Culture

Culture

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

Peter Phillips

Hints of the numinous

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There is something about the music of Arvo Pärt which does not sit well with Italian fascist architecture. There is something about the music of Arvo Pärt which does not sit well with Italian fascist architecture. Perhaps I am oversensitive, but vast stone lions and super-size friezes depicting epic battles conflict with Holy Minimalism in its most refined flights. Certainly Pärt’s music has its own grandeur and impressive spaciousness, but in the end it is a miniature artform, which cannot be said of much to do with Mussolini, certainly not of the Aula Magna in La Sapienza University of Rome. It is not that I am squeamish.

Lloyd Evans

Pale imitation

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11 and 12 Barbican, until 27 February A Life In Three Acts: Bette Bourne and Mark Ravenhill Soho, until 27 February Peter Brook, the world’s most maddening theatre director, returns to London with an adaptation of a novel set in the French colony of Mali in west Africa. Brook is never as bad as his critics hope nor as good as his fans dream. So he always disappoints somebody. 11 and 12 tells of a schism within an oppressed Muslim sect. Some worshippers recite 11 verses of a certain prayer, others 12. The tiff intensifies and the French authorities order a crackdown. This dispute neatly encapsulates the seismic pettiness of religious controversies but the bust-up isn’t pursued very far.

Kate Chisholm

Death in the afternoon

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After weeks of waiting, it was all over in a matter of seconds. Weeks in which I’ve listened to every episode, just in case. Weeks of enduring night after night the awe-inspiringly-dull Annette and Helen saga. Weeks of wondering how The Archers’ scriptwriters would cope with the death last October of Norman Painting, the actor described as ‘the lynchpin’ of the longest-running radio soap. Would they try to replace him, or simply do away with his character, Phil Archer? Then, when it came, we were given so much advance warning it was as if Health & Safety had visited BH and told the Controller: there’s to be nothing sudden, or too frightful.

James Delingpole

Missing Maggie

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The closer we get to the Great Disappointment — aka the forthcoming Heath administration — the more I miss Margaret Thatcher. The closer we get to the Great Disappointment — aka the forthcoming Heath administration — the more I miss Margaret Thatcher. Just how much I was reminded by Michael Cockerell’s new series The Great Offices of State (BBC4, Thursday). This particular episode was about Surrender Monkey Central — aka the Foreign Office — and featured Maggie in her pomp, eyes ablaze, holding forth on the only way to deal with jumped-up foreigners like Galtieri. ‘I’m not in the business of appeasement. It is not part of my psyche!’ she declared. ‘You can’t negotiate away an invasion!’ she said.

Robin Oakley

Cruising along

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Taxi touts outside greeted me with a hopeful ‘Bula’. Mynah birds squabbled in the jacarandas and teenagers on the nearby parkland were throwing long passes with a rugby ball. Not quite your average UK betting-shop setting, but this was the Fiji branch of Grants Waterhouse. I had stepped in seeking a little inspiration for the talk I was to deliver the next day to the Cunard liner Queen Victoria’s passengers on the joys of horse-racing. (It’s a tough assignment, but somebody has to do it.) And, given Mrs Oakley’s developing taste on board for Pina Coladas and White Ladies, a little profit would have done no harm.

13 February 2010

Marianne Gray

The Russian connection

Arts feature

Marianne Gray talks to Helen Mirren about her latest film, for which she’s had an Oscar nomination The first time I met Helen Mirren was at the Berlin Film Festival in 1985 when she was playing a Russian cosmonaut called Tanya Kirbuk in Peter Hyams’s space epic 2010. She laughed about having to learn Russian phonetically so she could say ‘roll the condensers’ and ‘send up the pod’ with an authentic Moscow accent.

Neil Clark

An actor from the age of elegance

Features

I don’t think I have ever been so nervous before a telephone call. I had written to Ian Carmichael, via his agent, to ask if I could interview him for an article I was writing on the late Dennis Price, who had played Jeeves to Carmichael’s Bertie Wooster in the 1960s BBC series The World of Wooster. Carmichael had written back to say that he’d ‘try to oblige’ if I telephoned him at his North Yorkshire home. ‘I don’t think I’ll be very much help,’ he added. ‘Dennis was a very private man.’ Hardly encouraging. I was nervous because Carmichael, like Price, was a hero of mine.

Andrew Lambirth

Feasts of colour

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Gillian Ayres at 80 Alan Cristea Gallery, 31 & 34 Cork Street, W1, until 13 March Claude Monet Helly Nahmad Gallery, 2 Cork Street, W1, until 26 February Birthday greetings are in order for Gillian Ayres, who has just celebrated her 80th with an exhibition of new work of undiminished vigour, inventiveness and sheer uplift. One of our leading abstract artists, Ayres manages to keep on surprising us with large-scale paintings of superabundant vitality despite her own poor health, and with images of pronounced joy. However, her work is not all high spirits. The celebration of colour which distinguishes it is made with the full and certain knowledge of personal extinction (though may that moment be long delayed).

Marcus Berkmann

Good year for the obsessive

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This may seem a little late to be talking about albums of the year. You might even ask, which year? and with reason. (I have already read three times that beloved cliché of January album reviews: ‘early contender for album of the year’.) But everything is so cheap at the moment, and Amazon knows we cannot resist its blandishments for long, having emailed me twice with special offers since I started writing this piece. Happily, it has been another good year for the music obsessive: there is just so much out there that begs your attention. As always, this is a strictly subjective selection, limited by my budget and very particular tastes, which I’m aware aren’t everyone’s.

Lloyd Evans

Losing the plot

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Really Old, Like Forty-Five Cottesloe, in rep until 20 April Stage Fright Canal Café, until 20 February This is what the National is for. A little-known writer Tamsin Oglesby has been given a chance to shine on the Cottesloe stage. Her Alzheimer’s play sets out to give the age-old issue of old age a brisk shake-up. We’re in the near-future. A sinister new health trust, The Ark, has been set up to grapple with the problem of granny-management. Ruthless bureaucrats discuss hardline policies. Motorway-style lanes should be imposed on pavements to allow athletic pedestrians to speed past dawdling wrinklies. A new wonder-drug has been discovered whose hidden side effect is death. ‘Ten per cent of old people suffer from dementia,’ says the chief policy-maker.

Michael Tanner

Family values | 13 February 2010

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Lucia di Lammermoor English National Opera, in rep until 26 February When David Alden’s production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor was first staged by ENO two years ago it was so beset by cast illnesses that it was difficult to tell to what extent the director’s intentions were executed. Even so, the musical side of things, under Paul Daniel, was admirable.

Simon Hoggart

Past perfect

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Last week I had the pleasure of lunching with Michael Medwin, who is the only surviving member of the cast of The Army Game (ITV, 1957–61). Last week I had the pleasure of lunching with Michael Medwin, who is the only surviving member of the cast of The Army Game (ITV, 1957–61). He is 86 now, but amazingly sharp and chipper, still an active and successful impresario. He is anxious that the show is not forgotten, because in its day — shortly after the start of ITV — it was the most popular programme on television.

Alan Judd

Caveat emptor

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A weekly airdrop of Exchange & Mart was the luxury I used to think I’d choose when the producers of Desert Island Discs realised who they’d been missing all these years. A weekly airdrop of Exchange & Mart was the luxury I used to think I’d choose when the producers of Desert Island Discs realised who they’d been missing all these years. But now, I fear, it would be access to eBay, that wonderful source of 24-hour auto-porn, plus everything else. Just to browse — I’d have nothing to bid with, of course, though that needn’t stop me. Wonderful though eBay is, it should be negotiated with care.

6 February 2010

Ariane Bankes

‘If he couldn’t paint, he couldn’t live’

Arts feature

Ariane Bankes talks to the widow of Arshile Gorky, whose retrospective is about to open at Tate Mougouch Fielding opens the door to me looking a little gaunt but as beautiful as ever, though I have not seen her for a couple of years. She is in her late eighties, but no less stylish now than when we knew her as children; we were mesmerised by her chic, her gravelly voice with its hint of an American accent, her sense of fun and the faint whiff of excitement that enveloped her. When she was about 17, my father, then working in China, helped her ashore from a capsized sailing dinghy and fell in love with her on the spot. She was then Agnes Magruder, daughter of a captain in the American Navy stationed off Shanghai, and her youthful romance with my father evolved into a lifelong friendship.

Deborah Ross

Game without frontiers

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Invictus, 12A Nationwide Gosh, Clint Eastwood will keep thinking of new ways to impress us, the cheeky little monkey. First it was the Dirty Harry and the spaghetti western characters and then he shifted to the director’s chair and ever since it’s been one different thing after another: Unforgiven; Mystic River; Million Dollar Baby; Flags of Our Fathers; Letters from Iwo Jima; Changeling and now Invictus, which tells the story of South Africa coming together for the 1995 rugby world cup. This is not a nuanced film, or even a sophisticated one. It has a story to tell and unapologetically tells it, often quite cheesily, Richard Attenborough-style.

Andrew Lambirth

Island inspiration

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Chris Ofili Tate Britain, until 16 May There’s always something temporary-looking about an installation of Chris Ofili’s early paintings. These works are not hanging on the wall, but lean against it, propped up on feet of elephant dung — the best-known ingredient of this Turner Prize-winning artist’s work. As a consequence, the exhibition looks as if it’s still in the process of being hung, and these elaborately decorated and largely trivial paintings have yet to be hoisted on to the gallery walls.

Michael Tanner

Distorted account

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Così fan tutte Royal Opera Phaedra Barbican When Jonathan Miller’s production of Così fan tutte was first mounted at the Royal Opera in 1995, it was the Armani clothes which received the most attention. Over the years there have been many modifications, and it now bears little relationship, certainly in the direction of the singers, to its original conception.

Lloyd Evans

Blunt instrument

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Enron Noël Coward Fool for Love Riverside With Enron, the playwright Lucy Prebble has picked an almighty task. The Texas fuel giant collapsed in 2000 with $30 billion worth of debt, which at the time was the largest bankruptcy in the history of money. The firm’s bosses flipped through the almanac of bent accountancy and lighted on a hoary old swindle. A shadow company was created to buy up their loss-making assets thus boosting profit margins and forcing the stock price skywards. To get the auditors to sign off the paperwork Enron simply bribed them. Anyone hoping to find any ingenuity or sophisticated elegance in the fraud will be disappointed. Money is a very blunt instrument in this play. So is the writer’s technique.

Charles Spencer

Anything goes | 6 February 2010

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God and the editor willing, next month’s column will be the 100th ‘Olden but golden’. God and the editor willing, next month’s column will be the 100th ‘Olden but golden’. For those who write in The Spectator every week, this would doubtless seem small beer. For a monthly column it feels like a landmark and one I sometimes doubted I would reach. And of course I may not.... As any journalist will tell you, every piece you write has the potential to be your last. ‘Olden but golden’ began in October 2001, and I was pleased as Punch to be allowed to do it. Pop music has been a big part of my life since 1963, when I was eight and first discovered the Beatles.

Kate Chisholm

Displaced families

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Imagine, if you will, that it’s 1922 and you’re living in a small mountain village thousands of miles from Istanbul above the shores of the Black Sea. Imagine, if you will, that it’s 1922 and you’re living in a small mountain village thousands of miles from Istanbul above the shores of the Black Sea. You’re a practising Christian, and there’s a tumble-down cruciform church in the central square, with an icon of the Virgin hanging above the altar. Life until now has been ruled by the Ottoman Turks, but you speak a version of Greek handed down from the days when this part of Asia Minor was ruled by the emperors of Byzantium based in Constantinople.

James Delingpole

Broken Britain

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I’ve got another brilliant idea for a TV series. I’ve got another brilliant idea for a TV series. It’s called MPs Walled Up in Scorpion-Filled, Ebola-Ridden, Plague-Rat-Infested, Acid-Drenched, Radioactive Tower Block of Slow Hellish Screaming Death. All right, so the title does give away the premise, slightly, but I’d still watch it, wouldn’t you? 24/7. Done right — with special feature-length episodes devoted to Ed Balls, Harriet Harman, and the Milibands — I reckon it would be more satisfying than Band of Brothers, The Sopranos, Das Boot, South Park, The Simpsons and University Challenge rolled into one. And from me, that’s quite an accolade.

2 February 2010

Alex Massie

The Problem with Mo

David enjoyed the Mo Mowlam biopic Channel 4 showed on Sunday; I wish I could say the same but am not surprised that I can't. (You can watch it here, incidentally.) Yes, Julie Walters was just as excellent as one imagined her to be and, yes, it's carping to complain about what wasn't in the film (though an acknowledgement that the Peace Process didn't start on May 2nd 1997 would have been usefu) and it can't be terribly surprising that the movie gives the impression that the Peace Process was somehow Mowlam's own possession. Despite that I thought the film was, in terms of the politics of the matter, quietly devastating.

1 February 2010

Alex Massie

Monday Night Country: Gillian Welch & David Rawlings

Bryan Curtis has an excellent piece at the Daily Beast on the current state of country music. Well, the state of commercially successful, Grammy-nominated country music anyway. As you might expect, it's depressing stuff. Basically, you have a choice between Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift and perhaps the best that may be said of this is that it might be marginally less gruesome than the era of Shania Twain and Garth Brooks. Marginally. As Bryan explains: To reduce Taylor vs. Carrie to style points would be a mistake. Their music has deep thematic differences, too. If you favor Swift, you are embracing a Weltanschauung that says that all of life is a high-school melodrama. Swift’s aesthetic is unapologetically teen angst; her songs can be divided into “Yay!

30 January 2010

Peter Phillips

The first Romantic

Arts feature

Peter Phillips on the life and times of Chopin, who was born 200 years ago The year 1810 may seem a little late to look for the beginning of the Romantic movement in music, but with the births of Chopin, Schumann and S.S. Wesley one could make a case. Think of the difference in the lifestyles of these composers, especially Chopin’s, when compared with those of their immediate predecessors. Where Mozart was tied to a court and lived more or less the life of a servant, these three travelled as they liked, the original freelancing musicians. Where Haydn was emotionally tied to the Church (and physically to a court), only Wesley relied on the Church for employment, and was famously outspoken about the low standards he found there, making himself thoroughly unpopular.

Luke Coppen

Welcome to the age of Gaga

Features

Unpredictable, spectacular, bold and contentious — Lady Gaga is the perfect pop star for the 21st century, says Luke Coppen In 1903, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a letter to a young man who yearned to be a great artist. ‘In the deepest hour of the night,’ the German poet advised, ‘confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself: must I write?’ It’s fair to say that Rilke never imagined his words would end up tattooed on the arm of a pop star with a penchant for porcelain bikinis and flamethrower bras. Lady Gaga, who has sold eight million records in the last 18 months, claims to read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet every day.

Lloyd Evans

All change at Hampstead

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As Ed Hall takes over the Hampstead Theatre, Lloyd Evans offers some advice on how to run this prestigious venue Congratulations, mate. You’ve landed a plum job. And a bloody tough one, too. Paradoxically, it’s harder to run a single venue than to run a group of theatres. The focus is tighter. There’s less opportunity to experiment, to learn as you go, to fine-tune your style. You have to get it right fast. Here are some hints. First, where are you? Since moving to its new premises in 2003, the Hampstead has barely left a trace on London’s theatre scene. Many play-goers have yet to pay their first visit. You’re a product in a marketplace but you’re invisible.

Andrew Lambirth

Extremes of joy and suffering

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The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters Royal Academy, until 18 April Sponsored by BNY Mellon From time to time we need to remind ourselves of the astonishing fact that Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) produced more than 800 paintings and 1,200 drawings in a mere ten-year career. He also wrote letters, of a depth and originality that qualify them as literature in their own right. So much to offer the world, such a sense of discovery and originality, yet he took his own life while still in his thirties. For decades, Van Gogh has been the artistic god of the self-taught and the misunderstood, making a particular appeal to the adolescent mind. I remember devouring my first book on him in an unusually quiet school dormitory during an influenza epidemic.

Michael Tanner

In sight of the <em>Ring</em>

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Anniversary-consciousness is no doubt primarily commercially driven, certainly in the music world, where the fact that a scarcely remembered composer has been dead for exactly 300 years is a reason for featuring him as This Week’s Composer on Radio Three, but more importantly for many record companies to persuade us that it is time to revalue his contribution to the Orpheus myth, the first to have a bass hero, etc., etc.