Culture

Present Laughter introduces us to a chic, louche and highly successful theatrical globetrotter, Garry Essendine, whose riotous social life is centred on his swish London apartment. This is Noël Coward’s version of Noël Coward. In the script, from 1942, Coward alleges that his alter ego is being chased by three women. The in crowd would have laughed at the reference to Coward’s secret orientation but this version rather earnestly converts one of the females into a rugged Spanish male. What for? Few scripts from the wartime era remain in the theatrical canon and one of the pleasures of seeing a vintage play is to examine the habits and conventions of a half-forgotten age.

Midsommar is the latest horror film from Ari Aster, who made Hereditary, which starred Toni Collette and was a sensation. That was a domestic, claustrophobic scenario packed with jump scares — well, jump-ish scares; I wasn’t that scared, actually — whereas this is pastoral and relies more on building a quiet dread. It’s set in the remote countryside where a pagan community has its own superstitions and rituals and ‘elders’ and a maypole — and they are never good news, maypoles. This is clever and gripping in its own right, but it is also familiar and will certainly put you in mind of The Wicker Man. That is, the 1973 original, not the 2006 remake starring a deranged Nicolas Cage jump-kicking women in the throat, which we will never talk of again.

In 1965 a journalist asked Paula Rego why she painted. ‘To give a face to fear,’ she replied (those were the days of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal). But when asked the same question shortly afterwards, Rego added a qualification: ‘There’s more to it than that: I paint because I can’t stop painting.’ Rego has carried on making pictures ever since and the results can be seen in a remarkable exhibition, Obedience and Defiance, curated by Catherine Lampert at the MK Gallery, Milton Keynes. This is not quite a career retrospective — Rego will get one of those at Tate Britain in 2021. But it is the first time that I have seen so much of her life’s work laid out consecutively in one place. The effect is truly powerful.

The tears of a clown have often fallen on fertile operatic ground. Think of Rigoletto and I Pagliacci; or The Yeomen of the Guard, where mock-Tudor merriment turns to ash in the mouth of the jester Jack Point. But what if the composer himself is the buffoon? Jacques Offenbach was the court jester of France’s Second Empire, and if he’s still (inaccurately) regarded as an essentially frivolous talent, well, let’s be blunt: his 100-plus stage works do include sentient vegetables, scenes of mass flatulence and at least one opera in which the title role is taken by a performing dog.

Six hundred and thirty years ago, Chaucer revealed in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ that what women really want is to be totally in charge of everything. With Girl now back home permanently having done her A levels, I can confirm that this is true: no longer am I in control of what we watch on TV, not even when I plead that it’s my job and how else am I going to be able to afford the extensive tour of Magaluf and Bali etc. that she’s got planned this summer? But I don’t mind really because it means I’m forced to watch stuff there’s no way I would have seen otherwise. And in doing so I become a better and wiser person because of all the fascinating things it teaches me about the female psychopathology.