Arts Archives

Losing the plot

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Theatre: The Country Wife, Haymarket; Rent, Duke of York’s A rarity at the Haymarket. A new production of a straight play. Such is the despair over the creeping musicalisation of the West End that this feels less like a review and more like a life-and-death prognosis on a stricken prince whose wellbeing has become an obsessive hobby among theatre critics and other intellectual pseuds. First the bad news. William Wycherley’s 332-year-old sex romp is about as entertaining as I would be if I were 332. The plot is dazzlingly crass. Horner, a self-adoring womaniser, returns home from a spell in France and spreads the rumour that he has lost his genitals.

Peter Phillips

Do it yourself

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Vanity publishing is all the rage these days. Not long ago the idea of putting out something by yourself under an independent label, owned by yourself or one of your many dependents, was considered to be rather shoddy. There was really no replacement for winning a contract (important words) with one of the ‘majors’, whether record label or publishing house. The acumen of the people who ran these monolithic enterprises was held to be beyond reproach, whose glory reflected back on to the artists and writers they invited to join them. These ‘majors’ are no longer held in such high respect.

Deborah Ross

Poor Cate

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Already, the word is out that Elizabeth: The Golden Age isn’t up to much, and it isn’t. It may even be a dog’s dinner although, I should stress, not our dog’s dinner. Our dog, Woofie, likes sushi, which he eats tidily with chopsticks before cracking the top of his crème brûlée with a teaspoon. You’ve never met a dog more particular. But I would certainly use ‘dog’s dinner’ in the way it is generally meant, as in such a mess. Now, the question is: where to start? OK, how about the paralysing banality of the supposedly romantic scenes? How about the Queen inspecting her face in the mirror and berating it for its wrinkles when she doesn’t have any; not the one?

Marcus Berkmann

Pause for thought

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With ever longer gaps between albums, it’s becoming difficult to identify which rock stars are just having a quick lie-down, and which are actually missing in action. Retirement: now that is a bold career move. There must be a few old rockers currently eyeing the example of Joni Mitchell, who retired very noisily some years ago, saying she’d had it up to here with the music business, and is now back with a new album, a ballet, a new range of Joni action figures and maybe a fragrance or two to follow. It’s probably more sensible just to ease quietly out of the picture, which at least gives you the option of easing quietly back in again a few years later. In which case, what is going on with David Bowie?

Giannandrea Poesio

Blinking marvellous

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According to Tom Roden, one half of New Art Club’s dynamic duo, ‘audience participation is s**t’. I could not agree more, especially since public involvement has become the trite last resort many performance-makers turn to when short of ideas. Yet, if it is well handled, it can still work marvels, as the New Art Club’s The Visible Men demonstrated last Saturday. The work, non-stop comedy pyrotechnics and cutting-edge dancing, relies on a disarmingly simple though effective idea: viewers are told to open and close their eyes. In this way, the actions performed on stage by the two artists appear as frames of a movie which develops in a madcap sort of way through many unexpected twists.

Kate Chisholm

Conversation pieces | 3 November 2007

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There’s an endless amount of ‘chat’ on radio and TV, but how much ‘conversation’? A recent book by an American, Stephen Miller, reminds us of the difference between them, and how much we have lost by our obsession with argument, obfuscation, self-revelation, or should I say self-deception. Conversation, argues Miller in his thought-provoking book on the subject (published by Yale), used to be regarded as one of the arts. It should be an intellectual adventure, a chance to extend your experience of life, experiment with ideas, flex your wits, improve your understanding, as well as a source of pleasure and delight. It once was. ‘Honest conversation,’ says Dr Johnson, prevents the mind from being ‘empty and unoccupied’.

James Delingpole

Young Muslim Britain

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Peter Kosminsky’s Britz (Channel 4, Wednesday and Thursday) was heavily flagged beforehand as a drama that was going to annoy a lot of people. Naturally, I assumed that one of those people would be me. It came in two parts, the first telling the story of Sohail, a young Bradford Muslim recruited by MI5, the second about his sister, Nasima, who, would you credit it, becomes a suicide bomber. At the end, everyone dies. Kosminsky based it on interviews with British Muslims in ‘Leeds, Bradford, the Midlands and London’, though not, I suspect, with many people from MI5. Which is to say that the first episode felt more like Spooks than gritty, observational drama.

2 November 2007

Alex Massie

“Get Money”

You don't need to like - or know anything about - rap music or cartoons to still think this is pretty neat*: *Though not entirely safe for work since it would be plastered with warning stickers in the stores. But, sod it, it's Friday...

1 November 2007

Henrietta Bredin

Edmund Tracey RIP

Memorial services. Difficult to get right but potentially celebratory, contemplative, comforting and spiritually sustaining. Earlier today, St Paul's Covent Garden saw a gathering that was all of those things, in memory of Edmund Tracey, a wise, witty and gloriously cultivated man, Literary Manager for many years at Sadler's Wells, then at English National Opera. He worked in happier times for that beleaguered company and a splendid assembly of singers, conductors, directors and numerous others came together to celebrate him. I can think of fewer more thrilling experiences than adding one's own piping tones in 'Immortal invisible' to the soaring notes of Dames Josephine Barstow and Anne Evans, backed up by Graham Clark's Wagnerian tenor, with Martin Neary at the organ. Wonderful.

Henrietta Bredin

Deserved applause

Has there been enough about Wagner in the Spec lately? Well, just one tiny snippet more. Last night at the Royal Opera House saw what was possibly John Tomlinson's farewell performance in the role of Wotan/the Wanderer in Siegfried, the third opera in the Ring cycle. Taking the place of Bryn Terfel he has proved himself resoundingly and thrillingly to be, as he has been for some years now, the great Wotan of our day. And I shouldn't be at all surprised if he doesn't relinquish that role quite yet. The reception he received from the audience at the end of the performance made the hairs on the back of the neck stand on end - there's nothing quite like the sound of sustained applause accompanied by yells of excitement and the rhythmical drumming of feet.

31 October 2007

Matthew Dancona

Unmissable drama

I was lucky enough to see Shadowlands at the Wyndham’s Theatre this week and, if you haven’t been, you really should. William Nicholson’s play, originally a TV drama now best known for the movie version starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, is powerful stuff, a demanding distillation of C.S. Lewis’s personal battle with the problem of theodicy: why does a supposedly loving God allow suffering? Charles Dance and Janie Dee are great as Lewis and Joy Gresham, the American divorcee with whom the ultimate Oxford bachelor found himself hopelessly in love and whom he nursed as she died from cancer. There are also fabulous performances from John Standing as Professor Christopher Riley and Richard Durden as Lewis’s brother, Warnie.

27 October 2007

Matthew Dancona

Rats to product placement

The magic of Pixar films - especially the Toy Story duet and The Incredibles - is that they appeal to adults as well as the children at whom they are primarily aimed. The latest creation of the CGI giant, Ratatouille, is arguably the best so far, and I certainly enjoyed it as much as my two young sons. No surprise then to read in today's Indy that there is a run on rats in the nation's pet stores. Product placement works at every level, it seems. I am just glad that we already have two gerbils.

Matthew Dancona

Matt Suggests

BOOK Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power by Robert Dallek: The double biography is a genre that, in the hands of a master, can shed fresh light on the most familiar materials. Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin is the example nonpareil and, more recently, Andrew Roberts has produced splendid volumes on (for example) Napoleon and Wellington. Funnily enough, I attended a lunch in Kissinger’s honour at Andrew’s house recently, as I was ploughing my way through Dallek’s majestic book which shows how the lives of these two very different men were interwoven and shaped the destiny of America in the second half of the twentieth century.

Andrew Lambirth

A well-kept secret

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One of the great things about having an area of specialism is the discovery of a new aspect to it. Since my teens, I have developed a particular interest in 20th-century British art, encouraged initially by a brilliant art teacher and by the writings of Sir John Rothenstein, quondam director of the Tate Gallery. Well, it’s a big area to cover, so for me new things are emerging all the time as my knowledge extends and my tastes change and develop. Charles Mahoney (1903–68) is one of those artists who had somehow slipped through the net of connections and cross-references I have gradually built up over 30 years of reading and research. Looking back, I realised I had come across his name from time to time but without the artist coming into focus.

Mark Glazebrook

Lifting the spirit

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Olaf Street sounds as though it should be in some Scandinavian city or other. No doubt there’s a street so named in several Norwegian towns, but there is also an Olaf Street in London W11, of mysterious origin. Could King Olaf II of Norway, fresh from asserting his suzerainty in the Orkneys, have decided to celebrate by keeping an English mistress in what was to become West Kensington a thousand years later? For those who can’t always afford taxis it’s an area which is now served, if somewhat erratically, by Latimer Road Underground Station and the 295 bus; but, whatever its beginnings, Olaf Street, London W11 is still off the beaten track and it’s a very surprising place in which to come across a large and exceptionally elegant modern art gallery.

Mary Wakefield

Close encounter

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Bill Clinton looks down at me with that famous, lazy grin. His perfect American teeth show bright white and his blue eyes lock on to mine. I take a few steps forward (who wouldn’t?) but as I draw closer something odd happens to Bill: his face blurs, its outline distorts, wobbling as if underwater. A few steps more and his features have begun to pixelate into small squares and the smooth pink of his cheeks has unmixed itself — separating out into a hundred different colours. Bill is going to pieces. Closer still, now eyeball to nostril with President Clinton, I lose all sense that I’m looking at a portrait: in front of me is an abstract painting — a vast grid-full of sherbert swirls: mauves, oranges, lemon yellow, fuchsia.

Lloyd Evans

Incapable of compromise

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Big date for Bohemians next month: 28 November marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Blake whose memory is honoured by every moth-eaten visionary, every babbling poet and every garret-bound artist flinging paint at a canvas. Nowadays, Blake’s eminence is universally accepted but the great mystery of his career is that his achievements, as both illustrator and poet, made such a feeble impression on his contemporaries. It didn’t help that he was widely thought mad. And he complained throughout his life of a ‘Nervous Fear’ that made him uneasy in company. Because of his visions his behaviour was often weird.

Laura Gascoigne

Ways of being

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Exhibitions 2: L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti: Collection de la Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti In terms of body shape, the week of the Rugby World Cup final was an odd choice for the Pompidou Centre to kick off a new exhibition of Alberto Giacometti, an artist whose attenuated vision of humanity seems better suited to Paris Fashion Week. In fact, those looking to apportion blame for size 0 models might well start with his spindly figures with platform-soled feet. In post-war Paris, Giacometti was himself something of a style icon. With his austerely sensuous face, rumpled tweed suits and ever-burning cigarette, he embodied existentialist cool. The camera loved him.

Susan Moore

What a waste

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Tons of sterilised domestic and industrial waste lay strewn across the gallery floor. Against one wall mounds of unidentifiable detritus are shrouded with ribbons of black tape like seaweed on rocks. Beyond, the work of sifting and sorting and baling recyclable material has begun. Despite the sanitisation, the place reeks. All around are the sounds of Guangdong — of the ships, the trucks, the machines and the people involved in processing the rubbish that the developed world has dumped in China. On the walls, in both Mandarin and English, a litany of statistics and quotations offers a damning indictment of the environmental and public health disaster of this ugly new China Trade. The irony of the venue is not lost on artist Liu Jianhua.

Stephen Pettitt

To finish or not to finish?

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Here’s your starter for ten. What’s the most famous unfinished piece of classical music in the world? Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, his Symphony No. 8, of course, which is usually played as a two-movement torso, bereft of the Scherzo and finale which a symphony of its provenance would normally include. Usually, but not always. The latest man to attempt to fill in the missing parts is the Russian composer Anton Safronov, whose version the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is due to play for the first time on 6 November at the Royal Festival Hall in London under the baton of Vladimir Jurowski, with performances both in the main evening concert at 7.30 p.m. and in a ‘Night Shift’ event beginning at 10 p.m.

Deborah Ross

Cut-throat world

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This is either a seriously good film with some flaws or a seriously flawed film with some good elements. I am hoping to work out which it is by the finish of this, otherwise I will have denied you a proper ending, and we all know how irritating that is. Eastern Promises opens with a throat-cutting slaughter in a barber’s shop — and why wouldn’t it? This being a David Cronenberg film — and then almost instantly cuts to the bloodied birth of a baby. Life and death, death and life, and all of it pretty brutal and all that. Nothing new here. Nothing to write home about. But, thankfully, the plot speedily and greedily surges forward.

Lloyd Evans

Horse play

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Here’s something new to ban. Writers who use the Great War as an emotional backdrop to their stories. It’s embarrassing to see so many authors marching up the alley marked ‘failure of invention’. And it dishonours the dead to use their blood as wallpaper. Sadly the subject is just too tempting. It’s our equivalent of the Oedipus myth. Jocasta is the war. Oedipus is the eager recruit. Their union leads to mutilation, chaos, death and a wave of blood-guilt spreading down the generations. Michael Morpurgo’s novel War Horse focuses on the millions of animals who died in the trenches and the NT has put the book on the stage to coincide with the Christmas shopping season. Nice day out. Death and horror followed by éclairs and new dresses.

Robin Holloway

A dark and stormy night

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‘Where were you when they crucified the Lord?’; when news of Waterloo was brought, or the Mutiny, or the Charge of the Light Brigade, or the death of Victoria? Thence into living memory and universal communications — when Edward VIII announced his abdication; when Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich with ‘peace in our time’; when VE, then VJ, were proclaimed; when the Suez débâcle shocked the nation; when JFK’s assassination shook the world. All these except the last are before my memory begins to go beyond feeding the ducks and collecting civic clocks (anything from the high street jewellers to Big Ben himself).

Giannandrea Poesio

Personal story

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Dance: Thierry Baë: Journal d’inquiétude, The Place: Robin Howard Dance Theatre; Shen Wei: Connect Transfer, Barbican So far, the two most thought-provoking performances I have seen in this year’s Dance Umbrella have both been French. But Compagnie Beau Geste’s duet between a man and a digger, which I reviewed enthusiastically two weeks ago, and Thierry Baë’s Journal d’inquiétude (Diary of Disquiet), which I saw last week, could not be more different. In Baë’s Journal there are no special technological devices or ideas, apart from a screen and a kind of fly-on-the-wall film. And yet both performances stood out for the same irresistible theatrical vibrancy.

Michael Tanner

Dream team

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Opera: Das Rheingold; Die Walküre Halfway through the second cycle of the Ring at the Royal Opera, I’m feeling far more positive than I could have expected. When I saw the separate parts of the work I found Keith Warner’s direction cluttered and confusing, Stefanos Lazaridis’s sets ugly and evidently unsafe, Antonio Pappano’s conducting wayward and sacrificing the grand design to fussing with details, and much, even most of the singing barely adequate, sometimes calamitous.

Simon Hoggart

Filth detector

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I wish Mary Whitehouse were still among us. In my teenage years, she was an invaluable guide to where the filth could be found on television — though to be frank most of what she disliked was disappointing: hardly titillating, and far from filthy. I suspect that if she were invited back to earth to see a special showing of Belle de Jour, Californication, and now Fanny Hill, she would realise with horror that her life had been in vain, and she would do whatever people who are already dead do instead of committing suicide. Andrew Davies is the adaptor who is famous for putting in the sex that the original writers left out, on the grounds that they would have included it if the mores of the time had allowed. Hence all those wet cambric shirts and heaving bosoms in Pride and Prejudice.

Kate Chisholm

Sense and sensibility

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Sex is never any good on radio. Think of all those excruciating scenes in The Archers — Sid and Jolene in the shower, or, for those addicts with a good memory, Shula on a picnic rug with that seamy journalist from the Borchester Echo. On radio, without the carefully crafted images of a film-maker and instead just the sound effects — splashy kisses and primeval squeals — it’s ludicrous. Worse still, when listening to sexual antics rather than watching them on screen you’re left with space in your head to wonder at the absurdity of a couple of actors standing at a microphone pretending to make all that noise.

26 October 2007

James Forsyth

Listen up

Tomorrow morning you’ll want to tune into The Week at Westminster on Radio 4, Matt will be presenting and he’s got some great guest lined up including Dennis Skinner, Gisela Stuart—whose comments on the European constitution have so discomforted Gordon Brown—and Malcolm Rikfkind who set the cat amongst the pigeons with his attack on Tory Europhobes in this week’s issue of The Spectator. The show airs at 11 and you can listen to it anytime after that on the programme’s website.

Matthew Dancona

No question about it, it was a great performance

Around Westminster today plenty of normally hard-bitten folk have been saying to me how good Fraser was on Question Time. He's far too modest to say it, so let me add my own congratulations, and here's Tim at Conservative Home (who is a very nice guy but doesn't dole out praise indiscriminately) doing the same. What do Coffee Housers reckon? A star is born, I'd say. (I just hope Fraser invites me on when he gets his own show).