Culture

Her Naked Skin Olivier Elaine Stritch At Liberty Shaw In 2004 Rebecca Lenkiewicz got the black spot from the Critics’ Circle. Sorry, I mean she was voted ‘most promising playwright’. Less a gong, more a millstone. Praising writers for what they’ve done is fine. Praising them for what they may do in future is like congratulating a pregnant woman on her foetus’s A-levels results. Lenkiewicz’s latest work about the suffragette movement arrives with fresh honours. The programme grandly announces that Her Naked Skin is ‘the first play by a living woman writer on the Olivier stage’. How aristocratic. It demands respect on account of its status at birth.

Elegy 15, London and Key Cities Elegy is about an ageing professor (Ben Kingsley) and a beautiful young woman (Penelope Cruz), and it is based on the Philip Roth novel The Dying Animal, which, in turn, takes its title from Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, in which the poet describes his soul as ‘sick with desire/and fastened to a dying animal’. Elegy. Ageing. Roth. Dying. Sick. And yet this movie is such fun! Hats off to the director, Isabel Coixet, for infusing it with candy colours and setting it to a kitsch yet funky Seventies pop soundtrack. OK, only teasing. This is gloomy. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I felt so gloomed. It is a very brown sort of film and there is a great deal of piano tinkling.

Mrs Spencer and I are just back from a few days in Tuscany where I was bullied into as punishing a round of culture-vulturing as I have ever endured. The temperature may have been just a degree or two short of 100°F in Florence, but a small matter like heat exhaustion wasn’t going to stop the missus in her tracks. Give her a guidebook, and she becomes a woman obsessed. We were up at dawn to queue for the Uffizi, outside the doors of the Medici chapel before they opened at 8.15 a.m. And in fact, though I grumbled, I must admit I enjoyed it almost as much as she did. After spending long days looking at great art and great architecture, you might have thought the spirit would crave the most beautiful classical music in the evening.

This is really rather splendid: starting next month, George Orwell's diaries will be published on the web, one day at a time, 70 years after they were written. Harry's Place has more.

It’s easy to see the way opera Inszenierung is going. We are in for a spate of US-located productions, just as we emerge from 19th-century industrial locations and nondescript car parks. Hollywood, Las Vegas, the prairies, Texas oilfields and the omnipresence of TV, something we are hardly likely to forget, are where Poppea, Giulio Cesare, Die Zauberflöte, Norma, all of Verdi and Wagner, Peter Grimes will find themselves next. Within a week two such disparate pieces as Candide and The Rake’s Progress have received broadly similar treatment, the locations dictating, to a large extent, the kind of characters and the range of their motivations. Absurd in Candide, this was wholly undermining of Rake, if it hadn’t already been a failure on musical grounds.

WALL.E, the latest CGI animation from Pixar in collaboration with Disney, has already been hailed as a ‘modern masterpiece’ — in America, at least — but I’m not so sure. It has a cracking, enthralling, wonderfully dystopian first half, but after that it appears mostly concerned with hurtling towards one of those predictable endings that are just too CUTES·E (hey, anyone can interpunct, you know) and DISN·E (see?) for words. WALL·E is exceptionally good, just as Toy Story was, and The Incredibles, but not Cars or Ratatouille — too heavy-handed — but a masterpiece?

The Royal Court’s search for new scripts has gone global. Its tireless talent scouts, assisted by the British Council, fan out across France, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Syria and Mexico laying on seminars, workshops and ‘residencies’. They go to India, too, although quite why the Court spends energy nurturing dramatists in a country with the world’s largest film industry isn’t entirely clear. Good Indian writers don’t need foreign aid. Bad ones don’t deserve it. Free Outgoing by Anupama Chandrasekhar is a harmless slice of Chaucerian parody which has arrived in Sloane Square from Madras. Like a migrant with the wrong papers, it hid in the Theatre Upstairs for a few months before descending on to the main stage with indefinite leave to remain.