The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘The Stone Roses are more important than Picasso’ claims the over-hyped and over-paid fishmonger Damien Hirst. The Manchester indie legends, led by Ian Brown, have reformed and are set to play three packed homecoming gigs this weekend. People will probably still be talking about this in twenty five years, just as they will be about Pablo in quadruple that. Can the same be said of the UK's richest artist? Mr Steerpike thinks not.
The death of the author and journalist Gitta Sereny earlier this month drew some strangely critical notices. One piece even tried to blame her for a current cultural tendency to claim people are not responsible for their own actions. Though this was a dissenting view, there was a more general seam of criticism which ran through many obituaries. The claim was, essentially, that Sereny grew too uncomfortably close to her subjects and even ended up on occasions sympathising with them or excusing them. It is probably on the basis of her biography of Albert Speer that most of the criticism has come. It is true that Sereny got close to Speer and liked him.
The awards season may be over, but can I nominate Neil White for a gong anyway? He genuinely deserves one. After all, he’s the chap from Nottingham who watched all of the 600 or so films that were released into British cinemas last year — and then blogged about them at www.everyfilmin2011.com. You might question his sanity, but you cannot question his dedication: hours and hours spent in the dark of cinemas across the country, and then further hours translating his thoughts on to the internet. And now? He is repeating the process for the current year. The rest of us would find it difficult to follow Mr White’s bleary-eyed example. After all, 600 films in a year equates to roughly 12 films a week, or nearly two films a day.
It’s a rare pleasure to find an unfamiliar artist of the 18th century whose work speaks to the contemporary mind as lucidly as Carlo Labruzzi (1748–1817). I had never heard of him before this show, being still in my playpen when the last Labruzzi exhibition excited the art world in 1960. Although celebrated in his day, he was largely forgotten in the 19th and for most of the 20th century, but it’s clear from this excellent exhibition that he deserves a permanent place in the history books. Not much is known about him beyond the meagre biography that he was born in Rome, the son of a weaver and finisher of velvet, and that his younger brother Pietro was also an artist and became court painter to the King of Poland.
There’s one exception to the sometimes trivial and artificial events of the Cultural Olympiad: Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands at the British Library (until 25 September). Where other shows emphasise London’s separateness, Writing Britain subordinates the capital to the geography, peoples and history of the British Isles as a whole. Writers have recorded Britain’s development over a millennium, from the Arthurian myths to the dark satanic mills, from polite society to the urban underworld, from the wild moors to the simple delights of home.
It’s as if James Joyce was writing for radio, as if he understood the potential of the new audio technology long before the BBC had begun to broadcast plays and poetry. All that freakish literary invention in his 1922 novel Ulysses suddenly begins to make sense when heard on air, spoken out loud, with sound effects to tell us where we are. If you’ve never read it, but are too embarrassed to admit this (like the academic guests at David Lodge’s dinner party who get caught out in a game of literary humiliation), you could have tuned in to Radio 4 on Saturday and become an instant expert on Joyce’s quarter-of-a-million-word blockbuster (at least three times the length of anything by Ian McEwan or Julian Barnes).
Welsh National Opera’s new production of La Bohème, which I saw last week in Birmingham, is striking in a variety of ways, but its outstanding feature is the conducting of Carlo Rizzi. One tends to think that of all operas Bohème can look after itself, and up to a point that is true. Bashed out metronomically on a pub piano, or dispersed underneath the arches at Waterloo, or most absurdly of all made into a DVD and set in ‘real’ locations, with actual snow falling, it remains inviolate, though that isn’t perhaps the first word to use in connection with anything Puccinian. Yet every now and then it gets the royal treatment, and how much more satisfying it is when it does.
Off to Narnia. Director Rupert Goold has recreated C.S. Lewis’s permafrosted fantasy world in a circus tent moored in Kensington Gardens. And at the height of summer too. An impossible feat. But tons of cash, and many months of preparation, have been sunk into this effort. The show starts with The Wardrobe looming up in the middle of the stage, like a fat slab of mystery, a sort of Tardis perhaps, or the Kaaba at Mecca. Not much like a wardrobe, though. A child steps out and finds herself in a freaky kingdom run by a demented tundra-monger. Here she comes. Sally Dexter, playing the queen in a luminous white bedsheet, cackles sexily and yells commands at her cowering minions. Then she whooshes off in a great surge of whip cracks and dry ice. ‘Was that a bit scary?
One of the great things about working in a collapsing industry is the cornucopia of possibilities that begins to open up of all the stuff you could do instead. In the past 18 months I have toyed with becoming: a speechwriter, a radio shock jock, a YouTube cult, a think tank senior visiting fellow, a TV star, a corporate communications director, an internet entrepreneur, a self-help book author, a Buteyko guru, a truck driver at an Australian mine, a gold bug, a fixer, an after-dinner speaker, a stand-up comic, an MEP. Some of it might actually happen. So I think I have a pretty good idea what David Bowie was going through in 1972 in the run-up to recording Ziggy Stardust — whose 40th anniversary was celebrated by Jarvis Cocker and friends in a BBC4 documentary this week (Friday).
So, another week, and another Judd Apatow comedy — The Five-Year Engagement — rolls into town, and blah-de-blah-de-blah and yet more blah-de-blah-de-blah although the difference this time, which I feel honour-bound to mention, is that I totally loved it. I laughed. I cried (twice; properly). It is funny, even though no one falls on top of an expensive wedding cake or brings down a giant display of china in a department store. It has emotional heft, with no frantic, last-minute drives to the airport, just a male and female lead who not only share actual, proper, bona fide chemistry — hallelujah! Praise be!— but are also allowed to go head-to-head as equals. I like romcoms, or at least the falling-in-love possibilities offered by them.
Now, here’s a question. Should Gary Barlow be stripped of his OBE? There are a number of possible answers, including who the hell is Gary Barlow? Well, he was, or is, part of the useless singing ensemble known as Take That. And second, another question in response to the question: why did we give the idiot an OBE in the first place? He’s hardly Lennon and McCartney, is he? If we give Take That honours for their services to music then you might just as well give one to that chap who, a few years ago, was able to fart Jerusalem. But it seems that Barlow got his at least in part for services to charrriddeeeeeee.
In 2011, the Southbank Centre hosted the Festival of Britain to mark its fiftieth anniversary. Not wanting to be outdone this year, they are staging the Festival of the World. Last night, Westminster’s arty crowd crossed the bridge to toast this ambitiously titled project. The evening was worth the walk, with flowing Pol and also a impromptu compulsory poetry reading. Simon Armitage informed ex-ministers (like Tessa Jowell) and Lib Dem wannabes (like Don Foster) that poets were the real lawmakers with the ‘constituency of the heart, the chief whip of the head and constitution of imagination.’ Foster shut his eyes and even swayed slightly to take in the words.
This time next week, we’ll hold the third Spectator School Revolution conference, and it’s our best-ever lineup. If any CoffeeHousers are in the world of education, or know anyone who is, then I’d strongly recommend coming (more for details can be found by visiting spectator.co.uk/schools). The keynote speaker is Michael Gove, the education secretary, who needs no introduction here. But I’d like to say a little more about the others. Michelle Rhee is best-known for her three years time as head of schools in Washington DC, where school reform is a battleground. She fired a thousand teachers in her time there, which made her No.1 on the unions’ target list. (In Britain, only 17 teachers have been struck-off for incompetence in the last ten years).
Imagine you had £20 million to spare, burning a big hole in your pocket. What would you spend it on? You could buy a stately home or a private jet, but that would be so boring. Surely the nicest way to spend it would be to ask one of America’s greatest architects to build a new museum in your hometown, to show the world your favourite paintings. Now that really would be fun. For the man I’ve come to meet today, this is no idle fantasy. It’s the story of his life. Ten years ago, Frieder Burda invited Richard Meier to design a gallery to house his art collection, here in Baden Baden. Since it opened in 2004, the Frieder Burda Museum has transformed this sedate spa town into a cultural oasis in the Black Forest.
There is hardly ever one of Noël Coward’s old plays not on tour or in the West End. Sometimes you think the commercial theatre would collapse without him. A ‘new’ Coward is therefore an event. Never performed or published, Volcano was written in 1956 when Coward was living permanently in Jamaica as a tax exile. The play is the result of his life out in the tropics well away from the Angry Young Men in their winklepickers who were ruling the roost back in Britain. What a life it was! After a hard day’s snorkelling, Noël would sit outside his house, sipping a cocktail served by a white-coated native, the sun setting over the Caribbean, no cheap airline tourists to pollute his coral-fringed paradise.
Rumours of disaffection were widespread even before I had seen this year’s RA summer extravaganza (sponsored by Insight Investment). The usual complaints about the hanging and selection had doubled or trebled, not just from non-members but from the Academicians themselves, but the critic tries to keep an open mind for as long as possible. Unfortunately, my equanimity did not survive the first room. This year, the visitor enters the exhibition via the Central Hall, where a gallimaufry of work has been hung against bright red walls. Some of it survives this shock treatment, but other exhibits are disastrously affected. Is it insensitivity or spite that accounts for the hanging of two early masterpieces by John Hoyland against this destructive red?
What does a producer do on a record? I have often wondered this, as the evidence suggests that they either do (i) too much, or (ii) not enough. The heavy rock producer Steve Albini legendarily limits his contribution to switching on the equipment and pressing ‘record’. The band bashes out the song, Albini switches off the equipment and everyone goes for a hearty lunch. By this studied policy of non-intervention, Albini seeks to reproduce a band at its most raw and primal. You don’t go to him if you want fancy keyboard fills or a symphony orchestra wheeling away in the background. Indeed, Albini is so fast that he ‘produces’ more records than anyone else would be able to. Not that he uses the word ‘producer’ any more.
Last Wednesday two of the three live pooches that appeared in Pina Bausch’s Viktor did onstage what most dogs do when in a state of arousal. The incident, which elicited a great deal of audience laughter and repressed giggles on stage, would have amused the late Bausch. First seen in 1986, Viktor was the first of the many city-specific works that Bausch created and on which the current World Cities 2012 retrospective (at Sadler’s Wells and the Barbican) focuses. Viktor’s rhapsodic and episodic narrative comes from the theatricalisation of memories each member of the Tanztheater Wuppertal had of their experiences in a particular location. Viktor is about Rome, though not the Rome one sees in travel books, postcards or holiday snaps.
There’s an honourable track record of versions of Shakespeare’s play presenting Julius Caesar as a dictatorial monster of modern times. In 1937 Orson Welles (playing Brutus) cast Caesar as Mussolini and staged many scenes like Nazi rallies. Despite a curmudgeonly critic dismissing the conspirators as looking like ‘a committee from a taxi-driver’s union’, the show was a huge hit and set in motion a train of similar readings. In Miami in 1986 audiences applauded the murderous disposal of Fidel Castro. At the RSC the following year Terry Hands directed a nakedly fascist Caesar, while in London in 1993 Caesar was played by a woman, thus supposedly representing the political assassination of Margaret Thatcher.
Will and Nic’s canoodling in the woods. Adam’s bashed-in head. Amy’s makeover from wholesome midwife to foul-mouthed stepdaughter. Ambridge, home to the Archers, the Grundys and of course Lynda Snell, has been transformed from a sleepy village in the heart of Middle England into a crime-ridden soap, fuelled not by the everyday happenings of ordinary folk but the high-octane antics of a new crew of emotion-hugging soap stars. Joe and Eddie Grundy have all but disappeared from the scene, as have Peggy, Jill and Clarrie. Now we know why. There’s been a TV takeover and the daily soap is now under the editorial control of John Yorke, who used to work on EastEnders. For him, every episode has to end on a cliffhanger.
When should you set Antigone? Apparently not in the time of Antigone. The greatest classics these days seem to be aimed at the stupidest ticket-holders. And these hapless wretches can’t possibly be expected to understand anything outside their immediate experience. Polly Findlay’s version of Sophocles’ tragedy doesn’t even get modernity right. Her slightly out-of-date set design includes antique reel-to-reel tape machines and hefty old photocopiers the size of freezers. She’s taken Thebes and transplanted it to the studio of Crimewatch UK in about 1994. Very odd. The usual justification for these fast-forwardings is that they add relevance.
As an occasional user of Queensway Tube station, I have noticed that on exiting the lift I am met with the extraordinary and beguiling sounds of Mozart symphonies and piano concerti — well-chosen, beautifully played and blasted over the Tannoy system. There is something transporting about this post-underground experience, something I don’t expect after the humdrum of a packed commute. The other day, a TfL official was standing around and I had a few minutes to kill while waiting for the lift, so I asked her about this bizarre but welcome phenomenon. She explained that this was part of a controlled experiment in crowd management.
The BBC has been heavily criticised for its coverage of the Jubilee flotilla, and the tone was incredibly annoying. All those smiley celebrities pretending to enjoy themselves! The tabloids, those for whom the Beeb can never do anything right, would have been just as mean if the treatment had been sombre and serious. ‘And we see a boat, followed by a barge, and next to that, another boat. And Her Majesty is waving, now to the crowds on the embankment, now to the next boat…’ The queue of vessels was a feeble idea, the rain made it worse and there was nothing anyone could have done. Bagehot himself would have been reduced to burbling about souvenir sick bags.
It struck me for the first time at the latest revival of David McVicar’s production of Richard Strauss’s Salome that this opera, Strauss’s first to maintain a place in the repertory, and its successor Elektra are, for all their differences, companion pieces. Even before reading the late Patrick O’Connor’s excellent article ‘Happy Families’, the best and least pretentious in the programme book, I’d been reflecting on how the two operas deal with the classic issue of the powerful and disturbing relationship between father and daughter: in the case of Salome, it is a stepfather in love with his stepdaughter, but that hardly alters the point; while in Elektra it is a daughter obsessed with her father.
The first Saturday of the Hay Festival is always a bit like the first day of term — bumping into people you’ve haven’t seen in months, sometimes for a whole year. Then there are the people down from London, dressed in mufti, sporting inappropriate sunglasses and crumpled linen jackets that haven’t been out of the wardrobe since the previous Hay Festival. I like to pick up my tickets, hang out in the green room and generally reacquaint myself with what is undoubtedly the greatest literary festival in the world. ••• I had planned to watch Hilary Mantel, Boris Johnson and Harry Belafonte, but a bout of food poisoning probably caused by a hastily consumed steak tartare the day before had thrown my schedule into turmoil.
A Royal Affair is a beautifully mounted historical drama which goes right where so many films of this type go wrong: it doesn’t get distracted by carriages and candlelight and pretty frocks and balls and sumptuous feasts, but keeps its eye firmly and surely on character and story and, my, what a fascinating story it is. Set in late-18th-century Denmark, it is the account of a love triangle between a German doctor, the Queen of Denmark and her imbecilic husband, the King, which sounds preposterous, but is actually based on a true event that not only led to scandal but also ultimately transformed the country.
Sad to hear of the death of Ray Bradbury, although he enjoyed a good long life. He was a wonderful writer. Rather better, I think, than the more fashionable Philip K. Dick — certainly Bradbury was the superior story teller, and his fiction was as much about what it is to be human as the mildly sci-fi weirdnesses which I suppose gave him his early fame. Between the ages of 15 and 18, when I was besotted with US literature, he was one of my three favourites — along with Updike and Sinclair Lewis. An odd threesome, I suppose. Oddly, it wasn’t Bradbury’s acclaimed masterpiece, Fahrenheit 451, which captivated me; I thought that sorta dystopian stuff had been done better by Orwell, Zamyatin and Huxley. It was the short stories, full of menace, wonderfully atmospheric.
This picture, to me, sums up today’s Jubilee flotilla: drenched Royal College of Music students cheerfully singing Land of Hope and Glory at the end of a spectacle attended by over a million people. The rain, far from ruining the event, made it even more memorable and didn’t seem to deter the crowds. As the choir’s conductor put it: 'freezing cold, wind, and rain but euphoric and unforgettable'. Sky News captured the spirit by covering its real source: the onlookers. 'Even on the train down, people were talking to each other,' a member of the public said. 'It’s been amazing seeing the princess and the queen, I loved it,' said a four year old. Sky seemed to have mobilized its entire staff, from every point on the Thames to street parties in (sunny) Devon.
Gustav Klimt first came to Venice in the spring of 1899, in pursuit of Alma Schindler, the young stepdaughter of his friend and fellow artist Carl Moll. The nascent love affair between the artist, who was then in his late thirties, and the 19-year-old Alma was brought to an abrupt end when the girl’s mother read her diary and Klimt was asked to leave. Three years later she married Mahler. But before Klimt departed from Venice, Klimt and Alma had visited San Marco where, as Alma recorded, the Basilica’s mosaics, glittering in the half-light, made a profound impression on him.
