Culture

Culture

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

Toby Young

Clash of cultures

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The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Peter Shaffer’s 1964 play about the conquest of the Incas The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Peter Shaffer’s 1964 play about the conquest of the Incas, contains one of the most famous stage directions in modern drama: ‘They cross the Andes.’ On the face of it, these four words are completely preposterous. How could a theatre company possibly create the illusion that a 4,000-strong army is crossing a mountain range? Yet there was method in Shaffer’s madness. By including a stage direction that was impossible to follow naturalistically, he was forcing directors, actors, set designers, and so on to fall back on their ingenuity.

Robin Holloway

Dream again

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Pointillisme — impressionism by numbers Pointillisme — impressionism by numbers: stand back, let the dots join up all by themselves, and the image judders into focus whatever the subject or lack of. In a month of volatile mobility I can offer no more than a stipple of blobs, musical moments snatched at or accidentally impinging, as Alice grabs at the marmalade, or thinks of Mabel, in the plunge down the chute that precipitates her Adventures.

Michael Vestey

Office politics

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The slot at the end of The Westminster Hour on Sunday evenings (repeated Wednesdays) is rarely dull and often quite informative. The last two maintained the consistency — the first, ‘The Gentleman Usher’, had an interview with a former Black Rod, Sir Edward Jones, explaining the nature of his work; and last Sunday’s, ‘The Lloyd George Papers’, presented by Trevor Fishlock, took a two-part look at the letters of Lloyd George. The office of Black Rod, by its traditional nature, seems to irritate many people, particularly those who hate the past or who are ignorant or unappreciative of history.

17 May 2006

Rod Liddle

A big thank you to Guy Goma: the wrong man in the right place

Features

This year’s most compulsive television viewing came on BBC News 24 last week, when they interviewed the wrong man. They were doing a story about the legal battle over registered trademarks between the computer company Apple and the Beatles’ record label, Apple Corps. They intended to speak to an acclaimed information technology expert, Guy Kewney, but some hapless researcher went to the wrong reception area and somehow brought into the studio Guy Goma, a Congolese business graduate with an extremely limited grasp of the English language. One of those identikit, bloodless and chirpy News 24 anchor babes carried out the interview regardless: Mr Goma’s answers were wonderfully uninformed and, because of his accent, almost unintelligible.

Neil Macgregor

Spreading the word

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In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Read in the name of your Lord Who created. Read and your Lord is Most Honourable, who taught to write with the pen, taught man what he knew not. Two texts from the Middle East, St John’s Gospel and the Holy Qur’an both proclaim the primacy and authority of words. The Evangelist’s Word is the eternal creativity of God which, in Jesus, became flesh: the Word Incarnate. In the passage from the Qur’an — the first of the Prophet Mohammed’s revelations — God announces his intention to use the written word to spread truth for all to read and learn: the Word Inscribed. In Europe, we long ago divided the thinking word from the pleasing image.

Martin Gayford

Bones of contention

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All over the world, scholarly folk look to Neil MacGregor — who writes opposite — to hold the line. All over the world, scholarly folk look to Neil MacGregor — who writes opposite — to hold the line. If the British Museum gave in and sent the Elgin Marbles air freight to Athens, a massive wave of demands for restitution would descend on the museums of the Western world. The sad fact is that very large numbers of antiquities reached our cultural institutions by means that were highly dubious. In recent decades, many have been illegally excavated and smuggled on to the art market. An ex-antiquities curator at the Getty is currently on trial in Italy on charges arising from that trade.

Andrew Lambirth

Lighten our darkness

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Lately I have adopted Word from Wormingford by Ronald Blythe as a bedside book. Composed of weekly bulletins from a Suffolk village, it combines observations on the countryside with reports on the spiritual welfare of Blythe’s parish. In its gentleness and generosity, it is the perfect antidote to the strain of London life, and cools the mind after anxiety-ridden days. (In this, it has the same welcome effect as the glorious novels of Alexander McCall Smith.) Cools the mind but doesn’t dim it, for Blythe mixes in comments from his wide reading with a deft hand, and leavens the brew with the wisdom garnered from a long life devoted to looking and pondering.

Mark Glazebrook

Lest we forget

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Visitors to the once devastated but now completely reconstructed and rather charming little town of Ypres will find themselves bowing the head to 54,896 dead soldiers of the Salient, as the front-line arc became known. These men fought for our freedom but have no graves. Their names are inscribed on the inside walls of the Menin Gate of 1927, the classic Roman memorial arch, designed by the traditional English architect Sir Reginald Blomfield. The fundamental message of John McCrae’s poem, which begins In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row... is that we must not break faith with the dead. I looked especially hard at the list of Welsh Guards dead, therefore, because it was my regiment during national service.

Laura Gascoigne

Talent to amuse

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The restaurant at Tate Britain is famous for two things — its wine list and its mural. The restaurant at Tate Britain is famous for two things — its wine list and its mural. Hamish Anderson, compiler of the former, began with the advantage of a famous cellar; Rex Whistler, creator of the latter, began with the blank walls of a dingy basement previously referred to as a ‘dungeon’. Whistler was only 20 and still a student at the Slade when he won the restaurant commission in 1926. His rare gifts of draughtsmanship and imagination had persuaded Henry Tonks he was the man for the job, and the Professor’s faith in his favourite pupil was rewarded.

Peter Black

Portrait power

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Tate Liverpool is the first venue for a memorial exhibition of the painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (born Vienna 1906, died London 1996). Motesiczky was from a wealthy and cultivated Jewish background. She was a friend (from 1920) and pupil of Max Beckmann in Frankfurt (1927–8). She left Austria in 1938, settling in London, where she lived an isolated life. It is not that it was lonely. In fact, she had a very rich existence socially, especially after her move to Hampstead, but German art was little regarded in post-war England. Her training added independent study, in Paris and elsewhere, to a few terms at Frankfurt with her master, Beckmann. He told her she might become greater than Paula Modersohn-Becker but she never established a career.

Michael Tanner

Worthy farewell

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Franco Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac may not be a masterpiece, though I would claim that it is a first-rate second-rate work, to use a handy taxonomy of Richard Strauss. Franco Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac may not be a masterpiece, though I would claim that it is a first-rate second-rate work, to use a handy taxonomy of Richard Strauss. Yet the altogether superb production of it which the Royal Opera has mounted jointly with the Met has been received with very ill grace. It seems that no Italian composer of the early part of the 20th century can hope for a fair hearing, with even Puccini being tolerated only because it would be absurd to write off a figure so popular.

Giannandrea Poesio

High fives

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There is no doubt that BareBones’ The 5 Man Show will stay vividly in the memory of any dance-goer There is no doubt that BareBones’ The 5 Man Show will stay vividly in the memory of any dance-goer — and for a long time, too. This fizzy, moving, hilarious, corrosive triple bill is an ideal celebration of the company’s fifth year. Its five artists — numerologists would have a field day with such a recurrence of ‘fives’ — hypnotise the audience from their very first appearance, taking each viewer through a cogently formulated rollercoaster of emotions and vibrating theatre images.

Olivia Glazebrook

Holy smoke

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So it’s here at last, the big hitter: The Da Vinci Code. So it’s here at last, the big hitter: The Da Vinci Code. Ron Howard (Cinderella Man, A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13) directing, Tom Hanks (you know the one) starring, Akiva Goldsman (Cinderella Man, A Beautiful Mind, Batman and Robin) adapting the book by Dan Brown. Millions of people have read the book; millions will see the film. Millions have been spent; millions will be made. It’s a serious business. The plot, in case you’ve just dropped in from Mars, concerns an American symbologist named Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) who happens to be lecturing in Paris when a murder takes place at the Louvre.

Lloyd Evans

Following Chekhov

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When he wrote Enemies, Gorky was in love. The object of his desire was the artistry of Chekhov and this 1906 play is his attempt to emulate the master’s theatrical style. Copying from geniuses is risky. Any attempt is doomed, so it’s remarkable that Gorky fails so successfully. He reproduces Chekhov’s entire theatrical caboodle, the bubbling samovars, the smocked peasants, the candles glimmering through the silver birches, the bickering, lounging, drunken toffs, and to all this he adds an element of revolutionary prophecy. A local factory-owner stands up to Marxist agitators, but when he closes down the factory he is murdered by a mob.

Simon Hoggart

Walking on eggshells

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I went to train in Manchester a year or so after the Moors murders, and they continued to hang over the city like an old-fashioned smog, sickening and inescapable. Reporters who had covered the trial in Chester and heard the tape of Lesley Ann Downey pleading for mercy and begging for her mother said that they used to lie awake at night hearing the little girl’s screams. The sense of a horror that existed on the fringe of normal life, yet hovered unnervingly nearby, was made worse by the moors themselves. These are not the cosy landscapes of the Peak District but are desolate and displeasing; the kind of scenery you never see on the cover of a Beautiful Britain calendar.

Michael Vestey

Honest John

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Although writing a biography of John Osborne can’t be the most difficult task as Osborne left voluminous and laceratingly honest diaries Although writing a biography of John Osborne can’t be the most difficult task as Osborne left voluminous and laceratingly honest diaries, as well as the two volumes of autobiography, I thought John Heilpern’s new book about him, A Patriot for Us, the Book of the Week on Radio Four last week, was quite compelling. Abridged by Robert Evans and read by Gareth Thomas, the book made it clear that Osborne was incapable of self-censorship and that, as Heilpern put it, his life was governed by ‘self-disgust and unconquerable clenched fear’. As the playwright wrote, ‘It is fear. I cannot rid myself of it, it numbs me.

13 May 2006

Andrew Lambirth

Pioneering vision

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Listing page content here Here are more than 300 works in yet another mammoth exhibition at Tate Modern. Perhaps the sheer size of it puts people off, though many of those I have spoken to on my travels through the art world hardly knew the show was on. Perhaps the Bauhaus tag puts people off, with its inescapable connotations of didacticism, though this doesn’t seem to have deterred the public from visiting the V&A’s Modernism blockbuster, which also celebrates the Bauhaus aesthetic. Likewise the Utopian thrust of such teaching is perhaps felt to be irrelevant — the belief in progress and the possibility of a better world. To contemporary cynics such idealism must seem ludicrous, and yet it contains the seed of all art — the credo of possibility and change.

Patrick Carnegy

Shaken or stirred?

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Listing page content here Completism has become a maddening obsession these days with the BBC’s Radio Three. Every crotchet of Beethoven given in a week, every demisemiquaver of Webern encompassed within hours, two weeks of wall-to-wall Bach before Christmas, and, most recently, Wagner’s Ring spun into a single day. What’s wrong is that good music craves total attention. Not even St Cecilia can manage that for longer than a couple of hours at a stretch. The RSC’s festival of the Complete Works of the bard is a different matter. Basically because it’s spread out over a year, allowing the determined playgoer time enough between shows to recoup his concentration.

Michael Tanner

Feel the force

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Listing page content here It’s a great relief to see Scottish Opera back on stage again, even if their season consists of only a handful of performances of a couple of operas. I hadn’t realised how sentimental I was until I found my eyes brimming with tears at being in the dress circle of Glasgow’s Theatre Royal again, shortly before the more familiar rivulets of sweat caused by the invariable sweltering heat of that place started coursing down my face. And then the excitement of the tremendous opening chords of Don Giovanni, stark but full, with the lower strings prolonged to menacing effect.

10 May 2006

Toby Young

Beyond belief

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Listing page content here At the matinée performance of Donkeys’ Years I attended, Michael Frayn was seated in the row behind me. Seeing this revival of a sex farce he wrote in 1977 must have been an odd experience for him, not least because he more or less single-handedly killed off the genre with Noises Off in 1982. I don’t mean commercially, of course — Ray Cooney is still capable of putting bums on seats — I mean artistically. Noises Off deconstructed the Whitehall farce with such clinical precision that Frayn made it virtually impossible for any self-respecting playwright to try his hand at the genre again. It was the farce-to-end-all-farces.

Olivia Glazebrook

Watching the detective

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Listing page content here I have read all Raymond Chandler’s books, some of them several times, but if you asked me for a synopsis of any of them I think I’d be stumped. I can remember scenes (the stifling orchid house, the blanketed old man in the wheelchair) and dialogue (‘She’d make a jazzy weekend, but she’d be wearing for a steady diet’) but not the plot. This film has had rather the same effect: I watched the credits roll four hours ago, and already its plot is blurring at the edges. It’s not surprising: Brick is a detective story, a film noir, an homage to films like The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown and The Long Goodbye.

James Delingpole

Building on success

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Alain de Botton has done it again and I hate him. A few years ago, I decided to make him my friend as a way of warding off the bitterness and jealousy I might otherwise have felt about his increasingly nauseating success. And for a while it worked. He still is a friend, up to a point. We still have dinner together; we still fancy each other’s wives; we could still conceive of having a gay relationship together if, one day, we end up stranded for ever on a Lost-style island or we’re the only people to survive the Apocalypse; we still ring each other up now and then to bitch about all the successful writers we hate, and about how vile writing for a living is and how much more fun it would be to be entrepreneurs.

22 April 2006

Andrew Lambirth

Comfortless aesthetic

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The classic Modernist interior familiar to us all is a white cube, minimally furnished and adorned, the clean geometric lines of the architecture given prominence at the expense of fittings and fixtures. As the visitor steps into the V&A’s homage to Modernism, it’s at once clear that the design of the show will not mirror that aesthetic. This is a busy, multicoloured display, crammed with pictures and artefacts, full of red or blue arrows linking labels to exhibits, and vamped up with variant wall patterns. It’s big on visual excitement, not restraint. There are over 300 exhibits and more than 50 film clips to be seen, and at times it’s difficult to make sense of the rich array.

John Spurling

Charcoal mastery

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In his foreword to the catalogue of John Hubbard’s Spirit of Trees, Duncan Robinson, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, invokes John Constable. Indeed if Constable were alive today he might be John Hubbard. Although Hubbard is American, he has lived in Dorset for 45 years and although his paintings are far more abstract than Constable’s and have been inspired by foreign places as well as British — the Atlas Mountains, Spanish gardens, the Vaucluse in France — they approach nature in a similar way, with romantic feelings but a pragmatic eye.

Michael Vestey

Honours and rebels

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With the government and the opposition flogging peerages to raise money for party funds, Radio Four decided to look back at the 1920s master of this practice, the former Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George, and J. Arthur Maundy Gregory, the crook he used to negotiate prices (The Man Who Sold Peerages, Easter Saturday). Matthew Parris told the presenter Shaun Ley that it was one of the three worst political scandals of the 20th century. We don’t know for how long the present government has been doing this and the exact going rates it charges, but back then a knighthood would set you back £10,000, a huge sum, more than £25,000 for a baronetcy and goodness knows what for a hereditary peerage.

Simon Hoggart

The nuns’ story

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Nostalgia is not what it used to be, but then in television it rarely is. For example, Dr Who (BBC1, Saturday) is back with David Tennant as the 10th full-time doctor and Billie Piper as his 21st female assistant. The show was first screened the day after JFK was assassinated. Frankly, it’s a bit of a mess. At the risk of sounding like an old fart, a risk I am generally prepared to take, a large part of the appeal of the old Doctors was the cheap, sticky-tape-and-string nature of the sets and the villains. Children might have needed to watch the Daleks through threaded fingers from behind the sofa, but they still looked like dustbins festooned with egg boxes and sink plungers. Nor were the Cybermen or the Ice Monsters more convincing.

15 April 2006

Michael Tanner

Pastel-shaded surprise

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Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is an argument in favour of ordinary life, as opposed to a life ruled by passion and intensity. It’s a kind of anti-Tristan, in which Isolde decides, in the terminology of Act II of Wagner’s drama, to call it a day as far as uniting with Tristan in undying (or unliving) love goes, and to settle down with King Mark. Actually, Tristan is far more ambivalent about the bliss of love than it at first seems to be, and Onegin about the value of domesticity. The only person in Tchaikovsky’s minor masterpiece who comes off really well is Prince Gremin, and to judge from his music and the sentiments he expresses he is such a thundering bore that Tatyana must leave him or kill herself shortly after the opera ends.

Toby Young

World of fear

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According to theatrical lore, no play can be considered an out-and-out masterpiece unless it’s initially rejected. The most famous example is Look Back in Anger, which received a critical mauling in the dailies and was only saved from closure by Kenneth Tynan’s rave in the Observer. The second most famous is The Birthday Party, which had actually closed by the time Harold Hobson’s favourable review appeared in the Sunday Times. (According to legend, one matinée was attended by just six people.) The Crucible, too, passes this test: its initial Broadway run in 1953 was not a success and no critic was willing to stake his reputation on the play’s merit.