Arts Archives

Great escapes

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It’s been difficult enough in this age of instant Googlification to wait even 24 hours until the next instalment of Radio Four’s latest Dickens serial, Our Mutual Friend, is given its 15-minute airing. It’s been difficult enough in this age of instant Googlification to wait even 24 hours until the next instalment of Radio Four’s latest Dickens serial, Our Mutual Friend, is given its 15-minute airing. So how did Dickens’s Victorian readers survive a whole month before the next instalment was published and they could at last discover the fate of Eugene Wrayburn? Or the truth about John Rokesmith?

Ursula Buchan

Spring promise

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Last autumn, I issued a self-denying ordinance. I would not allow myself to plant a single solitary tulip in the garden, except in the large terrace pots. This was because the varieties planted in the open ground had become hopelessly muddled over time, so I wanted to clear the borders of them. We are often told that bulbs are envelopes of secret spring promise buried in autumn, or some such thing; however, the adamantine imperative of a spring-flowering bulb’s requirement for a period of dormancy in summer means you cannot, to save your life, find them in July or August, when you need to dig them up.

Andrew Lambirth

Word pictures

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Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting Hayward Gallery, until 10 January 2010 Apparently, Ed Ruscha (born 1937 and pronounced Rew-shay) is widely considered one of the world’s most influential living artists. American, he has been based in Los Angeles all his working life, and is much indebted to the strategies and formal devices of film-making. Reference books tend to call him a Pop artist, in recognition of his interest in popular culture, and his exploitation of branding and presentation. (An early painting features one of those distinctive red boxes of raisins smashed flat to the picture plane.) His admirers want to distance him now from the Pop label and talk about conceptual art and surrealism.

14 November 2009

Henrietta Bredin

Dallas bucks the trend

Arts feature

Henrietta Bredin talks to Spencer de Grey, architect of the new opera house in Texas There can’t be a gesture much more brave and defiant than building a new opera house in the current doom-laden financial climate. Deep in the heart of Texas, in the centre of its freshly revamped arts district, Dallas has done exactly that. The project was awarded to Foster and Partners and has been the brainchild and chief responsibility of Spencer de Grey, whose previous work includes the Great Court at the British Museum and the Sage music centre in Gateshead.

Alex Massie

Saturday Morning Country: Laura Cantrell

Yay! Another young, still-to-reach-their-prime performer! I like Laura Cantrell heaps. She has something. Here she is performing When the Roses Bloom Again. A nice, properly mournful song that is, in its title anyway, a spin-off of an old Carter Family tune that itself is reminiscent of some of the old Border ballads and, thus, a reminder of how much good country music is still linked to songs from these parts...

Deborah Ross

Male power

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The White Ribbon 15, Nationwide Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, which won the Palm d’Or in Cannes, is coldly manipulative and, in a way, probably quite facile but, God, it is good. It is so powerfully intriguing that, for 143 minutes, I did not shift in my seat, yawn, sigh, strain to read my watch or even drift into thinking what we might have for dinner (I’d already decided, anyhow; chops). It is set in a small village in Protestant northern Germany just before the first world war and, like Haneke’s other work — Hidden (Caché, 2005); The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste, 2001); Funny Games (er...

Peter Phillips

Words are not enough

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Stravinsky once said that music was powerless to express anything at all. Leaving aside the niceties of whether a rising scale can at least represent something hopeful or aspiring, his music, like so much music, does nonetheless have the capacity to express the spirit of an age. Since this is a much vaguer undertaking than trying to depict a concrete verbal image in sound — like bird song, or a drunken man, or climbing a ladder — it is surprising how successful composers have been at it. Unwittingly successful, I guess, since how would you deliberately set about writing a piece to capture 2009? I became aware of this while watching some of my favourite television soaps — like The Tudors — or Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man.

Giannandrea Poesio

Bare essentials

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Triple Bill The Royal Ballet Although George Balanchine’s 1957 ballet Agon is not based on a Greek myth, it is traditionally regarded as the third instalment of the ‘classical antiquity’ series, following Apollo (1928) and Orpheus (1948). Inspired by the competitive displays of physical bravura that were so popular in ancient Sparta, Agon marked a significant stage in the development of Balanchine’s choreographic aesthetic. It is in Agon, in fact, that the dance-maker’s ‘stripped-to-the-essential’ formula found its most vivid first expression.

Charles Spencer

Peel appeal

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If someone had asked me last month when it was that the revered Radio One DJ John Peel had died, I’d have said a couple of years ago. If someone had asked me last month when it was that the revered Radio One DJ John Peel had died, I’d have said a couple of years ago. In fact he died in Peru on 25 October 2004, while on a trip for the Telegraph’s travel pages. This is one of God’s many cruel tricks on His creation. As one grows older, time passes more quickly. Just when you want each day to last longer, it becomes shorter, until you feel that life is hurtling you towards your terrifying appointment with mortality with positively unseemly haste.

Kate Chisholm

Quiet courage

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‘Listeners may find some of the content disturbing,’ said the announcer before the programme began (a warning that was also given in the Radio Times). ‘Listeners may find some of the content disturbing,’ said the announcer before the programme began (a warning that was also given in the Radio Times). You’d have thought we were about to hear a particularly raunchy play, or some horrific accounts of death by torture, murder or old age. Behind Enemy Lines (Radio Two, Saturday) was shocking at times, and needed to be. That was the point. John McCarthy, the Beirut hostage who was held captive by Islamic Jihad for almost five years, talked to others who had been imprisoned not for crimes committed but because of political hostilities and race hatred.

11 November 2009

Andrew Lambirth

Risqué associations

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Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill Royal Academy, until 24 January 2010 Supported by BNP Paribas and The Henry Moore Foundation It’s an unlikely grouping, this alliance of Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska and Gill. In many ways, this should be an Epstein solo show, or possibly an Epstein and Frank Dobson show (to link two key modernist sculptors who currently deserve reassessment), but neither of those interesting permutations would have pulled in the crowds. The popular appeal in Wild Thing is Eric Gill’s unorthodox sex life and the fact that the young rebel Gaudier died so romantically fighting ‘pour la patrie’ in the first world war (currently very fashionable).

Michael Tanner

Top of the class

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L’assedio di Calais Guildhall School of Music and Drama This is the time of year, before the long hibernation of opera companies sets in, when there is sometimes a choice of several operas per night, many of them performed by the schools of music, which often seem to adopt the unintelligent course of having their performances on in the same week. This year, however, it is possible to go to the Guildhall School this week, the Royal Academy next week, with Semele conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, and the Royal College the week after that to see The Magic Flute.

James Hamilton

Present, conserve, explain

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‘Thank you. It’s magnificent,’ said Philip Pullman as he opened the new extension at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford at the end of October. ‘Thank you. It’s magnificent,’ said Philip Pullman as he opened the new extension at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford at the end of October. And magnificent it certainly is, a triumphant reinvention of the Ashmolean, with 39 new galleries being added in this inspired development designed by Rick Mather Associates. The orientation of the museum has been radically altered, bringing archaeology and antiquity into the foreground.

Lloyd Evans

Darwin revisited

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Origin of Species Arcola Seize the Day Tricycle Oh, not again. Yup, I’m afraid so. I had no wish to return to the vexed topic of Darwinism but a much-praised show in east London tempted me out on a frosty night to the Arcola theatre. Bryony Lavery’s new play has a storyline that’s as nutty as a Christmas cake in Broadmoor. Molly, an archaeologist working in Africa, smuggles the skeleton of a female hominid back to her home in the Yorkshire Dales. The unearthed Neanderthal springs to life and Molly proceeds to school her in the amazing truths of evolution. The characters in this bizarre educational farce are symbolic rather than human and the show is more a dramatised lecture than a play.

Simon Hoggart

Spectator sport

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The X Factor (ITV, Saturday and Sunday) is the most popular show on television at the moment. I felt I should watch it so that you don’t have to. It’s very loud. There is a lot of clashing and banging and whooping and whooshing. A voiceover booms at you, and the presenter shouts at everyone. The audience sounds as if it’s on something which might not trouble Professor Nutt but could cause grief to Alan Johnson. The slightest remark makes them cheer or boo irrationally. It’s very camp and ironic. The two male judges — Simon Cowell and some Irish bloke called Louis — constantly niggle at each other, but it has the fake air of all-in wrestling, being mildly amusing but entirely unconvincing.

7 November 2009

Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 7 November 2009

The Wiki Man

I recently read of a music writer who believes the perfect pop song lasts precisely two minutes and 42 seconds. Crazy though it sounds, he may be on to something. Try ordering your iTunes collection by duration and you may find as I did that songs of that length seem slightly better on average than any others. For the record, mine include ‘Michelle’, Elvis’s ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’ and ‘Love me Tender’, Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, Josephine Baker’s ‘Si J’étais Blanche’, ‘California Dreamin’’ by The Mamas and the Papas, ‘The Wanderer’ by Dion and the Belmonts and ‘This Charming Man’ by The Smiths.

Kate Chisholm

Sharp as an arrow

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Four couples but only three available bedrooms is the brilliant stratagem devised by Alan Ayckbourn for his 1975 relationship comedy Bedroom Farce. Four couples but only three available bedrooms is the brilliant stratagem devised by Alan Ayckbourn for his 1975 relationship comedy Bedroom Farce. It’s being revived at the Rose Theatre in Kingston in repertory with a rather different take on coupled life, Strindberg’s Miss Julie, for an aptly named season, ‘Behind Closed Doors’. The three separate bedrooms fill up the unusually wide lozenge-shaped stage of the new Rose (modelled on the Elizabethan original) as our four couples writhe and wrangle under the spotlight of Ayckbourn’s all-seeing, all-knowing wit.

Giannandrea Poesio

Bad boys

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Mark Morris Dance Group Sadler’s Wells Michael Clark Company The Barbican Sleeping Beauty Royal Opera House Last week, the 2009 Dance Umbrella season rolled merrily towards its end with performances by two former ‘bad boys’ of the choreographic world. Luckily, neither event looked anything like those boyband comebacks the music industry thrives on these days. After all, Mark Morris and Michael Clark never cease to amaze and enthral audiences, thus remaining, Peter Pan-like, ‘bad boys’ for much longer than actual boyhood. Interestingly, they both presented recent works that allowed seasoned dancegoers to take the pulse of their current artistic creativity.

Michael Tanner

Glorious Gershwin

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Porgy and Bess Royal Festival Hall Artaxerxes Linbury Studio Cape Town Opera has been on tour in the last ten days, taking its production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess to Cardiff, the Southbank Centre and Edinburgh. I went to the first of the two London performances, staged but without scenery. The action took place behind some of the orchestral players, with the rest either side. That is not an ideal situation, but nevertheless Gershwin’s finest score came across with enormous impact — in fact, I was freshly astonished at how much finer this work is than anything else he wrote. Whereas, I gather, the production is set in Soweto, at the Festival Hall it wasn’t set anywhere at all.

Deborah Ross

Deprived of emotion

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Bright Star PG, Nationwide The most curious thing about Jane Campion’s Bright Star is that I did not cry, even though I was certain I would. I always cry in films. I cry at the drop of a hat. I cry when it only looks as if a hat might drop. I am continually alert for all hat-dropping possibilities. I cried when Rachel returned to Ross in Friends, and that’s an American sitcom. On TV! And this is about the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, which began when he was 25 and she was 18, and finished with his death from tuberculosis at 25. This story is sadness itself, and yet I did not cry, unless a very slight welling-up towards the end counts, which I don’t think it does.

Marcus Berkmann

Mythic quest

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An old friend of mine has a list of books he wants to buy. It’s very long and he is very disciplined (so he tells me), so when he goes into a bookshop and sees something else he wants, something that isn’t on his list, he doesn’t buy it, as anyone else would. No, he writes down the title of the book on a piece of paper, goes home, adds it to the bottom of his ‘master list’ and when the book reaches the top of his ‘master list’, he goes out and buys it, even though, by this time, the book is long out of print and he has in fact died of old age. So obviously I mock him relentlessly, as is only appropriate with your oldest friends. But I seem to be reaching a similar point with CDs.

6 November 2009

Alex Massie

Friday Afternoon Country: Lyle Lovett

Because, frankly, from Afghanistan to Texas to the corridors of Whitehall and the Bank of England, it's been a pretty bleak week it's appropriate to bring Saturday Morning Country forward by a few hours. This Lyle Lovett song - If I Had a Boat - always cheers me up. Added bonus: with its dreams of boats and ponies and ifs and ans and all the rest of it you may also read it as an arch critique of the promises politicians feel compelled to make and that we, because we want to believe, choose to take at more than face value. Not merely boats for all, but ponies on each and every boat too...

4 November 2009

Andrew Lambirth

Unholy alliance | 4 November 2009

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Damien Hirst: the Blue Paintings The Wallace Collection, until 24 January 2010 John Walker: Incoming Tide Offer Waterman & Co, 11 Langton Street, SW10, until 14 November Weeks ago, when the review schedules were first plotted, I had thought to include here a feature on Damien Hirst. Although I find his work unremittingly thin, I thought I would give it another chance. After all, he is showing new paintings he’s made himself rather than instructed a studio to produce. But the results are so feeble and insignificant that detailed execration (however enjoyable) is more than they’re worth.

Lloyd Evans

Street culture

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What Fatima Did... Hampstead Mrs Klein Almeida What Fatima Did... is billed as a play. Really, it’s a fugue, a variation on a theme, a crude and boisterous tone poem. The plot is deliberately small-scale. A gang of fun-loving inner-city sixth-formers are shocked to learn that one of their pals, Fatima, has forsaken Western values and adopted the nijab. Her boyfriend George is hit hardest by her betrayal, and he retaliates by showing up at a costume party dressed as a medieval crusader. This gesture doesn’t quite work now that the flag of St George has been reinvented as a multicultural symbol. To freak Fatima out properly he’d have to dress as Adolf or Enoch. That aside, this slender and skilfully elaborated drama is an outstanding piece of entertainment.

James Delingpole

Near flawless

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A few months ago my wife said something to me so awful and shocking I contemplated divorce. ‘I don’t want to watch any more war programmes with you,’ she said. ‘It’s like watching paint dry.’ Imagine, then, my secret joy when, right near the end of Into the Storm (BBC2, Monday), I detected beside me on the sofa the hint of a promising snuffle. It was VE Day. The King was on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, beckoning Winston Churchill to come and join him. As soon as he did, the crowd erupted with joy and gratitude. I glanced sideways just in time to catch the wife sneakily wiping a tear from her eye. ‘Yes!’ I inwardly exclaimed. ‘Victory.

Alan Judd

Dependable or exotica?

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Two visitors this month. One, the latest iteration of the VW Polo, now in its fifth generation and with ten million Polo ancestors. The other, a 1968 Bristol 410 whose ancestors can probably be numbered in the hundreds and siblings in scores, maybe dozens. The first was for a week, courtesy of VW, the second is for a few months, courtesy of a friend who wants to sell but wants it used while he’s away. Think Polo and you think smaller Golf, runabout, district nurses, retired primary- school teachers, reliable, sensible choice for modest budgets.

31 October 2009

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 31 October 2009

Columns

Watch what you say. There may be people around who haven’t really been listening ‘Say what you like about servicemen amputees,’ said the comedian Jimmy Carr on stage last week, ‘but we’re going to have a f–—g good paralympic team in 2012.’ Odd to see Patrick Mercer, of all people, calling on him to resign. From what, though? From leaving the house? Maybe Mercer thought this self-employed stand-up comedian was somebody else. Some sort of junior minister for Agriculture and Fisheries, perhaps. Scottish, obviously, with a name like Jimmy. Maybe one of those fat ones who used to hang around with Michael Martin, who all have faces like sanctimonious haemorrhoids. ‘He said what? Well, he should bloody resign. Like I had to.

Patrick Carnegy

Lovers in the Levant

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Twelfth Night Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon It’s a welcome refreshment after the RSC’s recent dramatisations of hard drinking and mass starvation in Russia to be landed on the sun-soaked coast of Mediterranean Illyria, and especially so in the company of a new and exquisitely beguiling Viola. Director Gregory Doran has been to much scholarly trouble in updating Shakespeare’s pirate-infested Illyria to Byron’s Albania. There, when visiting the court of a notorious warlord, Byron rhapsodised ‘The Turk, the Greek, the Albanian and the Moor/ Here mingled in their many-hued array’. Doubtless there were atrocities enough around the corner, but Doran has always been strong on devising exotic Mediterranean settings for Shakespeare’s comedies.

Tom Sutcliffe

Troubled Wexford

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The new Wexford Opera House has certainly raised the profile of opera in Ireland. You cannot argue with a prize-winning building that is one of just four large purpose-built opera auditoriums in these islands, alongside Glyndebourne, Covent Garden and the Wales Millennium Centre. Built with Irish taxpayers’ money, it would be a sick Irish joke to mothball the place within a year of its grand successful opening. Yet the Wexford Festival’s obsession with traditional dress-code (black tie, long frocks) adds to the feeling that opera belongs to a class with alien tastes. Meanwhile, even the Abbey Theatre — which scoffs the lion’s share of Irish performing-arts subsidy — has no permanent ensemble.