Arts Reviews

Beijing Modern Dance Company Linbury Studio When it comes to new dance, nothing sells as quickly as a multi- or inter-cultural performance. It matters little that the intercultural approach to art first came to light in the late Sixties; Western modern and postmodern dance-makers, dance-practitioners and dance-goers seem to have discovered this only recently and are having a whale of a time. Do not get me wrong; I like it too, for it is thanks to this interaction of different choreographic styles, genres and cultures, that ageing Western dance idioms have been totally rejuvenated. And, at the same time, the fusion between different vocabularies and syntaxes has broadened considerably the

How easily we forget! Who, for instance, was the first of the world’s major leaders to talk to George W. Bush after 9/11? No, it wasn’t Blair. Or the democratically elected leaders of Canada, Australia, France, Germany or Denmark. It was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the new President of Russia. He was staying at his villa on the Black Sea when, like the rest of the developed world, he watched the satellite pictures as the Twin Towers came tumbling down. His response was to phone Bush immediately and to tell him that at such a time his Russian government would not just talk about being helpful but would also take action

Imagine (BBC1); Ten O’Clock News (BBC1); That Mitchell and Webb Look (BBC2)  The Day of the Kamikaze (Channel 4, Monday) was really good, I’ll bet, but the Fawn wasn’t having it so I suppose I’ll have to watch it some other time on my own. She’d rather be watching some old rubbish like Ladette to Lady (ITV1), which I sympathise with up to a point. It’s so nice in these ghastly times to find a programme whose fundamental underlying assumption is that toffs are better than oiks. As a compromise, we settled for Imagine (BBC1, Tuesday), the first in a new series of Alan Yentob documentaries. This one was about self-help books,

Uncle Vanya Rose Theatre, Kingston The Death of Margaret Thatcher Courtyard At last the Rose has burst into bloom in Kingston. Luckily I allowed myself twice the suggested 40 minutes to get there from Waterloo. It took me quarter of an hour to extract a ticket from the computerised machines, which have been brilliantly programmed to be thicker and slower than human beings. On reaching Kingston I got instantly lost in a jungle of contradictory signposts. Best advice, make for Kingston Bridge (visible from outside the station), turn upstream and walk for three minutes along the riverbank. And there you are. Peter Hall’s new theatre is a modernist redoubt arranged

Salome Bridgewater Hall Peter Grimes Nottingham Die Zauberflöte Royal Opera House Salome Bridgewater Hall Peter Grimes Nottingham Die Zauberflöte Royal Opera House Does Richard Strauss’s Salome still have the power to shock, as the writers of programme notes like to claim? Not, anyway, in a concert performance, such as was given in the Bridgewater Hall last Saturday, the BBC Philharmonic on unusual territory, with soloists from the production that will soon be seen at the Teatro Regio, Turin. The uniting factor was the conductor, Gianandrea Noseda. Though not shocking, the performance was thrilling, mainly owing to the orchestral playing and Noseda’s brilliant shaping of the score, so that what can

In the past, television battle scenes consisted of half a dozen men in armour knocking seven bells out of each other. Then the camera angle switched and the same six men were still bashing the others, but from below. Next one of them fell (‘Aaaargh!’) and the other five kept on. It was not altogether convincing. Now, thanks to computer-generated images — CGI — an entire army can be conjured up, literally on a screen in someone’s bedroom. So in Attila the Hun (BBC 1, Wednesday) the warlord could look over an entire Roman army, tens of thousands of men in ranks stretching across the whole horizon, smoke rising from

James son of James Barbican Three Short Works Royal Opera House James son of James Barbican Three Short Works Royal Opera House It is a pity that the definition ‘theatre dance’ is commonly used to indicate any choreographic activity that takes place on stage, for it could be much more effectively used to describe those performances which do not sit that comfortably under the much more genre-specific term ‘dance theatre’. Look, for instance, at Michael Keegan-Dolan’s James son of James. Not unlike the two previous instalments of his Midlands Trilogy, a triptych based on Irish culture and lore, James son of James is mostly a play with fluidly interwoven moments

‘I think continually of those who were truly great,’ wrote Stephen Spender, which must have been awkward when he was trying to read a map, cook the lunch, or write that bloody awful poem about pylons. But I, too, have been thinking, if not continually, then at least often, about two great men, both dead, both much missed. They couldn’t have been more different, but they both played a major part in forming my attitudes, my taste and perhaps even my character. Philip Balkwill was my English teacher at Charterhouse, and I was reminded of him early in January when I went to re-review Alan Bennett’s The History Boys at

There was something ironic about a play entitled The Trial and Death of Socrates being broadcast on the weekend that our own great thinker, Rowan Williams, was undergoing what may turn out to be the biggest trial of his career. Maybe he tuned in on Sunday evening to Drama on 3 and heard Joss Ackland as Socrates manfully refusing to kowtow to the tyranny of wilful ignorance by declaring, ‘Would I have chosen this path for myself…if I did not believe I had a duty…to raise you from your complacency?’ Radio, very far from being the dinosaur among the new technologies, is becoming cutting-edge — in spite of the demise