Culture

They can’t even be bothered to think of a decent title. Good thing too. The Riots, at the Trike, is a rush job, a gripping and pacey attempt to analyse the disturbances that engulfed Britain last August. Cops, criminals and community leaders have been interviewed by Gillian Slovo, who fashioned their statements into a dramatic investigation. The riots might never have happened if more prudent tactics had been used at the start. The family of Mark Duggan, shot dead by police on 4 August, staged a demonstration outside Tottenham police station two days later. Police refused to speak to them, claiming that the independent investigation into Duggan’s death obliged them to remain tight-lipped. The family didn’t believe this.

Her mother was Ellen Terry, the most admired actress of the day. Her brother was Edward Gordon Craig, the celebrated stage designer. Little wonder then that Edith Craig was overshadowed for most of her life by two such towering figures. Yet her theatrical achievements were substantial. She was a talented costume designer and maker, the founder of the radical theatre group the Pioneer Players, and an indefatigable producer and director of countless plays and pageants. She was also an important figure in the suffrage movement, staging many feminist plays, and lived in a famous artistic lesbian ménage-à-trois.

Can a critic simply be wrong, in the way that a mathematician who said that 3x3=10 would be wrong? I’m beginning to wonder, since I am the only person I’ve read who thought Ricky Gervais’s Life’s Too Short was not vile but terrific and The Killing II (BBC4, Saturday) all right, though far from the work of genius others believe. I never quite caught the first series of The Killing on BBC4, though I have tried. I do have the box set, and one day I might even watch it. Mind you, suspicions were aroused when the main talking point seemed to be the heroine’s knitwear. ‘Say what you like about the plot moving like an arthritic snail, but that Faroe Islands sweater really caught the eye!

The changes to the Radio 4 schedule have been in operation for a couple of weeks. Have they made any difference? The extra 15 minutes added to the lunchtime news programme, The World At One, has had the knock-on effect of squeezing the afternoon. Do we need another 15 minutes of current affairs analysis? After all, we already have three hours first thing in the morning, 45 minutes last thing at night after the ten o’clock news, with another hour in the middle at five. The problem with extending news programmes at a time of budget cuts is that the only way you can fill the extra minutes is to add extra interviews. Anything else would cost too much money. There are just too few resources for in-depth coverage of world events.

ENO’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin has created something of a stir by departing from the house almost-tradition of postmodernist, stunningly intrusive and invariably grotesquely irrelevant presentations that began in earnest sometime last year. The set designs for this opera, by Tom Pye, and the costumes, by Chloe Obolensky, update it to the late 19th century, but that is just a nervous tic. More surprisingly, Deborah Warner’s direction of the characters and actors is so unobtrusive that one wonders if she told anyone to do anything in particular. The most sensational departure from what we normally see is that Lensky wears glasses (not sunglasses) for the duel, gently stressing his bookish otherworldliness; and one other touch, to be mentioned later.