Culture

One masterpiece, one dud, and one interesting rediscovery. That’s Pinter Five. Victoria Station is a hilarious sketch which might have been turned into TV gold by the Pythons or the Two Ronnies. A radio controller needs a cabbie to collect a fare from Victoria Station, but the only driver available is a charming lunatic whose car is idling near a ‘dark park’. The cabbie already has a passenger on board, who may be a murder victim, and although he claims not to know Victoria Station he insists that he’s the best man for the job. This dotty piece of verbal slapstick feels a bit dated because cab firms no longer rely on radios.

As the Allies advanced towards Germany in September 1944, their supplies were brought all the way from western Normandy in a constant shuttle convoy known as the Red Ball Express. If you were making a realistic movie about this, three quarters of the truck drivers would be played by black actors, because that’s how it was in real life. Similar rules would have to apply to any remake of Zulu or Zulu Dawn. It is an awkward but inescapable historical fact that there was no diversity whatsoever among Cetewayo’s Impis: they were all, resolutely, from the same African tribe.

Mary Queen of Scots is a historical costume drama that, unlike The Favourite, does not breathe new life into the genre, or any kind of life, even of the old accustomed sort. It is lifeless, in other words, and quite the slog, with jerky pacing, such an abundance of bearded men you lose track of which bearded man is which, and it reduces two of history’s most fascinating women to not much of anything. However, on the plus side, the scenery is ravishing, the two leads (Saoirse Ronan as Mary and Margot Robbie as Elizabeth I) are better than the film probably deserves, and the hair and make-up are cheeringly insane. By the end, Elizabeth most put me in mind of Ronald McDonald.

Sweat, set in the Pennsylvanian rust belt, looks at a blue-collar community threatened by a factory closure. The script uses the flashback device. Scene One informs us that two lads were found guilty of doing a Bad Thing eight years ago. What Bad Thing? The author won’t tell us because the play needs suspense but the revelation is delayed so long that our patience is tested to the limit. The flaccid writing doesn’t help. Scene Two lasts 30 minutes and introduces us to the main characters, who visit the same bar every evening to get hammered and scream at each other. The only dramatic point in this lengthy scene is the revelation that two lovers had a big row about a fish tank.

Here’s a tricky quiz question for you. What word completes this sentence from a BBC4 documentary on Friday: ‘The world as we know it was created by the…’? The answer, bizarrely enough, is ‘backbeat’ — because the documentary in question was On Drums… Stewart Copeland!, in which the former Police percussionist took a fiercely drum-centric view of well, more or less everything. This was a programme, for example, that compared Elvin Jones’s stick work for John Coltrane to Moses’s parting of the Red Sea; that attributed the Beatles’ success largely to Ringo; and that put forward Dee Dee Chandler as one of the key figures of 20th-century global history.