Arts feature

The jewel in the crown of Sir Michael Boyd’s decade as director of the Royal Shakespeare Company was his 2007–8 staging of the major Shakespeare Histories from Richard II, through Henry IV, V and VI, to Richard III. For a short, alas too short, period, the entire sequence of eight plays could be seen over a few days at Stratford. Fortunate indeed were those who were there, and I count it one of my greatest theatrical experiences. Boyd’s Histories would have enthralled only the tiniest fraction of the population. But with television it’s a different story. BBC2’s four Histories films, packaged as The Hollow Crown and broadcast on consecutive Saturday evenings, stand to have a far greater impact.

A young American documentary film-maker recently said to me, ‘Do you want to know why no British documentary film-maker would ever make a film about something like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations? There was no blood! No violence! No crack babies! No tears! People were happy, and one thing British documentary film-makers hate is happy people and happy endings. If you want to get a doc made and shown in Britain, you gotta go for gloom and doom.’ Of course my American friend was exaggerating — but by how much? Think British documentary and what comes to mind? For me it’s Pete Postlethwaite wagging a finger and making apocalyptic warnings of ecological disaster in The Age of Stupid.

‘I know it sounds arrogant but I think it’s undeniable that it has become fixed in the culture like a stately home,’ says Mark Haddon of his book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.   Arrogant or not, he is probably right. Haddon’s novel about an autistic boy’s attempt to solve the mystery of who killed his neighbour’s dog has sold more than two and a half million copies since its publication in 2003 and seems to have been read by everyone. As we chat in the basement of the Ashmolean Museum in his hometown of Oxford, Haddon doesn’t come across as an egomaniac. When he discusses Curious Incident he’s more like a proud parent marvelling at his child’s success.

History, geography, politics, news, entertainment: the world is at our fingertips, staged before our eyes through the click of a mouse. Before the age of the internet was that of television, and radio before that. In the 19th century, you went for your weekly fix of politics, news, opinion and enlightenment to papers such as The Spectator — its name a nod back a further 100 years, to the first of the great periodicals that emerged from the coffee-house culture of the early 18th century. According to the influential historian and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, it was in that coffee-house culture of the Whig world of Joseph Addison and his Spectator that a new space for debate was created: the ‘public sphere’.

Under the statue of Charles III in the Puerta del Sol a hellfire preacher is competing for custom with a mariachi band. ‘Porque la paga del pecado es muerte!’ he shouts. ‘Ay, ay, ay, ay,’ they sing, ‘porque cantando se alegran, cielito lindo, los corazones.’ The weather is with the preacher: the cielo is not lindo. The El Greco cumulonimbus overhead flickers with lightning as God adds a rumble of thunder to the mix. Apart from the angry heavens and the five police vans lined up opposite — for prevención, they tell me — there’s little sign that Spain is on the brink. The leaning towers of Bankia may be tottering, but to judge from the queues outside the Prado the culture industry has not been affected.

The awards season may be over, but can I nominate Neil White for a gong anyway? He genuinely deserves one. After all, he’s the chap from Nottingham who watched all of the 600 or so films that were released into British cinemas last year — and then blogged about them at www.everyfilmin2011.com. You might question his sanity, but you cannot question his dedication: hours and hours spent in the dark of cinemas across the country, and then further hours translating his thoughts on to the internet. And now? He is repeating the process for the current year. The rest of us would find it difficult to follow Mr White’s bleary-eyed example. After all, 600 films in a year equates to roughly 12 films a week, or nearly two films a day.

Imagine you had £20 million to spare, burning a big hole in your pocket. What would you spend it on? You could buy a stately home or a private jet, but that would be so boring. Surely the nicest way to spend it would be to ask one of America’s greatest architects to build a new museum in your hometown, to show the world your favourite paintings. Now that really would be fun. For the man I’ve come to meet today, this is no idle fantasy. It’s the story of his life. Ten years ago, Frieder Burda invited Richard Meier to design a gallery to house his art collection, here in Baden Baden. Since it opened in 2004, the Frieder Burda Museum has transformed this sedate spa town into a cultural oasis in the Black Forest.

Andrew Lambirth reflects on the images that help shape our perception of the Queen Her Majesty the Queen has been a global celebrity for 60 years, and she carries her status with a naturalness and dignity that many of the more tearaway celebs would do well to emulate. She graduated from being a young and glamorous queen to a happy and fulfilled mother, but then had to settle for pausing in that most difficult of categories — middle age — for rather a long time, owing to the wondrous longevity of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. As the Queen now celebrates her Diamond Jubilee, in her own distinguished old age, it is revealing to consider how art and the mass media have helped to shape our changing perceptions of the monarch.

As 200 children descend on the Savoy, Niru Ratnam asks why corporations sponsor works of art In July, 200 teenagers from east London will head to the Savoy where they will take over the Lancaster Ballroom for the day. There they will be given the freedom to create a large-scale event — food and performances included. In the weeks leading up to it, they will have been prepped by Ruth Ewan, the artist behind the project, on the history of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. The preparation and the event itself will revolve around the teenagers’ interpretation of that historical moment when Wat Tyler led calls for the redistribution of wealth and was subsequently put to death in Smithfield by London’s mayor for his troubles.

In 1966, under the influence of ideas about chance, the artist Tom Phillips pledged to take as the foundation for his next work the first book that he could find for threepence. That book, discovered in a junk shop on Peckham Rye, was a long-forgotten Victorian romance in journal form, A Human Document by W.H. Mallock. Phillips set about effacing the pages of this book with sketched line drawings and gouache swathes of colour. The result was A Humument, described by Evan Anthony in the early Seventies in this magazine as ‘one of the freshest and most original pieces of art-literary work you are likely to see’.

Alasdair Palmer questions the ill-conceived makeover of Chartres cathedral which robs us of the sense of passing time that is part of its fascination and mystery Should old buildings look old? Or should they be restored to a condition where they look as if they could have been put up yesterday? Those questions are raised in a particularly pertinent form by the work going on at one of the most beautiful and inspiring of all old buildings: Chartres cathedral in France. Most of Chartres cathedral dates from between 1194 and 1230, when the bulk of the colossal stone structure, with its nearly 200 stained-glass windows and thousands of sculptures, was built.

Lloyd Evans talks to the young, dynamic and much-in-demand Tom Scutt about the challenges of bringing to life Narnia and its inhabitants Barky? What does he mean, ‘barky’? We’re talking about Aslan and he says he’s aiming for ‘barky’. ‘Barky like a dog or barky like a tree?’ ‘Like a tree,’ says Tom Scutt, designer of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which opens on 8 May in Kensington Gardens. ‘What I often do with Rupert [Goold, the director] is to imagine setting the whole show in one location. In this case, the wardrobe. So you trace the wood of the wardrobe back to a tree and Aslan has a link with a tree, something honest and true and majestic. That felt right.

William Cook says that I.M. Pei’s latest building, Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art, once again captures the spirit of the age Standing outside Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art, in Doha, watching the sun rise over the Persian Gulf, you’re reminded of Mies van der Rohe’s dictum: ‘less is more’. Van der Rohe was a hero of the man who made this building, and I.M. Pei’s new museum sums up that minimalist rule of thumb. Doha’s modern skyline is a panorama of skyscrapers, but they all look trite and transient beside this discreet masterpiece. Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art is only a few years old, but it feels as if it’s stood here for a century. It’s part of the landscape, the way great architecture ought to be.

Once you grasp the essential triviality of the Olympics, the Cultural Olympiad falls perfectly into place, says Lloyd Evans. Even Shakespeare can’t escape Once you grasp the essential triviality of the Olympics, the Cultural Olympiad falls perfectly into place, says Lloyd Evans. Even Shakespeare can’t escape Funny business the Olympics. No one seems to want it. Clearly it doesn’t belong here or anywhere else. So what’s it for? The main athletic competitions — ‘track and field’ — are disciplines devised by Greek hill-farmers during the Iron Age to improve their skills in battle. The field events, like discus and javelin, teach you to throw heavy and/or pointy things at your enemy.

On 19 March, Adele’s 21 overtook Dark Side of the Moon to become the seventh bestselling album in British music history. A day or two later it caught Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms napping, and eased into sixth place. So far 4.15 million copies have been sold. One in six British households has one. Ahead lie Thriller, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, Abba’s Gold, Sgt. Pepper and Queen’s Greatest Hits, still the daddy with 5.86 million registered sales. These five have been the top five for so long that industry experts with sad goatees thought they would never be caught. But records are made to be broken, or at the very least scratched.