Culture

Caryl Churchill’s best-known play, Top Girls, owes a large debt to 1970s TV comedy. It opens with a Pythonesque dinner party in which noted female figures from myth and history get drunk while swapping gags and stories. We meet a Victorian explorer, an emperor’s concubine, a 16th-century Flemish battle-axe and a long-suffering Italian peasant girl. The scene has no internal logic or dramatic direction and, just like a Python routine, it’s besotted with its own inventiveness and it relies on erudite banter and verbal shocks to sustain our interest.

‘Where was the Kahlo brow?’ asked my guest in the first interval of English National Ballet’s She Persisted, a triple bill celebrating female choreographers. She was right: Frida had been plucked. It was an odd decision for a production that does not otherwise shy from ugliness. Broken Wings, a ballet inspired by the life of Frida Kahlo by Belgian-Colombian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, was first performed in 2016 and is revived here in a carnival of Tehuana skirts, antler bonnets and capering day-of-the-dead skeletons. The surrealist André Breton likened Kahlo’s art to ‘a ribbon around a bomb’ and that is Katja Khaniukova’s Kahlo: silken and explosive. We see her first as a teenager, all possibility, lifts and lightness.

On Sunday a drama began with ED905 being stolen by an OCG who’d faked an RTC that required IR, little realising that they had a UCO in their midst. So yes, Line of Duty (BBC1) is back in all its jargon-laden glory — and, judging from the first episode, it’s lost none of its ability to grip either. For those a bit rusty on their police abbreviations, that opening scene featured the female member of an organised crime group pretending she’d crashed her car with a baby inside, causing the woman in charge of a passing police convoy to stop and help. The rest of the gang then appeared in regulation Line of Duty balaclavas, killed three officers and drove off with the lorry-load of heroin the police were escorting.

Is it possible to write a feminist opera about Jack the Ripper? Composer Iain Bell thinks it is, and his Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel tries very, very hard to prove it. But while the result is respectful, topical and agonisingly, paralysingly sincere, it’s also a sheep in wolf’s clothing. You can’t have your victims and kill them too. You have only to look at the opera’s title, bent awkwardly round its central colon, to see the conflict. Front and centre you have Jack the Ripper — a marketing department’s darling, promising Gothic horror and lashings of gore. Following behind (in slightly smaller type) you have his victims, the drab, downtrodden women whose lives and voices the piece hopes, laudably, to restore.

At its best audio can be a much more visual medium than the screen. Making Art with Frances Morris (produced by Kate Bland), which I caught by chance on Radio 4 last week, gave us insights into the work of the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle that were so vivid it was almost as if we had been to an exhibition of her work. Calle, now 65, is known for her unconventional approach to what art can be. In 1980 she was invited to show one of her first works, The Sleepers, a collection of photographs, in New York. ‘I asked people to give me a few hours of their sleep. To come and sleep in my bed. To let themselves be looked at and photographed,’ is her explanation of the project.