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Wednesday

Simon Hoggart

Public face

My favourite Alan Bennett story dates from when his play The Lady in the Van was performed in London. The piece includes two Alan Bennetts, one to take part in the action, the other to narrate. One was played by Nick Farrell, a neighbour of ours, who had agreed to do it on condition that he would be free to attend the birth of his first child. For some reason there was no understudy, so when Nick’s wife went to hospital a chap in black tie appeared on stage before the curtain rose. ‘Owing to indisposition,’ he said — an odd choice of words in the circumstances — ‘the part of Alan Bennett will be played tonight by Mr Alan Bennett.’ And there was the playwright himself.

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Great expectations | 5 December 2009

After many years writing about my enthusiasms, I’m still fascinated by the relationship between expectation and actual enjoyment. After many years writing about my enthusiasms, I’m still fascinated by the relationship between expectation and actual enjoyment. How often have we seen a film everyone has been raving about, and been vaguely and obscurely disappointed? Or read a book of which we expected nothing, and loved it to pieces? My most complex relationship of this sort is with the CDs I have bought but haven’t played yet. They sit in a drawer in my desk, silently berating me for not having put them on as soon as I got home. It’s not that I buy so many that I don’t have time to play them (well, I don’t think so, anyway).

James Delingpole

Time wasting

I had to transfer some money into my Polish builder’s bank account the other day, so I rang up the Lloyds TSB Execmaster Super VIP service helpline. I had to transfer some money into my Polish builder’s bank account the other day, so I rang up the Lloyds TSB Execmaster Super VIP service helpline. As usual, I wasn’t permitted just to make my transaction and get on with my life. First, the helpful person at the other end impressed on me, I would really need to sort out my bank accounts. Currently, he had noticed, I held my money in a Greyman Ordinaire Current account and a Crapmeister Lo-Interest Saver account and this was losing me money. ‘Have you thought about transferring your funds into one of our new Spanglo Plutocrat Wealth-Enhancer Imperator accounts?

Kate Chisholm

Brush up your Handel

’Tis the season to be jolly — in spite of the gloom outside and the torrents of rain. ’Tis the season to be jolly — in spite of the gloom outside and the torrents of rain. But how do you banish the winter ghouls, put on a mask of good cheer and go forth beaming into the pre-Christmas crowds? Radio Three has come up with a possible help-all, by launching its Sing Hallelujah! campaign just as the days shorten into dreary half-light. So far the station has signed up almost 350 amateur choirs nationwide who at some time between now and Christmas will be performing Handel’s exhilarating chorus from Messiah. It’s the culmination of the year-long celebration of the composer’s music, marking 250 years since his death in 1759.

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

Where’s Tom?

Me and Orson Welles 12A, Nationwide For a film about drama, Me and Orson Welles — Orson Welles and I? Do we care? — is obstinately undramatic. I kept trying to will it into some kind of life, any kind of life. Come on. You can do it. Think of the children! But it would not be roused. It just plodded on, drearily and leadenly, for the full 114 minutes, like I had nothing better to do, which I didn’t, but that’s not the point. Based on true events, it follows the 22-year-old Welles as he mounts his ground-breaking New York 1937 production of Julius Caesar, but as a film about a famous play it has none of the pizzazz, wit, or invention of, say, a Shakespeare in Love. That, though, did have a script souped up by Tom Stoppard. Tom Stoppard.

Michael Tanner

Suffering for art’s sake

Cecilia Bartoli Barbican Messiah Coliseum After a brief but inspissatedly tedious overture by Porpora, played by Il Giardino Armonico, the curtains at the Barbican were pulled aside and Cecilia Bartoli, dressed like a highwayperson from a 1940s escapist movie, sprang on to the stage, flung off her feathered hat, rocked with superabundant energy as the orchestra played the introduction to her first aria, from another opera of Porpora’s, and launched into the first of many elaborate analogies between love and other conditions which might give an excuse for lots of drooping and even more giddy coloratura. She was on amazing form, and was greeted and received with almost hysterical rapture.

Lloyd Evans

Degas as mentor

The Line Arcola The Priory Royal Court Sex, fame, glamour, success, genius, riches, dancing girls. It’s all there, every single bit of it, in The Line by Timberlake Wertenbaker. Her new play traces the off-kilter friendship between Edgar Degas and a gifted but unschooled prostitute-turned-artist. The cheeky little sexpot barges into the great man’s studio one day and presents him with her portfolio. Astonished by her untutored ability he buys a drawing on the spot and promises to become her mentor. With art-history plays like this, the trick is to find a storyline that’s both dramatically satisfying and factually illuminating. Timberlake’s talent doesn’t let her down here. The truth does.

Saturday

Giannandrea Poesio

Feel the funk

Firsts Linbury Studio Theatre Gnosis Sadler’s Wells Theatre Funky is not normally a word used to describe the cultural activities at the Royal Opera House. But that adjective encapsulates the essence of Firsts, a showcase of different performing talents, now in its seventh year. Funkiness is indeed what greeted spectators last week at the opening of the 2009 edition, once they had descended into the cheerful vaults of the Linbury Studio Theatre. Multitalented Matt Hennem interacted with the incoming public, by dancing among them with his gravity-defying, mesmerising crystal ball. His elegant, well-choreographed evolutions and improvisations set the tone for the rest of the evening, thus becoming the prelude to equally captivating displays of different skills and bravura.

Michael Tanner

Parental indulgence

Cherevichki Royal Opera Tolomeo English Touring Opera, Cambridge Semele Royal Academy of Music The week’s operatic rarity was Tchaikovsky’s Cherevichki, inaccu-rately translated as The Tsarina’s Slippers. It is an adaptation of the Gogol story ‘Christmas Eve’, and is slightly more familiar in Rimsky-Korsakov’s version, which was mounted in a spirited production at ENO in 1988. Though I never thought I’d say so, the Rimsky score turns out to be considerably more engaging, certainly more suited to his temperament, and his flair for orchestral colour. Tchaikovsky was devoted to his own opera, which had a mild success as Vakula the Smith, and which he subjected to extensive revision.

Deborah Ross

Mounting dread

Paranormal Activity 15, Nationwide Paranormal Activity is the horror film which was made for $30,000 and has since gone on to earn $240 million at the box office globally. This is astonishing, just as the size of horror audiences always astonishes me. Who are these people who enjoy being scared to death, and consider it a good night out? I don’t. Indeed, as I said to the critic who initially sat next to me at the screening, ‘I should warn you, I’m not very good at this sort of thing and I may well jump into your lap.’ At this point, he promptly got up and moved. I was, yes, minded to call out after him, ‘And you are no great shakes yourself...Robert!’, but, of course, did not have the courage. This is how fearful I am.

Robin Holloway

Psalm-setting challenge

One day back in 2007 I sat down in a mood of bitter rancour and rapidly sketched out an unpremeditated draft setting of Psalm 39, that text unmatched for the utterance of such dark states — ‘my heart was hot within me …man walketh in a vain shadow...O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength before I go hence and be no more seen ...’. One day back in 2007 I sat down in a mood of bitter rancour and rapidly sketched out an unpremeditated draft setting of Psalm 39, that text unmatched for the utterance of such dark states — ‘my heart was hot within me …man walketh in a vain shadow...O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength before I go hence and be no more seen ...’.

Kate Chisholm

Filling in the blanks

‘Show, not tell’ is probably the best tip you can give anyone who wants to write; and the most difficult thing to achieve. ‘Show, not tell’ is probably the best tip you can give anyone who wants to write; and the most difficult thing to achieve. It’s so tempting to stuff everything in, to give away all the evidence too soon or describe every last detail down to the colour of the gunman’s eyes, just to make sure that your readers have followed the plot. It’s an even more difficult technique to master in a radio play, where you might think that ‘telling’ is what matters. How else can your listeners understand what on earth is going on when they have no visual clues?

Simon Hoggart

A certain smugness

Why do so many otherwise kindly people hate Children in Need (BBC1, last weekend)? We truly believe in helping needy children. We are genuinely pleased to discover that this year it raised £20.3 million, which is almost as much as last year, in spite of the recession, and which amounts to nearly 34 pence for every man, woman and child in the country. Actually, I chucked £2 into a collecting bucket on the Tube on Friday last, which makes me six times as generous as the average British person! We also like Terry Wogan. I think he is a national treasure, being one of the few disc jockeys who gives the impression of having read a book — or even several.

Wednesday

John Howkins

Farewell to the glory days

Are recessions good for the arts? Admissions to Britain’s free public museums and galleries were up 2 per cent in 2008, and most have reported increases of over 10 per cent in 2009. Are recessions good for the arts? Admissions to Britain’s free public museums and galleries were up 2 per cent in 2008, and most have reported increases of over 10 per cent in 2009. Tickets for the big touring shows are selling well. West End theatre box-office revenues were up 3.5 per cent in the first six months of this year. This winter we can enjoy a multitude of entertainments as wonderful or as wacky as ever. So is everything rosy? Well, no. It is true that stocks are high, quality is high and queues are long. But this masks problems in future supplies.

Liz Anderson

Mixing with prostitutes

Kienholz: The Hoerengracht Sunley Room, National Gallery, until 21 February 2010 The first time I saw Ed Kienholz’s work was at his 1996 retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York. I was completely overwhelmed — there was something so powerful and so disturbing about his huge stage-set-size installations which covered subjects such as brothels, mental hospitals and abortion. Kienholz was a pioneer of assemblage art in the Fifties and Sixties, using objects he found in flea markets and elsewhere to make up his ‘tableaux’. He died in 1994; but from the early Seventies he and Nancy Reddin, the photographer whom he married in 1972, worked together as a team, travelling between their studios in Idaho and Berlin.

Laura Gascoigne

Artistic confrontation

Matisse & Rodin Musée Rodin, Paris, until 28 February 2010 Of the grand 18th-century mansions with spectacular gardens that once lined the rue de Varenne in Paris, only two have escaped the developers. The Hôtel Matignon at number 57 survives intact as the residence of the French Prime Minister, but the Hôtel Biron at number 79 owes its escape to an artists’ colony. In the 19th century, the Maréchal de Biron’s former home became a convent school for young ladies; when the nuns moved out in 1905, the artists moved in.

Lloyd Evans

Double vision | 25 November 2009

The Habit of Art Lyttelton Cock Royal Court Upstairs Here’s my theory. Alan Bennett alighted on Auden and Britten as a promising theme. Two interesting old poofs collaborating on an opera shortly before their deaths. The first draft turned out to be static, chat-heavy and lacking in dramatic movement. Start again. Write a play about a company of actors rehearsing the Auden/Britten play. That’s better. That loosens things up. It adds gags. It adds layers, too. If we get bored with Auden and Britten we can watch the actors break character and make comments, discuss historical details and complain about the sorts of things actors complain about.

Tiffany Jenkins

Interview

Tiffany Jenkins talks to Scotland’s culture minister about the new ‘creative industry’ quango The unexpected hit of this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival was Mike Russell MSP, the SNP minister for culture, external affairs and the constitution. Surprisingly for a leading Scottish Nationalist, there was no mention of Rabbie Burns. Nor was it a populist pitch — bigging up bestselling Scottish writers like Irvine Welsh or Ian Rankin. Instead, he spoke of his love for the Chilean communist writer Pablo Neruda, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and even that pillar of Victorian imperialism, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Whatever you think of his politics, you can’t call Mike Russell parochial.

Saturday

Giannandrea Poesio

Rare treat

Quantum Leaps Birmingham Royal Ballet, Sadler’s Wells Despite the clever in-joke/reference, Quantum Leaps is not exactly a crowd-pulling title for a ballet evening. Last week, outside Sadler’s Wells, a couple of passers-by had trouble imagining how someone could turn a television hit into a ballet. And, on the opening night, a lady was heard querying whether the programme had something to do with James Bond. Yet such an ambiguous title — Latin and scientific terms are seldom popular — fits the bill perfectly, as it encapsulates the essence of the energetic, thought-provoking modern ballet that is on offer. Stanton Welch created Powder in 1998 to Mozart’s haunting Clarinet Concerto in A major.

Deborah Ross

Mysterious ways

A Serious Man 15, Nationwide Listen, I love a Jewish story as much as anyone, if not more so, and I even loved Neil Diamond in The Jazz Singer — only kidding; it was horrible! — but this? I am just not sure. Or, to put it another way, if I have one serious problem with the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, it is: just how seriously are we meant to take it? If it is meant to be significantly illuminating, in what way are we significantly illuminated? And, if it isn’t, then what are we being invited to laugh at? Jews? Judaism? Faith in general? Fat ladies? Family? Life in the ’burbs? Again? Honestly, I do wish film-makers would get over sneering at the suburbs. We can’t all live just off Wardour Street. Still, what do I know?