Culture

Culture

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

Patrick Carnegy

Storm still within

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King Lear Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in rep until 26 August At the prospect of every fresh attempt on the summit that is King Lear, one’s heart begins to sink — the bleak, bleak vision, the convoluted subplottings of son against sibling and father, of sister against sister, the merciless length of the play. It seems only yesterday that Ian McKellen triumphed in Trevor Nunn’s Stratford staging. But here’s the RSC with a new production, this time with Greg Hicks in the title role. For him it’s the culmination of a run of major roles in which his wiry physique and nervous intensity have always been memorable. Caesar and Leontes suited him less well than Coriolanus, but it’s as Lear that he’s delivering the performance of a lifetime.

Marcus Berkmann

Buggles are best

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Hooray for the one-click purchase. Reading one of the music monthlies, I saw that the Buggles’s second album from 1981, Adventures in Modern Recording, had been released on CD, digitally remastered, with ten extra tracks I clearly had to hear. A mere week or so later, the package came through the letterbox, slightly battered but still just about recognisable as a CD. Anyone who suggests that Amazon has taken away the joy of shopping simply has no soul. I did have the album, once, long ago. When you lend someone an album that you don’t much like or that is easy to replace, they always return it promptly and in good order. I’m not sure who had Adventures in Modern Recording but if they aren’t dead by now they bloody well should be.

Deborah Ross

From the Gothic to the Goth

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Shutter Island 15, Nationwide The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 18, Nationwide. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island is really rather outrageous. Thunder! Lightning! Crazies! Cliff drops! Creepy scientists! Nazis! It’s a madhouse thriller that plays like a wildly cranked-up B movie which, being Scorsese, must mean he intended it to play like a wildly cranked-up B movie. I can’t imagine he set out to make a deep, dark, intricately plotted mobster movie and this came out instead. What would he have said when he saw the final cut? Would he have slapped his head and exclaimed, ‘Bloody hell, where’s my mobster movie? This is a cranked-up B movie! I’m a schmuck!’? So, no, I think we can assume this is what Scorsese was aiming for, and?

Kate Chisholm

One true voice

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‘The BBC is a part of public space because the public themselves have put it there,’ suggests the BBC’s DG, Mark Thompson, at the beginning of the report which is recommending, among other things, that Radio 6 Music and the Asian Network be shut down. ‘The BBC is a part of public space because the public themselves have put it there,’ suggests the BBC’s DG, Mark Thompson, at the beginning of the report which is recommending, among other things, that Radio 6 Music and the Asian Network be shut down. The report is all about this virtual concept, ‘the public space’, and claims that it’s an ‘open and enriching experience’, and that ‘in public space, everyone’s as important and valuable as everyone else’.

Simon Hoggart

Guilty pleasures

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I am, I hope, still too young to watch daytime television, but conversation can be slow in the care home where I visit my parents every week. Having something bland wittering on in the corner is a help. In the middle of the afternoon we have antique shows. Endless antiques. Just as we are soon going to run out of cooks, so that nobody will be able to have friends round if there isn’t a camera crew, so we must be getting short of antiques. They’ll have to start recycling. ‘Has this lovely piece been in your family for long?’ ‘Yes, my father bought it at a televised auction, ooh, at least five months ago…’ What most of them do is take the formula of the Antiques Roadshow and, cleverly, add real money.

Alan Judd

Mr Bond’s favourite

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Bond had no need for thought. He’d seen it as a concept in Detroit and Geneva in 2006. Now that it existed, he wanted it. He spoke once more, ‘Get it.’ Then added, very quietly, ‘Please.’ Bond was right to insist. When I first saw designer Marek Reichman’s concept Rapide in Geneva, I thought it possibly the most beautiful four-door car on the planet. We weren’t allowed to touch it, let alone drive it, and if Ford still owned Aston Martin we’d probably still be waiting for it. But the marque’s new owners gave it the green light and the result is — well, possibly the most beautiful four-door car on the planet, as well as one of the fastest (188mph, 0–60 in 5.1).

10 March 2010

Rod Liddle

R.I.P Mark Linkous

It’s a pretty thin and overrated medium, rock music, and too much energy is expended lauding its practitioners. But Mark Linkous, who is dead having shot himself, was one of a small handful with genuine talent which sometimes, just sometimes, teetered into real brilliance. Few people have used the medium better, or understood better how to defy its obvious limitations. Under the name Sparklehorse, Linkous made one of the two great albums of the 1990s, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot (the other, I reckon, is Beck’s Mellow Gold). This was a peculiar mélange of southern country, Neil Young, Alex Chilton and Tom Waits, a bit of weirdness and noise, the sound of a child’s train set and various other lunacies. The music was either painfully delicate or abrasive.

9 March 2010

Daniel Korski

The philosophy of war

Every war takes its time to produce a good film or even a piece of journalistic analysis that goes beyond running commentary. Apocalypse Now came years after the end of the Vietnam War and it took seven years before this year's Oscar winner, The Hurt Locker, could be produced. The newspapers are full of excellent reporting from Kabul, with The Times Anthony Loyd, The Guardian's Jon Boone and the NYT's Dexter Filkens matching anything that came out of the Saigon. But sit-back-and-think-hard reporting has been rare.   Nine years after the ousting of the Taliban, author Robert D. Kaplan's piece "Man versus Afghanistan" in the April issue of The Atlantic is the exception.

6 March 2010

Henrietta Bredin

A view from the pit

Arts feature

Henrietta Bredin talks to the leader of ENO’s orchestra about working ‘in the trenches’ ‘Working in the trenches’ is how some people describe their lives in the orchestra pit, playing for opera performances. The traditional opera house has a horseshoe-shaped auditorium and the musicians are accommodated below stage level so that, ideally, the sound they make floats up and out into the theatre without overwhelming the singers. At Bayreuth, in the Festspielhaus that Wagner had built specifically for the performance of his own operas, the musicians are completely invisible, in a pit that is not just recessed well beneath the stage but is also covered by a hood.

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 6 March 2010

The Spectator's Notes

Mark Thompson’s strategic review of the BBC may be momentous in its implications, even though its actual cutbacks are minor (admit it: had you ever heard of, much less listened to 6 Music?). Mark Thompson’s strategic review of the BBC may be momentous in its implications, even though its actual cutbacks are minor (admit it: had you ever heard of, much less listened to 6 Music?). This is because it has abandoned the idea that the BBC has to do everything. Until now, the BBC has followed a ‘wider still and wider’ policy. It has defended every piece of junk and every market grab on the grounds that it must cater for the greatest possible variety of tastes and audiences in order to serve all licence-fee payers.

Lloyd Evans

Great Scot — a triumph for Vettriano!

Features

Every year the cream of Scotland comes to Boisdale of Belgravia to celebrate Scottish talent and to toast the winner of the Johnnie Walker Blue Label Great Scot award. Boisdale is quietly opulent. The mighty banqueting tables and blood-red walls decorated with country views suggest baronial splendour in a modern key. It’s Balmoral with central heating. Our host, Andrew Neil, began on a note of unapologetic patriotism. ‘Scotland invented the modern world,’ he said, and reeled off a list of his homeland’s greatest contributions to world culture. Tarmac, television and Tennent’s Super didn’t get a mention and instead he focused on ‘the decimal point, the cure for scurvy and the patron saint of Ireland, St Patrick.

Andrew Lambirth

Shape shifter

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Henry Moore Tate Britain, until 8 August Even some of the greatest artists go in and out of fashion, though market forces are grimly determined (in the short term) that this should not be so. Death often brings a lull in interest, or conversely a revival. An artist who has been overrated may be for a time forgotten, until someone starts the process of reassessment and perhaps a more balanced appraisal is reached. The reputation of Henry Moore (1898–1986) has had its ups and downs — he was first displaced from critical pre-eminence by his one-time assistants Anthony Caro and Phillip King and the revolution in abstract, coloured sculpture in the 1960s — but now his standing is deemed in need of revision.

Michael Tanner

Meditation on Gandhi’s life

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Satyagraha English National Opera, in rep until 26 March When Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha was first put on by ENO in 2007, I found it intolerably tedious, to the point where I felt that if I didn’t leave the theatre I might start to scream. Yet I came across quite a few people, some of them serious non-trendies whose views I share over a wide range of artistic and other matters, who found it compelling, moving, thought-provoking. So I felt that I needed to go back when it was revived last week for seven performances, having been by far the most successful contemporary opera that ENO has mounted. Obviously I was dreading the occasion, obviously I hoped I would change my mind. And I did change my mind.

Charles Spencer

Sleep deprivation

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My word, you Spectator readers are an education, and a delightfully idiosyncratic bunch to boot. To celebrate this 100th ‘Olden but golden’ column I invited you to send in your all-time top tens, and three dozen entries have arrived so far, some from as far afield as the US and Australia. In 2002, we confined ourselves to rock and pop. This time classical music and jazz and indeed any other musical genres were actively encouraged, and favourite singles as well as albums were permitted as well. I particularly like the bloody-minded independence of Spectator readers.

Lloyd Evans

Inner beauty

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Ghosts Duchess, until 15 May Off the Endz Royal Court, until 13 March Ghosts is the most Ibsenite of all Ibsen’s plays. In a sub-Arctic backwater two pairs of lovers pursue doomed romances while outside it drizzles constantly. Oswald can’t marry his mother’s serving-girl because his brain is being attacked by syphilis. Meanwhile, Pastor Manders’s ardour for Mrs Alving is smothered by his inflexible Calvinistic ideals. And outside it’s still drizzling. The external plotting of this great emotional thriller is unusually clumsy. Early on we’re told, in very specific terms, that a brand-new orphanage (made entirely of wood and not covered by buildings insurance) is being overseen by a notoriously clumsy carpenter who drinks too much.

Kate Chisholm

Focusing the mind

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You can see how difficult it must be for the powers behind BBC Radio. On the one hand, the Corporation is still pumping out programmes that we could have heard 60 years ago. The list is endless but try The Archers and Desert Island Discs for starters, brought together on Sunday (Radio 4) when June Spencer, who plays Peggy Woolley, was Kirsty Young’s guest. (She’s been in the series since the very first episode 60 years ago, when the broadcasts were live and the scripts changing even while they were on air, the producer tiptoeing up to the microphone, seizing the script and cutting lines with a pencil.) Can you imagine the outcry if either of these stalwarts were bumped off the airwaves?

James Delingpole

Why us?

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I have been depressed lately and Why Did You Kill My Dad? (BBC1, Monday) wasn’t what I needed at all. I have been depressed lately and Why Did You Kill My Dad? (BBC1, Monday) wasn’t what I needed at all. In it award-winning film-maker Julian Hendy interviewed the families of some of the 100 innocents who are randomly murdered each year by psychopaths. Hendy’s dad was one of them. It was all so sensitively, movingly done, and the ‘Why us?’ testimonies of the bereaved parents, wives and children were so heartbreaking that it made you want to cry. The villain of the piece was the psychiatric establishment.

Robin Oakley

Hero or zero

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The refusal of Manchester City footballer Wayne Bridge to shake the hand of his former Chelsea team-mate John Terry in a dispute over the favours of a lingerie model received roughly the same attention in the media last Saturday as the outbreak of a new war in the Middle East. Racing hardly got a look-in, even on the sports pages. But the sporting moment I relished was the high five — well, actually, it was more of a low five — as a mud-spattered Paddy Brennan slipped from the saddle of Razor Royale after the Racing Post Chase and slapped his hand into the open palm of an immaculate Carl Llewellyn, business partner to trainer Nigel Twiston-Davies. That and the grins which passed between them told a whole story.

28 February 2010

Alex Massie

Sunday Morning Country: Kitty Wells

Kitty Wells was born in 1919 and she's the oldest living member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. So it's well past time she featured here and, this being so, it's sensible to play her first big hit It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels. If Hank Williams was the inspiration for everyone who followed him then, after the Carter Family, you can argue that Kitty Wells played a similar role on the distaff side of country.

27 February 2010

Andrew Lambirth

Rare magic

Arts feature

Paul Nash: The Elements Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 9 May Paul Nash (1889–1946) is one of those rare artists whose work manages to be British, Modernist and popular at the same time without imploding. It is thus curious that there are not more exhibitions of his beautiful and poignant work. The last general Nash survey in London was at the Tate in 1975. More recently, the Imperial War Museum has shown his war work, and in 2003 there was a good and wide-ranging show at Tate Liverpool. With that exhibition the Tate no doubt felt it had done its duty to Nash, so the current, long-overdue London display was left to other hands. All praise, then, to Dulwich Picture Gallery for rising to the challenge. But a show of Paul Nash there presents certain problems.

Lloyd Evans

Cheapening the currency

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Here come the Oscars. Even people who rarely visit the cinema can’t resist the world’s greatest awards ceremony. The collision of extremities makes it compulsive viewing. It’s a sort of morality play where the seven deadly sins, and their contrary virtues, are paraded in dumbshow. Greed, hope, vanity, despair, jubilation, pride, joy, envy and a dozen other maxed-out sentiments are let loose. Moderation is banned. Temperance, decency and any restraining impulse must take the night off so that excess and all its spiritual allies can frolic and cavort. We know what will happen. The winners, clutching the pepper pot-sized statue, will sob their gratitude to the world and claim that the gilded midget means more to them than all the money they will ever earn.

Michael Tanner

Class act | 27 February 2010

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Ruddigore Opera North, touring What is wrong with me? I kept asking myself that question as I endured the two hours and 40 minutes of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore in the Grand Theatre, Leeds, while most of the audience rocked with laughter and regularly burst into delighted applause. I hadn’t originally intended to go, but the reviews were so unanimously ecstatic that I finally decided that I’d better make the effort. This show has been compared to Jonathan Miller’s famous Mikado at ENO, and that is something I see whenever I can and enjoy enormously — but the musical merits of that work apart (they are very high), Miller’s production is a brilliantly sly commentary on the piece, while in no way reducing its stature.

Giannandrea Poesio

Trial and error

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Royal Ballet Triple Bill Royal Opera House The nurturing of home-grown choreographic talent has always played a central role in the history of the Royal Ballet. Undaunted by the possible ups and downs of the experimental approach, Ninette de Valois, the company’s founder, set up a unique platform for budding dance-makers. True, not everything was a success and not everything stood the test of time; but, had it not been for her risk-taking, modern-dance history would have suffered a great deal. Against the pressures and the fashionable trends of today’s ‘artistic globalisation’, which prescribes the import/export of a universally adaptable prêt à porter kind of choreography, the company has long remained faithful to the principles of its creator.

Robin Holloway

Glorious Gershwin | 27 February 2010

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The prospect was so inherently unlikely — Nikolaus Harnoncourt fulfilling in the latter days of his career the dream of a lifetime conducting Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess — that I tuned in to Radio Three with low expectations, though with curiosity on high alert. The prospect was so inherently unlikely — Nikolaus Harnoncourt fulfilling in the latter days of his career the dream of a lifetime conducting Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess — that I tuned in to Radio Three with low expectations, though with curiosity on high alert. Coming to it as a doubter, potentially to mock, I was riveted at once, stayed the course and ended an enthusiast. The opera itself needed no such gyrations.

Lloyd Evans

Marital infidelity

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Serenading Louie Donmar, until 27 March Measure for Measure Almeida, until 10 April Genius detectors, busy in America, want us to meet the playwright Lanford Wilson. He hasn’t made much impact here possibly because his talent is so vast it can’t be hauled across the Atlantic. His 1970s play Serenading Louie focuses on marital infidelity in the suburbs, and English audiences are entitled to make comparisons with our home-grown chroniclers of bourgeois disenchantment. Wilson doesn’t stand much chance, I’m afraid. His static, pain-strewn narrative has none of the fun or sparkle of English suburban drama. And where Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, Alan Ayckbourn and Mike Leigh could manage one good line every couple of minutes, Wilson manages one every hour.

Kate Chisholm

Tapping into Robeson

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It was really difficult to tell where Paul Robeson ended and Lenny Henry began. The one-time stand-up comic was playing the black singer with the uniquely deep and passionate voice in Sunday night’s Drama on 3. Annie Caulfield’s intense, intimate play, I’m Still the Same Paul, looked at what happened to Robeson (1898–1976) after he came under surveillance because of his outspoken speeches demanding civil rights in America and his dubious enthusiasm for Stalin. ‘Whatever he thought was private in his life, we heard it. We knew it,’ says one of the spies who tailed him. Henry was just brilliant as Robeson; one of the best performances in a radio play I’ve heard in a long while.

Simon Hoggart

Recipe for success

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Things you never hear on Masterchef (BBC1, passim). The presenters: ‘Cooking doesn’t get more basic than this.’ The competitors: ‘Winning Masterchef would, frankly, make little difference to my already satisfactory life.’ And the chef in the restaurant kitchen where the contestants have to make lunch: ‘We’ve got very few people in today, so you lot can take it easy.’ What with Masterchef, Come Dine With Me and now Michael Winner’s Dining Stars (ITV1, Friday) it seems that sooner or later every amateur cook in the country is going to be rated. Nobody will just invite friends for supper any more. ‘Hi! Wonder if you’re free on Saturday to come round and award us points.

Ursula Buchan

Brains and brawn

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We have a picture hanging on a wall at home painted by Roger Fry about the time of the first world war and entitled ‘Pruning Trees’. We have a picture hanging on a wall at home painted by Roger Fry about the time of the first world war and entitled ‘Pruning Trees’. He portrays two men, one of whom is cutting off a very large bough from an apple tree, while the other is pulling the bough with a rope. Every winter, before I go out into the orchard to do my own apple pruning, I study it carefully, since I feel I need to remind myself what a highly regarded activity pruning has always been. I expect this is because it is a physical activity, like sex and cricket, which largely depends for its success on what goes on in the head.