Arts Archives

Value for money | 29 November 2012

Radio and podcasts

It’s been challenged as ‘elitist’ and at times in its more than 60-year history it’s been threatened with deletion from the schedule. But CD Review, with its specialist ‘Building a Library’ slot, has been around since I was old enough to listen. Radio 3’s keynote Saturday-morning show is probably the programme I miss most when I’m away. You know exactly what the format is going to be, recognise most of the voices behind the mikes, yet you’re never quite sure what you might hear, what you could discover. Its survival, in a format virtually unchanged as far back as I can remember, always strikes me as extraordinary in this age of constant makeovers.

Olivia Glazebrook

Fame and fortune

Television

Having planned to devote every one of this week’s 800 words to Sir David Attenborough’s 60 Years in the Wild (Friday, BBC2), I was distracted by fame, fortune and the politics of influence: Give Us the Money (Sunday, BBC4) and Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream (Tuesday, BBC4). Both these programmes I watched with interest but absolutely no enjoyment whatsoever; their combined effect was a feeling of overall grubbiness, as if I had sat too close to a wrestling match on a wet afternoon in a swamp. ‘Give us the money!’ was the instruction given by Bob Geldof to the public at Live Aid in 1985. The public reached into their pockets and did as he asked, and a new kind of charity was born.

Lloyd Evans

Comic clockwork

Theatre

Pinero’s comedy The Magistrate is a marvellous confection of shameful secrets and multiplying concealments. Agatha, a beautiful widow of 36, has trimmed five years from her age in order to bag her second husband, Aeneas Posket, an agreeably pompous magistrate. Her subterfuge is imperilled by her 19-year-old son who must pretend to be 14 in order to make the maths work. To please his mother, the young buck behaves like a child at home. But elsewhere he pleases himself. He keeps a private room at the racy Hotel des Princes in town. One evening, he persuades his weakling stepfather to accompany him for a night of drunken antics. The police swoop on the hotel and Posket has to run pell-mell from the officers of the law.

Peter Hoskin

Caravan killers

Cinema

Here’s a fun diversion for all the family: how many ‘high-concept’ film ideas can you think of in a single minute? These are the films with premises that can be summed up — and pitched to expectant, impatient Hollywood producers — in only a few words. ‘Jaws in Space’, say, or ‘Arnie versus Hitler’. Get started now, and you could soon have the studios drooling a path to your door, eager to turn your aphorisms into easily marketable products. Red carpets and golden paycheques await. I mention this because, at first glance, it seems as if Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers is the result of a similar game.

Michael Tanner

Decline and fall

Opera

Some operas become, thanks partly to the frequency with which they are produced, victims of their own popularity. The most obvious sufferer is Carmen, which is a no-winner for singers and directors alike. As soon as the curtain rises and you see lemon trees and swaying hips, your heart sinks and you spend the interval agreeing with everyone that it’s just another tired old cliché; while if the scene is a mortuary or a garage you complain — and fairly — that it’s wholly inappropriate for the drama and the music that gives it substance. Last time it was produced at ENO, in 2007, it failed on all scores and it’s almost unseemly to mention it.

Peter Phillips

Talking dirty

Music

Attached to the ménage of every artistic outfit these days will be an employee who believes there is a magic formula which, once found, will bring in millions of everything: fans, column inches, money. Perhaps all artists secretly believe that what we do must have universal appeal: our insights are simply too significant to be overlooked. The only reason why other people don’t come to our concerts, buy our discs, or otherwise frequent our places of high culture is that it hasn’t yet got through to them that we exist. They only have to be drawn in by the right kind of publicity and everybody will love what we do. To find this publicity is the job of expensive professionals who spend their lives identifying the perfect image or coining the irresistible slogan.

William Wootten

The Ladies’ Man

22 November 2012

Andrew Lambirth

Lonely Lakelander

Arts feature

Five years ago I had never heard of Percy Kelly (1918–93). I knew the work of some Cumbria artists, and much admired the dark and moody landscapes of Sheila Fell (1931–79), for instance, but Percy Kelly had not then registered on my radar. He was already highly regarded in the Lake District, but it was not until after his death that his work was really exhibited and promoted. He was one of those artists who believe in their own value, and want others to share their high opinion, but are not prepared to sell their work to achieve this. Time and again Kelly was offered exhibitions and sabotaged them, while potential buyers were frustrated in their attempts to purchase the paintings and drawings they admired.

Laura Gascoigne

Keeping the faith

Exhibitions

In 1929 the founder of Italian Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, reported from Milan that, after a wartime setback, the movement was ‘in full working order’ under the leadership of ‘the very young and very ingenious Bruno Munari’. Bruno Munari (1907–1998) was 22 at the time. He had arrived in Milan two years earlier as a refugee from his family hotel business in the Veneto and embraced with enthusiasm Giacomo Balla’s suggestion in The Futurist Universe that ‘useful and pleasing’ consumer products in shop windows were ‘a much more rewarding sight than the grimy little pictures nailed on the walls of the passéist painter’s studio’.

Francesca Steele

Dressed to impress

Exhibitions

Does the costume make the man or the man the costume? Well, a little bit of both if the Hollywood Costume exhibition at the V&A is to be believed. Five years in the making, this collection of more than 100 of the most iconic outfits in movie history, from Scarlett O’Hara’s green ‘curtain’ gown to Darth Vader’s suit, is a bold undertaking. The very nature of motion pictures means that there is something a little ghoulish about seeing static ensembles, with the clothes divorced from their character and digital images of famous faces floating above them. But movie-goers have an insatiable appetite for anything that gets them closer to their idols and there is something thrilling about being in such close proximity to items we know so well.

John Gohorry

The effects of rain

A world apart | 22 November 2012

Short changed

Radio and podcasts

Was that it? Was that the sum total of 90 years of radio? Radio Reunited, the three-minute ‘celebration’ of the first BBC wireless broadcast in November 1922, was a very odd affair. Billed as a revolutionary simulcast to a ‘potential’ 120 million listeners round the world, playing out on all the BBC’s radio stations at the same time, it was so short, so compressed, you couldn’t take in the many layers of sound at once, or decipher what the different soundbites could possibly be, now, then, or from the future. After about four or five listens, the babble of voices, Big Ben, Morse Code, birdsong and beeping did begin to clear so that keywords from the recorded messages from Listeners Anonymous cut through the background interference.

James Delingpole

Top of their game

Television

God, I’m jealous of Michael Gove. Not for being a cabinet minister in the same coalition as Nick Clegg and Vince Cable, obviously, but for being outed as a queer in the new series of Harry & Paul (BBC2, Sunday). Now that’s what I call fame. Harry & Paul has had mixed reviews. Some of the sketches — the ‘I’m a cop’ one; the US car salesmen — simply aren’t funny. But so what? Even at its best The Fast Show, arguably the funniest-ever broken-sketch comedy series, contained some sketches that weren’t funny. It goes with the territory. Unfunny sketches are the equivalent of the ‘darlings’ that William Faulkner advised authors they should kill.

Lloyd Evans

Warring outcasts

Theatre

Are we barmy or what? Our mawkish obsession with the first world war demonstrates that we’re in the grip of a mass delusion: institutional sentimentality. The latest symptom of our death-mania is Nick Dear’s engaging play about the pastoral poet Edward Thomas, who was killed in action in 1917. Thomas began writing verse aged 36 at the suggestion of his American chum Robert Frost. We first meet the pair in a West Country croft in 1914. Frost is a smug, wily and sententious trustafarian who likes the idea of tilling the earth but stops short of actually tilling it himself. Thomas, a suicidal depressive, is incapable of showing warmth to his wife, Helen, and his three squealing nippers.

Damian Thompson

Matchless mono

Music

Record companies: if you insist on sending CDs to my home address without so much as a covering note or a press release, well, that’s just fine by me. West Hill Radio Archives, I can’t say I’d heard of you, but the discs of Toscanini and the BBC Symphony Orchestra that landed on my doormat last week were a lovely surprise, in more ways than one. Toscanini refused to allow these concerts at the Queen’s Hall in June 1935 to be recorded, but thank goodness HMV ignored him. In the case of Elgar’s Enigma Variations the result is a revelation.

Michael Tanner

Change of heart | 22 November 2012

Opera

I think I have developed a crush on Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, which is strange, considering that it is so evidently adorable a work that most opera-goers fall for it straight away. I have never been averse to it, in the way that I am to quite a lot of Donizetti’s work, but in the light of the last two performances I’ve seen, within a few weeks, it has risen in my estimation to the level of being a masterpiece. The first was the Met’s broadcast, delightful in all respects, but with an interestingly unusual balance of sympathy towards the characters. Now, at the Royal Opera, Laurence Pelly’s production is revived for the second time, the revival director being Daniel Dooner, who has been unusually active, unless my memory fails me.

Clarissa Tan

Faking it | 22 November 2012

Cinema

The star of Gambit, it seems, is the Savoy. And why not? Nobody else seems to want to lay claim to this movie, a refashioning of the 1966 art con caper that starred Michael Caine. Not even Colin Firth, who spends a fair amount of time in the new film unhappily legging it, trouserless, up and down the hotel’s refurbished corridors. If you want to make an artistic copy, it had better be really good or you might as well not try, is the inadvertent message of this film. Scriptwriters the Coen brothers have taken the basic elements of the vintage Caine vehicle, which also had Shirley Maclaine, and made a crude sketch whose plot is paper-thin and whose characters are pencilled in.

Stephen Bayley

The Dagenham Dustbin

21 November 2012

Alex Massie

Israel’s Tragedy: Even If She Wins She Loses – Spectator Blogs

Next time someone bores on about the so-called decline of the British literary novel you might consider pointing out to your dinner-party companion that this is not such a bad thing. It suggests, if the thesis is true, that there aren't too many problems in this realm that are still worth exploring, far less solving. Consider, by contrast, the twin and warring agonies of Israel and Palestine. Is there a better, bigger, subject for any novelist working today than this? I suspect not which is one reason why the likes of Amos Oz and David Grossman (and, doubtless, others too) are vital in every sense of the word. These dual tragedies evoke terror and pity in equal measure. There are few innocents and many guilty parties.

19 November 2012

Steerpike

Mark Rylance the star attraction

There was some TV stardust at Stephen Fry and Mark Rylance’s all male production of Twelfth Night at the Apollo on Friday night. Gary Lineker and his wife Danielle were part of an ecstatic audience that gave a standing ovation to the players in this wildly successful show, which has recently transferred from the Globe to the West End. For those of you who are surprised to find that the perma-tanned resident of the Match of the Day sofa and his good lady wife take in Shakespeare of an evening, I hear that the Linekers count themselves as massive Mark Rylance fans after seeing him star as Jonny ‘Rooster’ Byron in Jez Butterworth's hit play Jerusalem. Who says that the theatre is elitist?

15 November 2012

Trevor Nunn

Everything goes

Arts feature

When I first began rehearsing a musical, I discovered to my genuine surprise that I was breaking an unwritten rule...that directors of serious ‘legitimate’ theatre should not dirty their hands by contact with such a lower form of entertainment! Since that time, it’s become almost impossible to name a leading play director who has not been successful and influential with musicals. It’s just possible that, back in 1986, our Royal Shakespeare Company show Les Misérables, which survived a universal critical drubbing in this country, was a vital step forward in proving that a musical could actually be about something — poverty, injustice, revolution, religious fundamentalism, that sort of thing.

Andrew Lambirth

Unexpected structures

Exhibitions

There are only eight single paintings in the current show of early work by Gillian Ayres (born 1930) — eight paintings and the four panels of a mural created for the dining room of Hampstead High School for Girls. The mural is over seven feet high and 27 feet wide, and its scale and achievement are remarkable for a young painter. (Ayres was 27 when she painted it.) But it is less original than the paintings it prepared the way for, and which now hang in the Foreshore Gallery of the Jerwood Foundation’s splendid new space in Hastings. The mural has an undeniably decorative impulse and looks very much of its time, but the paintings have moved beyond period confines and peer expectations.

Tanya Harrod

Weaving magic

Time trials

Television

It’s amazing what can be squeezed into an hour of The Hour (Wednesday, BBC2): smutty photos, gang violence, bent coppers, illegal gambling, fascism, racism, a political cover-up, a media exposé, leaked documents, seduction, abuse, neglect, the corrupting temptations of celebrity, the corrupting temptations of complicated dessert recipes, a dog in space, the threat to the nation of nuclear war, the threat to the BBC of commercial television and the threat to an English bluestocking of a sexy, bare-legged French girl with a carving knife, a wedding ring and a gamine haircut. The poor old kitchen sink, left out like Cinderella, must have had a dull time sitting at home by itself.

Kate Chisholm

Carry on broadcasting

Radio and podcasts

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.