Culture

We can all recite the statistics, can’t we? I mean the percentage fall in shopping activity in December, the names of the high street retail businesses that have gone bust or been taken over, the numbers of shopworkers who have lost their jobs. We can all recite the statistics, can’t we? I mean the percentage fall in shopping activity in December, the names of the high street retail businesses that have gone bust or been taken over, the numbers of shopworkers who have lost their jobs. Less well-known to us is what is happening to garden centres and nurseries, despite the fact that they are complex retail operations quite as much as Woolworths or Adams Childrenswear.

Henrietta Bredin talks to Ian McDiarmid about turning a novel set in Scotland into a play Ian McDiarmid possesses a voice that, if he chose to let it, could curdle milk. Half-strangled and poisonously clotted it emerges in an evil flow in his portrayal of the Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars films. As Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, it is all silken seduction and hidden threat. In his next stage role, his voice will be heard, not just as an actor, but as the author of an adaptation of Be Near Me, the novel by Andrew O’Hagan. He will play Father David Anderton, a Catholic priest in a small Ayrshire parish, in a joint production between the National Theatre of Scotland and the Donmar Warehouse. How had this happened?

Well Apollo Hit Me! The Life and Rhymes of Ian Dury Leicester Square In Blood: The Bacchae Arcola So what does the theatre critic make of the recession? No one’s asked me, actually, so here goes. Leaving aside the obsessive 24-hour media coverage, there’s little trace of it in the real world. Immunise your bonce against the gloom-rites of the newspapers and you’ll see that the impending ‘slump’ (dimple, actually) will prove to be the briefest and shallowest downturn in economic history. By next Christmas the factories will be pumping out skiploads of new consumer junk, the FTSE will be performing dizzying feats of alpinism at the 6,000 mark and the present media-orchestrated collective trance will have become a distant memory. How do I know?

I suppose it must have seemed a neat idea at the time, but Dan Drezner is absolutely correct: Bono's debut column for the New York Times is simply gibberish*. I guess one of the perks of celebrity is being able to find a publisher for nonsense that would, quite correctly, be rejected out of hand were it submitted by an average hack. Like Dan, I've no idea what point Bono is trying to make beyond a) he knew Frank Sinatra and b) people like Sinatra's songs. *And that's after it was edited. Did no-one at the NYT pause to ask "Hang on, why are we printing this tripe?" Or did they say: "This will be great blog-fodder...

Circus Cirque du Soleil has taken a surreal turn with its latest show, Quidam, at the Albert Hall: a headless man with an open umbrella, a crowd of people wearing white protective overalls doing, well, nothing much ... but it’s the acts what count. Most are thrilling: a couple lift, stretch and contort themselves in slow motion into anatomically-unbelievable positions; four Chinese girls looking about 12 years old spin their diabolos; and other members of the company skip, somersault, tumble and chuck one another high into the air. Lots more good stuff and, thank heavens, no tedious clowns — there’s only one, and he’s actually quite funny. Film Critics have been rather dismissive about Australia, Baz Luhrmann’s new film.

William Cook talks to the creators of some of TV’s funniest and best-loved comedy programmes As our economy disappears down the plughole, along with the reputations of most of our bankers and politicians, the one consolation is that entertainers like Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross suddenly seem terribly passé. When you’re broke, there’s nothing entertaining about other people’s affluence — or decadence — and, even if you can make ends meet, failure is always far funnier than success. The two men who understand this better than anyone are sitting side by side on the same sofa, in the august but comfy drawing room of a grand old house near Hampton Court.

Andrew Lambirth looks forward to some great exhibitions in the year ahead There’s a very full year’s viewing ahead to cheer the eye and gladden the heart however bleak the financial prospects. For a start, the National Gallery is mounting a major exhibition focusing on the fascinating relationship that Picasso had with the art of the past. His reworkings of Goya, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Chardin and Delacroix, together with responses to more contemporary masters such as van Gogh and Gauguin, provide a riveting dialogue of minds. Picasso: Challenging the Past (25 February to 7 June) will offer new ways to look at the Old Masters as well as a different take on Picasso.

Ronald Blythe examines William Blake’s influence on the work of the 19th-century artist Samuel Palmer Samuel Palmer was in his early twenties when he wrote in his notebook, ‘The Glories of Heaven might be tried — hymns sung among the hills of Paradise at eventide...’ As a subject for a painting he means. Just before this he discovered his paradisal hills at Shoreham on the Kentish coast. And that very same year, 1824, he had also discovered how to paint them, for John Linnell, his future father-in-law, had taken him to visit William Blake. This meeting was profound. Blake was near death and living with his wife in a grubby London back street. Palmer found him ‘lame in bed, of a scalded foot (or leg).