Culture

Culture

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

Simon Hoggart

Fond farewell | 19 May 2012

Television

Now and again a sitcom gag lodges in the public mind. In 1974, Ronnie Barker, in Porridge, was reminiscing about Top of the Pops and its all-girl dance troupe, Pan’s People. ‘There’s one special one — Beautiful Babs,’ he says. Beat. ‘Dunno what her name is.’ Her name was Babs Lord. She attracted the attention of a young actor called Robert Powell, then in a long-forgotten thriller called Doomwatch, so he met up with her in the celebrated and notorious BBC Club at Television Centre; after 36 years they are still married. She also became an explorer, described as the only housewife to have visited both the North and South Poles, which is an impressive feat, though a patronising title, since it sounds as if someone felt they needed tidying.

12 May 2012

Andrew Lambirth

Marketing man

Exhibitions

People go to exhibitions for different reasons, and although I was highly critical of David Hockney’s recent show at the Royal Academy, I accept that a great many people visited it and came out smiling and uplifted. They tended to be individuals who don’t usually go to exhibitions or look at real painting, and it may thus be said that they had very little idea of what they were actually looking at, or indeed should be looking for in an exhibition of painting, but if the experience made them happy, where’s the harm — you may ask — in that? Undoubtedly a great many went because it was the thing to do, and they felt better for being able to say that they’d been there and done that.

Alasdair Palmer

Restoration tragedy

Arts feature

Alasdair Palmer questions the ill-conceived makeover of Chartres cathedral which robs us of the sense of passing time that is part of its fascination and mystery Should old buildings look old? Or should they be restored to a condition where they look as if they could have been put up yesterday? Those questions are raised in a particularly pertinent form by the work going on at one of the most beautiful and inspiring of all old buildings: Chartres cathedral in France. Most of Chartres cathedral dates from between 1194 and 1230, when the bulk of the colossal stone structure, with its nearly 200 stained-glass windows and thousands of sculptures, was built.

Deborah Ross

Flaws with a clause

Cinema

Jeff, Who Lives at Home is a film about Jeff, who lives at home, and that’s enough subordinate clauses for one day. (Don’t be greedy; you know how fattening they are.) It’s a comedy from the Duplass brothers, Mark and Jay, who have previously made small films that have been well received (The Puffy Chair, Cyrus), and this is their first big film although it’s a small big film, coming in at 83 minutes, which, in its small way, is quite big enough. It’s a whimsical comedy and, as far as whimsical comedies go, it is quite whimsical, and sometimes comedic, which is fair enough, but ultimately it is slight and repetitive and nothing sticks in the mind.

Lloyd Evans

Ugly caper

Theatre

We all know the ‘excellence theory’ of migration. Barriers to entry guarantee that imported cargoes have outstanding qualities. Manfred Karge’s parable of urban despair in the Ruhr comes to the UK with high expectations. It’s been here before. Director Stephen Unwin premièred the play at Edinburgh, 1987. His new revival at the Arcola demonstrates that the ‘false charm theory’ of migration also applies. The foreign and the exotic can mesmerise us more easily than the homegrown. Unwin sets the play in some vague tower-block ghetto. We meet a quartet of jobless alcoholics who become fascinated by Amundsen’s trip to the South Pole. By impersonating Norwegian explorers, the drunken lunks briefly discover some purpose in their sozzled lives.

Michael Tanner

All at sea | 12 May 2012

Opera

Pharmaceutical considerations were uppermost in my mind as I made my way to the Barbican Hall for Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, a production which began touring in Michigan in January and ends in Hong Kong next March. I imagine that marijuana is probably the best preparation and accompaniment for seeing it, but that makes me feel merely giggly and stupid, so I took a modafinil, primarily intended for shift workers, insomniacs and examinees, to aid concentration and combat sleeplessness, clearly an indispensable medicament for opera critics too. But in this case it didn’t work. Einstein, which lasts about four and a half hours, has no interval, so the audience was invited to come and go as it felt fit.

Clarke Hayes

Opportunity knocks | 12 May 2012

Television

I should have thought about this more carefully — the timing of it, I mean. This is Crucible time, and in the normal scheme of things I would be watching almost nothing but snooker. Yes, dear readers, I am that sad and pathetic thing known as a snooker addict, and a red-button one at that. But I eschew the green baize and march purposefully into the world of television previews — and what a challenging world it is. Not, I suppose, as challenging as the task that faces The Town Taking on China (BBC2, Tuesday), one of those programmes that reassuringly does exactly what it says on the tin.

Kate Chisholm

Talking head

Television

‘There’s no point in being a liberal if you’re just a furry little herbivore on the edges of British politics,’ declared Paddy Ashdown on Sunday on Private Passions (Radio 3). It was a revealing comment. The programme went out last weekend after the LibDem’s disastrous results in the local elections, but it would have been recorded much earlier. Ashdown was meant to be talking about his favourite music, and why he had chosen it, but he could not resist telling us what he thought of the Con-Lib Coalition. ‘This [being in government] is not going to deliver a dividend for the LibDems until a little before the next [general] election,’ he said. Might he not have avoided the topic, knowing that he was not yet sure what would happen on 3 May?

Andrew Petrie

The first lady of song

More from Arts

Folk legend Sandy Denny’s eminently coverable songs, direct of melody and opaque of lyric, have scarcely declined in popularity since the singer’s death in 1978 at the age of 31. A tribute concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 2008 was such a hit that a similar event is being staged at the Barbican this month. Once again, a variety of vocalists will front a house band including members of contemporary folk stars Bellowhead and share the stage with Denny’s former Fairport Convention bandmates Jerry Donahue and Dave Swarbrick. Insecure but blessed with a versatile voice free of phony mid-Atlantic inflections, Denny’s infusion of traditional material transformed Fairport from blokey college circuit regulars into the definitive English folk-rock band.

3 May 2012

Andrew Lambirth

Outsider artist

Exhibitions

In the various mixed exhibitions I’ve seen over the years that dealt with 18th- and 19th-century British art, Johan Zoffany (1733–1810) has always seemed to stand out. Yet there hasn’t been a museum show devoted to his work in this country since the National Portrait Gallery’s survey of 1977, so Martin Postle must be congratulated on organising the current exhibition (supported by Cox & Kings), already seen at the Yale Center for British Art in Connecticut, especially since plans to hold it at the Tate were scuppered. I wonder why? The show has proved successful: it was very busy the day I went, though I did wonder what proportion of visitors had turned up to see the Hockney show, baulked at the queues and gone upstairs to see Zoffany instead...

Lloyd Evans

Grand designs

Arts feature

Lloyd Evans talks to the young, dynamic and much-in-demand Tom Scutt about the challenges of bringing to life Narnia and its inhabitants Barky? What does he mean, ‘barky’? We’re talking about Aslan and he says he’s aiming for ‘barky’. ‘Barky like a dog or barky like a tree?’ ‘Like a tree,’ says Tom Scutt, designer of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which opens on 8 May in Kensington Gardens. ‘What I often do with Rupert [Goold, the director] is to imagine setting the whole show in one location. In this case, the wardrobe. So you trace the wood of the wardrobe back to a tree and Aslan has a link with a tree, something honest and true and majestic. That felt right.

Peter Phillips

Counting the cost | 3 May 2012

Music

The arrival of the Proms prospectus, with its glamorous pictures of the stars of today, makes me wonder how much those very palatable-looking people are costing the BBC. The question is prompted by the style of the photography — the sexing up of the Weapons of Mass Destruction dossier has nothing on how string players enjoy curling round their instruments. It is all a far cry from the stolid, besuited look classical musicians used to affect, as if one could trust them to get their passagework right while delivering mature interpretations of intellectually taxing repertoire. The modern version says nothing if it doesn’t say expensive. The issue of what the leading names in classical music can charge was addressed recently in an article in Classical Music magazine.

Patrick Carnegy

Water works | 3 May 2012

Theatre

My colleague Lloyd Evans had much fun a couple of weeks ago playing the curmudgeon with the Cultural Olympiad. Alas poor Bard, he quipped, ‘press-ganged’ into the World Shakespeare Festival. And it sounds as though Lloyd will be running for his life, especially from the Bankside-based Globe to Globe project in which all 37 plays will be given in the same number of languages. It is left to the RSC to fly the flag for Shakespeare in his native tongue with a dozen new productions. Risky, you would have thought, to launch its initial contribution of The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night and The Tempest as ‘Shakespeare’s Shipwreck Trilogy’.

Lloyd Evans

Small talk

Theatre

What’s going on? Everyone’s doing playlets all of a sudden. I saw five this week. The Donmar is presenting a trio of scripts by Robert Holman entitled Making Noise Quietly. A silly title. ‘A writers’ writer’ — an even sillier cliché — is how the programme notes describe Holman. If they mean ‘a boring writer’ they should say so. His first play shows us two teenage pacifists meeting in the countryside during the closing months of the war. One is openly gay, the other is still hunting for the closet door. They chat. They flirt rather innocently. Then they strip off and sunbathe. That’s all that happens. Plays like this, static and plotless, take enormous risks with the audience’s patience.

Giannandrea Poesio

Celebrating identity

More from Arts

Last year, when I reviewed The Sum of Parts, the community-oriented piece produced by Connect, Sadler’s Wells Creative Learning department, I thought it wouldn’t be possible to do any better. Well, I was wrong, as this year’s Compass was an even more breathtaking experience. The new project, which involves more than 100 non-professional performers and a unique roster of artists, has been conceived at a time when World Cities 2012, Pina Bausch’s retrospective of works devoted to cities and cultures from around the world, is imminent. Compass, however, focuses only on London, which is a vibrant melting pot of diverse and complementary cultures.

Michael Tanner

Elemental force

Opera

The new production of Wagner’s first indisputable masterpiece The Flying Dutchman by English National Opera is a decided success, the best account of what contemporary producers make strangely heavy weather of that I have seen in decades. For some reason they find it hard to focus on the title role, and make it all a dream of Senta, or the Steersman. Jonathan Kent presents the Dutchman on Wagner’s terms, even though he can’t resist beginning the opera — and during the Overture, absurdly — with Senta as a small child being put to bed by her father Daland, and reading the story of the Dutchman, while projected mighty waves and a vast hulk loom excitingly.

Kate Chisholm

Soaps and suds

Radio and podcasts

Listeners beware. Especially those of you who are unashamed Archers addicts. The antics of the denizens of Ambridge might seem like casual, everyday stuff, but they’ve probably been carefully designed to indoctrinate us with the ‘right’ kind of behaviour. That’s if a two-part documentary on the World Service, hosted by none other than Debbie Archer (alias Tamsin Greig), is to be believed. Soap Operas: Art Imitating Life took us back to those first radio serials in America, funded in the 1930s by the big soap manufacturers to market their latest products. Yes, soap operas are so-called because they were originally given the means to go viral by firms like Colgate-Palmolive.

George Hull

Bum deal

Theatre

Wilton’s, the crumbly music hall in London’s East End, has been dressed up as a crumbly Prohibition-era speakeasy. And a good job they’ve done of it, what with the bootlegger types in the foyer, foxtrotters on the upstairs landing, and an Irish giant who ushers us into a side chapel where his friend’s corpse is laid out (is that normal in speakeasies?). The Great Gatsby, adapted by Peter Joucla, is on, too (until 19 May). But this feels like something of a pretext. The speakeasy theme spills into the auditorium and even onstage, in the form of — you’ve been warned — audience participation. To be fair, there is a link with the plot: one of the rumours surrounding Jay Gatsby is that his vast wealth comes from liquor smuggling.

28 April 2012

Andrew Lambirth

Rocky ride

Exhibitions

Now that the great design surveys regularly mounted by the V&A have come up to date, what will it seek to beguile us with next? These exhibitions have always been of interest, at least in parts, and often infuriating, a combination that has helped to ensure their success. The wide range of paintings and objects on display has also given them the status of offering ‘something for everyone’, rather like a vastly superior village bazaar. The current show is no exception. It begins very well, and then conks out repeatedly like an untuned engine. Ah well, who said the course of true progress (and innovation —  don’t forget innovation) runs smooth?

William Cook

On the waterfront | 28 April 2012

Arts feature

William Cook says that I.M. Pei’s latest building, Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art, once again captures the spirit of the age Standing outside Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art, in Doha, watching the sun rise over the Persian Gulf, you’re reminded of Mies van der Rohe’s dictum: ‘less is more’. Van der Rohe was a hero of the man who made this building, and I.M. Pei’s new museum sums up that minimalist rule of thumb. Doha’s modern skyline is a panorama of skyscrapers, but they all look trite and transient beside this discreet masterpiece. Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art is only a few years old, but it feels as if it’s stood here for a century. It’s part of the landscape, the way great architecture ought to be.

Charles Spencer

 Everlasting love

Music

A few weeks ago, feeling stale and stressed, I escaped to our dilapidated cottage in Dorset for a few days on my own. When I was younger, and especially when I was drinking heavily, I often felt ill at ease in my own company, but these days I get on quite happily alone, though I sometimes worry that I talk to myself too much, and wonder whether I am going slightly mad in my old age. I once read that it’s OK to talk to yourself, but there might be cause for concern if you find that you are answering yourself back. I do that all the time. If I am going mad at least it is a contented kind of dottiness, and walking on the cliffs, eating seafood at the splendid Hive Beach Café in Burton Bradstock and drinking endless cups of PG Tips did me the world of good.

Michael Tanner

Return to mystery

Opera

Weber’s Der Freischütz is the finest neglected opera in or hovering on the edge of the canon. It’s not entirely bewildering why it should be, but there are ways of coping with structural defects, which is what it suffers from. Yet I don’t think there has been a UK performance of it since Edinburgh in 2002 (not counting the Berlioz version last year at the Proms), when Jonas Kaufmann sang Max in a concert performance. Perhaps concert performances are the best idea, since the one last week at the Barbican, under Sir Colin Davis, was thrilling and moving.

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 and podcasts

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.