Culture

For the past month I have been glued to the BBC’s Why Poverty? season — ‘part of an unprecedented collaboration between public service media in which 37 EBU members have been dedicating multiplatform programming on the theme of poverty’. No, I jest. What I’ve actually been watching is MasterChef. Served with a MasterChef reduction, a smear of MasterChef purée, MasterChef shavings, MasterChef pickles and MasterChef tapenade and pommes, style Masterchef. With more MasterChef for pud, obviously. Does this make me a bad person? Well, possibly. But it also makes me a normal person.

Tough play, The Taming of the Shrew. Uniquely among Shakespeare’s comedies, it moves audiences to pity and fear. It’s a video-nasty in the garb of a marital farce, an uncomfortable romance whose closing reconciliation scene invariably draws lusty hisses from female play-goers as Kate renounces her autonomy and bows to the will of her brutal husband, Petruchio. Directors prefer to approach this squirm-inducing parade of sexual violence through the comforting distortions of a veil. Single-gender productions are popular. In a Gujurati version, Kate is portrayed as an immigrant and the title had been coyly changed to A Foolish Foreign Woman Comes to Her Senses. Cole Porter goes for the vegetarian option by taking us backstage during a tour of the play.

Five minutes into You Will Be My Son (or Tu seras mon fils in its original French), I expected a very different film from the one that eventually emerged. The first scene takes place in a crematorium, as a coffin and its occupant are cooked to ashes. A relative of the deceased picks at a flower, and asks whether the ashes of the man and of the wood will mix. At which the funeral attendant leans over like a great crow to say, ‘It’s all just carbon.’ The whole thing seems very poised, quite refined and a little bit clever. But then the film turns into something else entirely. Its location switches to a vineyard in Saint-Émilion, where we are properly introduced to the owner, Paul de Marseul (Niels Arestrup), and his son Martin (Lorànt Deutsch).

Here’s a fun diversion for all the family: how many ‘high-concept’ film ideas can you think of in a single minute? These are the films with premises that can be summed up — and pitched to expectant, impatient Hollywood producers — in only a few words. ‘Jaws in Space’, say, or ‘Arnie versus Hitler’. Get started now, and you could soon have the studios drooling a path to your door, eager to turn your aphorisms into easily marketable products. Red carpets and golden paycheques await. I mention this because, at first glance, it seems as if Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers is the result of a similar game.

Some operas become, thanks partly to the frequency with which they are produced, victims of their own popularity. The most obvious sufferer is Carmen, which is a no-winner for singers and directors alike. As soon as the curtain rises and you see lemon trees and swaying hips, your heart sinks and you spend the interval agreeing with everyone that it’s just another tired old cliché; while if the scene is a mortuary or a garage you complain — and fairly — that it’s wholly inappropriate for the drama and the music that gives it substance. Last time it was produced at ENO, in 2007, it failed on all scores and it’s almost unseemly to mention it.