Culture

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.

The Last Cigarette Trafalgar Studio Rookery Nook Menier Simon Gray’s twilight diaries may well be a prose masterpiece. That the stage adaptation hasn’t done them justice is a fact few want to admit. The ‘much-loved’ fallacy has descended over this production for understandable reasons. Gray was a darling of the theatre, and the cast — Felicity Kendal, Jasper Britton, Nicholas Le Prevost — are twinkly-eyed favourites from the national treasure trove. But even buckletloads of affection can’t disguise the mismatch between a meandering first-person narrative and the focused concision of the stage. Gray, a talented playwright, sidestepped the theatre and chose good old prose for his last testament. Strong hint there, I’d say.

As You Like It; The Winter’s Tale Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Back in the rehearsal room for the first time since his triumphant Histories cycle, the RSC’s artistic director Michael Boyd whisks As You Like It far away from the Forest of Arden. Not a tree in sight, and does anyone give a twig? Yes, the play’s in part a satire on the Elizabethans’ taste for awful pastoral verse, but Boyd wisely sets it on a clinically bare stage, asking us to respond firstly to its Mozartean games on the universal joys and terrible deceptions of human passion. The courtly costumes (puritanical black with white ruffs) could be 17th-century Dutch, while in the ‘forest’ pretty well anything goes.

The current exhibition at Tate Modern (Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism, until 17 May) is rich in cultural reference, apart from any reference to music. Here we have Popova collaborating with theatrical producers and designers, Rodchenko working alongside film-makers and poets (especially Mayakovsky), and everyone in a headlong dash away from easel work towards sculpture, and even architecture. It was a time of quite glorious redefinition of life and culture, taking in anything and everything. Why is music kept apart? It wasn’t that the musicians themselves were silent. The new Soviet authorities had a liking for opera, hoping that such an obvious art form would appeal to the masses. Well-known operas were ridiculously recast with new libretti.