Arts Archives

Battered but triumphant

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Big River Man (part of More 4’s ‘True Stories’, Tuesday) was one of the most gripping and brilliant, infuriating and disappointing documentaries I’ve ever seen. Big River Man (part of More 4’s ‘True Stories’, Tuesday) was one of the most gripping and brilliant, infuriating and disappointing documentaries I’ve ever seen. It was gripping and brilliant because the story it told with tremendous verve, wit, imagination and style was so extraordinary. Martin Strel, 55, a hideously overweight Slovenian drunkard and gambler, addicted to red wine and horse burgers, also happens to be the world’s greatest endurance swimmer. He’d already done the Danube, the Mississippi and the Yangtse.

Kate Chisholm

Lights out

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It’s not always a good idea to revisit poems or stories once loved as children. It’s not always a good idea to revisit poems or stories once loved as children. The magic and mystery can dissolve all too rapidly when refracted through adult eyes. Late on Saturday night, the poet Kenneth Steven did for me with his careful probing of the true story behind Wilfrid Gibson’s 1912 poem, ‘Flannan Isle’. Gibson retells in eerie, doomy verse the story of the disappearance of the three keepers of the Flannan lighthouse on the afternoon of Saturday 15 December 1900.

14 August 2010

Ben West

Space invaders | 14 August 2010

Arts feature

Ben West investigates the growth in unusual exhibition venues — from brothel to butcher’s shop The economic downturn has forced many of us to rethink how we operate. This is especially so in the arts, an area that has always struggled for funding, and where cuts are inevitably huge considering all the hospitals and schools we need to keep afloat — not to mention a sparkling new Olympic village to complete. Last month the government announced that it wishes to make cuts to the arts of 25 per cent over the next four years. However, in many areas, until now at least, tightened budgets have not been overly discernible: for example, you may have seen a slightly thinner programme in theatres, or fewer films in production in an already overcrowded marketplace.

Alex Massie

Saturday Morning Country: Emmylou Harris

You can never have too much Emmylou and her appearance, backed by the brilliant Hot Band, on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1977 is a joy from start to finish. Here she is with Making Believe - a Jimmy Work song that had previously been a hit for the great Kitty Wells too.

Andrew Lambirth

Picasso magic

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Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (1945–61) Gagosian Gallery, 6–24 Britannia Street, WC1, until 28 August The Gagosian Gallery has been remodelled for this exhibition by the architect Annabelle Selldorf, who has translated the normally looming white spaces into a succession of more sympathetic but nonetheless dramatic rooms. The expectant visitor enters via a black door to be confronted by a large but standard earthenware vase that Picasso has transformed by painting it with a brief yellow bikini. Vase becomes woman, as Picasso reinvigorates the old cliché of womanly hips looking like a vase, and effortlessly renews the metaphor. The humour and playfulness that characterise his work are at once in evidence, and the profound preoccupation with the human figure.

Lloyd Evans

Rural targets

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The Great British Country Fête Bush, until 14 August The Great Game: Afghanistan, Part 1 Tricycle, until 29 August Russell Kane, a rising star of stand-up, has penned a musical satire with an inflammatory theme. His play opens in a Suffolk village where the locals have risen up against Tesco’s attempts to blight the community with a thumping new shopping hub. Excellent subject! Rabid, thoughtless expansionism by supermarkets inspires rage in every corner of the country (apart from London, which couldn’t care less). After this superb set-up, the show goes wrong immediately and stumbles off in search of easy targets, facile rustic caricatures — the randy vicar, the gay farmer’s boy, the thick ferret-fancier, the racist lady from the WI, and so on.

Michael Tanner

Rare outing

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Francesca da Rimini La forza del destino Opera Holland Park, in rep until 14 August Tristan und Isolde Act II Royal Albert Hall Opera Holland Park makes a speciality of reviving Italian operas of the early 20th century, often absurdly and lazily dubbed ‘verismo’. Its latest, and possibly most courageous effort on this front, is Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini, which, far from conforming to the aesthetic brilliantly outlined in the sung Prologue to I Pagliacci, takes a subject very far removed from quotidian life, and decked out in the almost fatally pretentious language of D’Annunzio.

Giannandrea Poesio

Long voyage

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Le Corsaire, Don Quixote Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Opera House For many years in the West, Le Corsaire was just a pas de deux, a dazzling bravura number historically associated with male ballet legends such as Rudolph Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Then, in the mid-Eighties, the Kirov Ballet, now Marijinsky Ballet, came along with a fast-paced, colourful and highly entertaining complete version, loosely based on the much-interpolated 19th-century original. Since then, a few more versions have cropped up here and there, including the 2007 one signed by Alexei Ratmansky and Yuri Burlaka, respectively the former and current artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet. Entertaining as it might be, Le Corsaire is not a masterwork.

Marcus Berkmann

Missing link | 14 August 2010

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I had a crafty look at my neighbour’s CD collection the other day. I was supposed to be watering his plants, and obviously I fulfilled that task with my characteristic attention to detail, miraculously failing to kill any of them in the ten days he was away. I had a crafty look at my neighbour’s CD collection the other day. I was supposed to be watering his plants, and obviously I fulfilled that task with my characteristic attention to detail, miraculously failing to kill any of them in the ten days he was away. But I was drawn to the music shelves as a wasp is to jam. He receives nearly as many of those pleasing little cardboard CD-shaped packages from Amazon as I do. What was in them? Joni Mitchell, it turned out.

Robin Holloway

Touched by Schumann

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Schumann is probably the most lovable of the great German masters, simply because his music is inextricably involved in first impressions: many children learning the piano will encounter early the pretty little pieces from his Album for the Young, moving on with enhanced delight to the easier numbers in Scenes from Childhood. Then, after headier teenage intoxications, the taste recoils to discover his two greatest contributions to the world hoard — the body of solo piano works with which he began, and the body of songs that overlapped then wholly took over. The 24 piano works present a cavalcade of dancing, dreaming fantasy, peopled by lovers real or imagined, heroes of music and literature living and dead, brother warriors in art against the Philistines.

Kate Chisholm

Unsung talent

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So why are we all becoming radio addicts, listening to an ever-greater variety of stations for more minutes each day? Could it be a yearning for something simpler, more direct, less tricksy than the constant visual stimuli that persist in assaulting us wherever we are, via the internet, TV, DVD and cinema? It’s the immediacy and the fact that you don’t have to wait those endless seconds while the wretched machine boots itself up, ready to perform, which make radio so much more appealing. With a soon-to-be-abandoned analogue set (though not, alas, my smart new digital boxes) all you have to do is press your preset button and be taken straightway, between heartbeats, to another dimension of experience.

Simon Hoggart

Facts and fantasy

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The Unforgettable Bob Monkhouse (ITV1) might be thought a slightly coat-trailing title, though not perhaps as much as its follow-up, The Unforgettable Jeremy Beadle. Still, I don’t suppose we’ll ever be treated to the unforgettable Jim Davidson. Or the all-too-forgettable Freddie Starr, or Whoever Remembers Bobby Davro? Monkhouse had this highly veneered gloss, and symbolised for a lot of people all that was wrong with commercial television. Smooth, unfazed, just condescending enough to the public to make your teeth feel furry. If you can fake insincerity, you can fake anything. Privately, he had a pretty miserable time, losing one son to cystic fibrosis, another — already estranged — to drugs. Even his writing partner, Denis Goodwin, committed suicide.

13 August 2010

Alex Massie

Hackwatch

Tom Scott - who I'm pretty sure I saw taking part in BBC4's spiffing quiz show Only Connect - has been waging a mini-guerilla war against mediocre journalism. He explains his mission here and this is the kind of sticker he's taken to leaving in copies of spare newspapers he finds on the Tube... Plenty more here. You might need an entire sheet just for a single edition of some of our magnificent papers...

7 August 2010

William Cook

The new alternatives

Arts feature

William Cook goes to Skegness and watches Cannon & Ball attract an adoring audience It’s August and Edinburgh is full of fashionable young comedians, but here in Skegness the Festival Fringe seems a million miles away. With its amusement arcades and fish and chip shops, this unpretentious place feels forgotten by the metropolitan arts establishment. There are no TV producers on the windswept promenade, no theatre critics in the bingo halls. Yet Skegness boasts a theatrical heritage far older than the Edinburgh Festival — traditional seaside entertainment. And this summer it’s playing host to Britain’s most seasoned seaside entertainers, Cannon & Ball. Throughout the 1980s Cannon & Ball were one of the biggest acts in Britain.

Christopher Howse

Suburban hymns

Features

Arcade Fire’s third album The Suburbs is in a long, glorious tradition of pop lyricism inspired by everyday life, writes Christopher Howse Arcade Fire’s first album Funeral was not about a funeral. But, goodness, when we saw Régine Chassagne hammering away at her keyboard in red elbow-gloves with her husband Win Butler singing one of its tracks, ‘Power Out’, on Jools Holland’s show in 2005, we sat up and knew something had changed. Funeral was, in part, about the suburbs. Arcade Fire’s third album, The Suburbs, out this week, continues the interpretation of city life from the viewpoint of the ‘kids’, with particular reference to parents, and disaster. Not that the kids get off without criticism.

Andrew Lambirth

Damp squib

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Sargent and the Sea Royal Academy, until 26 September John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) is an artist whose name arouses hopes of dazzling technical virtuosity even when his subjects are fairly run-of-the-mill. Famed as a portrait painter, his art (at its finest) has great glamour and stylishness, backed up by exuberant brushwork which can be truly exhilarating. So a summer-themed exhibition of Sargent and the Sea sounds a treat for all: seductive at the very least, and possibly rising to great heights, with all the explosive splendour of Franz Hals crossed with the Impressionists. Sadly, there is little of such pyrotechnics visible in the Academy’s damp squib of a show.

Michael Tanner

It’s a knockout

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Die Walküre Longborough Not having been to Longborough and its opera festival before, I was bowled over by it in all respects. The much-referred-to extended garage is an extremely comfortable theatre, with more than 400 seats, and with plenty of space in the foyer to make intervals a far more agreeable affair than they are in London’s two major opera houses. The setting is, of course, enchanting, the trimmings slightly playful, no hint of pretentiousness such as one finds in several other country-house operatic establishments, and no lengthy hectoring before the performance gets under way. However, none of that would count for anything if the performances weren’t well worth the trouble of getting there. I went only to Die Walküre, and it was a knockout.

Lloyd Evans

German challenge

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The Prince of Homburg Donmar, until 4 September Danton’s Death Olivier, in rep until 14 October Welcome to London. This month we’re hosting the world’s very first, but probably not its last, Useless German Playwright Festival. Here’s a scribbler you may not have heard of. Heinrich von Kleist, born in 1777, angered his Prussian family by quitting the army and setting up as a dramatist. After an energetic start he decided he had better things to do with his life and killed himself. His final play, The Prince of Homburg, shows that he still had much to learn before his premature exit.

Charles Spencer

My all-time Top Ten

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Regular readers may have noticed an embarrassing lacuna in this column. Having urged you to come up with your top ten albums of all time, to which you responded in such numbers, and with such entertaining and illuminating results, the sadist who set you the task has so far failed to deliver a selection of his own. This isn’t a matter of cowardice or mere idleness on my part, I promise. For months now I have been cogitating on it, agonising about it, tearing up the list and starting all over again. But it’s been fun, too, listening to much-loved albums that had somehow been allowed to gather dust on my shelves, trying to separate the excellent from the absolutely essential, and to find room for as wide a variety of music as possible.

Giannandrea Poesio

Looking back

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Bolshoi Ballet Royal Opera House, until 8 August At the beginning of the second week of its new London season, the Bolshoi Ballet presented the classic Giselle, a ballet which, not unlike other 19th-century works, underwent myriad changes, cuts and choreographic adaptations. It was only after Mary Skeaping attempted to restore the original text in the 1970s that most ballet companies adopted what has today become a sort of standard text. Interestingly, this is not entirely the case with the 1987 Bolshoi production, in which historical originality does not play such a central role.

Kate Chisholm

Impossible questions

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‘I wish I knew,’ said the doctor in a rare moment of candour when asked, ‘What do you do with children who don’t want to take the tablets? ‘I wish I knew,’ said the doctor in a rare moment of candour when asked, ‘What do you do with children who don’t want to take the tablets?’ He was talking about Tanya, an HIV-positive teenager who was refusing to take the life-giving anti-viral drugs he had recommended. She’d been born with HIV, her mother had died of Aids when she was still a baby, and she’d been raised by an aunt in ignorance of why she was always falling ill with chest infections. No one in the family wanted her to know. Can Tanya be treated against her family’s wishes? Should she be told against their wishes?

31 July 2010

Freddy Gray

‘A totally irresponsible art’

Arts feature

Nina Conti appears convinced that her puppets are real. Freddy Gray investigates Isn’t Nina Conti too good-looking to be a ventriloquist? One thinks of blokes in working-men’s clubs with frazzled hair, not Nina with her smiling face and big brown eyes. It’s hard not to look at her, which must be a professional disadvantage: isn’t the audience meant to watch the puppet? I want to put this technical question to Nina, but worry that it might sound creepy. Instead, feebly, I ask if she believes reports that ventriloquism is making a comeback. ‘I’m not sure I really buy into that,’ she says, with a kind and apologetic shrug. But the art of talking through a puppet does seem to be enjoying a renaissance.

Andrew Lambirth

Summer round-up | 31 July 2010

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Cornwall is looking beautiful under summer sun and outdoor pursuits beckon, but St Ives provides the perfect alternative when the beach palls or rain threatens. Besides the Tate, there are a number of commercial galleries, and chief among them is Wills Lane, which offers a stimulating variety of fine and applied art. For the summer period I have selected a Critic’s Choice for the gallery (until 5 September); of 14 artists, some better-known than others: Maggi Hambling, David Inshaw and Colin Self rubbing shoulders with Tyrel Broadbent, Roland Collins and Nigel Ellis. Landscape is one theme, the sea another.

Michael Tanner

Great expectations

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La Traviata Royal Opera House Jette Parker Young Artists Summer Performance Royal Opera House The Royal Opera ended its season with yet another revival of Richard Eyre’s production of La Traviata, and the Jette Parker Young Artists Summer Performance, the latter a most interesting affair, but without much of a critical presence, presumably because it was at 1 p.m. on a Saturday. The distinctive feature of the Traviata revival was that Angela Gheorghiu returned to sing the role of Violetta, in which she had her first great international success, and which she has not sung at Covent Garden since 1996. I attended the third performance (First Capital Connect had thwarted my attempt to go to the first) and was somewhat disappointed. I had very high expectations.

24 July 2010

Charles Moore

Back to the future | 24 July 2010

Arts feature

Charles Moore on how to renew and maintain life in the deserted villages of rural Romania To understand this story, one must go back nearly 25 years. As Soviet Communism moved towards collapse in the late 1980s, people were in danger of forgetting Romania. Because of Romania’s relative independence from Moscow, the West played down the insane policies of its despot, Nikolai Ceausescu. The Spectator, I am glad to say, did not. We sent in journalists under cover, and started a scheme, paid for by kind readers, to send free copies of the magazine, much sought after by print-starved intellectuals. The world finally took notice of Ceausescu’s horrors when he began a policy of systematically destroying all villages, housing peasants in concrete blocks of flats.

Rod Liddle

Queens of camp

Homosexuals are tired of being portrayed on television as sexually obsessed, hilariously narcissistic, outrageously dressed queens each carrying a boxed set of Abba CDs - ie, Clary, Norton, Carr and so on. They want a bit more realism, believing that this sort of stereotypical depiction is hardly better than the Black and White Minstrels, or Al Jolson. Well, maybe. But be careful what you wish for. Inaccurate it may well have been, but at least it was an agreeable stereotype which probably advanced the cause of homosexual equality.

Lloyd Evans

Turn on, tune in, drop out

Features

Don’t knock daytime TV, says Lloyd Evans. It may be mindless and banal, but it is entertainment in its purest form It’s happening right now. I just had a flick-through and it’s all going on. You wouldn’t believe it. A Labrador called Pongo has been squashed by a tractor and is having his broken paw fixed at the vet. A grandmother from Dartford is trying to raise funds for her daughter-in-law’s wedding by auctioning a trunkload of heirlooms. And Mandy and Oona (in the blue), are hoping to make a bigger profit at the car-boot sale than Vaughan and Sanjay (in the red). It’s gripping stuff, take my word for it.

Andrew Lambirth

Psychological approach

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Alice Neel: Painted Truths Whitechapel Gallery, until 17 September Paula Rego: Oratorio Marlborough Fine Art, 6 Albemarle Street, W1, until 20 August The last time I wrote about Alice Neel (1900–84), on the occasion of an exhibition mounted six years ago by the commercial gallery Victoria Miro, a reader wrote in to correct my statement that Neel’s work had not been shown outside her native America. The point I was making was how relatively little known Neel was, particularly in England, though that situation has now changed. At Victoria Miro (until 30 July) a host of international artists pay tribute to Neel’s work, and at the Whitechapel there’s a major survey of her paintings.

Michael Tanner

Excellence amid the gore

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Salome Royal Opera House Die Meistersinger Welsh National Opera on tour, Birmingham Richard Strauss’s Salome is no joke for its director, however much it may be for the audience. When David McVicar mounted it at the Royal Opera in 2008, the production, together with the cluttered designs of Es Devlin, seemed to have as its main object to keep the eye occupied while the mind wondered and probably wandered. Scenes reminiscent of Pasolini’s Salò, not a movie I was happy to be reminded of, and one that has no connection I can see with Strauss (stills from it continue to illustrate the programme), were enacted down below, while at the very top of the stage a lavish Edwardian dinner was in full guzzle, and the heroine rushed up and down a connecting staircase to no purpose.