The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Clive Crook is on good form today: I am a huge admirer of Damien Hirst. Not of the art, which is rubbish, but of the sheer productivity and exuberance he brings to his life's work of fleecing rich idiots. "Oh Damien, you're a genius. Screw me over again." "Why not," he says, munching a bacon butty. Quite so. And why not indeed?
Earth: The Climate Wars (BBC 2); Amazon (BBC 2); Tess of the d’Urbervilles (BBC 1) A Church of England official has issued an apology to the descendants of Charles Darwin for the Church’s ‘anti-evolutionary’ fervour towards his Origin of the Species. I wonder if in about 150 years’ time the BBC — presuming it still exists which I won’t let it do, I promise, once I’ve become your emperor — will make similar amends for having been wrong about absolutely everything from Israel, Europe, Islamism and multiculturalism to women, children, animals and, above all, global warming.
Ancient Landscapes — Pastoral Visions: Samuel Palmer to the Ruralists Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, until 19 October Don’t be misled by the title: although in its entirety this is a wide-ranging exhibition, it was organised by Southampton Art Gallery (and thus draws heavily on that remarkable permanent collection) and was originally intended for a much larger musem. In Bath, restrictions of space mean the show had to be cut in half — but like an earthworm, both halves have continued to flourish. Part 1 dealt with the historical context, the Samuel Palmers, the Graham Sutherlands and the Paul Nashes, and Part 2 comes up to date with the Brotherhood of Ruralists.
Don Giovanni Royal Opera House La Rondine Peacock Theatre This latest revival, for which the opening night received a great deal of publicity, and which began with Tony Hall, the Royal Opera’s chief executive, welcoming Sun readers and bidding them to come again — but at what price? — sported as distinguished a cast as any the production has had during its six years, and Charles Mackerras in the pit; yet it failed to achieve any momentum, and if it had succeeded, it would have lost it shortly after acquiring it. I’d be interested to know to what extent the revival director Duncan Macfarland got the singers to develop their own conceptions of their roles.
Igor Toronyi-Lalic looks back to the early 20th century when organs were in their heyday ‘As in England, in America the organ is King,’ wrote the French organ-composer Louis Vierne in 1927, following a phenomenally successful three-month tour of America and Canada. His 50 recitals had drawn in around 70,000 obsessed fans, including some 6,000 at the Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia alone, home to the world’s largest organ. There was a time, not so long ago, when the organ and its practitioners were at the top of the musical pile.
Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray Sadler’s Wells I often wonder whether in a society so greedily obsessed with the commercial acquisition of good looks Dorian Gray’s disquieting handsomeness and prolonged youth would still mean anything. Liposuction, steroids, laser hair-removal and impossible fitness programmes have eroded and detracted from what once was the notion of ideal beauty, transforming the exceptional into the unexceptional. This is, in my view, the core problem of Matthew Bourne’s latest and much-hyped creation, Dorian Gray.
Although I spend my time working with counterpoint, and know jazz is as capable as any other sort of music at yielding the greatest delight in it, how jazz musicians organise their ‘compositions’ remains a complete mystery to me. I could more easily write a symphony than join in with a jam session. Are they improvising or aren’t they? If they are, how is it they all seem to agree on what the next chord should be? If they are not — and copies of notated music are regularly in use — how is it that the soloist of the moment is always applauded as if he or she has just invented the most amazing break ever heard?
Pineapple Express 15, Nationwide Pineapple Express is a ‘stoner’ comedy from the seemingly inexhaustible, super-producer Judd Apatow and, in its defence, probably wasn’t made with a middle-aged housewife such as myself in mind. As it is, I’ve only ever done pot once and did not like it (my knees went). Apatow was, of course, also behind the huge hits Superbad and Knocked Up, neither of which I have seen — too busy lining drawers with lavender paper; that sort of thing — although I did recently rent Knocked Up on DVD for my teenage son when my ten-year-old niece happened to be staying. Alas, I’m afraid I had no idea how unsuitable it was until, midway through the film, my niece sought me out to ask: ‘Deb, what’s an orgasm?
Saint François d’Assise Royal Albert Hall As the climax of the Proms centenary of Messiaen, The Netherlands Opera brought his vast opera Saint François d’Assise to a sadly uncrowded Royal Albert Hall. And by Act III there was room for the prommers to lie in the arena as if they were fellow recipients of the stigmata. Given the contemporary taste for the gigantic in music, I find that odd, though Saint François does make exceptional demands on its audience, not to mention its performers. The performance was musically, for the most part, on an exalted level. But I think it was a grave mistake to demi-semi-stage it: three small benches, a mingy cross in Act I — that was the ‘scenery’.
On the latest Spectator letters page you'll find a response by Robert Weide to Toby Young's Status Anxiety column last week. Weide's the director of the forthcoming film of Toby's semi-autobiographical book How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, and he objects to Toby's account of the actress Kirsten Dunst's on-set behaviour. As Weide puts it, “After reading unwarranted internet criticism of Ms Dunst for having Toby ‘banned’, I thought someone needed to print the truth.” And that "truth" is? You'll have to click here to find out. P.S. Also among the new magazine content is Fraser Nelson’s article on immigration, which he previewed yesterday. And Rod Liddle asks: Have we ever faced an enemy more stupid than Muslim terrorists?
It was the final of Maestro on BBC TV last night and I have been glued to every episode. Despite being extremely wary to begin with at the thought of a bunch of amateurs plunging in to try their hand at something so complex as conducting, a skill that requires years of study to master, I became entirely fascinated by just how much the participants managed to learn and the different ways in which they approached the challenge. They all became more and more serious about it and more entranced by the music they were dealing with.
Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress Leicester Square Theatre Liberty Globe Sons of York Finborough Let’s hear it for those ageing babes and their one-gran shows. Hip, hip, hip-replacement. Britt Ekland and Elaine Stritch are already at it, and here comes Joan Rivers who wastes no time wasting the opposition. ‘Anyone see Elaine Stritch? Wonderful show wasn’t it? Mind you, it was all me, me, me, me, me, me. “I understudied Ethel Merman. And I drank. I worked with Noel Coward. And I drank. I tried to seduce Rock Hudson. And he drank.”’ At 75, Rivers is easy on the eye, like a well-set egg custard in a wig.
Francis Bacon Tate Britain (sponsored by Bank of America), until 4 January 2009 At Tate Britain is a glorious centenary show of paintings by one of our greatest modern painters, Francis Bacon. It’s more than 20 years since the last Bacon retrospective at the Tate, but the Bacon industry has been chugging steadily away in the interim. His studio — which the Tate declined, astonishingly — was transported to Dublin, and opened there with much fanfare over the vast archaeological operation of decoding the layers of source material and detritus which comprise the studio floor.
If you’re able to read this magazine on Saturday in an unchanged world, it’s probably safe to assume that Wednesday’s gigantic experiment with particle physics has not brought about the catastrophe that some doomsayers have predicted. Big Bang Day was the moment when the scientists at the great Cern laboratory under the Alps finally switched on the Large Hadron Collider which they have been designing for the last 20 or more years in an attempt to replicate the moment when the universe was created. Billions of particles will be accelerated round a tunnel 27 kilometres in diameter at the speed (almost) of light; what happens when they collide will be detected and recorded.
Lloyd Evans talks to the Donmar’s artistic director Michael Grandage about his Wyndham’s venture It might so easily have gone wrong for Michael Grandage. In 2002 he was appointed to succeed Sam Mendes as boss of the Donmar Warehouse. Mendes would be a hard act for anyone to follow, let alone a director with just seven years’ experience behind him. But if anything Grandage has outshone his luminous pre-decessor, winning acclaim for heavyweight revivals like Schiller’s Don Carlos and taking the Donmar’s reputation overseas with Frost/Nixon, which transferred to Broadway, and his acclaimed version of Guys and Dolls, which had a successful run in Melbourne.
RocknRolla 15, Nationwide Guy Ritchie’s career has been in the doldrums recently. Having tried to remake Swept Away, then following it up with a Kabbalah-inspired remake of The Prisoner, he’s finally seen the error of his ways. He has now remade Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and the result, while hardly a classic, is a big improvement on Revolver. Not that I’ve actually seen Revolver, but according to Rotten Tomatoes, a website that keeps track of these things, it was one of the worst reviewed films of the year. RocknRolla is merely mediocre. Comparing RocknRolla with Lock, Stock, it is hard to pinpoint exactly what has gone wrong for Guy Ritchie.
Tory Boyz Soho Sick Room Soho The Pretender Agenda New Players The Conservatives were once a party of proud Etonians and closet homosexuals; now they’re a party of closet Etonians and proud homosexuals. This is the background to Tory Boyz, a new play by James Graham for the National Youth Theatre which examines the shifting attitudes of the Tory high command to gays within their ranks. Clumsily arranged, the play opens with the age-old question about Ted Heath and then shifts to a group of ambitious researchers whose only connection with Heath is that they work in his old office.
Fandom can be a lonely place. If you love a band, truly love a band with that slightly teenage desperation you hope never to grow out of (until they make a substandard record and you abandon them forever), it’s a love affair like no other. Other fans may love the same band, but they love them differently. My favourite band, as I may have mentioned in this space once or twice, are Steely Dan, a pair of jazzy old perversities now in their fourth active decade. My friend Mitch is also a fan, and every time the group release a new album we have roughly the same conversation on the phone: me enthusing ridiculously and saying it’s the best album they’ve made in years, and him saying he’s not so sure and really it’s not a patch on The Royal Scam (1976).
Painting Family: The De Brays, Master Painters of 17th Century Holland Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 5 October Cecil Collins — A Centenary Exhibition Monnow Valley Arts Centre, Middle Hunt House, Walterstone, Nr Abergavenny, Herefordshire, until 14 September I must say I admire museums and galleries that put on exhibitions devoted to the revival of lost reputations, in other words to a genuine spirit of reassessment. In these revenue-dominated days, exhibition organisers are driven increasingly in the direction of guaranteed best-sellers, and the crop of predictable subjects on the gallery circuit grows apace. So it is refreshing to be greeted by a relatively unknown name, and have a whole exhibition attached to it.
Love and Other Demons Glyndebourne I only caught up with Glyndebourne’s newly commissioned opera at its penultimate performance. It was a courageous thing to put on a work by a composer as little known in this country as Peter Eötvös, and was rewarded at the seventh performance with a respectably full house. It isn’t a difficult opera to follow or grasp, and though I was not especially impressed by it, in fact find it a weak piece, I have nothing but admiration for the élan with which it was presented, with the conductor Vladimir Jurowski giving a very strong lead. The long programme note by Edward Kemp helps to explain what the central pre-occupation of the work is supposed to be, though that is already indicated by the title.
The Duchess 12A, Nationwide The Duchess is probably no more than a most handsomely mounted costume drama which is no bad thing if you happen to like handsomely mounted costume dramas, and I do, I do, I do! Lavishly directed by Saul Dibb, whose previous work (the gritty London film Bullet Boy; the TV drama series The Line of Beauty) I liked a great deal, it has stupendous frocks, ravishing hats and more stately homes than you could shake a stick at, not that I’d advise shaking a stick at a stately home. These days, security will have you off the property before you can even buy a tea-towel in the shop, and then what will you have to show for your day out? It also has its Colin Firth moment — is this now obligatory?
Weddings! You couldn’t avoid them on Radio Four this week. As if Usha plighting her troth with Alan not just once, but twice, on The Archers Omnibus was not enough, those who were up early on Sunday might have been surprised to find themselves like flies on the wall listening in to the real-life wedding of Steve and Zoe. Instead of the usual hymn sandwich, Sunday Worship proudly presented us with a slice of real-life drama. Actually, it was a recording of a ceremony that took place on 8 August, rather than a piece of radio-verité, so even this bit of ‘reality’ was not quite kosher. We were not really being witnesses to the solemnisation of Steve and Zoe’s marriage, but were rather hangers-on to a bit of radio history.
Before I get on to TV, can I tell you about my horrible health-scare thing, oh, can I, can I? Right, well I’ve been having this horrible health-scare thing and I’ve been out of my mind with worry — to the point where I’ve been saying, ‘Oh, please, God, let it just be cancer...’ Very likely it will prove in the end to be all purely psychosomatic — I am the most dreadful hypochondriac: not that that stops it feeling any less real — and what I’ve vowed to do if I come out the other side is to stop whingeing about my life so much.
For five years I served on the Broadcasting Standards Council, and there I encountered a riddle whose resolution has eluded me. The BSC has passed into history. Its function was really just to exist, and by existing to provide politicians and broadcasters with a plausible answer to complaints of the kind made by the late Mary Whitehouse — a responsibility now assumed by other regulators. Our job was to censure rather than censor. We took it seriously. The required monitoring was hard work. But not always dull work.
King Idomeneo Birmingham Osud Royal Albert Hall Last year Birmingham Opera Company imported La traviata from Verona, and performed it to huge and enthusiastic audiences. Result: the Arts Council, in its infinite malignant imbecility, axed its grant, along with that of many other institutions which survive on an annual budget that would keep one of the metropolitan ‘centres of excellence’ going for a week or two. Gratifyingly, the outcry was such that the BOC was ‘reprieved’, and, to demonstrate how up and running it is, has staged one of Mozart’s most impressive but lengthy and demanding operas in a disused rubber factory on the outskirts of Birmingham.
Time to pay tribute to New Tricks, which ended its most recent run on BBC1 this Monday. The penultimate episode had 8.9 million viewers, which meant that more people watched it that night than Coronation Street. It has a good claim to be the most popular programme on television. All of this brings much satisfaction. For one thing, New Tricks is everything a TV marketing man hates. It is about older people. It probably appeals to older people. Marketing men have a set of beliefs which are quite as irrational as any cult religion. One is that only young people are worth advertising to, since they are crazed neo-philiacs and can be persuaded to switch brands, whether of cars, cook-in sauce or toilet cleansers.
Can this really be true? And if so, is it hilarious or horrifying? Or, perhaps, both... David Gest and, of all people, Michael Jackson are recording an album of Robert Burns' poetry: Gest's spokesman said the album is a modern musical take on some of Burns' classic poems, and had been a long cherished project. He explained that he and Jackson were originally planning to do a musical about Burns's life, but decided instead to turn his poetry into show tunes. Poems featured on the album include Ae Fond Kiss and Tam O'Shanter, the story of a man from Ayr who stays too long in a pub and witnesses a satanic vision on his trip home. Gest is now keen to tackle Red Red Rose, he said. "We haven't changed the lyrics but the music is now modern and brought up to date," Gest said.
The first-ever visit of this ardent Wagnerite to his festival at Bayreuth coincides exactly with my 20th anniversary of contributing this column to The Spectator. How satisfying to combine them! Whatever reservations, the experience of seeing all seven mature music dramas within nine days in Wagner’s own theatre was pretty mindblowing. I’ll begin by setting the scene. Arriving by rail, the initial aspect of the little town is somewhat humdrum — an impression later dispelled as one grows familiar with layout and feel.
Love National Gallery, until 5 October It’s that time of the year — some call it the Silly Season — when a themed exhibition visits the Sunley Rooms of the National Gallery, after previously showing at Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery, and the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne. This is the seventh in a series of collaborative exhibitions organised by the NG in partnership with Bristol and Tyne & Wear Museums, and this year the selection of exhibits relies very heavily on the National’s collection, with only one work each borrowed from Bristol and Newcastle. Happily, there is no restriction to sourcing loans elsewhere, so the show does not lack variety and strength. If anything, its diversity makes the theme a tenuous cohesive device.