Arts Reviews

You have neat, slicked-back hair which never gets dandruff. You keep a pile of beautifully laundered white shirts stacked in your office drawer. You look great in your sharp suit and so does everyone else in theirs. The girls in the office are there to service your every need, and actually discuss with one another tactics for making themselves look sexier and how to please you more. You smoke ALL THE TIME — so incredibly often that people in the future are going to look at you and wonder how it can possibly be that you and your friends smoked so much — and you do it suavely, without guilt

Amnesia? Forget about it. That’s my advice to dramatists considering handling this theme on stage because it always generates the same problem. Memory equals personality so a character without a memory isn’t a character. He’s some clothes. The central figure in The Living Unknown Soldier is a French major suffering from total memory loss after being wounded in the trenches. Early on, the script seems to recognise that its main character is a dud and focuses instead on the search for his family. Adverts are posted and hordes of bumbling French families turn up at the clinic all claiming Major Breakdown as their long-lost son. Here they come, wave after

Mark Glazebrook talks to Sandy Nairne, who explains why the NPG is part of the life of London David Piper, director of the National Portrait Gallery 1964–67, was a brilliant historian and museum director who, while writing a book called The English Face, found that there’s no such thing. It vanished like the smile on Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat. Piper himself was disinclined to mastermind the much-needed radical reform of a musty old institution — a challenge successfully embraced by his young colleague and successor, Roy Strong. Strong’s Cecil Beaton show, a first for photography, drew previously undreamed of crowds. Today, attendance figures have risen to 1.6 million per annum.

Alexander Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography Hayward Gallery, until 27 April There’s a whole separate exhibition in the downstairs galleries of the Hayward. It’s called Laughing in a Foreign Language and is supposed to explore the role of laughter and humour in contemporary art through the work of 30 so-called international artists. As an exhibition, it’s a total failure. It’s not just that humour doesn’t easily translate, even in this ghastly era of globalisation, when we seem to want to reduce everyone to the same set of responses and desires. It’s also that so many of the exhibits are striving to be knowing and clever. Laughter is a sacred gift, the

Quick Oscar** thought: no American actor or actress won an Oscar this year. The four acting awards went to: Tilda Swinton (Scotland), Javier Bardem (Spain) Daniel Day-Lewis (England/Ireland) and Marion Cotillard (France). Have the Americans ever been shut out like this before? Does it mean anything beyond the fact that the Oscars are an increasingly international event (as, indeed, the Academy becomes an increasingly international event)? Perhaps it’s just a small sample size and perhaps it doesn’t mean anything at all, but it seems like a pleasing development to me. Still: how long before the Democratic presidential contenders deplore the outsourcing of American acting jobs to foreigners and call for

Toby Jones on how theatre is being used in Malawi to help stop the spread of Aids The interior designer charged with decorating the IT suite probably didn’t have theatre in mind. I am staring at the pastel carpeting, Venetian blinds and the useless plug dangling from the overhead projector: we could be anywhere. The sex worker casually hands me her baby and takes to the carpet. As I rock the baby to sleep, I watch the mother and several of her sex co-workers acting out the moment a colleague of theirs declared herself HIV-positive. We are sitting in the British Council offices in Lilongwe, Malawi, where we have spent