FreelanceIntellectual.com - Reviews

Not enough politics, not enough drama

2008-08-22T20:49:01+00:00

Her Naked Skin by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, at the National Theatre

We so wanted this play to be good, my friend Amanda and I: the subject deserves a good play, and astonishingly this is the first new play by a living woman to be performed at the Olivier (although the qualifications make it clear it's not actually the first play by a woman performed there). You could only wish Her Naked Skin well. But it was less than satisfying, somehow.

Again I wondered whether a little too …

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A natural history of religion

2008-08-20T16:29:01+00:00

Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett

David Orban/CreativeCommons

I enjoyed this book. I've tried Dennett before, and not succeeded: Kinds of Minds was a book I found difficult to read, section not satisfactorily flowing from section, sentence not flowing from sentence so that its argument was hard to follow. Breaking the Spell certainly doesn't have that problem. It's true that occasionally you need to re-read a pair of sentences to make sure you've understood the way they hang together, but that's really just a question of prose style - …

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Death on Death

2008-08-11T16:17:00+00:00

The Revenger's Tragedy at the National Theatre

Meredith Farmer/CreativeCommons

I wasn't wowed by Melly Still's production, but I did enjoy it. It begins with a bang: drums crash us into a wordless prologue in which Antonio's wife is raped in the dark underground of what seems and sounds like a club. This is how we're immediately introduced to one of the stars of the production: the set. It's a thing of three parts - the club lounge, a more neutral chamber and the house of Vindice, the protagonist revenger himself, played here …

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One of London’s great pubs - ruined

2008-08-05T15:02:00+00:00

The Buckingham Arms, Petty France

Kake Pugh/CreativeCommons

It's sad news, this. When I was a civil servant (yes, I'm afraid I was, and for a fair while, too) I used to be a regular at the Buckingham. And a fine pub it was, too. The beer was Young's - I usually would order the ordinary bitter as a session with my mates (well, I'm think of one in particular) could easily extend to five or six pints, and some standards are required even in the governance of the country. He'd be on …

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World Without Love

2008-08-04T22:19:01+00:00

Grotesque, by Natsuo Kirino; translated by Rebecca Copeland

yumahaton/CreativeCommons

What is this book? On one level, it's a crime story, a murder mystery of a sort, a serial killer novel, even. But it is so much more than just that. It's the story of two prostitutes, Yuriko Hirata and Kazue Sato, apparently murdered by the same man in Tokyo within the space of a year. The main narrator, Yuriko's sister, is never named in the book, but she's a plain, middle-aged, middle-class public employee, who tells us what she knows of her …

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Ladette to Lady, Shavian-style

2008-07-26T23:59:00+00:00

Shaw's Pygmalion at the Old Vic, directed by Peter Hall

©Tristram Kenton

I snuck into this because my friend Alan couldn't go; and I'm glad I was offered the spare ticket, because this production deserves the good reviews it's had. There's nothing flashy about it. Far from it. In some ways it's an aggressively traditional, 1913-style production, using the Old Vic stage to its fullest stand-up-and-beg potential, with curtain and lights down and something like Elgar - quite possible actually Elgar - playing between acts. Nor was there anything fancy about the way the …

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Love in the Asylum

2008-07-23T11:00:01+00:00

The Edge of Love, directed by John Maybury

© Lions Gate Entertainment

I expected to hate this film; but of course if you begin a review like that, it means you mustn't have hated it at all. Why did I expect to hate it? It was something to do with its starring two supposedly stunning actresses. I thought it would be too superficial, about too-glamorous characters, a varnished version of the home front. And it was something to do with its being about a renowned poet, and my fear that it might, again, glamourise …

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Unexpected life from a flattish pitch

2008-07-21T17:06:00+00:00

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

When I was in New York in May, reviews of this novel were all over the New York Times and the New Yorker: it was clearly the book of that moment. And when Martha Kearney revealed not long after on Newsnight Review that she was reading it, I realised it had gone transatlantic. It seems that this story of the migrant experience in New York and of cricket - cricket - has broad appeal. In publishing terms, at least as far a literary fiction is concerned, Netherland is a …

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Immersion, calligraphy and colour

2008-07-10T16:17:00+00:00

Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, Tate Modern

cosmicautumn/CreativeCommons

A very mixed exhibition, this; very mixed. The earliest paintings on show, Tiznit and Quarzazat, promised interesting things, with their thick monochrome lines, though with the exception of The Geeks, which prefigured Nini's Paintings in a later room, the early automatic writing pieces - Criticism and Academy - were really no more than random scribblings on walls. And the whole exhibition would prove to be like this: rooms containing terrifically energetic paintings full of colour and style would alternate with much thinner works which …

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Mysteries and morals

2008-06-11T12:43:00+00:00

Hearbeat Detector (La Question Humaine) directed by Nicolas Klotz

© Trinity Filmed Entertainment

What a strange film. Kessler, played by Mathieu Amalric, is a psychologist working in the Paris office of a German chemical firm, when he's asked by a senior manager to investigate the behaviour and state of mind of the chief executive, Jüst. As he gets closer to his subject the shared past of this concern becomes more mysterious to us as well as to Kessler; and it becomes clear that everyone - Kessler, too - is damaged by their past. …

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A brilliant place for poetry

2008-05-23T07:50:01+00:00

Zaedryn Meade's Fervor at the Bowery Poetry Club and Café

Emerging from Cafe Colonial on Houston, where I'd found refuge from the rain (just: they weren't keen on a single diner; and you should have seen their faces when I got out my notebook) I set off in the general direction of the East Village where I had a late appointment at a jazz club, thinking of picking up a beer somewhere along the way. But instead, happily I chanced on the Bowery Poetry Club where I found a launch party and reading from a …

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A restrained meditation on art

2008-05-21T08:12:02+00:00

Occupant by Edward Albee, at the Signature Theatre

indieink/CreativeCommons

Yesterday was massively cultural, because after they museum I saw Mercedes Ruehl (an actress I've admired and had the hots for ever since her role in Terry Gilliam's great New York film The Fisher King) play the sculptor Louise Nevelson in Edward Albee's Occupant. It's a simple play. The dead artist is interviewed as though by a TV interviewer but with the audience filling the role of, well, audience. Nevelson is invited and cajoled to reminisce about her career and her marriage, …

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The Treasure-Palace on the Upper East Side

2008-05-20T18:27:00+00:00

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

wallyg/CreativeCommons

Rain, rain, rain in New York today. It's wet, I'm damp, and although I'm normally an insanely enthusiastic walker and subway rider, even I am happy to hail a cab (I admit to being economical to the point of asceticism at times but it's not that: I prefer to walk; I prefer public transport. Why pay for a taxi if you enjoy it less?). I step out at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where all New York has also decided to spend the afternoon.

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A somewhat detached observer

2008-04-22T15:43:01+00:00

Give Me Ten Seconds, by John Sergeant

photograph courtesy of Simon Gosney

I found this book a bit disappointing actually. Anyone who's obsessed with British politics will know John Sergeant, the long-serving BBC political correspondent who finally went over to become political editor at ITN. He's most famous for his microphone moment with Mrs. Thatcher outside the British Embassy in Paris - you know, when she emerged having failed to win outright and Bernard Ingham fumbled around looking for a microphone, and I thought this book would be full of brilliant …

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A bit adrift in 1950s Cardiff

2008-04-20T17:28:01+00:00

Small Change by Peter Gill; Donmar Warehouse

davescunningplan/CreativeCommons

Call me a philistine, but Peter Gill's play wasn't my cup of tea. I'm one of those who, in Dominic Cavendish's words in the Telegraph, have taken against it, I'm sorry to say.

The play was originally staged in 1976, and in this revival is directed by the playwright himself, so there can be no complaint that the production fails to do justice to the artistic vision. It's the Cardiff of the 1950s: two mothers, played by Lindsay Coulson and …

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What I don’t get about Boris

2008-04-16T14:33:00+00:00

Ian Hampton (CC)

Seventy-Two Virgins, by Boris Johnson

If writing were any sort of qualification for being Mayor of London, then Boris would be the obvious choice. Seventy-Two Virgins, his 2004 story of a terrorist plot to murder the US President during a state visit to Britain, is terrific.

It's important to say right at the start that the novel is unpretentious in literary terms: there is no attempt here to persuade you the novel rises above genre, no great emotional subtleties, no lovely, effortful writing - none of that. It's a fairly straightforward page-turning thriller on the familiar pattern, a large cast of characters being introduced in fairly quick succession, sometimes by their full names,

It was going to be a beautiful day, thought Eric William Kinloch Onyeama, as he walked across Lambeth Bridge.

with minimal interruption of the action. But I only say fairly straightforward because it's not entirely like that. For a start, it's fun: this is that rare thing, a comic thriller, and one of the reasons for its sheer pageturnability is the steady current of Johnson's humour, his joshingly affectionate view of London and all who sail in her.

King Harold’s Reign

2008-04-14T13:43:00+00:00

White Heat, by Dominic Sandbrook

A brilliant birthday present, this, from my friends Pete and Geraldine, whose infinitely edible ginger ice-cream has just floated back into memory as I write. But enough of my memories of that weekend; you want to read about Dominic Sandbrook's account of the 1960s.

White Heat is a substantial read, at 800 pages, but a good one. Sandbrook isn't very quotable, but sticks sensibly to a consistently decent and unshowy prose that reads quickly and conveys his history well, letting the voices of contemporary witnesses do the verbal showing off. The book …

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No spitting image of the original

2008-04-13T22:06:00+00:00

ITV's Headcases

©ITV Pictures

I'll say something nice about Headcases: I don't think it's as bad as James Donaghy did in the Guardian. But it doesn't get a lot better than that. I agree with him that it shows the danger of admiring the look of the screen to the detriment of the gags, which are what any show like this should be focused on. I thought the material was more mixed than he did, though that wasn't the main problem I had.

An excellent Spanish ghost story

2008-04-06T14:43:00+00:00

The Orphanage, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona

As ghostly thrillers go, this is good. Laura is adopted as a little girl; in later life, she happens to move with her her husband and her own adopted boy, Simon, to live in the old orphanage where she once lived. But the old orphanage has a strange effect on Simon (it's funny, isn't it, how buildings have this effect in ghost stories - like the hotel in The Shining. Always a mistake to move into a big old house). He begins to interact with imaginary friends, before unaccountably going missing. The rest of the story is Laura's quest to find him, and to discover what happened at the orphanage all those years ago.

Too Bookish for Words

2008-04-03T10:01:00+00:00

Previous Convictions - selected writings of a decade, by Cyril Connolly

What to make of Cyril Connolly? This book is a collection of his "writings" - essays, parodies and book reviews - mainly from the 1950s, when he was chief book reviewer for the Sunday Times. Reading it is an odd experience: annoying, at times difficult, but at the same time impressive and absorbing. I've been meaning to read something of his for some time - anyone who has William Boyd as a fan must be worth getting to know. But my feelings are very mixed. This writing is at times, in Boyd's words, self-conscious and straining for effect; and at times, in the words of Evelyn Waugh which Boyd quotes, snobbish, fey and posturing. Take this, from the first piece in the collection, on the Grand Tour:

Three stars for the Naples museum pulsating with life from the Campanian cities. Once again that tremor before the small still-lives, the peaches with a jug of water, the glow of Pompeian red in architectural trompe-l'oeil, the 'genre' scenes of Dioscorides, the exquisite mosaic of marine life with squid and octopus, crawfish and John Dory (art forms that were to disappear for the next 1,500 years). Shall we give up everything to the study of these flickering foreshortened landscapes and harbours?

It's too rich, this, too self-conscious and too self-consciously artsy, and frankly quite off-putting.