Arts Archives

And her hair hung over her shoulder tied up in an Orange velvet band…

A splendid Daily Telegraph obituary of Sammy Duddy, a, er, colourful figure in Loyalist paramilitary circles: Sammy Duddy, who died on October 17 aged 62, had a rather unusual curriculum vitae for a member of the Loyalist paramilitary Ulster Defence Association in having been a drag artiste who went by the stage name of Samantha. During the 1970s the self-styled "Dolly Parton of Belfast" became well known on Belfast's cabaret circuit, presenting a risqué act in Loyalist pubs and clubs, dressed in fishnet tights, wig and heavy make-up. Once he even performed for British troops on tour."I wore a miniskirt many a time," Duddy remembered, "but it was usually a long dress, a straight black wig, a pair of falsies I bought in Blackpool and loads of make-up to cover my freckles.

22 October 2007

Fraser Nelson

Hollywood goes to war

Just out of the Lions for Lambs premiere in Leicester Square. It is the latest of Hollywood's celluloid attacks on the White House, and a call to arms. The plot: Tom Cruise is a senator with presidential ambitions giving a reporter (Meryl Streep) an exclusive on his latest strategy in Afghanistan - ongoing as they talk. It backfires and two soldiers end up stranded on an Afghan mountain top, hoping they're rescued before the Taleban arrive. Robert Redford (who plays a university professor, trying to talk those two soldiers out of signing up) directs. His message is that it is time for good people (Democrats) to intervene, and stop the war. As his character says, "Rome is burning, and the problem is not the people who started this. They are gone.

Matthew Dancona

Who would have thought it?

There is a long tradition of the pop intelligentsia getting involved with academe or publishing -- Pete Townshend’s work as an editor for Faber being the obvious example, Jah Wobble’s labours over Blake’s poetry rather less so. Sir Paul McCartney was the driving force behind the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts. The Spectator’s own Alex James is the best bassist of his generation, and lived the pop life to the full, but he also has the cerebral firepower to hold his own in an academic common room or editorial meeting. So there ought to be nothing unsettling about the Smiths’ former guitarist, Johnny Marr, becoming a visiting professor of music at Salford University. One only has to hear, say, the opening chords of “How Soon is Now?

20 October 2007

Henrietta Bredin

Opera lives

Anyone tempted to think that opera might be a dying art only had to be at the Grand Theatre in Leeds on Tuesday night or the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden last night to discover that it is triumphantly and thrillingly alive. On Tuesday, for a performance of Madam Butterfly, I sat surrounded by a group of fabulously dressed-up 16-year olds, mostly female and every one of them chattering or texting busily until the moment the lights dimmed and the music started. From that moment they were all on the edge of their seats and silent except for the occasional sharp intake of breath or sigh of pleasure.

Robert Gorelangton

Packing a punch

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It’s a good month for the Great War. At the National Theatre this week a new play by Michael Morpurgo tells the story of the war seen through the eyes of a horse. Staged with huge puppet nags, War Horse sounds on paper like the theatrical lovechild of Equus and Birdsong. Up in Bolton, with a good deal less hype, they are doing another war horse — Oh! What a Lovely War. It was first staged in 1963 by the radical Theatre Workshop, in the East End. The Great War satire was aimed at the political edification of the working class, but sadly for the Revolution it quickly attracted posh nobs from Kensington, transferred to the West End and became a huge commercial hit and finally an all-star extravaganza film in 1969. The show remains a legend.

Andrew Lambirth

Restless mind

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For once a major blockbuster exhibition at the Tate justifies its size: the imaginative world of Louise Bourgeois is so potent and all-encompassing that a show of more than 200 works, from small experimental objects to large installations, seems not a fraction too extensive. Bourgeois, born in Paris in 1911, is famous — in this age of confession and determinedly autobiographical art — for her troubled childhood. Whereas most artists of this type foist their traumas on us raw, Bourgeois cooks hers to a turn. What is more, she has the imagination and creative vision to translate and transform her source material, transcending its personal impetus and making it universal.

Tom Rosenthal

Subversive narrative

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Paula Rego had a retrospective at Tate Liverpool a decade ago and a big show in her native Portugal, where she is properly regarded as the country’s greatest living artist, but both exhibitions seem niggardly in comparison with the more than 200 works shown in some 14 rooms at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Even to someone who has made a close study of her work, this is a revelatory, even overpowering, display of both her versatility and her passion. The exhibition has been curated by Marco Livingstone who, in his elaborate catalogue, includes as well as his own lucid introduction, refreshingly free of artspeak, a fascinating interview with the artist. Rego says of the ever-present threads in her oeuvre: ‘I think bullying and revenge run all the way through.

Deborah Ross

Familiar fantasy

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OK, here we have a fantasy film and I absolutely hate fantasy films. They bore me to hell and back, plus what if one day I don’t actually make it back? What if I end up stuck for all eternity in some place where, for example, everyone insists on speaking Elvish and having three-day message-board conversations about the story arc of Blake’s 7 or the nuances of Quidditch before going back to work on the helpdesk at the library? I accept this is probably my limitation; that my imagination is a dried, shrivelled-up husk of a thing, which does makes it simpatico with my face but does not make it simpatico with this particular genre. But there you have it and there I have always had it.

Michael Tanner

Indigestible fare

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It isn’t often that we get the chance to see a semi-opera, of which Purcell and Dryden’s King Arthur is a paradigm. And after seeing a competent production in Bury St Edmunds last week, I can’t say that I regret the infrequency of performances. This one was in the enchanting setting of the Theatre Royal, very recently restored and quite magnificent, a tiny theatre with excellent acoustics, and a fine example of English rococo. The production was a joint one with three German theatres, one of them the still more exquisite Markgrave’s Opera House in Bayreuth. The cast was of native English speakers, and the German audiences would have had an industrious evening reading the surtitles, for there is a vast acreage of text.

Giannandrea Poesio

Blurred boundaries

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Dance: Giselle — on love and other difficulties; Shaker As the blurb at the back of the programme says, it is well known that ‘Dance Umbrella celebrates and champions contemporary dance’. Yet the notion of ‘contemporary’ dance, once an artistically neat classification, has long lost its transparency. The vibrant and provocative combination of diverse performing idioms, techniques and genres that characterises today’s dance has indeed contributed greatly to blurring the boundaries of an historically defined artistic genre. It is not surprising, therefore, that ballet, namely the arch-opposite of contemporary dance, took centre stage last week in one of the world’s most significant platforms of new dance-making.

Kate Chisholm

Competitive edge

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Amid all the fuss about cuts at the BBC and how this will affect programme output, I can’t help thinking, why the outrage? For years, there have been dark rumblings among writers that there’s no longer a drama department to nurture young talent and commission new work — the Birtian revolution of the 1990s saw to that, and it did initially cause a sharp decline in standards, especially in the number and range of original drama productions. Over at Radio Three, the Controller Roger Wright has been attacked for not encouraging live performances of new music, but you could say he has brought other virtues to the network. Sometimes a financial squeeze on programme-making can have the effect of a health-ensuring purgative, getting rid of waste.

James Delingpole

Pointless bickering

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The thing I want to talk about this week is random and unnecessary tension-generation because it ruins almost every TV programme I watch and, once I’ve explained it, I like to think it will ruin all your TV viewing too. I’ll give you a classic example from Heroes (BBC2, Wednesday), a series to which I’m afraid I’ve become mildly addicted. I’m thinking of the episode where sinister Mr Bennet tries to stop his adopted daughter Claire from going to her prom-queen homecoming because he knows it’s her destiny to be attacked there by the evil serial killer Sylar. Does he a) say, ‘Look, Claire. I know about your superpowers. And by the way there’s a guy who’s trying to kill you, so best not go to the homecoming.

13 October 2007

David Jennings

The new seekers

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In Version 2.0 of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith will have a ‘preferred customer’ gold card for Googlezon, the corporation that results from the merger of the internet giants Google and Amazon. Google has completed its mission to organise all the world’s words, images and sounds and make them easy to find; and, once you’ve found what you want, Amazon sells it to you. By recording everything you purchase, look for, look at, listen to or read, Googlezon comes to know your tastes better than you yourself do. It serves you a personalised programme of recommendations and targeted promotions, all of these backed up with patented One-Click™ ordering.

Andrew Lambirth

Lost in translation | 13 October 2007

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Any show that sets out to be definitive encourages brickbats and controversy. When Charles Baudelaire called in 1863 for a painter of modern life, he was seeking the kind of artist who would do justice to the realities of contemporary existence rather than escape them as was the habit of the French Salon painters of the time. Eventually he lit upon the elegant though minor graphic talent of Constantin Guys (1805–92), unable to appreciate the towering genius of Manet who in fact precisely exemplified the painter he was looking for. Such is the short-sightedness of even the greatest critics.

John McEwen

Life and conflict

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Ever since he burst on the scene in the 1960s Michael Sandle RA has been the rogue elephant of British art. At Ludlow Castle, a perfect venue for work whose subject is war, both metaphorical and actual, his artistic power is irrefutable. This is a superb show. John Powis, who owns the castle, should be praised for his enlightened patronage and Judy Cox for curating with such panache. The event marks the inauguration of an annual sculpture exhibition of international standard. The selection covers the past 30 years of Sandle’s output, 18 bronzes and one fibreglass, most of it done when he was professor of sculpture at two of Germany’s leading art schools.

Charles Spencer

Happy days

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There was a piece in the Telegraph last week claiming that nearly two thirds of people over the age of 50 are happier now than at any previous time in their lives. We know there are lies, damned lies and government surveys, and at first sight this seems to be one of the least persuasive polls ever. Who could possibly prefer to be in their fifties than in their twenties, feeling the ache in their bones, realising they have probably had most of the sex they are ever likely to get, and knowing that their personal date with mortality is moving ever closer? I was just about to cast the paper aside with a Meldrewish ‘I don’t believe it’ when I realised that, actually, absurdly, I really am happier now than I’ve ever been before.

Giannandrea Poesio

Mechanical magic

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Dance: Transports Exceptionnels, Compagnie Beau Geste, Jubilee Gardens; Cast No Shadow, Sadler’s Wells Dance-making has come a long way since the days when a duet was the expected climatic bravura piece for principal dancers. Even before modern and post-modern challenges altered the traditional format of the classical pas de deux, 20th-century ballet-makers such as Mikhail Fokine had already revisited the old formulae in ground-breaking works such as Le Spectre de la Rose (1910). Removed from a larger context and left on its own as a complete performance, the duet soon became the favourite discrete artistic expression of many in the dance world.

Lloyd Evans

Pet hates

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Theatre: Present Laughter, Lyttelton; Moonlight and Magnolias, Tricycle; Dealer’s Choice, Menier Perhaps it was all a joke. In 1939 Noël Coward wrote a play starring a vain, bullying, self-obsessed, misogynistic diva called Garry Essendine. Himself, that is, with his worst faults exaggerated. He duly took the role into the West End and everyone duly loved him. But all subsequent productions have lacked the magic of Coward’s presence. In Howard Davies’s revival Alex Jennings very nearly manages the impossible and makes Garry’s non-stop narcissism adorable. It’s no dishonour that he doesn’t succeed. Garry Essendine is the light comedian’s Hamlet. Even the greatest attempts are partial failures.

Deborah Ross

Shut your mouth, dear

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Now, listen, and listen good, or I’ll come round and box your ears. Should anyone happen to say to you, ‘Shall we go see The Nanny Diaries tonight?’, you must answer, ‘No.’ There should be no need to embellish this. Just say ‘no’. It’s very simple. Practise it now. No, no, no, no, no. Should you not listen, and should you allow an ‘OK’ to pop out, you will not only prove yourself the lily-livered, pathetic, no-good shmuck I have always suspected you to be, but I will also have to box your ears — I know where you live — and I do not want to box your ears. Don’t you think I’ve got enough to do?

Michael Tanner

ENO gets it right

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As I sat contentedly watching the latest, and supposedly last, revival of Nicholas Hytner’s production of The Magic Flute last week at the Coliseum, I wondered why, when something is as serviceable and as flexible as that, it need ever be retired and replaced by another — which, to judge from recent experiences, especially ones at ENO, is almost certain to be vastly inferior to what it’s replacing. Only two evenings before I had suffered rage and contempt sitting in the same seat and watching the new Carmen, which will no doubt be dubbed ‘controversial’ by the management, on the basis of one idiotically favourable review.

Simon Hoggart

Special effects

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There is no end to the programmes about the land we live in: we have had portraits of Britain, the Britain we built, the coast of Britain, and journeys around Britain. There seems no aspect of the country that’s not been covered. The Beeb must be desperate. How about Underground Britain, Around Britain on a Milk Float, or Excitable Foreigners Praise Britain? I offer all those ideas free to whoever becomes the new controller of BBC1. In the meantime we have Alan Titchmarsh presenting Nature of Britain (BBC1, Wednesday), and it must be the most patriotic programme the Beeb has made in decades. I was whisked back to my childhood, when my primary school teacher, Miss Holt, told us that Britain was the finest country in the world in every respect, including the weather.

Kate Chisholm

Favoured few

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The only good thing about being stuck in crawling traffic at 9 a.m. on Monday morning was that it gave me the rare chance to tune in to Andrew Marr’s Start the Week on Radio Four, and even better to listen to it full-on instead of with my attention half-drawn to a weekend’s worth of emails or the previous night’s washing-up. It’s years since I’ve heard a whole edition of the programme, having got tired of its relentless plugging of the latest books. Hype usually backfires on me as the more I hear about something the less I want to read it. There’s nothing worse than deflated anticipation.

6 October 2007

Jane Feaver

From the horse’s mouth

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Following the National Theatre’s hugely successful productions of His Dark Materials and Coram Boy, an epic realisation of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse opens at the Olivier on 17 October. Originally published in 1982, the book was, the author told me, ‘the first I’d written that I thought was any good’. He has since written over a hundred books for children, but this is still one which is counted by them (and by his wife Clare) as one of his best. I went to see Morpurgo at his home in Devon to talk about the original inspiration for the story and the prospect of having the book adapted for the stage. Iddesleigh is an unbelievably picturesque village. It looks south, across to Dartmoor, one of the last true wildernesses in the country.

Andrew Lambirth

Bucolic pleasures

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It’s tempting to think we know everything about Henry Moore (1898–1986), household name that he is. As early as the 1950s, Percy Cudlipp was composing satirical ditties for magazines like Punch with rousing first lines such as ‘Don’t do any more, Mr Moore’, which suggests an over-familiarity perhaps bordering on satiety. But it’s all too easy to shoot down a leviathan — the most miserable shot can hardly miss. It’s far more profitable to consider Moore’s strengths and look at some of his real and substantial achievements. One of these was to make large-scale sculpture that looked at its best in the landscape. Moore always maintained that sculpture was an art of the open air.

Laura Gascoigne

Scottish love affair

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In 1838 the Duke of Sussex was presenting the awards for drawing at the Society of Art, when the silver medallist failed to appear. His Grace complained that he was taking his time, until someone pointed out the nine-year-old Mr J.E. Millais hovering below his line of vision. The Duke patted the young prodigy on the head and told him to write if there was ever anything he needed. Millais took up the offer, but not to advance his artistic career. Instead, he begged the Duke for the restoration of fishing rights for himself and his brother William in the Round Pond. That the painter of all those bloodless Pre-Raphaelite beauties should have had a passion for blood sports is not such a contradiction as it may seem.

Michael Tanner

Sinking spirits

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The opera season at ENO began with a new production of Carmen. It was an occasion so dispiriting that I’ve been toying with the idea that the management had decided on provoking a mass act of critical suicide in order to solve the seemingly endless crisis that the house has been in for several years, with one decent production being forgotten in the welter of catastrophes, either in choice of repertoire or execution or both. Carmen can seem to be a work that is too well known, but only inside a fairly hermetic fraternity, not to the whole theatre-going world, and it is the latter to which ENO is now addressing itself. Opera is the most difficult to produce of all performance arts, the one which is least tolerant of amateurism.

Marcus Berkmann

Knowing when to stop

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One of the rudest things you can ever say about a pop record is that it’s overproduced. We have all said it at some point in our lives, often before the age of 20, when you must repeatedly demonstrate to your contemporaries that you can hear the subtle differences between, say, Deep Purple and Boney M. In the punk years and afterwards, ‘overproduced’ was often used to describe any record that had been produced at all. In the late 1980s, though, overproduction became the norm. Bands like Tears For Fears were famous for spending weeks perfecting a computerised drum sound, when really a long holiday on a beach somewhere would have done them more good. More recently, overproduced has become a euphemism for ‘this band is using considerable quantities of cocaine’.

Deborah Ross

Saved by Jim

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Although And When Did You Last See Your Father? is probably not a great work of cinema, and may not even be a work of cinema at all — it could easily be 90 minutes of above-par Sunday night telly — it is touching and the cast are wonderful. That Jim Broadbent, can he do anything wrong? I don’t think so. I think he could recite the menu from Pizza Hut and somehow make it not just a must-see event, but poignant, too. How does he do that? I have no idea, as I know little about anything, but I do know this: Jim Broadbent saves this film, if it is a film, from what could have so easily been mush and sentimentality at every turn. And When...

Lloyd Evans

Dynamic duo

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If you can, get to Macbeth. Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood have set a benchmark that will remain for years. Never mind impersonating the murderous couple, these two look like the genuine article. Consider Stewart. That sly and lordly head, those inscrutable little eyes, the smirking menace, the sudden changes of temper. A king, easily, or a killer of kings. And Kate Fleetwood is the most terrifying Lady Macbeth I’ve ever seen. Imagine Lauren Bacall with the eyes of a cobra. There’s a coldness and cruelty about her so palpable that it seems an aspect of her nature, not of her art. And the sexual chemistry between them, the slow hungry greed of their embraces, suggests a violent eroticism.