Culture

Culture

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

Giannandrea Poesio

Magic chemistry

More from Arts

Artifact was the first work that the groundbreaking dance-maker William Forsythe created in 1984 for the legendary Ballet Frankfurt. It is, therefore, pure ‘vintage’ Forsythe, even though it is as aggressively and engagingly provocative today as it was 28 years ago. It therefore comes across as a theatrically vibrant reminder of where it all started. Central are the quirky postmodern challenges that Forsythe first laid down to both the ballet canons and the set rules of traditional theatre-going. Hence the curtain coming down and going up more or less unexpectedly and/or arbitrarily, an idea aimed at questioning the way audiences used to watch — and still do — a ballet, which was to become Steptext’s main feature one year later, in 1985.

Lloyd Evans

Bible story

Theatre

Be still, at last, you clamouring brainboxes. Those who long for more highbrow drama in the West End can thank God for David Edgar’s Written on the Heart. Commissioned by the RSC, this celebratory play tells the story of the King James Bible, which was first published in 1612. Making scripture accessible to the masses represented a huge moral and cultural upheaval. In 1536 William Tyndale had been executed in Flanders for translating the Bible into English, but just eight decades later the king himself ordered a new vernacular version and showered the translators with rewards. Edgar is no slouch when it comes to taking on lumpish, glutinous topics and he relates the entire story of the English Church during the 16th century.

Deborah Ross

What a marvel!

Cinema

As last week I believe I provided the world’s first entirely interrogative film review, I thought that this week I would up the stakes and embroider this review on antimacassars, in mirror writing — this has also never been done before, as far as I know — but time, alas, proved my great enemy, so I’m afraid I have simply written it in verse instead. I hope you will forgive me. Avengers Assemble, my lovelies, is ‘the superhero event of the year’, And if this gets you all excited, you probably have nothing to fear. But if big action so big it’s humongous just isn’t really your thing, You may find, as I did, it drags, with its surfeit of CGI bling.

Kate Chisholm

Good night out

Radio

It would never have worked on TV. Ann Widdecombe going out for a night on the town with a group of young professional women. No self-respecting binge-brunette would have allowed themselves to be seen on camera with a sexagenarian ex-MP who just happened to be off the booze for Lent. But there she was, in the Reggae Music and Soul Food Bar at gone midnight, knocking back her glass of fizzy water while Rebecca, Brooke, Phoebe and Kate sipped their shots and tots of vodka. Widdecombe’s challenge was to look for some ‘real human beings’ behind the screaming headlines about Britain’s binge drinkers, those dolled-up girls in high heels, staggering along the nation’s high streets at three o’clock in the morning. Who are they?

Olivia Glazebrook

Under pressure | 28 April 2012

Television

Rest easy on your deckchair, Delingpole, for I come in peace. Your column is safe — from me, at least — because this week I have made an unpleasant discovery: your job is really hard, and I don’t know how to do it. It’s not the watching that’s so hellish, it’s deciding what to watch. It took me two days just to plough through the listings, for Pete’s sake, with a sense of panic rising in my bosom. What sort of locum would I be if I missed the week’s televisual pearl? What if the hours, days and nights I spent in front of the box were wasted on the wrong programmes? The responsibility that comes with this position is fearsome and, what’s worse, unending.

Luke Jessop

From street to stage

More from Arts

Breakin’ Convention, now in its ninth year at Sadler’s Wells, offers a feast of hip hop for all-comers, be they newbies or hip hop heads. Hip hop developed in the Bronx in the late 1970s from a mix of Bboying (breakdance), graffiti art, MC-ing and DJ-ing. From street-corner hobby of young Afro and Latin American ghetto teenagers, it exploded into a worldwide phenomenon. The transition from street to stage has been turbulent, provoking fierce debate on the direction of hip hop culture. Only Bboying seems to have maintained its integrity. Bboying’s significant theatre presence is down to strong-minded individuals who understand that the dance form does not have to remain a competitive street art.

27 April 2012

Alex Massie

The Interview of the Year

Since I discovered this interview on Armando Iannucci's Twitter feed I wondered if it was actually a spoof. But no, it seems Bill Shorten really is an Australian politician and not an Ocker Chris Morris. Anyway, for the time being it is my new favourite political interview...

22 April 2012

David Rodigan

Spotify Sunday: The essential Bob Marley

I first became aware of Bob Marley when I heard ‘Put It On’ by the Wailers, and their version of Tom Jones’s ‘What’s New Pussycat’, in 1967. These tracks in turn led me to discover the ska songs recorded at Studio One, such as the blueprint of Bob’s all- time world classic ‘One Love’ and their first Jamaican chart-topping single, ‘Simmer Down’. However, it was the landmark album Soul Rebel, produced by Lee Perry, that really blew me away: haunting harmonies and powerful lyrics, set to a lean, bass-driven set of dense reggae rhythms, the sparseness of which provided the perfect backdrop for the glorious vocals of Bob and his fellow Wailers, Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingstone.

21 April 2012

Andrew Lambirth

Flying colours

Exhibitions

If you take the Tube to Colindale on the Northern Line and then hop on a 303 bus or walk for ten minutes, you arrive at the Royal Air Force Museum, open daily from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m., admission free. The place is full of planes, as might be expected, and has a wonderfully relaxed atmosphere (not nearly as frenetic as the Imperial War Museum) and a feeling of spaciousness. The Museum also mounts temporary exhibitions, and the one that drew my attention is of the pastel portraits of Eric Kennington (1888–1960), a war artist in both world wars, and an incomparable draughtsman, interesting painter and tough, inventive sculptor. The exhibition has been curated by the Kennington expert, Dr Jonathan Black, who has written a substantial and densely informative catalogue (£19.

Lloyd Evans

Playing with the Games

Arts feature

Once you grasp the essential triviality of the Olympics, the Cultural Olympiad falls perfectly into place, says Lloyd Evans. Even Shakespeare can’t escape Once you grasp the essential triviality of the Olympics, the Cultural Olympiad falls perfectly into place, says Lloyd Evans. Even Shakespeare can’t escape Funny business the Olympics. No one seems to want it. Clearly it doesn’t belong here or anywhere else. So what’s it for? The main athletic competitions — ‘track and field’ — are disciplines devised by Greek hill-farmers during the Iron Age to improve their skills in battle. The field events, like discus and javelin, teach you to throw heavy and/or pointy things at your enemy.

Michael Tanner

Role reversal

Opera

Considering how close, if mysterious, the links are between being gay and loving opera, it could seem surprising that there are almost no operas explicitly on gay subjects. Many of Britten’s operas heave with homoerotic subtexts, but his only opera to come out is his last, Death in Venice, and that’s paedophiliac. Tippett, always wackier and more courageous, has a gay couple in The Knot Garden, but they’re tangential. There is Harvey Milk, but that is best forgotten. Perhaps it isn’t so surprising, since what seems to appeal most to the gay sensibility is the suffering diva, suffering preferably both in life and art.

Deborah Ross

No flies on me

Cinema

Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, anyone who happens to be passing, I have decided to quiz myself about this week’s film, for no other reason than the idea occurred to me, and I fancied it, so here goes: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, any good? No. That it? OK, if this film teaches us anything, it teaches us how to take a perfectly fine book — Paul Torday’s novel of the same name — and transform it into a mushy, corny, ghastly mess of the most trying kind. How would you describe the viewing experience? Like swimming upstream yourself, but through treacle, and with someone heavy strapped to your back. How heavy? Someone like Eric Pickles, say. I wouldn’t like Eric Pickles strapped to my back, I don’t think.

Lloyd Evans

Written in tears and blood

Theatre

Great title, Long Day’s Journey into Night. The sombre, majestic words are suffused with auguries of doom. ‘A play of old sorrow written in tears and blood,’ was O’Neill’s description of the script, which is inspired by his personal background. We’re in a beautiful seaside mansion where a prosperous New York family, the Tyrones, are living in great splendour. But beneath the gorgeous surface everything’s going to hell. The oldest son is a washed-up actor who can’t keep away from the local knocking-shop. The younger boy, a preppie drifter, keeps coughing TB spores into his hankie. The mother, still grieving for a lost child, is hooked on morphine. And the whisky-soaked dad is a millionaire who can’t bear to switch on a spare light bulb.

Simon Hoggart

The American way | 21 April 2012

Television

I spent the last week in America, and my hosts had 900-plus channels listed on cable, though some required payment, others were in Spanish, and many featured what can only be called niche programming, such as lacrosse from the high school. My hostess liked Chopped!, which is their version of MasterChef — less hectic though with more repulsive food. But I liked the commercials, which I watched carefully since — even though our advertising industry regards itself as the world’s most influential — American styles will soon cross the Atlantic. One problem advertisers face is how to plug something that nobody hopes they’ll need to buy. Man is driving along an empty road in the far west. Steam starts to come out of the engine.

Kate Chisholm

Beware the growlers

Radio

It’s the weirdest thing. This obsession with the sinking of the Titanic. Go to the BBC iPlayer website and you’ll find eight programmes you can listen to now, if by chance you missed them first time round. Take Titanic: Minute by Minute on Radio 2, broadcast ‘live’ on the very same night (100 years later) that the luxury ship went down. Billed as ‘experimental’, an ‘adventure’ in radio, this blow-by-blow account of what happened on that fateful night in April 1912 took place in real time in the studio in London, beginning at 11.30 p.m., just before the White Star liner hit the misplaced iceberg, and ending three hours later, by which time the Titanic was lying at the bottom of the North Atlantic.

Lloyd Evans

Tim on top

Music

Tim Minchin swept the board at the Oliviers last Sunday. The Australian’s hit musical, Matilda, won a record seven gongs at the West End’s most prestigious awards ceremony. The rise of Minchin has been stratospheric. Just eight years ago he started out on the Melbourne cabaret circuit performing quizzical spoofs like ‘Inflatable You’, a ballad dedicated to a blow-up doll. He came to Edinburgh in 2005 and scooped the fringe award for Best Newcomer. His material mixes the topical, the cerebral and the unashamedly populist. ‘I get a huge thrill out of writers like Ian McEwan,’ he says, ‘someone very organised in their ideas. It’s what I aspire to, to be able to discuss ideas articulately and with clarity.

14 April 2012

Virginia Ironside

Relatively eccentric

Exhibitions

My uncle Robin Ironside bewailed the demise, after the scandal of the Wilde trial and the early death of Beardsley, of the imaginative tradition which, he wrote, ‘had been kept flickering in England since the end of the 18th century, sometimes with a wild, always uneasy light, by a succession of gifted eccentrics’. The truth is that he himself was one of those very eccentrics. Born in 1912 of a staunchly upper middle-class background, and after stints at the Courtauld and the Sorbonne, he landed, in 1937, the job of assistant keeper to Sir John Rothenstein at the Tate Gallery.

Marcus Berkmann

Adult entertainment

Arts feature

On 19 March, Adele’s 21 overtook Dark Side of the Moon to become the seventh bestselling album in British music history. A day or two later it caught Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms napping, and eased into sixth place. So far 4.15 million copies have been sold. One in six British households has one. Ahead lie Thriller, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, Abba’s Gold, Sgt. Pepper and Queen’s Greatest Hits, still the daddy with 5.86 million registered sales. These five have been the top five for so long that industry experts with sad goatees thought they would never be caught. But records are made to be broken, or at the very least scratched.

Michael Kennedy

The unforgettable Ferrier

Arts feature

On the centenary of her birth, Michael Kennedy pays homage to ‘Klever Kaff’, occasional golfer, and inventor of Rabelaisian limericks Was she as wonderful an artist and woman as legend has it? Yes. Everything is true that has been said or written about the contralto Kathleen Ferrier, the centenary of whose birth is 22 April. She has been dead for 59 years, but through her recordings her voice — rich and always with a vein of melancholy — lives on, and could be mistaken for no one else and no one else for her. Never has a woman singer been so widely loved. The radiance of her personality suffused the music whether it was Bach or a folk song.

Rod Liddle

Boogie aahhhnnnn

There was a sort of interesting documentary on BBC4 last night about a genre of popular music called 'Southern Rock' — ie what we, back in the 1970s, called Southern Boogie — Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Bros, Charlie Daniels, and so on. It was interesting for mainly two reasons. First it reminded me of how truly, staggeringly, awful most of the music was — perhaps as much as 98 per cent of it. I am a catholic sorta guy when it comes to music, open to any genre, by and large. But this stuff, with its endless, interminable, identical guitar solos over the same three chugging chords and vacuous lyrics which veered between the swaggeringly and bone-headedly macho and the lachrymose and saccharine...oh, just awful.

Andrew Lambirth

In the literary tradition

Music

In recent years there have been a number of exhibitions of Keith Vaughan’s work in commercial galleries, and his prices at auction have climbed steadily, but no major show in the nation’s museums. Yet interest in his life keeps pace with the revival in his art (the standard biography of Vaughan, by Malcolm Yorke, is long out of print and avidly sought after), and 2012 as the centenary of his birth will see the publication of a new monograph, a catalogue raisonné of his paintings and an annotated volume of his final journals.

Michael Tanner

Thrills and chills

Opera

Lightning struck, after what must surely be one of the most dreary seasons at the Royal Opera, with a revival of Rigoletto. You never know. I haven’t been an admirer of John Eliot Gardiner, either in the pre-classical repertoire in which he made his name, or in his excursions into more recent orchestral and operatic music, for instance Puccini’s Manon Lescaut at Glyndebourne. With the opening bars of Rigoletto, however, it was immediately clear that his tight grip on proceedings was going to have thrilling results, even though the orchestra took a little time to settle. David McVicar’s production of decrepit Mantua is itself looking pretty decrepit by now, and the opening orgy sorely needed a generous hand-out of Viagra.

Lloyd Evans

The magic of speech

Theatre

Not yet, since you ask. And I doubt if I ever will. My aversion to multiplex cinemas, with their cheerless foyers and their hordes of texting, tweeting cola-hydrated popcorn-gobblers, has deterred me from seeing new movies lately. The King’s Speech eluded me until it arrived, in its original form as a play, in the West End. You know the plot: stammering monarch makes boob-free speech. What’s striking is that the writer David Seidler has managed to hang his entire drama, and by implication the destiny of Britain, on such a footling little crisis. His script is a tad short on analysis.

Deborah Ross

Routine carnage

Cinema

If you go down to The Cabin in the Woods today you can be sure of very little in the surprise department and an insufferably dreary time of it. It’s a comic horror film and although I do not like horror, comic or otherwise, it’s the only major release this week, so I felt compelled. Also, the website www.rottentomatoes.com, which aggregates film reviews, had given it a 95 per cent approval rating based on critics calling it both ‘hilarious’ and ‘frightening’ and ‘a game-changer’ even though it is none of those things. Still, at least it does go to prove what I have said all along: I am the only one you can ever trust, and the only one you should trust.

Kate Chisholm

Question time | 14 April 2012

Radio

You might be thinking ‘Oh no’ as you listen to yet another trailer announcing the BBC’s latest Shakespeare season, designed to showcase England’s great playwright across radio and TV in this Olympics year. ‘Do we really need a 20-part series on Radio 4, scratching through the surprisingly few facts that are known for sure about the Bard, or even trying to evoke that faraway world in which men dressed in slashed-velvet bloomers and heretics were hung, drawn and quartered?’ Actually, we do, and especially when it’s written and presented by Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum. Shakespeare’s Restless World, which starts on Monday, doesn’t try to make the playwright more accessible by bringing him up-to-date.

James Delingpole

My way

Television

By the time you read this it’s quite likely I shall be in mid-air on my long journey to Australia. I’m off on a month-long speaking tour to promote Killing the Earth to Save It (the Oz version of Watermelons) and I figured my flight might work out cheaper if I arranged to be travelling on Friday the 13th. Should my plane blow up or the door come off at 30,000 feet causing me to be sucked out of the aircraft or I succumb to deep-vein thrombosis you’ll know I made the wrong call. This will be the longest stretch without a Delingpole Spectator TV column since I took over Nigella Lawson’s slot at the end of August 1995.

Peter Robins

Booze and pews

Cinema

Home cinema equipment isn’t only for the home; in fact, home may not be the best place for it. If you really want to see the effect of a good digital projector and a set of surround-sound speakers, put them in the back room of a pub. An increasing number of publicans are doing so. There are at least four pub cinemas in my narrow slice of south London. They bring in regular custom on quiet nights, and can help landlords make good on the ferocious cost of their Sky Sports subscriptions. In the age of austerity and the £12 movie ticket, they make sense for viewers, too. My pub-cinemagoing has been done at the Montpelier, in Choumert Road, Peckham, which is at the more serious end of the phenomenon.

7 April 2012

Andrew Lambirth

To the point

Exhibitions

Ten years ago, Duncan MacAskill went into Rymans to buy some drawing pins and was struck by the range of colours on offer. That moment of revelation led him to construct a self-portrait from drawing pins, adapting the ideas of Seurat’s pointillism, and the ben-day dot approach of Roy Lichtenstein, to contemporary needs and materials. Now he has been commissioned by the Royal Opera House’s Deloitte Ignite festival, curated by Mike Figgis, to make two vast pin portraits for The Link at the ROH. These ‘paintings with pins’ hang near the box office over the exit to Covent Garden Piazza, and depict MacAskill’s father in black and white, and the choreographer Wayne McGregor in colour.

Andrew Lambirth

Sacramental vision

Exhibitions

As the focus for an Easter meditation, David Jones’s ‘Sanctus Christus de Capel-y-ffin’ (1925), a small, heartfelt painting in gouache on paper, could scarcely be bettered. The Crucifixion takes place in a luminous landscape with the bird of hope in attendance. This is the world of medieval illuminated manuscripts and ivory carvings, a highly sophisticated spiritualised and classicised vision of existence that is sometimes dismissed as primitive. A Welsh hill pony is set off against a chapel, trees and a bridge over running water in an arabesque design quivering with natural and spiritual life. Rhythm is crucial. As Jones said, ‘I don’t care how static the subject is, but it must be fluid in some way.