Shakespeare

Thursday

Tristram Hunt

Diary - 14 January 2016

Whatever you do, don’t allow your six-year-old to be caught short at Crewkerne station. With the rain pouring and the wind howling, my daughter needed the loo. But it was locked. And no staff anywhere to be seen. So I pressed the ‘Help’ button on one of those machines that have replaced stationmasters. ‘How can I assist you?’ responded a warm South Asian voice. ‘Er, we need someone to open the loo at Crewkerne.’ ‘Where exactly are you?’ she came back, sounding lost. ‘You know, in Dorset, after Yeovil. On the Exeter line. How far away is the help centre?’ I was thinking Bristol, maybe Swindon. ‘Oh, we are in

Charles Moore

The Spectator's Notes | 14 January 2016

No amount of reports in the press that Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet-making is farcical and his party is divided should distract us from the fact that he is winning. I don’t mean that he will become prime minister, or even (though this seems quite possible) that he will survive as leader until the general election. It is just that he is gradually bringing more and more of Labour under his control, and grinding down his opponents. Besides, his public positions are coherent — in the sense of being internally consistent — and he is quite accomplished at adhering to an undeviatingly hardline, left-wing ideology while sounding mild and decent. Taxed,

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: A wet performance from Jeremy Corbyn

Corybn gave his wettest ever performance at PMQs. The party leaders had different theories about the authorship of the floods. Corbyn blamed Cameron. Cameron blamed the weather. Rainfall, he explained, had wept from the heavens in such unheralded quantities that a record-breaking dip-stick had to be lowered into the bucket to assess its full volume. Corbyn wouldn’t have this. He said government scrimping was at fault. He personified the issue with his usual set of hand-picked hankie-drenchers. He’d met a nice pair from Leeds, he said, called Chris and Victoria, whose holiday had been ruined by tides of sewage inundating their pressies. This prompted mystifying giggles from Tory backbenchers. Geography

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Why 'safe' is Dot Wordsworth's word of the year

‘Makes me feel sick,’ said my husband, referring not to the third mince pie of the morning (in Advent, supposedly a penitential time of preparation), nor to accepting a glass of champagne after having earlier accepted a glass of whisky at another house. No, what made him feel sick was the seasonal greeting: ‘God bless, and be safe.’ For once, I agreed with him. It was bad enough to be exhorted to drive safely or even stay safe during periods when terrorists had eased off a bit (after peak IRA, but before 2001). But now, with a fashion for shooting civilians in unexpected places, to be told to be safe

Thursday

James Delingpole

I’m a Celebrity is like The Simpsons: good if you’re thick; even better if you’re not

The best bit in I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! (ITV) will be when the prisoners finally revolt and turn on their evil captors, Ant and Dec. The sparky Geordie comedy duo will be imprisoned in a semi-submerged, rat-infested cage like the one in The Deer Hunter, fed on a diet of liquidised kangaroo bottom and wombat testicle, and released only to participate in a series of amusing challenges, such as a recreation of the Lemmiwinks episode from South Park, involving two giant funnels, a bunch of inserted eucalyptus leaves and a pair of ravening koalas. Though it hasn’t happened yet I’m going to keep watching every night,

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Winter wonderland | 19 November 2015

Kenneth Branagh opens his West End tenancy with Shakespeare’s inexplicably popular The Winter’s Tale. We start in Sicily where Leontes and his queen Hermione are entertaining Polixenes, the king of Bohemia. The design is heavily Germanic. Crimson drapes shroud the grey marble columns. A massive fir tree, twinkling with candlelight, is rooted in an ornamental toboggan. Everyone swishes about in thick, elegant Victorian costumes. The sets, by Christopher Oram, aren’t just lovely to look at, their detailed perfection is almost heartbreaking. And Neil Austin’s lighting would have won gasps of admiration from David Lean. The only fault is that it all seems overcontrived. An orchestral score intensifies the emotional colouring

Thursday

Taki

High life | 12 November 2015

Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it, tweeted Jon Ronson, a man I’d never heard of until his quip about spaghetti. I read about the tweet in a newspaper, as I’ve never used social media — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram — and hope that I never will. Why would I, unless I wanted to make trouble for myself? Not everyone needs to know what you’re doing all of the time. Or any of the time, for that matter. They say that the most destructive four-letter word in the digital domain is ‘send’. (Just as the scariest three words in American literature are Joyce Carol Oates.) I recently received

Lloyd Evans

How did this plotless goon-show wind up at the Royal Court?

One of the challenges of art is to know the difference between innovation and error. I wonder sometimes if the Royal Court realises such a confusion can arise. Its new production, RoosevElvis, has been hailed as a thesaurus of fascinating novelties but to me it looks like a classic case of ineptitude posing as originality. It opens with two costumed women perched on bar stools speaking into microphones. One is dressed as Teddy Roosevelt in a cowboy hat and a handlebar moustache with a three-foot wingspan. The other is an Elvis impersonatrix wearing a lazy smirk and a black wig that sags forlornly over her ears, which seem to have

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Battle fatigue

Can anyone explain this sudden enthusiasm for Agincourt, that unexpected victory over the French, now being celebrated, or rather commemorated, on radio, on digital, online? It was so weird to switch on Radio 4 on Sunday morning (which just happened to be St Crispin’s Day, the day on which the battle was fought) to discover that even Sunday Worship was being devoted to commemorating one of the bloodiest battles in that most bloodthirsty period. The service, old-fashioned Matins, came from the Chapel Royal at St James’s, and apparently the priests, choristers and vestrymen from that chapel were singing on the battlefield alongside Henry V in October 1415, when the English

Thursday

Michael Tanner

What's the point of the Met's new Otello?

The new production of Verdi’s Otello at the Met, with set designs by Ed Devlin, did make me wonder, as I watched it in the Cambridge Picture House, why they had bothered, since in no respect does it improve on many traditional productions. The sets are kind of sumptuous, but then what looked like a solid wooden or stone building turns out to be perspex, with neon lighting, and liable to slide around for no obvious reason. The costumes are suitably period, lavish, spotless. From the cinema-goer’s point of view, the most irritating thing is that the camera remains almost always on the person singing. This is especially exasperating in

Lloyd Evans

Shakespeare at his freest and most exuberant: The Wars of the Roses reviewed

The RSC’s The Wars of the Roses solves a peculiar literary problem. Shakespeare’s earliest history plays are entitled Henry VI parts (I), (II) and (III), which is thought to put people off. If you see one why not see all? If you miss the opener will the sequels confuse you? The solution is to condense the material and to reconfigure it as a single theatrical event. The result is a revelation. Here we have Shakespeare at his freest and most exuberant cramming the stage with every blockbusting trick he can contrive. Sex, battles, conspiracies, sword fights, gorings, cuckoldings, lynchings, beheadings. And there’s a constant stream of jibes aimed at the

Thursday

Jasper Rees

Speech impediment | 1 October 2015

Who goes to big-screen Shakespeare? Not theatre-goers much, and with reason. Apart from the odd corker by Kurosawa, arguably Olivier and Orson Welles — and let’s bung in Zeffirelli for those with a sweeter tooth — the Bard is a better scriptwriter when the words are dumped and the plots he nicked from elsewhere are updated. See 10 Things I Hate About You (the Shrew as high-school comedy), Forbidden Planet (Prospero in outer space) and, best of all, West Side Story (in fair Manhattan where we lay our scene). There is, as it happens, a semi-respected English-language version of Macbeth by Roman Polanski, who used the cloak of art to

Stuart Kelly

Bard times

It is fair to say that Jeanette Winterson is not Shakespeare, though I cannot imagine why any authors would accept these commissions to retell the plays — Margaret Atwood is lined up for The Tempest, Howard Jacobson for The Merchant of Venice — since the only certainty is that the texts will not be as good as Shakespeare. At least Winterson has chosen one of the more fascinating plays. Collected with the comedies in the First Folio, it is a singularly stark and strange work. Updated to the present day, the jealous King Leontes of Sicily is now Leo, the hedge-fund manager of Sicilia. His wife, MiMi, is a half-French

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Nice work

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/merkelstragicmistake/media.mp3″ title=”Kate Maltby and Igor Toronyi-Lalic discuss Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet” startat=1642] Listen [/audioplayer]You can’t play the part of Hamlet, only parts of Hamlet. And the bits Benedict Cumberbatch offers us are of the highest calibre. He delivers the soliloquies with a meticulous and absorbing clarity like a lawyer in the robing room mastering a brief before his summing-up. And though he’s a decade too old to play the prince (the grave scene sets his age at about 28), he cavorts about the stage like a ballet dancer delighting in his own athleticism. But he’s also much too nice. The darkest shades of melancholy and the raw emotional ugliness are

Frances Wilson

Come rain or shine

‘Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr Worthing,’ pleads Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.’ Weatherland would make Gwendolen very nervous indeed. Our observations of the sky, Alexandra Harris reveals in this extended outlook, have always meant something else. Weatherland is a literary biography of the climate. Beginning with the Fall (in the Biblical rather than the autumnal sense) and ending with Alice Oswald, Harris condenses 2,000 years of weather ‘as it is recreated in the human imagination’. It is the weather-consciousness of

Thursday

Robert Gorelangton

All white on the night

Shakespeare’s ‘Wars of the Roses’ will have no ethnic minority actors in the cast when the shows (two Henry VI plays and Richard III) open at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames, later this month. A sprinkling of so-called BME (black and minority ethnic) actors in Shakespeare has been the norm for ages now. So the decision by the director to go with an all-white cast has caused much hurt and concern from the actor’s union Equity, the Guardian, and from various groups promoting racial diversity in the arts. From all the fuss, you’d think the plays are being directed by a hooded white supremacist. In fact they are being

Lloyd Evans

Art by committee

Australia, 1788. A transport ship arrives in Port Jackson (later Sydney harbour) carrying hundreds of convicts and a detachment of English officers under orders to guard the prisoners and to implant the roots of a well-ordered colony. These facts form the basis of Our Country’s Good, which was created in 1988 by Timberlake Wertenbaker in collaboration with Max Stafford-Clark’s Joint Stock company. Stafford-Clark’s method is to prepare a script using committees of actors under the supervision of a writer and the invariable result is a show that prizes the concerns of players over those of play-goers. The director Nadia Fall has revived this script with lavish efficiency. We begin with

Thursday

Allan Massie

Another near run thing

Charles VI of France died on 21 October 1422. He had been intermittently mad for most of his long reign, ‘a pathetic figure’ flitting, often witless, around his palaces. He left a ruined and divided kingdom. There was no French prince to follow his funeral. ‘Tradition was maintained by a solitary figure in a black cape and hat’ on foot behind the coffin. ‘It was the Regent of France, John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford.’ His brother, Henry V of England, married to Charles’s daughter Catherine, would have become King of France had he not died of dysentery two months previously. His infant son, Henry VI, would indeed be crowned

Thursday

Duncan Fallowell

Rio’s rococo genius

The surname is pronounced ‘M’shahdo j’Asseece’. There are also two Christian names — Joaquim Maria — which are usually dispensed with. K. David Jackson, professor of Portuguese at Yale, confines himself to ‘Machado’ and has invented an adjective ‘Machadean’. Stefan Zweig, who committed suicide in the very Machadean town of Petropolis, called him ‘the Dickens of Brazil’ which is not true — he has not Dickens’s range or sustained ebullience. I used to say he was the Gogol of Brazil — particularly in his short stories — but re-reading Dom Casmurro, one of the five novels of Machado’s maturity, I can see he has not Gogol’s hatred, which gives the

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Family matters

God, what a title. The Gathered Leaves. It sounds like a tremulous weepie about grief and endurance with a closing scene featuring three anvil-faced spinsters staring through the rectory window at an autumn bonfire. It’s not quite like that. The play opens with some clumsy exposition revealing the political chronology. It’s Easter, 1997, and Labour’s shiny-fanged messiah is about to evict the Brixton mule from Downing Street. We meet the Pennington family, a high Tory clan nestling in a frondy corner of the Thames Valley, who are eager to heal an ancient rift. Their estranged daughter and her mixed-race sprog have been skulking in France for the past 17 years.