Culture

The Royal Horticultural Society is like the Church of England. It seems always to have been there, a fixed, reassuring point in a changing world. Even to those who do not belong to it, it seems a Good Thing and it is hard to imagine national life without it. Among those who know it, it inspires affection and exasperation in about equal measure and, like the C of E, it is troubled. In early September, the director-general of the RHS, Inga Grimsey, suddenly resigned and will leave next January. The resulting media attention alerted the world to the fact that the directorate was halfway through a ‘restructure’, cutting 10 per cent of salary costs, a loss equivalent to 80 full-time posts.

Roger Ebert believes not, and that its use in films is an annoyance and a distraction Has it really come to this? I read in Variety, the film industry journal, that ‘Mark Thomas of Elsinore Films is producing a 3-D musical Hamlet targeting the Harry Potter and High School Musical market’. I am not concerned for Hamlet, which has been kneaded into so many preposterous shapes and survived. What horrifies me is the prospect of seeing the film in 3-D. Variety helpfully explains: ‘Hamlet lends itself to a 3-D treatment. The producers hope to include a ghost that hovers in front of the audience’s eyes, cannon fire that flies into the auditorium and a sword fight that appears to happen all around viewers.

The East Anglians; Subversive Spaces: Surrealism and Contemporary Art Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, until 13 December Most exhibitions of photographs could be viewed just as satisfactorily from an armchair with a book of high-quality reproductions, but not The East Anglians. There are 58 colour photographs in this show, and they need to be seen in situ, partly because of their scale (some are very large), and partly because of their darkness, which would not transfer well to the printed page. The darkness is not helped by the slightly overweening black frames, which add a funereal air to the proceedings, but perhaps this is not inappropriate in a body of work that chronicles the decline of a way of life.

Aye lads, it's what you might call a Reiving moon right enough. Taken circa 9pm tonight.

Old operatic conventions will no longer do, says Igor Toronyi-Lalic: no more parking and barking Caricatures are often instructive. Those that acquire legs will offer a crystallised version of the truth. The hoary send-up of opera, for example — the lardy singers, the stilted poses, the outstretched arms — is representative of a historic reality. Opera singers did once park and bark. Character was once illustrated through stock gesture and semaphore. The presumed impossibility of mastering both the singing and the acting meant consigning half the art form to the dustbin. ‘How can you act if you have to hold a sustained note for six measures in the middle of an emotional climax, with your eyes glued on the conductor?

Henry Moore Textiles The Sheep Field Barn, Hoglands, Perry Green, Hertfordshire, until 18 October Hoglands, the former home of Henry Moore (1898–1986) near Much Hadham in Hertfordshire, was looking radiant on the late-summer day I visited it. The Foundation that Moore set up to care for his estate and reputation acquired the house from his family in 2004 and began restoring it. It gleams today probably more than it ever did when lived in, but a marvellous array of furniture and fittings, art and artefacts (including the original bottles of drink offered by HM to his visitors) ensures that the place still seems more of a home and less of a museum. The ground floor is open to the public and may be viewed under careful supervision.

Andrew Lambirth talks to the sculptor Anish Kapoor on the eve of his major new exhibition at the Royal Academy I interviewed the sculptor Anish Kapoor (born 1954) while preparations for his major new exhibition at the Royal Academy were nearing conclusion. The galleries were busy with technicians so we talked in the Members’ Room (Kapoor has been an RA since 1999). I last interviewed Kapoor 11 years ago, on the eve of his last big museum show in London, when he had the whole of the Hayward Gallery. Now he has been given the grand rooms which comprise the entire main floor of the Academy. Our talk was inevitably concerned with his new show. Was it a retrospective?

Rogier van der Weyden 1400–1464: Master of Passions Museum Leuven, until 6 December Musée Hergé Louvain-la-Neuve When I was a child in Belgium, architecture was a dirty word — angry drivers would wind down their windows and yell, ‘Architecte!’ The insult dated back to the 19th century, when the megalomaniac architect Joseph Poelaert imposed the enormity of the Palais de Justice on Brussels, forcing large numbers of residents from their homes. Times change and memory fades; architects are back in favour in Belgium.