Culture

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Novello The Stefan Golaszewski Plays Bush Revolutionary republics, like the USA and Soviet Russia, never really get rid of royalty. They just appoint surrogates. America’s yearning for icons has accorded the actor James Earl Jones a rank somewhere between Richard the Lionheart and John the Baptist. The producers of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof approached him on bended knee (‘You don’t audition James Earl Jones,’ gushed one) and begged for the royal assent. Good King James was probably giggling behind his hand as he boomed out an affirmation with the famous Darth Vader rumble. I bet he was thrilled to smithereens to be offered a lead role on Broadway as he approached his 80th year. His voice is a marvel.

Edward Bawden Bedford Gallery, Castle Lane, Bedford, until 31 January 2010 In these days when museums seem to think it acceptable to sell off the charitable gifts of past ages to feed contemporary vanities, I wonder who will be tempted to donate works of art without binding them securely in protective red tape? In the last eight years before his death, the artist and illustrator Edward Bawden (1903–89) gave a vast archive of his work to the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery in Bedford. It was, effectively, the contents of his studio, representing nearly every period of his career, and it numbers more than 3,000 items.

Proof that even well-intentioned and useful fads can go too far: the Grow Your Own Vegetables movement has reached a tragi-comic end with the news that Shane MacGowan, the hardest-living poet ever to emerge from the mean streets of Tunbridge Wells, is, well, this... Shane MacGowan is set to appear in a reality TV programme about growing vegetables. The Pogues' frontman and his girlfriend Victoria Mary Clarke both take part in the RTÉ One programme, which is called 'Victoria and Shane Grow Their Own'. In the show, the pair attempt to emulate the plot of '70s sitcom 'The Good Life', which saw characters Tom and Barbara Good attempt to live a sustainable life by growing their own veg and rearing their own animals for food.

Cecilia Bartoli Barbican Messiah Coliseum After a brief but inspissatedly tedious overture by Porpora, played by Il Giardino Armonico, the curtains at the Barbican were pulled aside and Cecilia Bartoli, dressed like a highwayperson from a 1940s escapist movie, sprang on to the stage, flung off her feathered hat, rocked with superabundant energy as the orchestra played the introduction to her first aria, from another opera of Porpora’s, and launched into the first of many elaborate analogies between love and other conditions which might give an excuse for lots of drooping and even more giddy coloratura. She was on amazing form, and was greeted and received with almost hysterical rapture.

Andrew Lambirth trawls the galleries and finds a visual feast for the festive season Most people who have heard of James Ward (1769–1859) will know his monumental landscape in Tate Britain, ‘Gordale Scar’, but perhaps little else by him. ‘Gordale Scar’ is immensely impressive (I also love Karl Weschke’s versions of the same subject made in 1987–8), but Ward was far from being a one-work artist. A painter of animals as well as of landscapes, his gifts of observation and curiosity made him a valued recorder of country life. A superb show of his drawings at W.S. Fine Art/Andrew Wyld (27 Dover Street, W1, until 11 December) gives a full account of his skills as a draughtsman in subjects ranging from charcoal burners to cloud studies.

Kienholz: The Hoerengracht Sunley Room, National Gallery, until 21 February 2010 The first time I saw Ed Kienholz’s work was at his 1996 retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York. I was completely overwhelmed — there was something so powerful and so disturbing about his huge stage-set-size installations which covered subjects such as brothels, mental hospitals and abortion. Kienholz was a pioneer of assemblage art in the Fifties and Sixties, using objects he found in flea markets and elsewhere to make up his ‘tableaux’. He died in 1994; but from the early Seventies he and Nancy Reddin, the photographer whom he married in 1972, worked together as a team, travelling between their studios in Idaho and Berlin.

Marianne Gray talks to John Malkovich about his latest film, his vanity and his first love, the stage When I met John Malkovich to talk about Disgrace, the film of J.M. Coetzee’s novel, he hadn’t seen the film yet and was positively tremulous, if a word like ‘tremulous’ can be associated with the forceful Malkovich. ‘I am looking forward to hearing how it does because the film-makers say J.M. Coetzee likes the film,’ he tells me. ‘It is very faithful to the book but the screenplay has expanded from the novel. These are always worrying things. ‘But far more worrying is my South African accent.