress, is performed, the new production at English National Opera has been greeted antiphonally, with cries of ecstasy mingled with indignation that it is so little performed from one side, and moans of boredom and weariness from the other. Though I am temperamentally disinclined or even unable to take a compromise position on almost any subject, in this case that is what I find myself doing. It seems to me that there are long stretches where The Pilgrim’s Progress is serene, noble, elevated, radiant and life-giving, others where it stalls, nothing much happens (in the music more than on stage) and it belies its title: progress is just what, sometimes, we don’t get.

Patrick Carnegy

Vengeance, at a price

Theatre

Where have you been all my life, Orphan of Zhao? Come to think of it, where has any Chinese theatre been? Bang up to the minute, the RSC’s new artistic director, Gregory Doran, launched his regime with the so-called (actually, badly called) ‘Chinese Hamlet’ on the very day that President Hu Jintao, dwarfed by a 20ft hammer and sickle, prepared to hand over control to Xi Jinping. As the Orphan is about successful resistance to the misuse of power, Xi Jinping will need to pay good attention. In truth, the Orphan is a deeply interesting play with a history running back over two millennia.

Lloyd Evans

Issues of Trust

Theatre

An orgy of navel-gazing on the South Bank where a national treasure is satirising the National Trust at the National Theatre. Alan Bennett sets his latest comedy in the drawing room of a crumbling Georgian mansion in South Yorkshire. Greedy speculators are queuing up to seize the house from its plucky owner, Lady Dorothy Stacpoole, a high-born hippie who spent her youth going to parties and modelling. Now aged 80 or 90, she’s ill equipped to outwit the circling vultures. Bennett is good at creating warm, believable women but with Lady Dorothy he simply regurgitates a stale theatrical burp: the beatnik with a bus pass. Writing plots has never been his strong point and he unwisely stuffs his story with fistfuls of loose threads. They poke out all over the place.

Philip Hancock

Wear and Tear

More from Books

Buttons like liquorice Catherine wheels on the cape coat I always loved you in. No longer flush, the top one dangles by two last threads, face down. A couple of minutes, why not sort it? For God’s sake, you say, turning back the lapel. You’re obsessed. Flip through the pages of your Grazia. Mum’ll fix it. Monday, doing it up for work, the shock, where, when — in the surge off the tube at Green Park, plucked from the back of the seat at the Curzon? Could be anywhere. Despite the miles of haberdasheries, nothing comes close.

8 November 2012

Kate Chisholm

Global power

Arts feature

Go back 90 years to the first radio broadcast by the newly formed BBC and you might think you’ve entered a time warp. The company (it became a corporation later) was obsessed about a government inquiry and accusations that it was elitist and biased towards London. How could it survive without the licence fee? How do you keep those troublesome regional stations happy? How do you stop your unruly artistes (as they were then so politely called) from landing you in the muck? Not much has changed in 2012. The BBC has always been at the mercy of the licence fee, set initially by the government at ten shillings (equivalent now to about £13).

Andrew Lambirth

Missing links

Exhibitions

The primary experience of looking at painting is the crucial encounter between a painted surface and the human eye. Nothing is quite like it, and this unique experience cannot be replaced or replicated by looking at a painting in printed reproduction or on a computer screen. This may be a truism but it is worth emphasising once again in an age that relies increasingly on mediated experience, and lives — almost literally — by the screen. It is a truth brought into especial prominence by the concatenation of three exhibitions currently showing in London. Photography does not require the same intimate experience of viewing.

Andrew Petrie

London pride

More from Arts

The trend for documentary portraits of individual cities assembled from archive footage continues with Julien Temple’s London: The Modern Babylon, out now on Bfi DVD. Temple was the obvious choice of director, as a native of the city and creator of London films Absolute Beginners and Oil City Confidential, not to mention 2010’s superb Requiem for Detroit? for the BBC. The film has been compared to Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg and Terence Davies’s Of Time and the City (about Liverpool), though London lacks those works’ deeply personal perspective and strict avoidance of cliché: this is a film that opens to the sound of  ‘London Calling’ and closes with ‘Waterloo Sunset’.

Kate Chisholm

Living document

Radio

It takes Alistair Cooke three minutes, or about 450 words, before he finally gets round to declaring ‘I was there’ — on the night that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968. Cooke was talking just a few days later on his weekly Letter from America slot on Radio 4. You might think Cooke would not have been able to contain his excitement that after 30 years on the job as a foreign correspondent he had at last actually been there as an eye-witness to this dramatic ‘accidental convulsion of history’. But, no, Cooke, as the ultimate professional, understood that for us, his listeners, the impact of his account would be enhanced 300 per cent if he gave us a preamble, a slow build.

James Delingpole

Zombie hell

Television

Derren Brown is a great big cheating liar. Or so my old mucker Rod Liddle reckoned last week in his Spectator blog. Derren Brown’s Apocalypse was ‘clearly, demonstrably, faked’, declared Rod. Well, I guess that settles it then. Or does it? First some background for those of you who missed it. (Though my advice for those of you who did is: stop reading now and watch both episodes immediately on Channel 4’s 4oD catch-up site.) Derren Brown’s Apocalypse (Channel 4, last Friday) was — or, pace Rod, purported to be — an extraordinarily bold TV experiment.

Giannandrea Poesio

Captivating kaleidoscope

More from Arts

When Philippe Decouflé first introduced the idea of sheer fun into the deadly serious business of postmodern dance-making, sceptics predicted that his comic strip and animated movie-like ideas would soon start to wear off. Almost 30 years later, his stuff is still as provocatively entertaining, and his work holds a special place in the history of choreography. Panorama is a cleverly woven look at some of his past and much-acclaimed creations. Yet the performance has very little in common with trendy, pompously celebratory and unbearably lifeless choreographic retrospectives. Structured as a sort of music-hall review and compèred like one by the most unlikely of MCs, Panoroma is a kaleidoscope of choreographic and theatrical ideas that amuse, intrigue and captivate.

Lloyd Evans

Essential Chekhov

Theatre

Uncle Vanya comes into the Vaudeville at an artful slouch. Lindsay Posner’s take on Chekhov’s story of bickering Russian sophisticates has an unusual visual style. In Britain we’re used to seeing Chekhov set in some fading Palladian mansion just outside Haslemere or Bath. Designer Christopher Oram has rummaged through the archives and discovered some hideously authentic stylings. He offers us a gloomy Siberian dacha, all cobwebby nooks and stacked timbers painted cowpat brown and carved with ornamental Asiatic doodles. This hulking coffin of a house emphasises the isolation and pinched misery of the play. The starry cast shine with fitful brilliance.

Marcus Berkmann

Golden oldies | 8 November 2012

Music

Old blokes make records too; they just take their time over it. Graham Gouldman of 10cc has one out, his first for 11 years. Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra has two out, but they’re his first for 11 years too. Donald Fagen’s new one is his first for six years, but he may be in a bit of a hurry. How long have any of them got left? How long have any of us? It’s a race to the line, for each artist and his audience. Because I doubt that any of these three are adding many young people to their fanbase. We are all ageing together. It’s a little low on dignity, but there are worse ways of living your life. Graham Gouldman is the last man standing in 10cc. Godley and Creme left in 1976, so long ago that even they probably can’t remember why.

Deborah Ross

Lost in translation | 8 November 2012

Cinema

Mother’s Milk is an adaptation of Edward St Aubyn’s novel of the same name and is about an English family who are about to lose their beloved holiday house in Provence. (Diddums, I’m minded to say, but only because I’ve never had a holiday house in Provence to lose, and am quite bitter about that.) Although I am generally a fan of this sort of in-action film — a family go away, there are tensions, they return home again — this is just too hopelessly faithful to the text. Huge chunks of it are spouted all over the shop.

Michael Tanner

Triple time

Opera

The Guildhall School of Music and Drama is outdoing itself in putting on a triple bill of little-known operas, two by Massenet and one by Martinu. What is still more remarkable is that GSMD has put them all on before, though I think in different productions. This time round the designer Yannis Thavoris has produced a set of which the main ingredient, a heap of miscellaneous broken or discarded objects, remains throughout the evening, while other props are introduced that are sufficiently striking to create a quite different mood as the curtain rises on the three little operas. The first, Massenet’s La Navarraise, goes so against everything we associate with the composer that it must have been written partly in order to demonstrate how wide his range was.

4 November 2012

Nick Cohen

My life as a connoisseur

'Passion for freedom' is now holding its fourth exhibition at the Unit 24 Gallery just behind Tate Modern. The show is a visible and occasionally dazzling manifestation of an often submerged movement in western liberalism that regards the liberal-left mainstream with something close to disgust. They – we – find the indulgence of radical Islam as a betrayal of the best of the liberal tradition. We are equally repelled by multi-cultural orthodoxy, which puts the interest of a 'community' before the interests of the individual, particularly when the individual is a woman. The magnificent Maryam Namazie, One Law for All’s Spokesperson, and a woman you will rarely hear on the BBC, explained the show’s purpose.

3 November 2012

Rod Liddle

Derren Brown’s Apocalypse faked?

If you didn’t watch Derren Brown’s Apocalypse, then the following will be meaningless... I suppose all television is a kind of charlatanism, a usually agreeable deception to which the rest of us more or less willingly sign up. We know, at the back of our minds, that TV is fake. Which is why Derren Brown’s Apocalypse was salutary viewing: clearly, demonstrably, faked - and even beyond that obnoxious in its presumptions. Sort of TV incarnate, in exaggerated microcosm. The audience are mugs, the supposed representative from the audience – the protagonist of Brown’s fifth form horror show – a mug who can be lifted from his humdrum torpor and selfishness only through the redemptive intervention of television.

1 November 2012

Rosanna Durham

All that jazz | 1 November 2012

More from Arts

What London can give jazz music — beyond an audience in its concert halls — is a setting to match the music’s diversity. The city offers access, culturally, to what is European, American, African and more. And so it is with the London Jazz Festival (9–18 November), whose extensive programme is significant both for its cultural mix and for its line-up of jazz’s greatest living musicians. 2012 marks the festival’s 17th outing, with over 250 concerts, 40 hours of which are to be broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Performers will include the legendary saxophonist Sonny Rollins (16 November, Barbican), who recorded with Miles Davis before he was 20. Now aged 82, Rollins is passing through London on a seven-date European tour.

Kate Chisholm

Hearing voices | 1 November 2012

Radio

It’s business as usual for the BBC’s radio stations. While the boardroom burns, the production teams are busy creating — weekloads of entertainment, information, erudition. The doomsayers love a crisis, and this latest disaster is a devil of a mess, but we should probably remember that the Corporation depends for its survival not on the superiority of its management techniques but on the continuing excellence of its programmes. Once that goes, we should be really worried. Anyone doubting this should spend the afternoon with Simon Callow and his Tasting Notes programme on Classic FM (Sundays). Sponsored by Laithwaite’s Wine, the programme’s format obliges Callow to match each and every piece of music on his playlist with a suitably blended glass of wine.

Tom Sutcliffe

Sideshow winner

Opera

I thought my 27th Wexford Opera Festival since 1972 was going to be one of the best. I had seen and enjoyed the Cilea and Chabrier operas on the bill at Holland Park and Opera North in the 1990s, and I was intrigued whether Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet was viable music theatre. Wexford veterans are used to disappointment and surprise success. We know why Glyndebourne audiences go with the flow and enjoy themselves, there being dinner, gardens, atmosphere and ticket prices to dissolve criticism. Wexford is cheaper: €25 to €130 a night for the main operas, less for sideshows. But most visitors make a three-night excursion with b&b as minimum. In the old days, it was a drinking as well as an opera festival — a tradition started by Compton Mackenzie.

Lloyd Evans

Ryans’ daughter

Theatre

Martina Cole is a rarity among novelists. Her work is set in the ugly, male-dominated world of London’s criminal fraternity and yet nearly all her fans are women. Blonde women, in particular, as I found out when I took my seat in the Theatre Royal Stratford East to see Patrick Prior’s adaptation of her breakthrough novel, Dangerous Lady. In a great sea of peroxide hairdos, my coiffure was the only point of darkness. Cole’s novel starts with a gem of an idea. She takes the brutal mythology of the Kray twins and softens it with a dash of femininity. Her criminal gangsters have a sister. The Ryans are a family of Irish Catholics dominated by a ruthless matriarch, Sarah.

Jessica Berens

No more heroes | 1 November 2012

Music

The Wharf is an unpretentious venue in Tavistock which offers a menu of entertainment whose criteria are difficult to fathom but are probably linked to the fact that Tavistock is near Plymouth and therefore miles from anywhere and quite an arse to get to. I saw a fat girl in an anorak screaming out loud with excitement at a poster advertising The Wurzels, so there isn’t too much going on for the under sixties. The venue stands 300 and seats about 30, which is pretty much what Hugh Cornwell would have been playing to when the Stranglers first drove their van around pubs in Guildford. All those years ago. He was old then. As a teenager doing A-levels I remember being more shocked by the fact that he was 30 than by the fact that he shouted out the word clitoris on Rattus Norvegicus.

Michael Tanner

Creeping confusion

Opera

The legend of Faust is perhaps the dominant one in post-Renaissance Europe, yet it resists satisfactory artistic realisation. The most celebrated versions of the legend, such as Marlowe’s and Goethe’s, seem to me to be utter messes aesthetically, retaining their status through the great passages they include rather than through any coherence. Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus is a very great novel with a fundamental structural flaw.

Deborah Ross

What shall we do with the drunken sailor?

Cinema

Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is his first film since There Will Be Blood and although it stars Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who give two of the most blistering performances you will see for an unspecified time period — usually, the form is to say ‘this year’, but how do I know? I’m not psychic! — it is all so enigmatic and underwritten I felt rather shut out. A ‘challenging’ film is one thing, but one that actually slams the door in your face is quite another, as well as rude. Heck, I’m mother to a teenager and can stay at home if I want to be shut out and have doors slammed in my face. It’s a pity, though.

Giannandrea Poesio

Mixed bag | 1 November 2012

More from Arts

Last year I raved about Birmingham Royal Ballet, their artistic drive, their freshness, their impeccable artistic eclecticism and, not least, their superb dancing. It was with such memories that I went to Sadler’s Wells last week, only to leave both programmes with reservations and mixed feelings. Neither programme stood out for being particularly well constructed; one, titled Opposites Attract, lacked contrast and shadings, while the other suffered from excessive stylistic idiosyncrasy. David Bintley’s Take Five, to Dave Brubeck’s luscious jazz, strived to add sparkle, but did not succeed — surprisingly, one might add, given that it has all the right ingredients to be a success.

Peter Phillips

Bolivian treasure

Music

Every so often in my line of business one reads heartwarming stories about manuscripts from the past turning up in unlikely places. The most favoured of these places over the years has probably been bricked-up chimney stacks in Tudor manor houses, where one supposes the terrified owners once thrust documents that would have incriminated them with the prevailing religious authorities. These documents might well have included music written for whichever Church was currently out of fashion; and so it is that pieces of music thought to be long lost have reappeared centuries later, both Protestant and Catholic. There is every chance that further discoveries will be made. Other places have included municipal and monastic libraries.

Ben West

The same old story

Theatre

Hard on the heels of last year’s television adaptation starring David Suchet and Ray Winstone is a new version of Dickens’s Great Expectations, in cinemas later this month. The new version, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes, and which closed the 2012 London Film Festival, comes after adaptations which include David Lean’s 1946 classic, the BBC’s 1999 version with Charlotte Rampling, a 1981 take on the yarn, an early 1970s production starring Michael York, one in 2007 with Timothy Spall, another featuring Ray McAnally, and yet another with Gwyneth Paltrow.

Katrina Naomi

Nan’s Advice After My Partner’s Breakdown

More from Books

What did you know of love? You, who slept in a separate bed, separate room, who knew nothing of us. You told me to let him be, let him get on with it, let him alone. You gave me your harshest advice, told me what you’d done after Grandpa was discharged from the Navy; hiding from the merest sound, from you. You made me hear every whistle and blast of your advice. And I never thanked you.