Arts feature

The 199 steps up to the ruins of Whitby Abbey are a pilgrimage; they always have been. And any good pilgrimage takes effort. Count Dracula (also acquainted with the north Yorkshire town) cheated — he climbed the steps in the guise of a black hound. These days, with its new £1.6 million museum and visitor centre, our vampire friend would find a ground-floor café and gift shop. Knowing English Heritage, there is probably a bowl of water for dogs, which would have kept the Count happy. Whitby is a surprise, with a history that puts it at the heart of Britain’s spiritual and literary life. It’s also a vibrant fishing port, somewhere you can pick up a Whitby smoky — smoked herrings — made in a backstreet smokehouse.

On Tuesday, thousands of miles apart, in three great cities, London, New York and Los Angeles, 75 dancers will dance 100 solos in each venue in honour of the late iconoclastic choreographer Merce Cunningham, who would have turned 100 that day. It is a spectacularly ambitious wake for the choreographer who for 70 years denied dance a dramatic or expressive face, and threw all norms of beginnings, middles and ends, of meaningful sequence or physical logic, into a bonfire of expectations. This fabulous celebration, involving dancers of the whole spectrum from contemporary to the Royal Ballet, is a declaration of intent for posterity by the Cunningham Trust, established since his 2009 death to ensure digital preservation of 86 of his dances for future performance and study.

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a group of slightly ramshackle workmen decide to put on a play. The play they choose — The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe — is famously and funnily terrible, as is their handling of it. Its central scene takes place at night, so they decide to dress up one actor with a lantern and a thorn bush: the idea is that light might shine through the thorns and convey the illusion of moonlight. This is an elegant solution, but Peter Quince, who is directing the scene, adds that the actor must explain to the audience that ‘he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine’.

I think I probably qualify as the oldest fashion editor in the world, because in spite of my advanced age I am still writing about clothes (in the Oldie). This gives me one USP: it means that I was actually around — even wearing them myself — when the revolutionary fashion ideas that are now the stuff of museum exhibitions were being invented. Next month the Mary Quant exhibition opens at the V&A, and sure enough I have been asked to talk about those giddy times for a video that will be shown at the museum. I was 16 in the autumn of 1955 when Quant’s shop, Bazaar, first shocked the passers-by in the King’s Road, Chelsea, with its startling window displays. One of these featured a black-and-white gingham skirt.

In March 1968, Frank Zappa released an album called We’re Only in it for the Money. Presumably, then, Zappa — who died a little over a quarter of a century ago — would be delighted to discover that he begins his latest tour next month, with a series of shows in the US followed by a visit to the UK in May, including a show at the Palladium in London. Zappa will be appearing in holographic form, using footage filmed in a Los Angeles rehearsal space in 1974, his disembodied voice backed by a live band. The show is to be made up of ‘footage that no one has ever seen, as it has been locked in the vaults since the early 70s,’ says Jeff Pezzuti of Eyellusion, the company that produced the hologram.

Toby Jones shuffles into the café in Clapham where we are meeting. He’s wearing a duffle coat and a hat and carrying a rucksack. He looks just like one of those unsung characters that he specialises in, the kind of person you don’t take much notice of unless you have to. Today we are talking about his new ‘vehicle’ (sorry), Don’t Forget the Driver. It’s an everyday tale of an everyday coach driver (Peter Green) from Bognor Regis, his daughter Kayla, who turns ennui into an artform, and mother Audrey, who’s going downhill fast with Alzheimer’s. It is going to twang the nation’s heartstrings. What makes it different is that it is Jones’s first go at writing a TV comedy — or co-writing one.

Artists can be trained, but they are formed by their earliest impressions: a child of five may not be able to draw like a master but he can see better and more intensely. The light of Valencia was burnt into Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida’s mental retina and he could not get it out of his mind: ‘I live here like an orange tree surrounded by heaters,’ he told an interviewer in Madrid in 1913. Never a studio painter, he worked best under the lamp of his native sun and returned to Valencia from wherever he was living every summer to set up his easel on the beach.

According to his friend and fellow-composer Ernest Reyer, the last words Berlioz spoke on his deathbed were: ‘They are finally going to play my music’. It has taken time, but he was right. A century and a half later, Berlioz 150 is the watchword of the hour. That is as it should be. Berlioz was a devotee of the ancient world (‘I have spent my life with that race of demi-gods’), where it was believed that at the moment of death one might be granted foreknowledge of the future. Why has it taken so long? In his native France there were plenty of reasons. As a forceful, witty but sardonic music critic he inevitably put Parisians’ backs up with his attacks on modern Italian music, which he regarded as frivolous, formula-ridden and fatally undramatic.

The creation of a commission to examine beauty in new building created a stir in the media, with the chairman subjected to a hate storm of unusual turbulence even by the standards that he regularly has to endure. Hate storms arise when powerful interests are threatened, and this was no exception. There is hardly a person in this country who is not aware of what Milan Kundera has called the ongoing ‘uglification of our world’ and who does not hope that something might be done about it. No one I talk to denies the need for a large number of new houses. But they all hope that this need can be reconciled with our deep-seated desire for beauty. Kant wrote that in judgments of beauty we are ‘suitors for agreement’.

It’s a 31ºC Mumbai morning, and on Marine Drive the Russian winter is closing in. The Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) is rehearsing Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony ahead of its first ever UK tour, and even on the campus of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) — a palm-shaded tropical Barbican next to the Arabian Sea — this is still music to raise a shiver. Strings sigh; horns call across frozen steppes. Then the guest conductor Martyn Brabbins gives the signal for a break and players spill into the foyer, chatting and gulping tea. If the sky were more grey and the tea less sweet, it could be a general rehearsal anywhere in the UK.

Strange to think when you visit the Christian Dior show at the V&A that his time as designer was so very short. From the first show in 1947 when he brought the war to an end — at least in terms of clothes — with the New Look, to his sudden death at the age of 52 was just a decade. But in that brief time he brought about a revolution in fashion, creating some of the most beautiful dresses ever made for women, with a line that was wholly his own. It was both architectural and natural: the skirt of his celebrated Bar suit was based on the corolla of a flower. He was a creative genius, but also brilliant at PR and commercially astute, as you would be if you’d lived through the interesting times he had.

Dau is not so much a film as a document of a mass human experiment. The result is dark, brilliant and profoundly disturbing. For three years up to 400 people, only one a professional actor, lived for months at a time on a city-sized set specially built for the shoot near Kharkov, Ukraine. Modelled on the real Kharkov Institute of Experimental Physics between 1938 and 1968, every detail on the set was scrupulously in period, from the light fittings to the lavatory paper. The participants — who included a real-life Nobel Prize winner and famous orchestra conductor as well as real former KGB and prison officers — were required to live in role 24 hours a day, eating Soviet food, wearing Soviet underwear and undergoing Soviet-style total surveillance.

In 1950, Bette Davis had a string of recent flops behind her. She was 41, married to an embarrassing twerp (her third husband), and her career was spiralling above the plughole. She only got the lead part in All About Eve when Claudette Colbert — who was all signed up — ruptured a disc while doing a rape scene on another film. The story goes that with Colbert shrieking in traction, the producer Darryl Zanuck, who hadn’t spoken to Davis since using the words ‘You’ll never work in this town again’, was obliged to offer her the part. It didn’t take much. No sane actress could resist Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s fabulous script with its sophisticated wit and refreshing cynicism.

Gary Raymond must have been wondering if it was the end of a promising career — curtains. He was starring in The Rat Patrol, a wartime adventure series. Co-star Justin Tarr had managed to roll the jeep Raymond and fellow actor Christopher George were travelling in. Raymond escaped with a badly broken ankle (he tells me it still gives him jip). George had more serious injuries, including an injured back and a heart contusion. Raymond lived to act another day, but when The Rat Patrol ended after two series, it really was the end of his Hollywood years. But what a few years he’d had, in El Cid alongside Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren, The Greatest Story Ever Told (playing Peter) and in Jason and the Argonauts. I’m interviewing him in the canteen at the National Theatre.

An early morning in late November in the peaceful glades that surround an ancient temple complex. A Shinto priest in sombre silks slips through a sliding door; a maple leaf catches the breeze. Suddenly, the silence is broken by the crunching thwack as two 400lb slabs of prime meat collide. It is the 15th and final day of one of Japan’s six annual sumo tournaments: the Kyushu Basho, held every autumn in the balmy southern city of Fukuoka. A group of visiting wrestlers have begun their pre-breakfast workout in one of the outbuildings of Torikai Hachiman-gu, preparing for the afternoon bouts at the arena three miles away.

Given their track record, you might think that Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais would be spared the struggles that lesser screenwriters go through to see their writing on screen. But this, it turns out, would be naive. Clement and La Frenais may have written some of the best-loved programmes in British television history: Auf Wiedersehen, Pet; Porridge; The Likely Lads; Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? Their CV may contain the huge hit film The Commitments — as well as more recently acclaimed TV dramas like The Rotters’ Club and Archangel. Yet, when I meet Clement on a solo visit to London, the two most striking things about him are how driven he remains at 81, and how driven he apparently needs to be.

In the early 1370s an elderly Scandinavian woman living in Rome had a vision of the Nativity. Her name was Birgitta Birgersdotter, and she was later venerated as St Bridget of Sweden. In her account of the experience, transcribed by her confessor, she described herself as an eye witness. Her narrative began: ‘When I was present by the manger of the Lord in Bethlehem…’ Around a century later, Piero della Francesca (c.1412–92) used Bridget’s vision — or parts of it — as a starting point for a painting. This picture, now in the National Gallery, is one of the best-loved depictions of this immensely popular subject in the history of art. In some respects, Piero followed Bridget’s visionary account closely.

There is very little art about modern poverty, because who wants to know? It is barely acknowledged, unless there is redemption, or salvation, as in A Christmas Carol. Those most suited to make it — those who are actually poor — are usually too busy doing something else, such as surviving. So, it is remarkable to learn that Alexander Zeldin’s play LOVE, a success at the National Theatre in 2016, is now a film and will air this weekend on BBC2. The closest thing to it recently was Benefits Street, which was exploitative and, therefore, an instant hit. Zeldin is 33. He read French at Oxford University and is artist-in-residence at the National Theatre. His work is plain and understated. He listens, rather than writes, and there are no diatribes, just calm despair.