Arts Archives

Landscapes of grief

Exhibitions

The caption on the photograph (above) makes a difference: ‘A young boy grieves at the funeral of his father who died of Aids at Ndola, Zambia, 2000.’ There were two million Aids orphans in Zambia alone. ‘I care about not letting this tragedy go unseen,’ Don McCullin said. Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin, at the Imperial War Museum (until 15 April 2012), shows 250 items from the long career of a man best known for his photojournalism, from Vietnam onwards. The boy at Ndola looks straight at the lens, if he is looking outwards and not into the empty future, or back into the life with his father that has gone. Light from one side catches tears that have coalesced in the valley by his left nostril.

Michael Henderson

Let’s hear it for elitism

Features

Last month, on the most glorious of autumnal days, the world of music paid its last respects to Robert Tear. St Martin in the Fields was packed and the singing, as you can imagine, was magnificent. Sir Thomas Allen gave us Kurt Weill’s ‘September Song’, Sir John Tomlinson contributed Sarastro’s aria from Zauberflöte, and Dame Janet Baker read a poem by Emily Dickinson. It was some send-off. Bob deserved no less. As well as being one of the finest tenors of the past half-century, he was a man of many accomplishments, not the least of which, as his agent Martin Campbell-White said in a splendid address, was being ‘effortlessly friendly’. A fellow of King’s, Cambridge, he was utterly without malice or pomposity.

Simon Hoggart

Aussie rules

Radio and podcasts

The Australians do suburbia well. We seem to be interested in the working classes and the poor (EastEnders, Coronation Street, searing one-off dramas about sink estates), Americans like the rich (Dallas, Dynasty) and well-to-do urban folk (Frasier, Friends). But in Oz they are fascinated by the people who live in medium-size houses in leafy streets — think of Neighbours and the sublime comedy Kath and Kim, which was set in the Melbourne ’burbs. In Britain, a dramatic moment comes when someone rapes their ex-wife. In America, it’s when you manage to steal $10 million of oil shares from your brother-in-law. In Australia, it’s hitting a brat, who’s not your son, at a barbecue. I guess it is the halfway status of the suburbs which fascinates.

Kate Chisholm

Great expectations | 29 October 2011

Radio and podcasts

‘We chose to believe things that could not be true,’ says Velma Hart, the American finance officer who famously confronted President Obama at a town hall meeting in Washington DC and told him straight that she was tired of constantly having to defend him against his former supporters among the middle classes. She voted for Obama, believing that with him as President real change was possible in America, but since then she has become less sure of his ability to make any difference. Having just lost her job, her fears for the future have been realised. Would she vote for Obama again? Hart was talking to Gary Younge, who reported on the Obama election campaign for the Guardian.

Deborah Ross

Anonymous

Cinema

To see or not to see, that is the question, just as it is always the question with us — I believe our relationship may be caught in what is generally referred to as a ‘rut’ — but I shall answer all the same and my answer is this: Anonymous is a ‘not see’ and I would urge you to not see it at your earliest possible convenience. Shame, as it had looked such a prospect. It’s a big, fat costume drama set during the Elizabethan era which asks what some scholars have been asking for the past century or so: did Shakespeare actually write the works credited to him? It has a tremendous cast, and stars, among others, Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance and David Thewlis.

Michael Tanner

Der fliegende Holländer

Opera

Compelling, succinct, elemental, The Flying Dutchman, Wagner’s first indisputable masterwork, wouldn’t seem to present any great problems for an opera house, unless his directions about heaving ships are taken too literally — very unlikely — so why does one never see it well produced? The Royal Opera has made especially heavy weather of it, but not in the right sense, for the last quarter-century. Tim Albery’s 2009 production has egregious faults, and few merits: above all, it fails to establish any potent atmosphere, and the singers are left largely to their own devices, with unhelpful scenery to stagger around on. The present revival is nonetheless very worthwhile, thanks to the powerful rendering of the two leading roles.

Giannandrea Poesio

Birmingham Royal Ballet

Theatre

Contrary to general belief, there is little glamour in the professional life of a dance critic. What there is, though, is a considerable amount of time spent confronting painfully unsuccessful attempts at making art or, at least, making something worth seeing. What makes one digest those endless stretches of choreographic drabness is the promise — sometimes the mirage — of rare moments of pure bliss. Which is what I experienced last week when, for the first time in years, I struck it lucky and sat through three superb performances in a row. Signs that the Birmingham Royal Ballet’s brief run at Sadler’s Wells was going to be a hit were evident from the moment the curtain went up on its Autumn Glory programme.

Patrick Carnegy

Marat/Sade

Theatre

Peter Brook’s 1964 staging of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade for the RSC was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life as a young journalist. The magnificently titled Persecution and Assassination of Marat as performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade was a knockout. With Patrick Magee as de Sade, Ian Richardson as the Herald (later as Marat) and Glenda Jackson as Charlotte Corday, the play’s argument between de Sade’s belief only in the warts and all of one’s own self and Marat’s faith in utopian socialist revolution made spellbinding theatre, the dialectics irresistibly packaged with song and dance routines and the brilliance of Peter Brook’s production.

Lloyd Evans

Inadmissable Evidence

Theatre

Fashionable Londoners go to the Donmar Warehouse to engage in shut-eye chic. It’s a weird way to relax. You buy a ticket to John Osborne’s 1964 classic, Inadmissable Evidence, and you sleep through most of its two and a half hours. All around me were seats full of happy dozers. How I envied them. Mind you, I felt bad for the cast because the snoozers were nodding and drooling in full view of the stage. Entertaining the unconscious isn’t what thesps go into showbiz for. Still, they’d read the script so they knew the scale of their enemy. Osborne’s bright idea was to create a self-loathing misanthropist and to watch his world collapse around him.

Tom Sutcliffe

Going solo in Ireland

Opera

Wexford’s remarkable opera house is as good a symbol as any of the Irish financial meltdown. The auditorium is fabulous, and not just acoustically. The building — funded by the Irish government just before the banks collapsed — is now the trump card that has preserved the Wexford Festival as Ireland’s sole surviving operatic gesture. There was a brief fantasy moment when a previous culture minister talked about creating an Irish national company in Dublin, and the Arts Council of Ireland said it would provide over €5 million for the artform. But dream on. Instead, Opera Ireland has been wound up and Opera Theatre Company reduced to a shadow. Wexford is the wrong place to have built Ireland’s only opera house.

27 October 2011

Kate Maltby

Thandie Newton dies as the Maiden

When I was a teenager, Death and The Maiden was one of the plays I read when I was discovering that theatre could be angry, obscene and unafraid of speaking truth to power. Ariel Dorfman’s tale introduces us to Paulina, a torture survivor who becomes convinced, but can’t prove, that the urbane neighbour her husband, a civil rights lawyer, has befriended was one of the secret servicemen who imprisoned her during a now-fallen military dictatorship. When the play premiered in 1991, it delivered a shock blow to the culture of compromise and denial emerging as Dorfman’s homeland, Chile, made the transition to democracy, a year after the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship.

24 October 2011

Rod Liddle

Misplaced outrage

I think my favourite story of the day concerned the theatre-goers at Stratford-upon-Avon who were outraged that the play they had just seen contained considerable amounts of sex, violence and depravity. The play was Marat/Sade. You'd think the "Sade" bit might have given them a bit of a clue, wouldn't you? It's a bit like me marching back to Blockbusters with my copy of Lesbian Lavatory Lust complaining that it consisted of little more than ninety minutes of rug munching and a particularly grotesque scene with a toilet duck. It would be too much to expect these theatre goers to have had an awareness of this old warhorse of a sixties play. Theatre has become such a comfortable bourgeois past-time, a displacement activity for cooking Tuscan Lamb with gratinated fennel.

22 October 2011

Laura Gascoigne

Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer

Exhibitions

Photographs of roadworks feature regularly in the Hampstead Village Voice but, even with the postmodern fashion for grungy subjects, no contemporary residents have made paintings of them. Yet that, astonishingly, was what Ford Madox Brown did in the 1850s, lugging his two-metre canvas on to The Mount, off Heath Street, to do it. Brown’s unlikely masterwork ‘Work’ was the first ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ painting bought by Manchester Art Gallery, where it is now the centrepiece of a major exhibition dedicated to the artist. I put ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ in inverted commas because Brown — a prickly individual with a deep distrust of all ‘Bodies, Institutions, Art unions & academies’ — was never strictly a member of the Brotherhood.

David Platzer

Fra Angelico and the Masters of Light

Exhibitions

Fra Angelico (1395–1455), Il Beato (‘the Blessed One’) to his contemporaries as well as to John Paul II, who beatified him in 1982, is probably best known today for his frescoes in Florence’s San Marco, the Dominican convent where he lived as a monk. Perhaps fearing that some art-lovers will question the wisdom of mounting a Fra Angelico exhibition without the San Marco frescoes, the show’s curators have included a video of them. They need not have worried. Even without the frescoes, the 25 Fra Angelicos at the Musée Jacquemart-André, together with a well-chosen assortment of pictures by the friar’s colleagues working in the same religious vein, are more than enough to make this a rich exhibition.

Michael Prodger

Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape

Exhibitions

Claude Gellée (c.1600–1682), known as Claude Lorrain, started life as a pastry cook and despite turning his attentions from pies and patisserie to painting he never lost his love for confection. Although he is revered as the father of the landscape tradition and was hailed by Constable as ‘the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw’ there is precious little that is natural in his paintings. Claude instead mixed his pictorial ingredients — a tree, a ruin, a river — just as he had his butter, flour and eggs and whisked up poetry-frosted views that delighted the delicate palates of his noble patrons.

Daniel Grant

The only way is up | 22 October 2011

Exhibitions

Homes may continue to lose value, the euro becomes shakier by the day, the unemployed stay unemployed and even the Chinese economy shows signs of overheating, but the international art market seems to know only one direction: up. For the first half of 2011, Christie’s sold $3.2 billion in fine and decorative art (an improvement of 25 per cent on 2010), while its rival Sotheby’s auctioned items worth $3.4 billion (up 38 per cent on the previous year). The bubble appears to be far from bursting, and the autumn sales promise to provide plenty of entertainment for those who like to see big prices on both sides of the Atlantic.

Andrew Lambirth

Set art free

Arts feature

Too often art is subjugated to curators’ theories or interpretations. Let the work speak for itself, says Andrew Lambirth The casual observer of London’s art scene, or even the devoted reader of exhibition listings, might be forgiven for thinking that the range of shows available throughout the conspectus of the nation’s museums was of a healthy vigour and diversity. In fact, it could be effectively argued that there are still too many different blockbusters simultaneously competing for box-office success, with museums forever chasing revenue by putting on displays of tried-and-tested favourites, and not actually serving the public in the best possible way.

Alex Massie

Saturday Morning Country: The Louvin Brothers

How is it possible to have come this far without featurig this song? Madness, man, madness. Anyway, here are Ira and Charlie Louvin with I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby. Dang they're good.

Giannandrea Poesio

The Royal Ballet

Box of delights | 22 October 2011

Music

I don’t know about you but I have to steel myself these days to turn on the Today programme in the morning. There is always the terrifying prospect that an infuriatingly overexcited Robert Peston will come on, barely able to contain his glee as he reports that one’s own bank or pension fund has just gone spectacularly bust. And when that dire day comes, as I increasingly fear it will, Peston will doubtless be followed by a sanctimonious government minister who will inform us that we are all going to have to work until we are 80 before we can receive our meagre state pensions. What’s scariest of all, I find, is that when one runs into people who really understand money, they always seem to take the most apocalyptic view of all.

Deborah Ross

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Cinema

We Need to Talk About Kevin was a horrible book and this is the horrible screen adaptation of that horrible book, and whether you will want to see it or not will, I suppose, depend on how much you are prepared to revisit that horror. At this point I’d love to say you needn’t bother, skip it, there is absolutely no reason why you should upset yourself all over again, but this has been so skilfully executed and Tilda Swinton is so superb I don’t know if I can. It may be one of those pesky films that is awful to watch but is worth watching all the same. Oh, dear. The trouble with cinema is that it can sometimes be quite challenging and may even force you to think, which is exhausting.

Michael Tanner

Xerxes

Opera

English Touring Opera, under the inspiring directorship of James Conway, is the most energetic and enterprising operatic company in the country, not only taking three operas round the country this autumn, and another couple next spring, but also touring sacred works by Buxtehude, Gesualdo and Bach to 15 destinations, mainly ecclesiastical. ETO is working with a new orchestra for its baroque repertoire, a director-free group formed earlier this year calling itself the Old Street Band. On the second night of Handel’s Xerxes, which I went to at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre, it seemed to be a first-rate group, and with Jonathan Peter Kenny conducting incisively, sometimes perhaps a bit too much, this fairly lengthy piece almost sped by.

Lloyd Evans

The Pitmen Painters; Honeypot

Theatre

At last, it’s reached the West End. Lee Hall’s hit play, The Pitmen Painters, tells the heartening tale of some talented Geordie colliers who won national acclaim as artists during the 1930s. Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot, has done extremely well from a pretty limited set of dramatic techniques. He draws each of his coal miners from a couple of opposed attributes: youthful but jobless; single-minded but foolish; erudite but insensitive; unhealthy but idealistic. His dialogue consists of gentle interrogations and nothing else. It’s like a cop show for kids. Every scene involves a misunderstanding — caused by ignorance, stubbornness or some cultural confusion — which has to be resolved by characters cross-examining each other.

Rebecca Newman

Bewitched

Music

The Biophilia live show at Harpa, Reykjavik is another cog in the complex wheel that makes up Björk’s eighth album, which is not simply a collection of nice songs, but a concept record about nature, a series of educational apps and a showcase for its specially created instruments. The performance is, however, where it all comes to fruition, with the extensive thinking behind it distilled into the joy of putting on a show. Björk is the star attraction of the Iceland Airwaves annual music festival, and there’s a particular magic at seeing her not only perform in her home town, but her 20-strong girls’ choir, too, who add a dance element as well as backing vocals, stomping and singing in their glittering costumes with chaotic synchronicity.

James Delingpole

Et tu, Hugh?

Television

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall thinks it’s time we all went veggie (River Cottage Veg; Channel 4, Sunday). Coming from a man whose favourite dish is human placenta marinaded in fruit-bat extract, who slaughters his own pigs with a pocket knife and dances naked in their gore as he turns them into 2,058 varieties of artisanal black pudding, and who recently confessed he wouldn’t mind eating the odd puppy if push came to shove, I suppose this is something we should take quite seriously. Personally, I feel betrayed. As betrayed as I felt all those years ago when my most heavy-duty smoking friend Ewen gave up fags, which was so unfair because I’d been relying on him to die of lung cancer, not me. ‘Et tu, Hugh?’ it made me think. Because I like my meat, an awful lot.

17 October 2011

Kate Maltby

The Sea, the Sea

Sea-storms seem to be buffeting London theatre at the moment, and I’m not just talking about Trevor Nunn’s sugar-saturated Tempest. Down at the Southwark Playhouse, Edinburgh Fringe hit Bound blows into London after a worldwide tour, while at St Giles Cripplegate, in the Barbican complex, you’ll find a darker, sacral The Tempest just back from its premiere in a West Bank refugee camp. The winner of multiple awards at Edinburgh 2010, including a Fringe First and National Student Drama Awards, Bound reaches into the heart of what men will do in times of economic desperation. It’s also a peek into the life of a traditional fishing community, a frequently overlooked bulwark of our island history.

15 October 2011

Liz Anderson

The art of collecting

Arts feature

Passion was in the air in the rooms of the Wallace Collection last week — or at least the word was at the inaugural Apollo seminar sponsored by specialist art broker Stackhouse Poland with AXA Art Insurance. ‘How do you collect art and antiques in today’s market?’ was the question and the panel, chaired by Apollo’s editor Oscar Humphries, was unanimous that passion played an essential part when starting a collection. James Stourton, chairman of Sotheby’s, believed that to start a collection one had to be energetic, assiduous, knowledgeable and to be at the right place at the right time because supply was always short. And he advised always to buy the best one can afford. Ah, money.

Richard Dorment

Blots on the cityscape

Exhibitions

As the 414 bus swings left from the Edgware Road at Marble Arch you avert your eyes, hoping you won’t have to look at the thing looming up in front of you for a single second longer than you have to. Even so, you know it’s there — a blot on the sky, a gulp of polluted air. I’m talking about a 33-ft-high bronze sculpture in the form of a decapitated horse, muzzle pointed downwards, in the middle of Marble Arch. The epitome of ghastly good taste, it looks like an expensive knick-knack from Harrods blown up to a size that would have appealed to Saddam Hussein. When the thing arrived, the Evening Standard assured us that it would be on view for only one month.

Michael Tanner

Cause for alarm

Opera

Whereas Don Giovanni seems, for assorted reasons, to be unfloatable at present, The Marriage of Figaro is virtually unsinkable, with Così somewhere between. In general it seems that comedies go in and out of favour and fashion more than tragedies or ‘straight’ works, though Figaro may be a glorious exception, like Die Meistersinger. It is horrible to contemplate the possibility of a world which was indifferent to their charms and profundities. Even so, the new production of Figaro at ENO gives some cause for alarm. Fiona Shaw, who has not previously produced a classic opera, sees the work as a maze, a harmless enough notion unless you take it that in the middle of a maze there must be a Minotaur, the only candidate for that in Figaro being the Count.