More from Arts

Bright Star PG, Nationwide The most curious thing about Jane Campion’s Bright Star is that I did not cry, even though I was certain I would. I always cry in films. I cry at the drop of a hat. I cry when it only looks as if a hat might drop. I am continually alert for all hat-dropping possibilities. I cried when Rachel returned to Ross in Friends, and that’s an American sitcom. On TV! And this is about the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, which began when he was 25 and she was 18, and finished with his death from tuberculosis at 25. This story is sadness itself, and yet I did not cry, unless a very slight welling-up towards the end counts, which I don’t think it does.

Damien Hirst: the Blue Paintings The Wallace Collection, until 24 January 2010 John Walker: Incoming Tide Offer Waterman & Co, 11 Langton Street, SW10, until 14 November Weeks ago, when the review schedules were first plotted, I had thought to include here a feature on Damien Hirst. Although I find his work unremittingly thin, I thought I would give it another chance. After all, he is showing new paintings he’s made himself rather than instructed a studio to produce. But the results are so feeble and insignificant that detailed execration (however enjoyable) is more than they’re worth.

Twelfth Night Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon It’s a welcome refreshment after the RSC’s recent dramatisations of hard drinking and mass starvation in Russia to be landed on the sun-soaked coast of Mediterranean Illyria, and especially so in the company of a new and exquisitely beguiling Viola. Director Gregory Doran has been to much scholarly trouble in updating Shakespeare’s pirate-infested Illyria to Byron’s Albania. There, when visiting the court of a notorious warlord, Byron rhapsodised ‘The Turk, the Greek, the Albanian and the Moor/ Here mingled in their many-hued array’. Doubtless there were atrocities enough around the corner, but Doran has always been strong on devising exotic Mediterranean settings for Shakespeare’s comedies.

Ben Whishaw sits unrecognised, wearing a black T-shirt and drinking red wine in a dark corner of the Royal Court’s café. He has just come off stage from rehearsing Mike Bartlett’s new play Cock — in which he plays a chap who takes a break from his boyfriend and accidentally meets the girl of his dreams — and he’s still all buzzed up. I had been warned that giving interviews isn’t Whishaw’s favourite occupation. But it certainly doesn’t show here. There’s no sulkiness or distractedness on his part. Perhaps his recent jaunt around the US, to promote his hotly tipped performance as John Keats in the film Bright Star, has acclimatised him to the rigours and demands of a celebrated life.

Fantastic Mr Fox PG, Nationwide Fantastic Mr Fox is actually no more than So-So Mr Fox, if that, and I was pretty bored right from the get-go. The animation is beautiful, the attention to detail is a thing of wonder — with enough mise-en-scènes to keep even the most fanatical mise-en-scène-ists happy — but the story is a mess, the script is banal and, as visually stunning as it all is, it just doesn’t seem to have any kind of soul. I don’t know what Roald Dahl, who wrote the original story, would say, but I’m betting it’s something along the lines of, ‘Clear off. I’m busy. Don’t come back.’ He was always quite grumpy, by all accounts, although you wouldn’t know it from this.