Culture

My granny used Spode willow-pattern crockery for everyday use. There was another grander service for Sunday lunch, also blue-and-white chinoiserie: Booths dragon, picked out with a gold border. Willow pattern evokes for me the taste of slightly stale ginger biscuits, which I liked very much, and coronation chicken, which I was less keen on. The idea of owning a table service now seems close to antediluvian; too formal and too much washing-up, although this was a ritual that mattered greatly to Granny. People now prefer plates that give a dull clunk when flicked, rather than fine china’s dulcet ping. Such changes of fashion were a factor in the 2008 closure of the Spode factory in Stoke-on-Trent, which had been producing willow-pattern plates since the 1790s.

Arriving in Oslo, the Barcode District is unavoidable. It is so named because its blocks are laid out like dominos – each design a tawdry, throwaway joke. But the Norwegians have had enough. With a spate of such controversies, Oslo has become an epicentre for an architectural uprising against the uglification of cities. Its Nordic Symposium on Beauty in Architecture has become an annual meeting point for plotting the insurgency. Unlike on this side of the North Sea, where traditional and classical architecture found a champion in the King, Scandinavia’s counterrevolution is led by ordinary citizens.

Grange Park Opera has acquired a new chandelier for its theatre at West Horsley; a jumble of foliage and fairy lights that ascends into the roof pre-curtain, like in The Phantom of the Opera. It’s a fun addition, and very on-brand. This stockbroker-belt festival knows its audience. It raises and splashes cash with equal gusto, and it doesn’t overthink things. A Ring cycle – opera’s ultimate status symbol – has been on the cards at GPO for a few years. Now it’s arrived and the opening gambit, Das Rheingold, looks and sounds impeccably high-spec. It’s designed and directed by Charlie Edwards, and the visuals are familiar but effective.

Under the Shadow is a timely drama set in Tehran in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam’s missiles are raining down on the city which puts an additional strain on the troubled marriage of Iraj and Shideh. Iraj is a doctor. Shideh is a part-qualified doctor. During quiet spells, they chat about humdrum stuff. Iraj wants Shideh to have another baby. Shideh prefers to leap around doing her Jane Fonda exercises. Her mother-in-law potters in and out and fusses over bits of crockery. Their daughter snuggles on a sofa with a rag doll. The low-energy dialogue flits from one issue to the next without any sense of direction. The characters tell each other jokes to pass the time.

Grade: A It’s spring in Vienna; well, OK, it’s early summer but it’s a grey day when Mozart doesn’t make you feel younger and I reckon this new release from Alim Beisembayev will do just that. In a world of infinite entertainment possibilities, Beisembayev has done the hard bit – the choosing – for you. Here we have two late piano concertos (Mozart wrote them between the ages of 30 and 32, as his own solo career wound down) charged with a grandeur, a playfulness and an endless smiling compassion that will come as a glorious corrective to anyone whose last experience of Mozart involved bodily fluids and confectionery in Sky’s hellish remake of Amadeus.

In 1911 Duncan Grant’s ‘Bathing’ went on display as part of a design scheme for the dining room of the Borough Polytechnic in Southwark. This large painting depicts a group of strongly muscled male bathers diving, swimming and hauling themselves into a boat. Only one of them is wearing a bathing slip, and while this kind of spectacle might have been familiar to anyone educated at a public school at this period, the art critic of the Times complained that it could well have ‘a degenerative influence on the children of the working class’. The picture now hangs in Tate Britain, and is used on the gallery’s website to direct people to an account of ‘Queer Life and Art’.