Culture

An orgy of navel-gazing on the South Bank where a national treasure is satirising the National Trust at the National Theatre. Alan Bennett sets his latest comedy in the drawing room of a crumbling Georgian mansion in South Yorkshire. Greedy speculators are queuing up to seize the house from its plucky owner, Lady Dorothy Stacpoole, a high-born hippie who spent her youth going to parties and modelling. Now aged 80 or 90, she’s ill equipped to outwit the circling vultures. Bennett is good at creating warm, believable women but with Lady Dorothy he simply regurgitates a stale theatrical burp: the beatnik with a bus pass. Writing plots has never been his strong point and he unwisely stuffs his story with fistfuls of loose threads. They poke out all over the place.

'Passion for freedom' is now holding its fourth exhibition at the Unit 24 Gallery just behind Tate Modern. The show is a visible and occasionally dazzling manifestation of an often submerged movement in western liberalism that regards the liberal-left mainstream with something close to disgust. They – we – find the indulgence of radical Islam as a betrayal of the best of the liberal tradition. We are equally repelled by multi-cultural orthodoxy, which puts the interest of a 'community' before the interests of the individual, particularly when the individual is a woman. The magnificent Maryam Namazie, One Law for All’s Spokesperson, and a woman you will rarely hear on the BBC, explained the show’s purpose.

If you didn’t watch Derren Brown’s Apocalypse, then the following will be meaningless... I suppose all television is a kind of charlatanism, a usually agreeable deception to which the rest of us more or less willingly sign up. We know, at the back of our minds, that TV is fake. Which is why Derren Brown’s Apocalypse was salutary viewing: clearly, demonstrably, faked - and even beyond that obnoxious in its presumptions. Sort of TV incarnate, in exaggerated microcosm. The audience are mugs, the supposed representative from the audience – the protagonist of Brown’s fifth form horror show – a mug who can be lifted from his humdrum torpor and selfishness only through the redemptive intervention of television.

One departs and three more come charging in. It’s always rush-hour for Chekhov in the capital. As the Young Vic’s production of Three Sisters is drawing to a close, the Vaudeville is preparing to host a star-studded version of Uncle Vanya. Up the road, at the Novello, another Uncle Vanya is about to arrive from Moscow. And rehearsals are already under way for The Seagull, starring Matthew Kelly, at Southwark Playhouse. For years, we’ve been recreational users of Chekhov. We’re now in danger of becoming hopeless addicts. How come we’re hooked? Chekhov’s career as a dramatist was short and full of trouble. Early plays flopped.