Arts feature

William Cook goes to Skegness and watches Cannon & Ball attract an adoring audience It’s August and Edinburgh is full of fashionable young comedians, but here in Skegness the Festival Fringe seems a million miles away. With its amusement arcades and fish and chip shops, this unpretentious place feels forgotten by the metropolitan arts establishment. There are no TV producers on the windswept promenade, no theatre critics in the bingo halls. Yet Skegness boasts a theatrical heritage far older than the Edinburgh Festival — traditional seaside entertainment. And this summer it’s playing host to Britain’s most seasoned seaside entertainers, Cannon & Ball. Throughout the 1980s Cannon & Ball were one of the biggest acts in Britain.

Nina Conti appears convinced that her puppets are real. Freddy Gray investigates Isn’t Nina Conti too good-looking to be a ventriloquist? One thinks of blokes in working-men’s clubs with frazzled hair, not Nina with her smiling face and big brown eyes. It’s hard not to look at her, which must be a professional disadvantage: isn’t the audience meant to watch the puppet? I want to put this technical question to Nina, but worry that it might sound creepy. Instead, feebly, I ask if she believes reports that ventriloquism is making a comeback. ‘I’m not sure I really buy into that,’ she says, with a kind and apologetic shrug. But the art of talking through a puppet does seem to be enjoying a renaissance.

Charles Moore on how to renew and maintain life in the deserted villages of rural Romania To understand this story, one must go back nearly 25 years. As Soviet Communism moved towards collapse in the late 1980s, people were in danger of forgetting Romania. Because of Romania’s relative independence from Moscow, the West played down the insane policies of its despot, Nikolai Ceausescu. The Spectator, I am glad to say, did not. We sent in journalists under cover, and started a scheme, paid for by kind readers, to send free copies of the magazine, much sought after by print-starved intellectuals. The world finally took notice of Ceausescu’s horrors when he began a policy of systematically destroying all villages, housing peasants in concrete blocks of flats.

The ‘seriously handsome’ Toby Stephens talks to Mary Wakefield about the magic of acting With some people, their prep school selves seem barely submerged beneath the adult surface. They talk away like grown-ups but one shrug, a grin, and you can see their inner schoolchild. Toby Stephens, sitting opposite me in a boxy room high up on the top deck of the National Theatre, is a good example. He’s 41, seriously handsome with dark red hair and a fine-boned 1940s face; he’s a dab hand at playing cads and attempted world domination as the evil Gustav Graves in Die Another Day (quite outshining that drip Pierce Brosnan). But there’s something about him that still seems to be 12. It makes me want to hug him, though I’m quite sure that wouldn’t help.

What are the ingredients of a good audio guide? Henrietta Bredin investigates These days you’re more than likely, at any museum, gallery, exhibition or public building of interest, to be offered an audio (or even a multimedia) guide with which to ‘enhance your visitor experience’. There will probably be a small cost involved and you will then find yourself with a pair of headphones and an attached box to sling around your neck — or something known in the trade as a wand, which looks like a large telephone with a selection of buttons to choose from.

Marianne Gray talks to the down-to-earth Oscar nominee Brenda Blethyn about her latest film Brenda Blethyn doesn’t really understand why people continually ask her why she plays dowdy, often downtrodden characters, like Cynthia, the despairing mother in Secrets & Lies, or James McAvoy’s heartbroken mother in Atonement, or Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, who horse-trades her daughters. Or, indeed, like her latest role, the anxious Elizabeth, an ignorant, conservative, prejudiced woman, in London River. ‘I just don’t see it like that,’ says Blethyn, who has made a brilliant career out of playing understated, restrained women. ‘Everyone must be portrayed. Everyone must have a voice, even the flawed ones. I don’t try to smooth out the edges.

Andrew Lambirth talks to John Richardson, biographer and friend of the artist John Richardson has spent a lifetime in the company of great art and artists, and is justly celebrated for his ability to evoke, explain and evaluate their work in beautiful prose. Best known as the biographer of Picasso, he has written about many other artists, including Manet and Braque, and has curated a number of seminal exhibitions since the Picasso retrospective he staged in New York in 1962. For the past 50 years he has lived in New York, though born in England in 1924. He was in London recently for the installation of his major new curatorial excursion, Picasso: The Mediterranean Years 1945–62 at Gagosian Gallery (6–24 Britannia Street, WC1, until 28 August).

Lloyd Evans talks to Michael Attenborough, whose star at the Almeida is the theatre itself The back office of the Almeida Theatre in Islington could do with a major refit. Dowdy, open-plan and scattered with Free-cycled furniture, it looks like the chill-out room of a student bar or the therapy suite of some underfunded weight-watch clinic. The tin chairs are arranged around elderly coffee-tables. The walls have been painted with the ramshackle expediency of a squat — a blue stretch here, some scarlet columns there, a few purpley flourishes. Beneath the roof eaves a beer gut of damp and crumbly brickwork bulges outwards precariously. I’d give it three months, maybe six, before it collapses.

Mary Wakefield talks to Roger Allam and discovers that he thinks acting is only a game As I meet Roger Allam’s eye, in the bar area of Shakespeare’s Globe, I feel a lurch of dread. I love Roger Allam. I’ve held a torch for him since the mid-Eighties, when he starred in Les Mis as the original and best Inspector Javert — but the look in his eye today is one of profound boredom. It bodes badly. You must be in the middle of rehearsals [for Henry IV Part 1] I say, brightly. ‘Yes.’ He looks out of the window at the glittering Thames. It must be difficult to do interviews then — do you still feel in character as Falstaff? ‘No. Not really.’ Roger Allam is, everyone says, a nice man.

As Clint Eastwood celebrates his 80th birthday, Peter Hoskin salutes his artistic legacy My life at the movies began with Clint Eastwood about a decade ago. Channel 4 was screening A Fistful of Dollars (1964) one night, and my brother insisted that we stay up and tune in. I didn’t know beforehand that it was a western, let alone one directed by the great Sergio Leone. But, from the opening scene, I knew everything I needed to know about Clint: the poncho, the cheroot, those eyes burning with cathode ray intensity. This, I realised, is what people meant when they talked about cinema. And I was hooked. Fast forward to the present, and the lone gunslinger is about to turn 80 years old. He still stands tall, lean and gruff, with none of that old intensity dimmed by the passage of time.

New Labour inspired a golden age of political comedy. William Cook looks to satire’s future Although few will mourn Gordon Brown’s departure, his drawn-out demise should be a source of sadness for comedy aficionados, be they red, yellow or blue. For New Labour’s most unlikely legacy was to inspire a renaissance in political comedy. It may have ended with a disgruntled whimper rather than a bang, but for anyone with a taste for satire these were 13 golden years. When Tony Blair first swept into Downing Street in 1997, a lot of left-wing comics seemed bemused. They’d been attacking the Tories for 18 years. Now that the Labour landslide they’d yearned for had happened, they didn’t quite know what to do.

Robert Gore-Langton on a stage adaptation of the Erskine Childers classic Riddle of the Sands The Riddle of the Sands was published in 1903. It was an instant bestseller and has never been out of print since. It’s the story of two young Englishmen who, while sailing off the German coast, unearth a fiendish plot to invade Britain. The book is often cited as the first ‘factional’ spy story, one that launched a genre. With its mass of authentic, verifiable detail it set the trend for Fleming, le Carré and the rest. The book includes maps, charts and tide timetables.

Henrietta Bredin goes backstage at the Royal Opera House and finds a stash of weaponry I am standing outside a heavily reinforced metal door somewhere in the furthest flung recesses of the labyrinthine corridor-tangle backstage at the Royal Opera House. A painted shield has the word Armoury picked out on it in gold lettering and next to a no smoking warning is a sign saying ‘No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again’. The door swings ponderously open to reveal the possessor of this somewhat macabre sense of humour, chief armourer Rob Barham. He is not a small man and his lair seems to fit around him like a tortoise shell, leaving him the minimum of space in which to manoeuvre.

Marianne Gray talks to Debbie Reynolds, one of the last of Hollywood’s Golden Era Debbie Reynolds is the first to admit she’s no longer Tammy. At 78, she’s more like the Unsinkable Molly Brown as she tours Britain this month in her one-woman show, Alive and Fabulous. ‘You people in England probably think I died years ago but I’m still kicking,’ she says, laughing. ‘I know that a lot of young people don’t know who I am unless they’ve noticed me as Grace’s mother, Bobbi Adler, in the sitcom Will & Grace, but I’ve never stopped working. I’m an Aries and it’s in my nature to be a performer.

Andrew Lambirth on how a powerful Easter message can be found in images of the Crucifixion Easter is not just a time for bonnets and bunnies, but also for reexamining the fundamentals of life and faith. In the self-denial of Lent, whether we’ve given up chocolate or alcohol, or something even more difficult, we are offered the opportunity of facing and considering temptation, without the usual pretence that it’s not happening to us. Taking the easy way out is perhaps our most constant temptation, particularly rife in a society which dislikes rules and moral restraints, but Lent gives us the chance to confront that insidious habit. Also the chance to check — if only fleetingly — the wilder excesses of self-indulgence. And the purpose of all this self-denial?

I admire J.G. Ballard, who died last year, but much of his writing leaves me cold — as if abandoned in one of the lunar jungles or deserts that Max Ernst’s paintings so often depict. I admire J.G. Ballard, who died last year, but much of his writing leaves me cold — as if abandoned in one of the lunar jungles or deserts that Max Ernst’s paintings so often depict. It’s a deep chill of the psyche, a numbing of the human warmth that makes life bearable, and Ballard rightly identified it as taking over our culture. He wasn’t really a science fiction writer so much as a social commentator, dissecting our present dystopia — a remarkable and original voice, unafraid to describe the dark psychopathology of the human race, however ominous his predictions.