Culture

Culture

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

Mark Mason

A touch of clarse

Features

There aren’t many things on which John Humphrys is undecided, but one of them shows itself nearly every time he presents the Today programme. It’s a trait shared by many broadcasters, and indeed people from all walks of life, and constitutes one of the great social barometers of our time. It’s the inability to decide whether your ‘a’s should be long or short. If your upbringing conditions you to pronounce ‘grass’ to rhyme with ‘ass’ rather than ‘arse’ — if, in short, you’re a non-posh non-Southerner — there is a temptation, on moving to London, to lengthen your ‘a’s in order to fit in.

Ed Rex

Taking Time

Music

James MacMillan has a string of large-scale choral and orchestral works to his name, and last month saw the première of his chamber opera Clemency at Covent Garden. One wonders, then, how he makes time to write a new, small-scale choral piece for the re-opening of St Patrick’s Church in Soho Square. James MacMillan has a string of large-scale choral and orchestral works to his name, and last month saw the première of his chamber opera Clemency at Covent Garden. One wonders, then, how he makes time to write a new, small-scale choral piece for the re-opening of St Patrick’s Church in Soho Square.

Laura Gascoigne

Call of the wild

Exhibitions

‘Not something I’d want on my wall,’ said an English lady visitor to Antwerp’s Rockox House, standing in front of a painting of wolves attacking cattle. ‘Not something I’d want on my wall,’ said an English lady visitor to Antwerp’s Rockox House, standing in front of a painting of wolves attacking cattle. ‘Nor that,’ said her friend of another painting showing lions feasting on a live gazelle. I didn’t dare tell them that I’d come to Belgium specially to see a whole exhibition of paintings by the artist responsible, Roelandt Savery (1576–1639), in his native Kortrijk. ‘Kortrijk where? Roelandt who?’ you may be asking.

Lloyd Evans

No laughing matter | 4 June 2011

Theatre

A miracle at the Barbican. I reached the venue after a mere half an hour blundering around following directions from helpful staff. The main stage, which is so vast it feels like an open-air theatre, is the result of an alluring misconception of scale. You build a venue the size of the cosmos and you get universal art. But art finds its own measure. If the habitat suits the substance all should be well. The latest delight here is an update of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal directed by Deborah Warner with a very classy cast and an absolute ton of money. Warner, a recent arrival at Obvious Island, wants us to know that today’s fashion-obsessed culture is just like the beau monde of the 18th century. Wow. Not much gets past you, eh, Debs? Everything is a mishmash.

Michael Tanner

Royal rewards

Cinema

Macbeth may not be Verdi’s greatest opera, in fact it’s hard to imagine anyone’s claiming it is, yet in a performance that is as musically inspired as the one I saw at the Royal Opera last week (the second of the run) it comes across as an inspired work, almost all the way through, and one which can be considered seriously alongside Shakespeare. Macbeth may not be Verdi’s greatest opera, in fact it’s hard to imagine anyone’s claiming it is, yet in a performance that is as musically inspired as the one I saw at the Royal Opera last week (the second of the run) it comes across as an inspired work, almost all the way through, and one which can be considered seriously alongside Shakespeare.

Deborah Ross

Golden boy

Cinema

I have zero interest in motor racing and zero interest in cars generally yet this documentary about the Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna knocked me for six, which I think is a cricketing metaphor but can’t say for sure, as I also have zero interest in cricket. I have zero interest in motor racing and zero interest in cars generally yet this documentary about the Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna knocked me for six, which I think is a cricketing metaphor but can’t say for sure, as I also have zero interest in cricket. (I quite like ice dancing as a sport but only in the secret hope someone is going to fall over; shaming, but true.) This is not just a good film — it’s a great film: fascinating, exciting, nerve-wracking and profoundly moving.

Damian Thompson

Getting to know him

Music

Here’s a strange thing about Johann Sebastian Bach. Here’s a strange thing about Johann Sebastian Bach. You can be devoted to his work, love it more intensely than any other music, yet never get round to hearing some of his most awe-inspiring compositions, or even know what you’re missing. There are dozens — literally dozens — of pieces of 24-carat Bach whose names are known only to professional musicians and scholars and are barely represented in the recording catalogue: you might find two good digital performances of them, maybe three. Bach wrote at least 400 Church cantatas, of which half are missing.

Giannandrea Poesio

Triple thrill

More from Arts

After a few thematically uneven mixed programmes, the Royal Ballet takes its summer leave from the Royal Opera House with a nearly ideal triptych of works. Central to it are stunning examples of 20th-century choreography, which highlight the role that British ballet played in both making and consolidating the Western modern ballet tradition. As such, this triple bill comes across as more connoisseur-oriented than a flashy crowd pleaser. Balletomanes still get their fair share of starry dancing, though, for each work provides the principals with plenty of chances to shine. At the first performance, Lauren Cuthbertson and Sergei Polunin thrilled in Frederick Ashton’s Scènes de Ballet.

Kate Chisholm

Reliving Lockerbie

Radio and podcasts

‘We will know one day why it happened,’ said the mother of Helga Mosey. ‘We will know one day why it happened,’ said the mother of Helga Mosey. Helga was just 19 when she was killed in the bomb that destroyed PanAm flight 103 as it flew over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on the night of 21 December 1988. Mrs Mosey was being interviewed the day after, doorstepped at her home in the Midlands by several news teams anxious for a story, a reaction, a headline. This week’s Archive on 4 was the first in a series, ‘A Life Less Ordinary’, which is not so much reliving history as looking back at the radio interviews, the TV reporting, the newspaper stories to examine the ways in which these very dramatic events impact on the people at their heart.

James Delingpole

Is he a genius?

Television

You’ll forgive me, I hope, for coming back so soon to the subject of Adam Curtis, the first part of whose All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace was so ably dissected by Simon Hoggart last week. You’ll forgive me, I hope, for coming back so soon to the subject of Adam Curtis, the first part of whose All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace was so ably dissected by Simon Hoggart last week. Only, no less a personage than Bryan Appleyard of the Sunday Times has estimated Curtis as ‘TV’s greatest documentary maker’ and the BBC obviously agrees. So, really, two Speccie TV reviews in a fortnight is surely the barest minimum this genius deserves. Is he, though? Is Curtis really a genius?

3 June 2011

2 June 2011

Kate Maltby

Two Ados

Like most Shakespeare comedies, Much Ado About Nothing is often performed as a garden party fantasy of Merrie England – so it’s a treat to see two major productions both committed to restoring the Mediterranean flavour of this hot-blooded piece, which Shakespeare actually set not in Stratford, but Sicily. 

 At the Globe, Jeremy Herrin strews the stage with oranges and Moorish lattice work. Amidst the almost Pagan street festival, this really is a place where a sun-addled youth might blindly search for a metaphor to describe his unfaithful lover and find it to hand in ‘a rotten orange’.

28 May 2011

David Blackburn

Ditching the dirt

Exhibitions

Cleanliness was nowhere near godliness in 17th-century Europe — except in Delft, where God came second. The Wellcome Collection’s examination of humanity’s relationship with dirt begins in Vermeer’s city, where thousands of girls with pearl earrings scrubbed hearths for a living. Delftware, those distinctive blue and white ceramic tiles so common in antique shops, was mass-produced because it was so easy to clean and molysmophobic merchants used it to plaster their interiors. It’s tempting to mock the fashion; but the show immediately moves on to Dickens’ s London – a miasma of grime, dust and disease. The obsessive compulsives of Delft were visionaries.

William Cook

Consolations of Constable

Exhibitions

William Cook takes refuge from the modern world at an exhibition of the artist’s paintings of his beloved Salisbury I’d always thought of Constable’s paintings of Salisbury Cathedral as grand, majestic things — but seeing them again in Salisbury, with Richard Constable, the artist’s great-great grandson, you begin to look at these splendid pictures in an entirely different light. Richard has come here, to the Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum, to attend the opening of an exhibition that celebrates his ancestor’s close relationship with this city, and standing alongside him, in the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral, you realise John Constable wasn’t painting architecture, but the landscape of his private life.

Alex Massie

Saturday Morning Country: Cowboy Junkies

Amidst all the Dylanmania this week it's worth recalling that Steve Earle once said, "Townes van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that." He may be forgiven his touch of hyperbole.

Andrew Lambirth

Candid camera | 28 May 2011

Opera

When the photographer Ida Kar (1908–74) was given an exhibition of more than 100 of her works at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1960, history was made. When the photographer Ida Kar (1908–74) was given an exhibition of more than 100 of her works at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1960, history was made. She was the first photographer to be given such an honour — a substantial solo show in a public gallery — and the presentation of her photographs was carefully considered. This set a precedent for subsequent photography exhibitions and brought the question of whether photography is art firmly to the forefront of debate. The person responsible for all this was the dynamic and innovative director of the Whitechapel, Bryan Robertson.

Michael Tanner

Master piece

Opera

Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is one of the most taxing of all operas to stage, with a large cast, gigantic proportions and requirements of stamina, both musically and emotionally, such as very few works make. Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is one of the most taxing of all operas to stage, with a large cast, gigantic proportions and requirements of stamina, both musically and emotionally, such as very few works make. Yet it has received two superb productions in the UK in the past 12 months, the second of which opened at Glyndebourne last Saturday, before an extraordinarily attentive and rapturous audience.

Patrick Carnegy

Faites vos jeux

Theatre

A short while ago Rupert Goold transplanted Prospero’s isle to an Arctic ice floe. A short while ago Rupert Goold transplanted Prospero’s isle to an Arctic ice floe. His latest hazard as theatrical travel agent is to whisk Antonio and Shylock off to Las Vegas. The hurly-burly of a modern casino turns out to be a buzzy metaphor for the high stakes for which everyone’s playing in The Merchant of Venice. There actually is a super-casino in Venice — bizarrely located in the very palazzo on the Grand Canal where Wagner died — but it’s much more fun for Goold to relocate to the US.

Lloyd Evans

Barmy and bleak

Theatre

The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov’s barmiest and bleakest play. The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov’s barmiest and bleakest play. It’s also his richest. The madness starts immediately. To set the opening scene of a sprawling family drama at four o’clock in the morning seems eccentric to the point of rashness but Chekhov is a master of his craft. A wealthy widow, Ranyevskaya, has arrived at her estate after a long trip from Paris and she’s greeted by staff and relatives who’ve waited up all night to help her entourage settle into the house. This gives the scene a fragmented dynamism which allows a dozen characters and relationships to be gradually elucidated in conditions of perfect naturalism.

Deborah Ross

Unrequited obsession

Cinema

Two films this week, one assiduously without heart, and one which may suffer from a surfeit, so you pays your money and takes your pick or you don’t pays your money and you stays in and has a jacket potato and watches TV. Two films this week, one assiduously without heart, and one which may suffer from a surfeit, so you pays your money and takes your pick or you don’t pays your money and you stays in and has a jacket potato and watches TV. Makes no odds to me. I’ll review in the order in which I saw them, as that seems only fair so, first, Heartbeats, which is so heartless it is almost daringly heartless, and although it did win the special youth prize at Cannes, I’m kind of thinking the youths can keep it.

Simon Hoggart

In your dreams

Cinema

Two self-directed films this week, and that is usually a bad sign. Every television auteur, even the best, needs someone at his shoulder saying, ‘Nah, mate, won’t work.’ The lack of an independent voice can be disastrous and lead to Billy Bunter levels of self-indulgence. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (BBC2, Monday) was the latest Adam Curtis film, named after a poem by Richard Brautigan. This imagines — ironically, I suppose — a situation in which humans return to a state of nature, with all our needs cared for by computers. It was a typical Curtis film, resembling one of those dreams you sort of remember because you’ve just woken up. One image follows another without there necessarily being any connection.

21 May 2011

Henrietta Bredin

Wit of a hunter-gatherer

Exhibitions

Over the years Chris Beetles must have made the pencil-wielding fingers of Quentin Blake and Ronald Searle itch with a desire to draw him. He presents a vigorously compact figure, possesses a pair of appropriately beetling brows sheltering an extremely shrewd gaze and sports an unabashedly splendid set of bugger’s grips. Standing in the doorway of his gallery on Ryder Street in the heart of art-dealing London, both he and his collection are a world away from the smooth-talking, sharp-suited power-broking of Christie’s and Sotheby’s, the plush hush of Colnaghi. The walls of the gallery bristle with pictures, hung to fill every possible available space from floor to ceiling.

Andrew Lambirth

All things bright and beautiful

Exhibitions

Beauty is generally considered old-fashioned by the young and not-so-young bloods of contemporary culture, so an exhibition appealing unashamedly to the aesthetically refined will not seduce the practitioners of sensationalism, bad taste and ever more self-indulgent and feeble art. But it will appeal to a public fed up with the empty, egomaniacal posturings of today’s fashionable art world nonentities, whose every burp and slurp is faithfully reported by a cynical press. At last, you may justifiably say, here is an exhibition to delight the eyes. Assuredly, it’s another of the V&A’s great blockbusters, and as such really too large to take in at one session, but at least it’s full of real art, worth more than a sneer or a puff.

Michael Henderson

Never say goodbye

Arts feature

Michael Henderson considers the perennial appeal of Bob Dylan Bob Dylan turns 70 next week, and from Duluth to Derby they will blow out the candles. The Minnesotan troubadour, who rolled into New York the year Kennedy became president, will pay no attention. As he wrote in one of his better songs, ‘Me, I’m still on the road, heading for another joint.’ Like Ken Dodd, a different kind of minstrel, he will stop performing only when they put him in a box. It would not be unkind to say he has been crooning like a 70-year-old for some while. His voice, which was never an instrument of beauty, lost whatever shape it may have had at least a decade ago.

Andrew Lambirth

Read all about it

Exhibitions

As newspapers are consulted increasingly on screen, and newsprint is all set to become a thing of the past, artists are turning their attention to this endangered medium. The Irish Expressionist painter Michael Kane (born 1935) has produced a provocative series of 100 paintings in ink, acrylic paint and collage, done on newsprint magazine pages taken mostly from the Irish Times (see above). The results are witty and moving, powerful comments on the age-old imperatives of humanity, acted out against the media stories and features of yesterday. Kane responds to the pictures and headlines he’s painting over, either as shapes or narratives, juxtaposing and repositioning to good effect. Man and the city is his great theme.

Lloyd Evans

Family at war | 21 May 2011

Theatre

Edward Albee doesn’t like the word ‘revival’. His plays aren’t dead, he says, just lurking. His 1966 drama A Delicate Balance has been coaxed back into the limelight by James Macdonald in a sumptuous new version starring Penelope Wilton and Imelda Staunton. Edward Albee doesn’t like the word ‘revival’. His plays aren’t dead, he says, just lurking. His 1966 drama A Delicate Balance has been coaxed back into the limelight by James Macdonald in a sumptuous new version starring Penelope Wilton and Imelda Staunton. We’re in a New England mansion whose unshowy opulence is brilliantly suggested by designer Laura Hopkins. The chairs are elegant, costly and fading. The shelves are neatly crammed with dilapidated classics.

Michael Tanner

Spark of the divine

Opera

With its new production of Janácek’s last and in some ways most intractable opera, From the House of the Dead, Opera North shows once more that it is the most intelligently adventurous company in the UK, using its money where it is most needed: not on elaborate and perverse staging, but on high-class soloists and a small but excellent chorus, and an orchestra that can rival any in the country.

Deborah Ross

Guilt trip

Cinema

Win Win is a comedy-drama that is warm-hearted and compassionate and enjoyable without, alas, being especially remarkable or original, which is a bit of a blow but I think you’ll get over it, with bed rest and time. Win Win is a comedy-drama that is warm-hearted and compassionate and enjoyable without, alas, being especially remarkable or original, which is a bit of a blow but I think you’ll get over it, with bed rest and time. Written and directed by Tom McCarthy, who made The Station Agent and The Visitor — two powerful character studies I could watch and rewatch into infinity — this is broader, lighter, schmaltzier and more generic, as the journey is a rather familiar one. I’m not saying don’t go.

Giannandrea Poesio

Incomparable Verdi

More from Arts

Call me biased, but I believe that my illustrious compatriot Giuseppe Verdi composed ballet music like no one else. It is a pity he never felt like penning a full ballet score, and limited himself to composing balletic interludes for his glorious operas. As demonstrated by the work of eminent scholars, he possessed the unique ability to mentally choreograph a ballet. His approach to ballet music thus started with a detailed visualisation of the action, which fed into the unique innovative fluidity of his balletic compositions. Take, for instance, the complex Peregrina ballet, composed for the Paris Opéra staging of Don Carlos. The demands of creating a work that would suit the hierarchy of the corps de ballet — i.e.