Arts Archives

Building block

Arts feature

Britain’s architects can produce the best designs in the world, says Amanda Baillieu. So why aren’t any on display at the Venice Architecture Biennale? Something has gone very wrong for the British at the Venice Architecture Biennale. This three-month event may play second fiddle to the older and larger Art Biennale, but for architects it is meant to be the only festival where they can let rip, free from the restraints of budgets, planning and bureaucracy. They come to gossip, to see what their rivals are up to and schmooze clients. Even Norman Foster has dropped by to talk up his firm’s plan for Hong Kong’s new £1.8 billion arts district. Some 30 countries show their wares in national pavilions, slugging it out for punters and prizes.

Andrew Lambirth

Weaving a spell

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We tend to take for granted the fact that the V&A houses one of the great wonders of the Italian High Renaissance: Raphael’s remarkable tapestry cartoons celebrating the lives of St Peter and St Paul. We tend to take for granted the fact that the V&A houses one of the great wonders of the Italian High Renaissance: Raphael’s remarkable tapestry cartoons celebrating the lives of St Peter and St Paul. These tapestries were designed for the Sistine Chapel to be hung around the lowest tier of the walls on ceremonial occasions, and thus had to complement (if not compete with) Michelangelo’s awesome ceiling decoration.

Ariane Bankes

Friends reunited

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Zanzotti’s in Soho: redolent of surreptitious lunches fondly remembered, with its red gingham cloths and crusted tricolore paintwork, its ‘chianti-in-a-basket./ Breadsticks you snap/ with a sneeze of dust...And Massimo himself/ touring the tables / with his fake bonhomie.’ An old haunt, and the setting, in Christopher Reid’s poem ‘The Song of Lunch’, for a reunion between former lovers, ten years on — or could it be 15? Zanzotti’s in Soho: redolent of surreptitious lunches fondly remembered, with its red gingham cloths and crusted tricolore paintwork, its ‘chianti-in-a-basket./ Breadsticks you snap/ with a sneeze of dust...And Massimo himself/ touring the tables / with his fake bonhomie.

Lloyd Evans

Choppers for whoppers

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Pakistan. Big problem. Burning issue. Put it on stage so we can find out how we got here. J.T. Rogers’s new play opens in 1981 just after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. A young CIA officer, with the exotic and suggestive name of Jim, sets off for the badlands of Waziristan to offer his support to anyone in a headscarf who wants to kill anyone with a red star on his helmet. He strikes up a mutually exploitative relationship with some mountain-dwelling shepherds. He’ll give them military hardware, they’ll give him information (much of it unreliable). Choppers for whoppers. If this sounds crushingly predictable, then don’t slash your wrists just yet because there’s a joke coming. Here it is. The uncouth Muslim rustics love The Eagles.

Michael Tanner

Crime and punishment

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As I descended, then descended again, then again, to get to my seat in the subterranean, uncomfortable Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House, I thought gloomily of the number of miserable evenings I have spent there, and reflected that Philip Glass’s In the Penal Colony was probably all too apt a name for what I was about to experience. As I descended, then descended again, then again, to get to my seat in the subterranean, uncomfortable Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House, I thought gloomily of the number of miserable evenings I have spent there, and reflected that Philip Glass’s In the Penal Colony was probably all too apt a name for what I was about to experience.

Simon Hoggart

Hosed down with artificial cream

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Highgrove: Alan Meets Prince Charles (BBC2, Thursday) brought us two men who are not quite national treasures, though who would certainly like to be. It’s interesting that ‘Alan’ apparently needs no surname, though ‘Charles’ requires the identifying title. But in spite of the implied matiness this was a deeply old-fashioned BBC royal slathering operation, in which no knee is unbent and no forelock goes untugged. Alan Titchmarsh could not get over how excited he was to be on his way to Highgrove and the prince’s garden: ‘its incomparable beauty and purity of purpose ...by the best royal gardener in history,’ he breathed, even before he’d got there.

18 September 2010

Alex Massie

Saturday Morning Country: Loretta Lynn

Country music ain't always about cowboys and outlaws; there's the distaff side of strong and righteous ladies too. Notably, in this instance, Loretta Lynn and her warning that You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man)...

A A Gill

Candid camera

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A.A. Gill talks to his friend Terry O’Neill, whose iconic photographs captured an entirely new kind of celebrity I remember the first time Terry O’Neill took my photograph: he wore blue; I wore grey and the Great War helmet of the third regiment of Pomeranian Grenadiers. We were at the Imperial War Museum, and the nice curator gave me the tin hat with reverence. ‘They’re surprisingly hard to get hold of in good condition, considering how many were made,’ he said. This one had been lifted from a corpse in Arras. And I can pass on to Spectator readers — because I know how much you love this sort of thing — that the second world war version is slightly smaller than the first, to save steel. I donned the coal scuttle and a Teutonic demeanour.

Andrew Lambirth

Liquid gold

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William Pye has observed, somewhat wryly, that he’s better known among architects and designers than he is by the art-loving public. William Pye has observed, somewhat wryly, that he’s better known among architects and designers than he is by the art-loving public. There is a simple reason for this: in recent years he has had very few exhibitions in galleries. His work used to be a regular feature of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, but he is not an RA, and an artist of his stature does not readily court rejection. After a run of showing at the RA for some 30 seasons, he was turned down twice in the hurly-burly of general submission. The panjandrums of Burlington House missed a trick when they passed over Pye.

Peter Hoskin

Making history | 18 September 2010

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No one who has seen The World at War will ever forget it. Thirty-six years on from its original broadcast, it still stands atop a glittering mound of British documentary television. But the great is about to be made better with a new restoration of the series, available on DVD and Blu-ray. The promotional material informs us that every single frame has been individually tweaked and upgraded – and it shows. Even those who own previous DVD versions should consider stumping up for this set. The genius of The World at War was always in how it allowed the second world war and its participants to speak for themselves. And so it treats us to miles of footage shot during the conflict itself, and lengthy interviews with everyone from Hitler’s secretary to concentration camp survivors.

Deborah Ross

Over the top

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The Kid is based on a true story and the book by Kevin Lewis, who had an horrific childhood taking in abuse, violence, poverty, starvation and abandonment by the social services. These books are called ‘misery memoirs’ and sell by the bucketload so I’ve even had a go myself. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: hang on, you had a thoroughly uneventful — nay, happy — middle-class upbringing in the Hampstead Garden Suburb, which doesn’t sound like an especially promising basis for a true story of cruelty, neglect, survival against the odds and the indomitable nature of the human spirit, but you would be wrong. Here is a taster: ‘I grew up in a house where no one was safe, particularly from music lessons (piano, mostly).

Lloyd Evans

Killing joke

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Ira Levin’s name isn’t nearly as well known as his titles. Ira Levin’s name isn’t nearly as well known as his titles. Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, both originally novels, are his most celebrated works. He also wrote quite a few Broadway hits. In his 1970s play Deathtrap he tries to imagine how an author of murder mysteries might fare as a real-life killer. This idea is entirely preposterous or, if one were being ungenerous, entirely insane, but never mind. It might be fun. We open with Sidney Bruhl, a famous playwright whose best work is behind him, discovering a great new play by an unknown dramatist. It’s a surefire hit. He feels it in his bones. ‘Even a gifted director couldn’t ruin it.

Peter Phillips

Reasons to be cheerful

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It was being whispered last week at the first of the two Berlin Philharmonic appearances at the Proms that attendance across the board this year has been 94 per cent. If this is true, and is maintained to the end, it is a staggering achievement. Every year for the past 15 or so, the press office at the BBC has put out ever-increasing claims about the number of people who have bought tickets, in such a way that I have never quite believed them. The increase year on year was somehow too reliable. But this would trump them all by far. I wonder why it has happened, if it has.

James Delingpole

In search of lost time

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My friend Mickie O’Brien, late of 47 and 44 RM Cdo, died the other day. My friend Mickie O’Brien, late of 47 and 44 RM Cdo, died the other day. I’m not sure how old he was — late 80s, I would imagine — but, whatever, it was good going for a man who should have been killed at least twice in the 1940s, once at the Battle of Kangaw when the Japs shot away half his stomach and once when he walked deliberately into a minefield to rescue a French farmer. For one exploit or another Mickie won an MC. The question I used to ask Mickie most often was how he managed to cope with so much fear and horror. He always replied that he had the perfect temperament for wartime soldiering: ‘a strong sense of fatalism and no imagination’.

12 September 2010

Kate Maltby

THEATRE: Review – Bedlam Shakespeare’s Globe

The Southbank has always been an anarchic place. Shakespeare’s Globe proudly reminds visitors that Elizabethan theatres were considered far too lawless – and, implicitly, too much fun – to be licensed within the city limits. After years of rubbing shoulders with gamblers, pimps, and bear-baiters, by 1815 most theatres had advanced to the semi-respectability of the West End, only to be replaced in Southwark by their natural heirs, the lunatics of Bedlam.

Alex Massie

Sunday Morning Country: Johnny Cash

There was almost as much hackery as brilliance in Johnny Cash's career and even his terrific late American albums are pretty uneven. But when he was good he was very good...So here he is lamenting - or celebrating? - those old Folsom Prison Blues...

11 September 2010

John Berry

The art of risk-taking

Arts feature

Despite the economic gloom, ENO’s John Berry is optimistic about the future of opera Opera director David Alden said in a recent interview, ‘Opera is alive, popular — and hot.’ I agree. Opera is very much in the public eye and thriving in UK opera houses, cinemas and performing arts centres. However, as we wait to see the outcome of the coalition’s spending review, the arts community has been vocal about its concerns and fears. London is not Munich or Vienna where public subsidy for the arts is a way of life and debated on the same level of necessity as health and education. Yet Britain is revered worldwide for the energy and quality of its performing arts institutions.

Kate Maltby

THEATRE: Review – Deathtrap Noel Coward Theatre

When was the last time you shuddered in the stalls as a deathly thriller played out on stage? It’s a long time since the heyday of the West End whodunnit, when audiences piled tight into theatres only to better leap from their seats and squeal each time Death struck again. The world expert on modern storytelling structures, Princeton professor Peter Brooks, claims that rise of the thriller was directly related to middle class anxiety about social and familial disorder – perhaps, in Broken Britain, there are few suffocating nuclear families from which to escape, and the chaos of the outside world is less of a shocking intrusion than a constant presence.

Michael Henderson

Proms notebook

Features

The world’s greatest festival of music continues to grow under the splendid stewardship of Roger Wright, but there is always plenty of missionary work to do, for the world will never run short of grouches. The world’s greatest festival of music continues to grow under the splendid stewardship of Roger Wright, but there is always plenty of missionary work to do, for the world will never run short of grouches. Perhaps, like Sir Harold Acton in his Tuscan grotto, who loved to ‘hunt philistines’, we should trap the blighters in cages and force them to listen to lashings of Beethoven and Wagner until they recant. Step forward, if you will, Miss Lynsey Hanley.

Andrew Lambirth

Out of the ordinary | 11 September 2010

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Frederick Cayley Robinson: Acts of Mercy National Gallery, until 17 October The free exhibitions in the Sunley Room offer a programme of meditations on the National Gallery’s permanent collection, either through works of art directly inspired by or related to the old masters, or connected in a more oblique way. Frederick Cayley Robinson (1862–1927) is a little-known early-20th-century English painter in oils, tempera and watercolour who deserves wider recognition: this loan exhibition is the first show of his work for more than 30 years. A traditionalist with a feeling for the more modern statement, Cayley Robinson was using the same methods and materials as the old masters, but wanted to create something of relevance to his period.

Lloyd Evans

Vexed issues

Theatre

Clybourne Park Royal Court, until 2 October Tiny Kushner Tricycle, until 25 September Bash the bourgeoisie is a game the Royal Court likes playing and I’m always keen to join in. Bruce Norris, a brilliant American satirist, delighted us a few years back with The Pain and the Itch, a hilarious exposure of middle-class hypocrisy. Clybourne Park is a pair of plays set in a house in the prosperous Chicago suburbs. We start in the 1950s when black families are just arriving in the neighbourhood. We then fast-forward 60 years and see prosperous whites returning after decades of poverty and neglect. The earlier play feels very wonky. The dice are overloaded against the whites. As well as their black servants, they have a deaf friend and a kid next door with Down’s syndrome.

Marcus Berkmann

House music

Music

When you really want to feel miserable, read a few lifestyle features in a glossy magazine. The other day, in a momentary loss of concentration, I started reading one about a family who were willing to admit publicly that they own five televisions. Obviously I ventured no further, assuming they all have enormous bottoms, brutally compromised digestive systems, failing eyesight, withered musculatures and the brains of ferrets. But then I thought of my own modest north-London flat. We have just the one television, unfashionably small in that it’s only about the size of a small car.

Michael Tanner

Without harmful intent

Opera

Hänsel und Gretel Royal Albert Hall How frightening an opera is Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, or how frightening should it be? The answer to the first question, if one had only encountered Hänsel at the Prom performance which Glyndebourne brought to London last week, was ‘not at all’. It was given in a semi-staged version, but virtually nothing of Laurent Pelly’s distinctive production survived.

Kate Chisholm

Liberation day

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‘We’re women, not ladies,’ the Women’s Libber, still in campaigning mode after 40 years, reminded us sharply. ‘We’re women, not ladies,’ the Women’s Libber, still in campaigning mode after 40 years, reminded us sharply. She was for the first time in the same room as Peter Jolley, who had helped to organise the notorious 1970 Miss World contest. He, too, does not seem to have changed much in the intervening decades. ‘So much work went into it, my dear,’ he insisted, riling his fellow conversationalists, perhaps deliberately.

Simon Hoggart

Sex lives and videotape

Television

Him and Her (BBC 3) is the BBC’s notion of a really edgy sitcom. Him and Her (BBC 3) is the BBC’s notion of a really edgy sitcom. This is not My Family. The first words uttered are from a bloke who is in bed with his girlfriend. ‘You. Are. Very good at blow jobs.’ ‘Thank you,’ she says demurely. ‘And I am brilliant at receiving them.’ Moments later we see her sitting on the loo, and not just for a pee. Then a neighbour drops round to discuss, inter alia, Kate Winslet’s breasts, and how everyone pauses that bit on the Titanic DVD. I found myself wondering what would have happened if an advance tape had been shown to Lord Reith. ‘It is, um, er, director-general, somewhat experimental in tone and content.

6 September 2010

Kate Maltby

THEATRE: How To Be Another Woman

There’s a moment in the Gate Theatre’s new devised play, How To Be Another Woman, when an actress slowly mimes reaching for a book and ostentatiously flipping it open on a crowded bus. She tells her companion that she’s reading Madame Bovary. There’s a moment in the Gate Theatre’s new devised play, How To Be Another Woman, when an actress slowly mimes reaching for a book and ostentatiously flipping it open on a crowded bus. She tells her companion that she’s reading Madame Bovary. The audience isn’t fooled. We can see that she’s posing with a stiff sequined evening bag, the flap held open like the cover of a book.

4 September 2010

Alex Massie

Saturday Morning Country: George Jones

I've been listening to George Jones a lot, lately. So here's video of a younger Possum singing, in his usual style, Things Have Gonel to Pieces which is, I suppose, a decent-enough summary of an entire school of country music.

Roderick Conway-Morris

Seaside renaissance

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Roderick Conway Morris on how Genoa’s glorious Villa del Principe has been brought back to life Palazzo Doria Pamphilj houses the most important private art collection in Rome. But the family possesses another treasure, the Villa del Principe in Genoa. The Doria side of the family moved to Rome in 1760, when they inherited the Pamphilj titles and estates, after which the Villa del Principe suffered a slow decline, punctuated by two major disasters. But after 16 years of work it has now been restored and reopened to the public.

Andrew Lambirth

Shared affection

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The Switch 12A, Nationwide As a rule, Richard Burton acted stupendously well in stupendously bad films. Jennifer Aniston has mastered half that duality. The Switch, her latest film, is comfort-zone Aniston: a charmless rom-com with a crass attempt at eroticism — Toy Story’s more titillating, to be honest. Cliché is The Switch’s currency. A pallid dawn rises over New York’s landmarks and we are taken back seven years. It is breakfast time. An aging girl-next-door (Aniston) tells her lachrymose friend and former lover Wally (Jason Bateman) that she is seeking a sperm donor. ‘The clock has struck,’ she says, to crown the cliché.