Culture

Powder Room is a small British film all about women and starring only women — boo-hoo, men; my heart bleeds for you all — yet it is almost entirely set in a nightclub, so whether you enjoy this film may depend on how willing you are to spend 90 minutes in such a club along with all that thumping music and the flashing lights and the scrabbling to get to the bar. As a rule, this is how I’d feel about such a prospect: I’d rather shoot myself in the head. However, I accept this doesn’t hold true for everyone and, from what I’ve learned over the years, I suspect it doesn’t hold true for most Spectator readers, who are out clubbing until all hours most nights of the week.

In 1992 Quentin Tarentino gave us Reservoir Dogs. At a stroke he reinvented the gangster genre and turned it into a comedy of manners with a deadly undertow. This new mutation looked as if it might be easy to copy. Many tried. Among them was Jez Butterworth, whose 1995 play Mojo takes Tarantino’s zany-macabre format and moves it to Soho in the 1950s. Butterworth also leans heavily on Pinter. The play opens in the back-office of a nightclub. Two pilled-up criminals are exchanging streams of lairy London chit-chat. Their boss, Ezra, has discovered a teenage heart-throb named Silver Johnny but rival gangsters are keen to muscle in and grab a piece of the star’s income. The details are hard to follow because the jabbering thugs leap so fast from one topic to the next.

There aren’t many operas from which you can extract a single act and make a concert of it, in fact I can’t think of any except ones by Wagner. I’ve been to Act I of Die Walküre, Act III of Die Meistersinger¸ Act III of Parsifal at the Proms, Act II of Lohengrin, and several times to Act II of Tristan und Isolde. It’s not that Wagner’s acts tend to be longer than anyone else’s, they don’t: Handel’s often last as long, so do Rossini’s.

Gary Bell is the rudest man in Britain. I have known the bastard for years and no one —move over, lightweight Starkey — comes even close to matching his bluntness, his tastelessness, his heroic urge to offend at all costs regardless of how much collateral damage he causes his friends, his family or indeed his own reputation and career as a brilliant QC. But Gary has a dark secret: underneath that elephantine carapace of intellectual arrogance, gratuitous cruelty, and room-clearing crassness beats a heart so warm and tender it makes Princess Diana look like Hannibal Lecter. If a mate were in serious trouble, Gary would be the first to rush to the rescue. Well, wobble to the rescue because, as Gary would be the first to acknowledge, he is exceedingly fat.

Stuttgart Ballet’s rapid ascent to fame is at the core of one of the most interesting chapters of ballet history. Between 1961 and 1973, the year of his untimely death, the South African Royal Ballet-trained choreographer John Cranko turned what had been a fairly standard ballet ensemble into a unique dance phenomenon. Although Stuttgart is still known as a ‘choreographer’s company’, his legacy was never artistically constraining. His successors took his powerful vision on board and broadened the repertoire in line with it. It was thus a pleasure to see the history of the company celebrated through the composite programme Made in Germany, in which past and present were seamlessly combined.

Next month marks the 30th anniversary of the release of what is, in my opinion, one of the funniest films of all time: Trading Places. Starring comedic demigods Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd, together with Jamie Lee Curtis and Denholm Elliot, this 1983 critical and commercial success is an amusing and trenchant satire on race, class, money and the whole American dream.