Culture

Die Meistersinger Welsh National Opera, Cardiff and touring Welsh National Opera’s new staging of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is a triumph. Not an unqualified one — I doubt whether there has ever been such a thing — but enough to leave the audience feeling that mixture of glowing wellbeing and sadness that this work alone engenders. WNO has a distinguished history of Wagner productions, thanks above all to the close relationship which it had with Reginald Goodall in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and which resulted in the most inspired performances of Tristan und Isolde that I have ever attended. By then Goodall had had his say with his great, enormous accounts of The Mastersingers with ENO a decade before, and the Welsh company moved on with him to Parsifal.

Marianne Gray talks to the down-to-earth Oscar nominee Brenda Blethyn about her latest film Brenda Blethyn doesn’t really understand why people continually ask her why she plays dowdy, often downtrodden characters, like Cynthia, the despairing mother in Secrets & Lies, or James McAvoy’s heartbroken mother in Atonement, or Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, who horse-trades her daughters. Or, indeed, like her latest role, the anxious Elizabeth, an ignorant, conservative, prejudiced woman, in London River. ‘I just don’t see it like that,’ says Blethyn, who has made a brilliant career out of playing understated, restrained women. ‘Everyone must be portrayed. Everyone must have a voice, even the flawed ones. I don’t try to smooth out the edges.

Andrew Lambirth talks to John Richardson, biographer and friend of the artist John Richardson has spent a lifetime in the company of great art and artists, and is justly celebrated for his ability to evoke, explain and evaluate their work in beautiful prose. Best known as the biographer of Picasso, he has written about many other artists, including Manet and Braque, and has curated a number of seminal exhibitions since the Picasso retrospective he staged in New York in 1962. For the past 50 years he has lived in New York, though born in England in 1924. He was in London recently for the installation of his major new curatorial excursion, Picasso: The Mediterranean Years 1945–62 at Gagosian Gallery (6–24 Britannia Street, WC1, until 28 August).

Lloyd Evans talks to Michael Attenborough, whose star at the Almeida is the theatre itself The back office of the Almeida Theatre in Islington could do with a major refit. Dowdy, open-plan and scattered with Free-cycled furniture, it looks like the chill-out room of a student bar or the therapy suite of some underfunded weight-watch clinic. The tin chairs are arranged around elderly coffee-tables. The walls have been painted with the ramshackle expediency of a squat — a blue stretch here, some scarlet columns there, a few purpley flourishes. Beneath the roof eaves a beer gut of damp and crumbly brickwork bulges outwards precariously. I’d give it three months, maybe six, before it collapses.

Mary Wakefield talks to Roger Allam and discovers that he thinks acting is only a game As I meet Roger Allam’s eye, in the bar area of Shakespeare’s Globe, I feel a lurch of dread. I love Roger Allam. I’ve held a torch for him since the mid-Eighties, when he starred in Les Mis as the original and best Inspector Javert — but the look in his eye today is one of profound boredom. It bodes badly. You must be in the middle of rehearsals [for Henry IV Part 1] I say, brightly. ‘Yes.’ He looks out of the window at the glittering Thames. It must be difficult to do interviews then — do you still feel in character as Falstaff? ‘No. Not really.’ Roger Allam is, everyone says, a nice man.