Culture

The face is unlined. The tan is as deep as Brazilian hardwood. The thatch of grey hair looks like a gift from God rather than the achievement of surgical intervention. At 63, the actor Henry Goodman keeps himself in excellent trim. He exudes energy and concentration, and in the hour we spend together, he relates every aspect of our talk straight back to the show he’s promoting, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Brecht’s political allegory uses imaginary figures from Chicago’s underworld to satirise Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany during the 1930s. The script was written in just three weeks, in 1941, while Brecht was in exile in Helsinki awaiting his visa for America. ‘Brecht wrote this to warn the Americans: fascism could happen in your country.

Why are clever-clever people so rude about Birmingham? Bruce Chatwin dismissed his hometown as absolutely hideous, Kenneth Tynan called his birthplace a cemetery without walls. Britain’s second city has always been belittled, not least by those who’ve left it, and now the old slights have been revived in the current debate about HS2. Never mind the pros and cons of that controversial high-speed railway — it’s the destination which really gets London’s goat. If HS2 went to Liverpool we’d be sure to mind our p’s and q’s, but Brum has always been an easy target. As Londoners never tire of telling one another, ‘Fancy forking out all that cash, just to make it a bit easier to get to Birmingham.

‘Professor’ Bruce Lacey (born 1927) is one of those figures who has existed effectively on the periphery of the art world for more than half a century. Part licensed jester, part society’s conscience, Lacey operates best on the fringes, stirring things up, provoking thought and challenging preconceptions, a lightning conductor for comment and criticism. Before this exhibition, I associated him principally with the Kitchen Sink painters (John Bratby used to describe him as ‘a whizz’) and the type of idiosyncratic humour best exemplified by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

What Maisie Knew is an adaptation of the Henry James 1897 novel, updated to Manhattan in the now, and is described in the bumf I received as ‘heart-warming’, which is utterly strange, as it’s a child-caught-in-the-middle drama, and just so painful. It’s compelling. It’s exquisitely done. It’s brilliantly acted. (According to the most recent figures,  the chances of Julianne Moore turning in a duff performance are 0.00 per cent.) But it’s not a comfortable watch, which should not put you off, of course. There must be discomfort at the cinema just as there is discomfort in life, as Socrates might have said, if he had lived to experience film.

My wife says you can always tell a self-portrait by the quality of its self-regard. There’s something about the eyes and mouth (though not invariably flattering or admiring) or the set of the chin that give the artist away. Perhaps it’s simply that the artist is more interested in depicting the self than anyone else; or that the degree of self-awareness is inevitably deeper. Some of the great paintings have been self-portraits, from Rembrandt to van Gogh, and when they’re good they’re always worth looking at. So it was with optimism in my heart that I made my way to Kings Place to view the results of the second bi-annual Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Competition.

Politics is everywhere in Edinburgh. It’s embedded in the architecture of the streets. The New Town, built in the latter half of the 18th century, is a granite endorsement of the Act of Union, a stone pledge of loyalty to Britain’s new Germanic monarchy in London. The layout forms an oblong grid. The horizontals of George Street, Princes Street and Queen Street intersect at right angles with Charlotte Street and Hanover Street. This makes the approximate proportions of a flag. There are rumours that a scheme was proposed to dig two diagonal avenues, meeting in a central X, which would have turned the New Town into a colour-free Union Jack. My hunch is that this is a fantasy dreamed up retrospectively by ingenious nationalists.