Culture

Culture

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

Robin Holloway

Fab four

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The last of 2009’s remarkable concatenation of musical anniversaries was celebrated — if that is the word — by Radio Three on New Year’s Eve with a chat show in which each of the four great composers was allotted a defence by a noteworthy music lover, backed up by live phone calls for a brief, impromptu telegram, illustrated with well-chosen extracts from their works, subjected to dissenting discussion, and eventually put to the vote at the hands of the anonymous mass of listeners.

Deborah Ross

Mixed blessings | 30 January 2010

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Precious 15, Nationwide Claireece ‘Precious’ Jones is a 21-stone, illiterate, black, 16-year-old girl with a father who rapes her — not every day, but still — and a mother so insanely abusive that she throws televisions at her and force-feeds her hairy pig’s feet. (Not every meal, but still.) Precious has already had one child by her father — a Down’s syndrome girl, known non-affectionately by the family as ‘Mongo’, short for Mongoloid — and is pregnant with another. She describes herself as ‘just ugly black grease to be wiped away’, but is then dispatched to an alternative school where a saintly teacher works her saintly magic and, what do you know, Precious is precious, and worth something after all.

Lloyd Evans

Dealing and drifting

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Six Degrees of Separation Old Vic, until 3 April The Little Dog Laughed Garrick, booking to 10 April Even those who’ve never entered a theatre know the title. John Guare’s 1990 play, Six Degrees of Separation, tells of a penniless black hustler, Paul, who inveigles his way into New York’s upper-class society by claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier. The couple he bamboozles are art dealers. Wily, avaricious and insecure, they work without a gallery and instead operate in the shadows of parties and restaurants, like illicit bookies, speculating in works which they own briefly and then ‘flip’ to the next greedy broker or syndicate.

Kate Chisholm

Sound check

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Thank heavens for Chekhov! Master of the mundane, the boring monotony of daily life, the meaningless passage of time, he actually makes the random chaos, the pointless repetitions of day-to-day survival seem somehow rather beautiful. Or at least he helps us to realise that we’re all enduring the same feelings that life is useless and trivial and dull, so why worry. Just get on with it.  Radios Three and Four have been giving us a feast of the Russian writer (born 150 years ago), with plays, features, monologues. It’s been the perfect antidote to this drabbest of all Januarys, now that the snow has gone leaving behind layers of grimy grit through which a few timid bulbs are struggling to peep.

Simon Hoggart

Perfect pitch

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Our attitude to the past of our own youth is like our feelings towards an old grandfather: we love him, admire him for what he’s done, but, goodness, we don’t half patronise him. Our attitude to the past of our own youth is like our feelings towards an old grandfather: we love him, admire him for what he’s done, but, goodness, we don’t half patronise him. ‘Gosh, grandad, you mean if you weren’t at home, nobody could phone you? How did you find anything out without Google?’ Television does this mixture of affection and condescension very well. Rock and Chips (BBC1, Sunday) was John Sullivan’s prequel to his astoundingly successful sitcom Only Fools and Horses. It was set in 1960 and told the back story. But this was scarcely a comedy at all.

25 January 2010

Alex Massie

Hayek vs Keynes

This is superb. Friedrich August vs John Maynard. Rapping. Needless to say, if we were to have a real discussion and a real debate between FAH and JMK this election season then we'd have an election to look forward to. As it is no-one of any sense can be anything but terrified by the nonsense that is about to be unleashed upon us all. Guilty confession, mind you: I tend to live as a Keynesian while believing or at least suspecting hoping that Hayek is right. If we each contain multitudes we're also made of weakness and contradiction. Right? And yes, too many videos on this blog lately. Been a busy couple of days. "Proper" blogging to return soon.

23 January 2010

Andrew Lambirth

Do the locomotion

Arts feature

On the Move: Visualising Action Estorick Collection, 39a Canonbury Square, London N1, until 18 April The Estorick Collection, which specialises in modern Italian art, has mounted a series of rewarding exhibitions in recent years, all of which bear some essential relationship to its permanent holdings. Futurism remains the best known and most widely celebrated modern Italian art movement, and the current exhibition helps to put in context the Futurist obsession with recording movement through the static image. This display, curated by Jonathan Miller, offers a background to and explanation for the way in which the Futurists depicted movement by examining how animal locomotion was first represented and analysed through the developments in scientific photography.

Mary Wakefield

Keeper of the treasure

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It’s lovely here in the Art Fund director’s office, both elegant and cosy. Windows sweep from floor to ceiling, an Iznik bowl on a low table reflects the glow from a gas fire. But, even so, Stephen Deuchar doesn’t seem quite settled. It’s the way he moves warily across the room; turns to stare at his computer when it makes a noise. Do you feel at home here yet? I ask. ‘No, not yet. But, actually, being uncomfortable isn’t a bad thing.’ Deuchar sits down on a sofa opposite me and grins. ‘I know from having spent 11 years in my last job [he was founding director of Tate Britain] that it’s much easier to see things clearly when you’re uncomfortable and new.’ So what does Dr Deuchar see? Well, the Art Fund is a curious place.

Deborah Ross

Shifting power

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A Prophet 18, Nationwide A Prophet is an astounding, wholly gripping French film which is both a prison drama and a gangster thriller, and my guess is that, when it comes to the best foreign film category at this year’s Oscars, it’ll be between this and Michael Haneke’s White Ribbon. Obviously, I cannot say which will win, just as I can’t yet say what I won’t be wearing to the Oscars. Every year, it’s the same: they don’t invite me and I then have to worry about what not to wear. Should I not wear the oyster-pink chiffon? And, if not, what shoes am I not going to put with it? I do wish they’d stop not inviting me. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Lloyd Evans

Family tensions

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Greta Garbo Came to Donegal Tricycle Every Good Boy Deserves Favour Olivier Frank McGuinness, the world’s leading supplier of Celtic Kleenex drama, is back with a variation on his favourite theme. Misery upon misery bravely borne in a green, green island long, long ago. The twist is the addition of Greta Garbo. In 1967, the wandering superstar visited McGuinness’s home town of Buncrana in Donegal. This nugget of truth is decorated with fictional frills. McGuinness billets the melancholy hermit on an invented Irish family, the Hennessys, whose house has been bought by a society painter from England. The toiling Irish underlings are thus condemned to scrub and skivvy in a mansion their ancestors once owned. Family tensions are accentuated by this daily humiliation.

Michael Tanner

Ocean of ugliness

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Elektra Barbican La bohème Opera North In his little-read but wonderful book Daybreak, Nietzsche writes: Our composers have made a great discovery: interesting ugliness too is possible in their art! And so they throw themselves into this open ocean of ugliness as if drunk, and it has never been so easy to compose...But you will have to hurry! Every art which has made this discovery has turned out to have only a short time to live. Written in 1880, with Wagner in mind but unmentioned, the words fit Richard Strauss’s Elektra with uncanny precision. Everyone exclaims about Strauss’s alleged retreat from modernism after Elektra, but where was there to go?

Kate Chisholm

Confessions of a Cog

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There’s something about Chris. There’s something about Chris. Don’t know what it is. But his Radio Two breakfast show is so bright, so bouncy, so full of bonhomie, it’s irresistible. I just can’t turn it off — even though I know Evan and Jim are waiting patiently on the other side. By the weekend I was wondering how I’d cope without that blast of high-octane energy to wake me up. Yes, I’m going to have to admit it. I’m a Cog — and proud of it. He’s not, it’s true, blessed with Sir Terry’s smooth, seductive voice. It’s actually a bit hoarse and grating, and the decibel level is far too high for first thing in the morning when it’s still pitch-dark beyond the bathroom window.

James Delingpole

Glorious send-up

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Bellamy’s People (BBC2, Thursday) began life in 2006 as a spoof Radio Four phone-in show called Down the Line presented by ‘award-winning’ Gary Bellamy (Rhys Thomas) with the Fast Show’s Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse playing the various callers. Bellamy’s People (BBC2, Thursday) began life in 2006 as a spoof Radio Four phone-in show called Down the Line presented by ‘award-winning’ Gary Bellamy (Rhys Thomas) with the Fast Show’s Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse playing the various callers. Now it has moved to TV and its satirical target — not before time — are all those programmes where celebrities drive round the country meeting people and saying, ‘Isn’t Britain brilliant?

Ursula Buchan

Go west

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The gardening press in England is often criticised for being parochial. The Scots I meet never miss an opportunity to remind me of this but you could argue that Irish gardens and gardeners are more at the margins of our consciousness. Geographical distance is a major factor, of course, but against that must be set a common pre-20th-century gardening heritage — among the moneyed classes, at least — as well as a common language, temperate maritime climate and, in the case of Northern Ireland, citizenship. Indeed, if it were not for the impact made by an irrepressible trio of contemporary horticulturists, I suspect that Irish gardening would be largely ignored by English gardeners.

16 January 2010

Michael Kennedy

Mahler’s mass following

Arts feature

It is 150 years since the composer’s birth. Michael Kennedy on his remarkable popularity Approaching 60 years of writing music criticism, I have been wondering what I would nominate as the most remarkable changes on the British musical scene since I started. I decided there were three: the emergence of Mahler as a popular composer worldwide; the enthusiasm for the music of Janáček, especially his operas; and the establishment of regional opera companies. It is not as if Mahler’s music was completely unknown in Britain, even in his lifetime (1860–1911). But until about 1960 his impact on the general public was roughly the equivalent of, say, Szymanowski today. Now you cannot escape him.

Andrew Lambirth

Talk show

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The Conversation Piece The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 14 February A visit to the Queen’s Gallery is always a civilised, enjoyable experience. Apart, that is, from the airport-style security to which the visitor is subjected — a saddening sign of the retrograde times we live in. The treasures of the Royal Collection are worth any number of visits (I always want to see Gainsborough’s ‘Diana and Actaeon’ or Annibale Carracci’s ‘Head of a Man in Profile’, but there are plenty of other fine things), while the temporary exhibitions mounted in the side galleries are very often of the highest quality. One such is the current display devoted to The Conversation Piece, and subtitled Scenes of Fashionable Life.

Lloyd Evans

Living dangerously

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Rope Almeida Generous Finborough Oh dear, not this again. I’ve seen Hitchcock’s wonderfully creepy film Rope several times and I had little appetite for the Patrick Hamilton play on which it’s based. Big surprise. The film script was radically customised to accommodate the timid tastes of 1940s film-goers. The original, from 1929, is more daring, subtle, profound and psychologically interesting in every way. In fact, this isn’t just a masterpiece. This is one of those rare occasions in art when a mind of extraordinary power takes a stale genre — the repertory thriller in this case — tosses aside all the conventions and raises the format to a previously unimaginable plane of sophistication. Right from the first line Hamilton rewrites the rule book.

Patrick Carnegy

Magicking away misogyny

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Arabian Nights Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon The RSC’s Christmas show is a welcome revival by Dominic Cooke of his adaptation of Arabian Nights, first staged with great success at the Young Vic in 1998. This is also the first ‘family show’ in the Courtyard, and it was good there were so many children there to enjoy it on the opening night. The stories told by the beautiful Shahrazad to the King in hope of postponing her post-wedding-night execution are obscure in origin. But even the unexpurgated versions by Sir Richard (‘dirty dick’) Burton (16 volumes, 1885–88) run to no more than about 260 tales and not the thousand-and-one that legend would have us believe.

Charles Spencer

Walking on air

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Minicab drivers have a bad reputation for being dishonest incompetents and worse — a current poster campaign suggests that if a woman gets into an unlicensed cab she has only herself to blame if she gets raped — but down here in suburban Surrey they couldn’t be more helpful or reliable as I have had recent cause to find out. Just before Christmas, I skidded on ice in Dorset and my beloved VW Passat slid slowly and graciously into the iron railings of the picturesque bridge that runs over the River Brit in Netherbury. Having just driven off from a standing start, I was only travelling at a few miles an hour and time seemed suspended during my helpless slide across the ice.

Michael Tanner

Golden olden

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La bohème Royal Opera House Thanks to the cautiousness of the major opera companies over the festive season, I saw Puccini’s La bohème twice in five days, with another couple of productions to go. The most fascinating aspect, for me, of seeing the Royal Opera’s 577th performance of this masterpiece, in John Copley’s production from 1974, was to compare it with the shoestring production which I saw at The Cock Tavern in Kilburn on New Year’s Eve. Many dimensions of comparison suggest themselves, the most obvious being that of cost. Tickets for The Cock are £15, those for much of the Royal Opera House about £205, with even the centre amphitheatre at £89.

Simon Hoggart

Family values

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What’s your favourite Simpsons joke? This is mine: Lisa and Bart are having a row and Homer tries to stop them. ‘Oh, dad,’ one of them says, ‘we were arguing about which one of us loves you more.’ What’s your favourite Simpsons joke? This is mine: Lisa and Bart are having a row and Homer tries to stop them. ‘Oh, dad,’ one of them says, ‘we were arguing about which one of us loves you more.’ ‘Gee, that’s sweet,’ says Homer, or words to that effect. ‘She says I do, and I say she does...’ Mind you, working on the show does sound fun. When they have guest stars they try to get them to come to Los Angeles in person, though some, such as Tony Blair, are allowed to do it long-distance.

Kate Chisholm

Telling our story

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Back in the Sixties or Seventies it was TV that made the cultural running, showing off its photogenic qualities to make series that were supposed to change the way we thought about ourselves. Huge amounts of dosh were pumped into Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man as Clark swanned around the Western world displaying gems of creativity, while Bronowski did the same for our intellectual development travelling from Easter Island to Auschwitz and back. Now, though, TV is looking more and more like a blowsy old music-hall star, decked out with cheap glitter but unable to disguise its creaking lack of creativity.

10 January 2010

Alex Massie

Sunday Evening Country: Waylon again

Been a whole lotta time since Waylon was seen around here. Time to rectify that so here's the great man singing A Good Hearted Woman which is what every outlaw needs though since all mommas also know they really shouldn't let their babies grow up to be cowboys you'd think that means they'd be doubly hesitant to let their daughters hitch themselves to the outlaw bandwagon...

9 January 2010

Marianne Gray

Wry, clever and cool

Arts feature

A driven George Clooney tells Marianne Gray how important it is not to get typecast George Clooney arrived on British screens more or less a fully formed star. He had spent years trapped in American sitcom hell and by the time we got him he was in his mid-thirties playing the debonair Dr Doug Ross in the hit series ER. We never saw him as a young hopeful in embarrassments like The Return of the Killer Tomatoes or Murder, She Wrote, a TV show he describes as a junkyard for actors who become skeletons of themselves. He was delivered to us as Gorgeous George, the actor who could do no wrong. ‘Listen,’ Clooney comments amiably, when I meet him just before Christmas, ‘I was unfamous for a very long time and I’m enjoying being where I am now.

Andrew Lambirth

Fine line

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Drawing Attention Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 17 January Last chance to see a really excellent selection of works on paper from the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada. It’s a relatively new collection, begun in 1969, but despite that it includes many of the great names of Western art. From the Italian Renaissance to 18th-century France via England and the Netherlands, from German Expressionism to international abstraction, not forgetting a group of works by some of Canada’s finest, the collection maintains a hearteningly high standard. In the first room are the Italians, so good it’s difficult to know where to start. Stroll round the room a couple of times and see what particularly catches your eye.

Marcus Berkmann

Blast from the past

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I’m sure I’m not the only Spectator writer (or reader) who doesn’t watch television any more. I’m sure I’m not the only Spectator writer (or reader) who doesn’t watch television any more. Blame middle age, or lack of time, or the grim, brutal feeling that you’ve seen it all before and can’t be bothered to see it again, or in my particular case the eight years I spent working as a TV critic for newspapers. (In the eyes of one or two people I worked for, no longer enjoying telly would make me better qualified than ever to write about it.) But what with one thing and another, until Christmas Day I hadn’t sat down and watched anything on television (other than cricket) for about five months.

Michael Tanner

Cut-price treat

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La Bohème Cock Tavern The Enchanted Pig Linbury Studio Puccini’s La Bohème has oddly become the Christmas opera of choice, broadcast on BBC TV on Christmas afternoon (an especially ludicrous affair), and major opera houses dusting down their elderly versions. I doubt whether any of them will be as involving, indeed thrilling and upsetting, as OperaUpClose’s production at the Cock Tavern Kilburn, originally scheduled to run from early December to 20 January, but now extended by two full months, it is proving so popular. The Cock has seating for only 40, so that is not quite as amazing as it sounds, but given the comparative obscurity of the venue it is still impressive.

Lloyd Evans

Meddling with Molière

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The Misanthrope Comedy Molière is a genius but only in France. Play-goers here need some convincing that he belongs in the first rank. This new production of The Misanthrope shifts the action from 17th- century Paris to present-day London and turns the bickering upper-class lightweights into film-makers and their hangers-on. Gosh. What a breakthrough. Translator Martin Crimp has single-handedly discovered that the movie world is a sort of aristocracy. Call the Nobel committee. They need to hear about this guy. The most striking aspect of his translation is its incessant jangling lexical peculiarities. He’s decided to preserve one minor facet of Molière’s language, the rhyming couplets.