Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Selective memory

It’s 70 years since the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and yet there has been no rush to commemorate this anniversary. It’s perhaps not surprising. Who would choose to recall the events of 6 August 1945 when the world first witnessed the effects of nuclear warfare? Yet the absence of date-setting, the annual forgetting, makes it appear that we’re much less keen to remember something that might make us feel uncomfortable or discredit us. One exception was on Radio 4 on Monday morning, when, in Under the Mushroom Cloud, Shuntaro Hida, a 98-year-old survivor of Hiroshima, told us frankly and without sentiment his memories of that day in

Stephen Bayley

Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid is the most famous woman architect in the world. Would women or, indeed, architecture, be better off without her pushily hard-won, global celebrity? She established her studio in London in 1980. For nearly 14 years Hadid, absurdly, became famous for not having built anything. Her reputation was boosted by a clique of fawning admirers who saw in her uncompromising angles and, later, zoomorphic blobs a fearless repudiation of stuffy tradition. The competition entry for Cardiff Opera House was her celebrated cause. This, with genius, managed to alienate both the left and the right. The former thought it elitist, the latter outrageous. It was, after years of well-publicised struggle,

William Cook

The Long view

On the green edge of Clifton Downs, high above the city, there is a sculpture that encapsulates the strange magic of Richard Long. ‘Boyhood Line’ is a long line of rough white stones, placed along the route of a faint, narrow footpath. When Long was a boy, this was where he used to play. There are children playing here today. They pay no attention to Long’s new artwork. Already ‘Boyhood Line’ has melted into the scenery. Half a century since he rolled a snowball across these Downs, and photographed the wobbly line it left behind, it feels as though Long has come home. Richard Long was born here, in Bristol,

Roy Kelly

Dreams

Early August and not yet half past eight, but all along the dual carriageway more than half the cars have headlights showing in the air from which daylight moves away — the summer, not the hour, being late — the shapely boxes streaming and glowing under the sky that was brighter two weeks ago, and two weeks before at this time, the season turning at the speed it must as the cars race or dawdle, and dark leaks through the porous heavens, and the stars climb to visibility in blue August early dusk, the beautiful headlight beams illuminating what leaves. Children. Dreams.

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Look at my Fringe

Like everyone performing at the Edinburgh Fringe I’m about to make a lot of mistakes. I’m about to lose a lot of money too. But after ten years covering the festival as a reviewer I’m at least able to predict which errors I can’t avoid blundering into. First, the campaign to attract a crowd will be pointless. This stands to reason. Five or six thousand hopefuls swarm up to Edinburgh each year and they all use the same marketing strategy. Attention-seeking stunts on the Royal Mile. Tiresome afternoons forcing leaflets on unimpressed Americans. Fly-posting after dark, on tiptoe, by torchlight. Desperate texts to friends of friends promising five-for-one discounts. Bravura

Martin Gayford

Watery depths

I learnt to splash about in watercolour at my grandmother’s knee. Or rather, sitting beside her crouched over a pad of thickly ‘toothed’ paper and a Winsor & Newton paintbox on a wind-swept East Anglian seashore. Now, looking back, I see that what she was doing belonged to a tradition. Her predecessors, idols and reference points are to be seen in an admirable small exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Watercolour — Elements of nature. This consists of works from the museum’s collection, but is much more full of delightful surprises — even for those who know the Fitzwilliam well — than that description suggests. The reason is that, while

Peter Culshaw

Conspiracies, hookers and bombs – welcome to the Odessa Film Festival

Odessa, the pearl of the Black Sea, is one of the most charming port cities you can imagine, the centre of the city mainly 19th-century Italian and French architecture. Like a run-down Riviera, but with the exchange rate gone from 8 grivnas to the pound to 34, it’s fabulously cheap for visitors. At my favourite Azeri restaurant, which doesn’t sell wine, they offered to go to the supermarket and buy me a bottle of red. £1.50 for perfectly drinkable Ukrainian plonk. The rate has dived due to the unrest and war in the East of course. On the surface things are somewhat calmer than last year when a fire killed dozens

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Family matters

God, what a title. The Gathered Leaves. It sounds like a tremulous weepie about grief and endurance with a closing scene featuring three anvil-faced spinsters staring through the rectory window at an autumn bonfire. It’s not quite like that. The play opens with some clumsy exposition revealing the political chronology. It’s Easter, 1997, and Labour’s shiny-fanged messiah is about to evict the Brixton mule from Downing Street. We meet the Pennington family, a high Tory clan nestling in a frondy corner of the Thames Valley, who are eager to heal an ancient rift. Their estranged daughter and her mixed-race sprog have been skulking in France for the past 17 years.

James Walton

Affairs in squares

On all those comic lists of the world’s shortest books (Great Italian War Heroes, My Hunt for the Real Killers, by O.J. Simpson etc.), the best title I ever came across was Bloomsbury: the Untold Story. Now, though, BBC2’s new drama, Life in Squares, is giving us yet another chance to marvel at how many sexual permutations one small group of people can achieve. But before all that began, Monday’s first episode was at some pains to show us the forces of Victorian stuffiness against which the Bloomsbury group rebelled. In the first scene, a suitor tried to woo Vanessa Stephen with the chat-up line, ‘Only two more days, Miss

Anna Picard

Welcome to Bedlam

Caius Gabriel Cibber’s statues of ‘Melancholy’ and ‘Raving Madness’, their eyes staring blindly into the void, petrified in torment, once posed on top of the gate to Bedlam. In 1739, when Handel’s dramatic oratorio Saul was first performed, you could pay a modest fee to pass beneath them and gawk at the living spectacles within, victims of ‘arbitrary passions’ including pride, lust and envy. In Barrie Kosky’s Glyndebourne staging of Saul, Cibber’s archetypes are animated and given voice by Christopher Purves as the king driven mad by ‘Envy! Eldest born of Hell!’ Saul was the second of Handel’s great studies of madness. But where Orlando (1733) proposes a cure, restoring

Ismene Brown

Pulp fiction

Hot, languorous, sizzling… I was thinking what an ideal show Matthew Bourne’s noir comedy is to watch on a summer’s evening in T-shirt and shorts as you sip a cold beer in a plastic cup and feel all toasty while the garage mechanics are bumping and grinding away at Dino’s Diner. Then the rain started chucking it down outside, the temperature fell, and I found myself ruminating on how a dance show feels different if you’ve just been watching it, rather than feeling it in your skin and body. The great thing about Bourne’s choreographic style is that it feels like something you might have done yourself during some summer

Kate Chisholm

Matters of life and death

‘Bait by Cartier,’ she growls as her priceless diamond bracelet is strapped to a piece of rope and dropped overboard in the hope it might lure a fish on to the line. She’s stuck on a boat with a group of survivors after the freighter she was aboard was hit by a German U-boat during the second world war. She was Tallulah Bankhead, playing Connie, heroine of John Steinbeck’s novel-cum-film Lifeboat, for Mystery Theater, the American radio drama series, first broadcast in 1950 and now replayed on Radio 4 Extra (Sunday). They just don’t make voices like that anymore. It had star quality streaked right through it. That deep husky

Thursday

Maisie Rowe

Wild things

Mud, timber, junk, fires, splinters, rust, daubed paint… Suddenly people are talking about adventure playgrounds again. With the Turner Prize-nominated collective Assemble constructing a new adventure playground in Glasgow, and their exhibition The Brutalist Playground at Riba, we’re being asked to think again about these ugly but lovable spaces. It was the landscape architect Lady Allen of Hurtwood who saw that in these gloriously chaotic environments — with their dens, walkways, animals, zip wires and cargo nets — children could find a freedom, self-expression and self-determination that is denied to them elsewhere. In 1946, on the way to Norway for a lecture tour, Lady Allen’s plane stopped to refuel in

Martin Gayford

Portrait of the artist as a madman

Charles Dickens’s description of Cobham Park, Kent, in The Pickwick Papers makes it seem a perfect English landscape. Among its ‘long vistas of stately oaks and elms’, he wrote, ‘occasionally a startled hare’ ran with ‘the speed of the shadows thrown by the light clouds’. It was there on the morning of 29 August 1843 that a butcher from Rochester got a nasty surprise. He discovered the corpse of an apothecary named Robert Dadd; he had been battered and stabbed to death by his son Richard. There is no doubt that Richard Dadd was far from sane. On the other hand, his loss of mental balance — though very bad

Catherine Barnett

Kisses of Virtuous Renunciation

He was checked in under the name Immortality, Mr Immortality — but on the vanity were the little capsules of mouthwash and shampoo, a packet with needle and thread, and letters from his father, who was dead. (And books to write, and letters of instruction, to have read.) He’s a valued guest at the Clarion, at the Shelburn, like others in this inferno though I miss him most. ‘Time is a monster,’ he said before calling down for another hour. He had to spell his name to the woman at the front desk. ‘I am mortality,’ I heard him say between kisses I remember to this day.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Has-Bean

Richard Bean, the country’s most bankable playwright, knocks out a new script every four months. Thanks to the success of One Man, Two Guvnors, he’s not short of houses ready to stage his work. And the hunt for treasure in his back-catalogue continues. The Mentalists, from 2002, stars Stephen Merchant (co-writer of The Office) and Steffan Rhodri as two needy chums pursuing a whimsical dream in a cheap hotel room. Chum One is a hairdresser who makes porn films on the side. Chum Two is a salesman who dreams of founding a rebel colony overseas. Chum One films Chum Two delivering a sermon that will kick-start the revolution. That, ladies

Alexandra Coghlan

Salieri’s revenge

Magical transformations are a commonplace of opera. We see our heroes turned into animals, trees, statues; witness wild beasts turned suddenly gentle and even the dead brought back to life, with scarcely a raised eyebrow. But opera’s greatest metamorphosis — and one still less remarked upon — is the annual British phenomenon of country house opera. Auditoriums are conjured up in fields and gardens, ruins filled with light and life, and rural silence is exchanged for cosmopolitan croonings and tunings. With little more than a generator and a couple of portaloos, companies like Longborough, Bampton, Iford and Garsington serve up serious music season after season, taking risks the major metropolitan

Deborah Ross

Sweeney Plod

The Legend of Barney Thomson is the directorial debut of actor Robert Carlyle, and it’s one of those black comedies about a serial killer in which, as the bodies pile up, plausibility edges closer and closer to the window until it flies out completely. (No. Wait. Come back! I’ll massage your feet!) This wouldn’t, in fact, matter at all if there were something else to hang onto; if the characters were involving, or the story was told with wit, zip and panache, but it just monotonously drones on. The central figure is a barber so I guess you could say this is Sweeney Plod rather than, you know, that other

Kate Chisholm

Space case

The idea that Radio 2 should be sold off by the BBC to a commercial rival is as nonsensical as BBC1 losing Strictly Come Dancing, or Heinz giving up on baked beans. The station, in its former incarnation as the Light Programme, was a core product of the corporation, the home of the Palm Court Light Orchestra, Kenneth Williams, Semprini, Billy Cotton, Sid James and Edmundo Ros. It gave us ‘light’ entertainment — music to dance, exercise or sing to, comedy shows, magazine programmes, dramas of ordinary life rather than Greek tragedy. The comedy programmes on 2 were siphoned off long ago to 4 and then 4 Extra, as were

James Walton

Institutional feminism

Some revelations, it seems, are capable of being endlessly repeated while still remaining revelations. Think of all the books, articles and TV programmes over the years which have ‘revealed’ that the Victorians weren’t, after all, mad sexual repressives who had a fit of the vapours at the sight of an uncovered table-leg; or that the 1950s were a lot more fun than the drab conformist decade of popular imagination. Or that Rudyard Kipling was by no means a straightforward imperialist. (Feel free to add examples of your own.) And yet, no matter how many times these things are pointed out, it’s always with a proud flourish — as if what’s