The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
emerge from the orchard. There now Aunt Kit says, pouring us lemonade. It’ll be another scorcher. The bronze birds drop wing, shake caruncle and snood engorged with purple blood, and rattle in full barding. My prize cock’s gone lame! He lifts each ringed foot singly, slowly — to shoot the short film frame by frame. In rue Ortolan I hear the chorus of gobbles roll across the mossed cobbles from distant Ophir.
From the Woolrich Elite Concealed Carry line Shawn Thompson bought two shirts. He wrote on his blog: ‘The clothes I used in the past to hide my sidearm looked pretty sloppy and had my girlfriend complaining.’ The line includes the sort of vest that includes a stealth compartment. The wearer can appear to be warming his hands while gripping a pistol in a holster. Says a spokesman for Woolrich: ‘The bad guy gets a glimmer of fear wondering “Are they packing, or not?” ’ Not everyone is a fan. Howard Walter, 61, a salesman, said he preferred to carry his colt and a couple of knives and two extra magazines in a durable pair of work pants. Said Mr Walter: ‘They don’t shout “gun”, they shout average guy in the street. Dress for the gun.
You can take a five-minute flight across the Thames on something called the Emirates Air Line. It’s a cable-car ride between North Greenwich and the Royal Docks that’s sponsored by the Gulf carrier. Much else on the ride simulates a plane trip — the tickets are called boarding passes, and when you ‘take off’ from either side of the river there’s a large digital screen showing cheery people waving you off, as at an airport. As I embark from the southern bank, a bunch of ‘Butchers from South London’ bid me goodbye. The cable cars, however, are called gondolas rather than, say, ‘cockpits’ or ‘cabins’ — and once up in the air the whole of London unfolds.
It’s like being a fly on the wall (or maybe an earwig) at one of those fantasy dinner parties where a group of people who intrigue, infuriate or fascinate us are brought together just so we can see how they will get along. 6 Music, as a Christmas treat for listeners, has put Bradley Wiggins and Paul Weller behind the same mike and given them a record player (definitely not a CD; these two are seriously vinyl) and two hours of airtime to fill. What’s the favourite lyric you’ve ever written? Bradley asks Paul. Quick as a flash, Paul replies, ‘Two lovers kissing amongst the scream of midnight.’ Not quite Wordsworth, but that ‘scream of midnight’ does resonate. Can you name one song that means more to you than any other? Paul asks Brad.
Despite a wet summer, the recent crop of food programmes has been prodigious: six episodes of Nigellissima, eight of Nigel Slater’s Dish Of The Day, six of Lorraine Pascale’s Fast, Fresh and Easy Food, 40 of Jamie’s 15-Minute Meals and 25 of Hugh’s Three Good Things — truly a basket of plenty. Two cooking competitions (The Great British Bake Off and Masterchef: The Professionals) have dished up a total of 34 episodes; Heston Blumenthal has hand-reared seven bloated and inedible turkeys (Heston’s Fantastical Food), and Yotam Ottolenghi (Ottolenghi’s Mediterranean Feast) has concocted, in the kitchens of Morocco, Istanbul, Tunisia and Israel, four unexpectedly delicious treats.
Both these plays are about concealed sexuality. Straight, by D.C. Moore, is based on an American indie flick named Humpday. The play has one of the funniest openings you’ll ever see. We’re in a flat occupied by suburban nonentity Lewis and his wife Morgan. Lewis’s old college mucker, Waldorf, has come home after seven years in Mongolia and he cheekily decides to announce his return to western civilisation by inserting his unsheathed tumescence through the letterbox. Lewis doesn’t see it. His wife does and she has to persuade him that she isn’t hallucinating. The gate-crashing phallus symbolises the play’s theme of male eroticism thrusting itself uninvited into soporific domesticity.
2012 has been an undistinguished year in opera, at any rate in the UK. A combination of cutbacks and the promise of stops being pulled out next year for the bicentenaries of Verdi’s and Wagner’s births and the centenary of Britten’s has led to the big companies counting on our anticipation. Except that, in the case of Wagner, though oddly not of Verdi, the gun has been jumped. We have already had the Royal Opera’s Ring, four cycles of it in just over a month, so that there will be no staged Ring in London next year, only a concert version. It will be left to Longborough, for those who have the money, the time and the transport, to see it on stage, and judging from the individual parts that have been mounted in the past four years, the results should be tremendous.
Is there anything more essential to one’s well-being than the sound of an English choir at evensong? Is there, for that matter, any word in our language more beautiful than ‘evensong’, with its evocation of architecture, music and the Anglican liturgy? This is the season to reflect on such matters. On Christmas Eve, Cambridge once again becomes the centre of the world for two hours as the choristers of King’s College celebrate the famous festival of carols and lessons and two days before, in St John’s, Smith Square, the choir of Trinity College will perform Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment. Moreover, they will be singing from memory.
What are the rules of taste at Christmas? How might the fastidious chart a neat path through this garish and cluttered carnival of unreflective consumption? How might dignity be maintained in this tinselled and glitter-balled waste of space? Actually, how might we design it better? Nicky Haslam once and quite correctly, without a flicker of irony, advised me that ‘coloured lights are common’. There is value in such advice and we will return to this refreshing idea a little further down the page. Germans and Americans have a peculiar historic hold over our imaginations at this time of year. It was Victoria’s earnest German Prince, Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who first imported the hitherto pagan Christmas tree.
Wow! Just: wow! Life of Pi may be the most ravishingly beautiful film I have ever seen. It’s stunning. It’s gorgeous. Its visual inventiveness made me want to weep for joy. It is magical realism made magical and realistic. The palette of colours is extraordinary. You will feel you are in the sea and above the clouds and as if you are on a boat with a Bengal tiger too. Wow! Just: wow! But, weirdly, while enraptured by its look, its emotions never seemed especially pressing, and as for the spiritual journey, it didn’t exactly float my own particular boat. Is it saying a belief in God always makes life a better story than one without a God? That this is why we require faith? Is it advocating a Life of Pi-ety?
The Hepworth has been garnering plaudits right and left as a new museum to be welcomed to the fold, and my first visit to this monolithic structure with its feet in Wakefield’s River Calder exceeded all expectations. Designed by David Chipperfield Architects, the ten linked blocks that make up this new suite of galleries are spacious and light-filled with excellent views out to the river and town. Restaurant, education centre and offices are on the ground floor, and upstairs the art comes into its own. At the top of the stairs is a room of six classic sculptures by Barbara Hepworth (1903–75), whose name the museum has taken since this significant figure of British Modernism was born in Wakefield.
In 1997, the Russian Academy of Sciences gave the names Hermitage 4758 and Piotrovsky 4869 to two small planets discovered 500 million kilometres from earth. The signal honour paid to the State Hermitage Museum and Boris and Mikhail Piotrovsky— its dynastic succession of directors — heralded a new era of post-Soviet expansionism for the former Imperial museum: from now on, the sky would be the limit. Since then, the Hermitage has opened branches in London, Las Vegas, Amsterdam, Kazan, Ferrara and Vyborg. More than a goodwill gesture, the St Petersburg museum’s overseas expansion has been a way of getting its collections seen.
Come December, I often find myself writing a lot of quizzes. Not that I’m complaining: I love writing quizzes, and I really love being paid for writing quizzes. There’s a definite skill in crafting a decent question, and therefore considerable satisfaction in getting it right, tempered only by the unceasing fear of getting it completely wrong. (Like all writing, therefore.) All of us who toil in the quiz mines are naturally aware that we have our favourite subjects, our home territories if you like. I could go on writing increasingly abstruse questions about cricket or pop music far into the night, but I don’t, because the audience simply isn’t as interested in those subjects as I am. If you are a quizmaster, your job is to entertain people.
The bulk of what I retain I learnt through him, from that trek to Flanders Moss in the hope of seeing a grey shrike on a blackened tree-fork, to a pair of hen harriers whose upward glide made him beam with pleasure. His first ringing-trap dismantled (it attracted vermin), he designed and built one that bears his name on the Isle of May; while in the cottage we shared, coffee-mugs and cigarette-butts cleared, and like as not whisky glasses from chess the night before, he’d set up his carousel of colour-slides to display the field marks of various species — pointing out such features as eye-stripes and wing-bars, nesting habits and flight-patterns — or draw lightning sketches, his profile more and more that of a raptor.
Once, I met Priscilla Tolkien, the daughter of J.R.R. Tolkien. It was at the Oxford Catholic chaplaincy, and she was giving a talk about her father. She was charming, something of a hobbit herself with her neat figure, and an engaging talker. But she seemed taken aback by some of her audience. It was divided into two distinct parts. Some were the ordinary Tolkien admirers, the normal, slightly shabby young people you get at chaplaincy talks, and the others were, well, a bit scary. They almost all had black T-shirts, pale faces and intense expressions, and there was a weird sort of obsessiveness about their questions. They read all sorts of things into the books, symbolic meanings that had never occurred to the rest of us.
In the ‘psychotherapy ward’ of a secret venue somewhere in east London, watercolour portraits of troubled male faces line the wall. Nearby in the ‘court-room’ a sound installation broadcasts an ominous tick-tock into the airy acoustics of a large hall, while the ‘Warden’s Office’ below is furnished by quilts handmade by inmates. This is Secret Gallery, the latest venture from the company behind Secret Cinema, which stages immersive screenings of celluloid classics (kept secret until the screening itself) that have so far included Blade Runner, The Red Shoes and now The Shawshank Redemption, Frank Darabont’s cult tale of prison injustice.
Two really scary programmes this week, and not a vampire or psychopath to be heard. Both gave personal accounts of catastrophic hearing loss. Not something you’d expect to work on radio, the aural medium. How can you explain what it’s like to stop hearing when there’s no pictures, no other way to explain the absence of sound except through sound? But that’s what made them both such terrifying programmes. All the time I was listening, I kept on thinking: what would it be like if I suddenly couldn’t hear these voices, that piece of music they’re playing, this discussion of ideas. Hearing loss doesn’t mean, of course, that you actually stop hearing. It’s far worse than that, as both programmes illustrated, to alarming effect.
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).
The way the director James Conway sees it, Monteverdi’s last opera L’incoronazione di Poppea is about that most delicate of subjects, adult abuse by youngsters. That isn’t what he says in his programme note for his production at the Royal College of Music, where he claims that the opera is about power, ‘love, yes, but love’s power’. That is tendentious: you might as well say that Otello is about the power of jealousy, which is true, but that doesn’t make it ‘really’ about power; or that Wozzeck is about the power of powerlessness, etc. Poppea is about several things, power among them, but also love, jealousy, ambition, ruthlessness, the abuse of power.
I reason with the crown of the tree. Surely from this fourth floor window, we are equals now. I calculate the trajectory, whether it would catch me if I threw myself at it. I comb for clues from the uneasy rocking of the branches, the slow swimming of its fingers stirring the air. There must be something in the moth flutterings of the mylar balloon trapped between the twigs; a pincered ghost, failing to tear itself away even with the wind as an ally. You can’t blame the Poplar for wanting to hoard it, the only fruit it has ever held onto or is capable of bearing.
Taking a break doesn’t come naturally to Michael Grandage. His decade-long run as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse came to an end less than a year ago, but his latest big adventure is already set to begin. ‘The idea that I’d leave the Donmar and cruise for a bit would have been such a waste,’ he tells me, between mouthfuls of soup and crusty bread. Not even lunchtime can stop him. He is chatting to me during a break in rehearsals for Privates on Parade, the first show in a debut West End season for his new venture, the Michael Grandage Company. Four more productions will follow, all at the Noël Coward Theatre, and Grandage will direct each one. Did he not fancy a long holiday after finishing at the Donmar?
Christopher Wood (1901–30), billed as the great white hope of British Modernism, who perished by his own hand before his full potential could be explored. Friend of Ben Nicholson, with whom he supposedly ‘discovered’ the naïve painter Alfred Wallis in 1928, he was a Europeanised sophisticate who knew Picasso and Cocteau and dabbled in Cubism and Surrealism. He was a talented painter with a penchant for harbour scenes, but, as this fascinating exhibition suggests, his gifts have been exaggerated (no doubt because of his romantic life story), while the achievement of his older contemporary Cedric Morris (1889–1982) has been marginalised and largely ignored.
What is so noticeably lacking in Mathew Brady’s interviews with the dead are the smells; likewise in Ambrose Bierce’s corpses their faces gnawed by hogs near the Greenbrier, Cheat, Gauley; or the wounded roasted in gullies a foot deep in leaves at Shiloh, Spotsylvania; and you, reader, cannot supply what is left out. So how much more eludes us? . . . the scent in the rain.
‘How’re you doing in the cheap seats? They’re not that cheap, though, that’s the problem,’ said Mick Jagger as he launched into the first of the Rolling Stones’ 50th anniversary concerts. Still, the electrifying combination of swagger, swing and blues transformed the O2 Arena into a raucous celebration of the self-proclaimed ‘greatest rock-and-roll band in the world’. The Stones were last on stage in 2007, and the intervening years have done little to diminish the band’s sprightliness. Jagger remained the archetypal front man, while 71-year-old drummer Charlie Watts kept up the momentum. The gnarly fingers of guitarist Keith Richards did, however, sometimes fail to find the notes, his languid playing style exaggerated by age.
It’s been challenged as ‘elitist’ and at times in its more than 60-year history it’s been threatened with deletion from the schedule. But CD Review, with its specialist ‘Building a Library’ slot, has been around since I was old enough to listen. Radio 3’s keynote Saturday-morning show is probably the programme I miss most when I’m away. You know exactly what the format is going to be, recognise most of the voices behind the mikes, yet you’re never quite sure what you might hear, what you could discover. Its survival, in a format virtually unchanged as far back as I can remember, always strikes me as extraordinary in this age of constant makeovers.
Having planned to devote every one of this week’s 800 words to Sir David Attenborough’s 60 Years in the Wild (Friday, BBC2), I was distracted by fame, fortune and the politics of influence: Give Us the Money (Sunday, BBC4) and Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream (Tuesday, BBC4). Both these programmes I watched with interest but absolutely no enjoyment whatsoever; their combined effect was a feeling of overall grubbiness, as if I had sat too close to a wrestling match on a wet afternoon in a swamp. ‘Give us the money!’ was the instruction given by Bob Geldof to the public at Live Aid in 1985. The public reached into their pockets and did as he asked, and a new kind of charity was born.
Pinero’s comedy The Magistrate is a marvellous confection of shameful secrets and multiplying concealments. Agatha, a beautiful widow of 36, has trimmed five years from her age in order to bag her second husband, Aeneas Posket, an agreeably pompous magistrate. Her subterfuge is imperilled by her 19-year-old son who must pretend to be 14 in order to make the maths work. To please his mother, the young buck behaves like a child at home. But elsewhere he pleases himself. He keeps a private room at the racy Hotel des Princes in town. One evening, he persuades his weakling stepfather to accompany him for a night of drunken antics. The police swoop on the hotel and Posket has to run pell-mell from the officers of the law.