Culture

Irresistible, the allure of a snatched weekend in Paris to catch a rare, adored opera, Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui. Irresistible, the allure of a snatched weekend in Paris to catch a rare, adored opera, Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui. This glorious cornucopia of intoxicating invention has ‘enjoyed’ a history of bad luck: the delirious imbecility of the plot — ‘a negative tour de force, to invent such a confusing story with so few characters’ — has occasioned two comprehensive overhauls (most recent the brave rewrite mounted by Opera North in the mid-1990s).

‘Consider the depth of despair,’ suggested the playwright David Hare in his half-hour reflection, Wall, on Monday evening (Radio Four). ‘Consider the depth of despair,’ suggested the playwright David Hare in his half-hour reflection, Wall, on Monday evening (Radio Four). It is extraordinary how Israel’s construction of a 486-mile barrier along its eastern border, at a cost of £2 billion, has been so rarely discussed, let alone acknowledged, by the wider world. Twenty years after the celebrations that greeted the tumbling down of the Berlin Wall, there’s another blot on the earth’s landscape, built so deep, so wide, so high that it can be clearly seen from space and has all the appearance of a permanent memorial to irresolution.

So it could be that ITV is saved not by a cigar-chomping, hot-shot show-biz executive but by a spinster from a Scottish village. The appearance of Susan Boyle in the first semi-final of Britain’s Got Talent (ITV, all week) was greeted with adoration — and audience figures — that would have been apt if Maria Callas had returned from the dead. Miss Boyle looked rapturously happy, and it was impossible not to feel delighted for her. She has had an unsung life of some difficulty; now, thanks to the internet, she is famed and celebrated around the world. Jay Leno, the American late-night talk-show host, sang dressed as her. There are politicians who would sacrifice their second homes allowance for such lavish, affectionate mockery. But I have reservations.

Peter Grimes English National Opera L’elisir d’amore Royal Opera House Norma English Touring Opera, in Cambridge ENO’s advertisement for its new production of Peter Grimes under David Alden, and the front of the programme, is of a surly, even aggressive youth with ropes coiled behind him. I wondered whether Alden had decided, in characteristic fashion, that the Apprentice, a silent role, was the malevolent centre of the work, manipulating Grimes and the townspeople into regarding him as a victim. No such luck. The Apprentice we get is considerably older than usual, as tall as anyone on the stage, and certainly sullen, displaying his bruise to Ellen with defiant hostility.

Duet for One Vaudeville Ordinary Dreams Trafalgar Studio Therapy is celebrity by another name. An artificially created audience bears witness to your anguish and joy and enables you to resolve the terrible contradiction that underpins every human being’s world-view. Each of us, in his gut, feels like the star of his life. But in his head he knows he’s just one of billions of forgettable cameos. Celebrity and therapy resolve this conundrum. Therapy lets you believe your little world, and its problems are as significant as the rest of humanity. Celebrity forces the same belief.

On Go4it, Radio Four’s shortly to be axed Sunday-evening programme for children, we heard from children in Swaziland who have created their own radio station, Ses’khone Radio. On Go4it, Radio Four’s shortly to be axed Sunday-evening programme for children, we heard from children in Swaziland who have created their own radio station, Ses’khone Radio. Their topic for the week was human rights, which for them meant having the opportunity ‘to speak our minds to adults’. Many of them are living as adults anyway, cooking for themselves and surviving independently because their parents and extended family have all been decimated by Aids (half the population of Swaziland is now under 21).

There’s been a lot of muttering lately about the word ‘sorry’ and the reluctance of politicians and bankers to say it — an unrealistic expectation, given that the logical follow-up is resignation. There’s been a lot of muttering lately about the word ‘sorry’ and the reluctance of politicians and bankers to say it — an unrealistic expectation, given that the logical follow-up is resignation. In Seville, they have a more sensible approach: instead of demanding personal apologies, they muck in for a mass penitence lasting a week. Before attending my first Semana Santa this year, I’d imagined it to be a punishing affair involving penitents shuffling on their knees. As I discovered, it is anything but.

Waiting for Godot Theatre Royal Haymarket Monsters Arcola Godot is one of the most undramatic pieces of theatre ever written and it contains a conundrum I’ve never seen satisfactorily resolved. As a playwright you aim to communicate emotion. If you can make the spectators feel what the characters are feeling, you have a success. However, if what the characters are feeling, and what the spectators are feeling, is suicidal boredom you have sabotage. Beckett takes a sado-masochistic pleasure in elasticating his play with tedious longeurs so that viewers don’t just watch the boredom, they share in it, live it, breathe it, die of it. Much as you try to counsel yourself, ‘Bored?

In his Point of View this week (Radio Four, Sunday), Clive James wove together a subtle threnody on the virtues of having a Poet Laureate. He remarked on how good poets have the ability to conjure up ‘the phrase that makes your mind stand on end’, showing that it’s a quality shared by many prose writers too. The very existence of the Poet Laureate, argued James, is an acknowledgement by the state that there is something out there that the state cannot control — the national memory — and the national memory ‘travels’ in the language, which in turn is preserved, above all, by the poets. It was such a hope-inspiring thought amid the terrifying misuse of words, and ideas, by our current crop of state representatives.