Culture

I’d never really looked at landscapes with cows until a student experience brought them sharply into focus. I was standing in front of one at a tutor’s party when I noticed the boy next to me staring at it. As I wondered what had so captured his imagination, he suddenly gasped, ‘God, I’m hungry!’ There are a lot of cows, and sheep, in Compton Verney’s new exhibition of landscapes from the Royal Academy’s collection, but they’re not there to whet the appetites of starving students. Rather, runs the thesis behind the show, their presence lends credibility to a pastoral vision of England designed to appeal to the new class of industrialist collector that came into being with the Royal Academy in 1768.

Handel’s Giulio Cesare in a staged concert performance at the Barbican, given under the experienced baton of René Jacobs, was something to look forward to keenly, especially for that tiny minority of us who think the work a great one but the enormously popular Glyndebourne production a vulgar travesty. In the event, it was rather a flat evening. Perhaps if one way of celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Barbican Centre were to be the introduction of effective air-conditioning into the stifling atmosphere of the Hall, such huge events (this was another almost four-and-a-half-hour marathon) wouldn’t seem so interminable.

‘Censorship,’ shrieked Hanif Kureishi after discovering that his short story, ‘Weddings and Beheadings’, was not going to be read on Radio Four as part of the National Short Story Competition (organised with various organisations including Prospect magazine, Booktrust and the Scottish Book Trust to promote the skill involved in writing short stories). The five shortlisted stories were all meant to be aired last week on Radio Four, but Kureishi’s was withdrawn at the last moment on the orders of the Controller, Mark Damazer. Damazer stated firmly that the BBC was ‘not censoring’ the story, just ‘postponing transmission’.

A feature of the gardening world, which probably strikes me rather more forcibly than it does you, is the number of amateur plant specialists there are. These are experts in one area of plantsmanship, usually, who aggregate in groups in order that they can exchange technical talk, test their skills in competition and learn from their fellow-enthusiasts. Although hidden from general view (unless you become an expert yourself and start looking for them), these people add much to the sum of our understanding about plants, whenever their expertise leaks out of learned journals and into the popular prints. The layman may find their conversation mystifying, even sometimes tedious, but it is pleasing to know that it goes on.

Questions are easy, answers less so. That’s the conclusion of Joe Penhall’s new morality play and it won’t come as a surprise to anyone brighter than a hedgehog. A brilliant but unstable missile scientist has invented a gizmo that will give Britain military superiority for a generation. Professor Brainiac then suffers an attack of conscience and announces that he wants personal control of the export licences. (Does that sound likely? On stage it seems so loaded with improbabilities that it’s hard to see the play over the top of the pile.) Prof. B. is worried that his gizmo may fall into the hands of nutcase states like (who else?) the US and Israel. Instead he suggests handing the innovation to the European Union. Hmmm. Imagine the EU trying to fire a new weapon.

I caught up with Welsh National Opera’s production of Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina only in Birmingham, the last performance of its first run. I hope it’s revived soon, since an account of it as intense as the one I saw, without longueurs, is just what this work needs to lift it from the status of masterpiece-but-also-bore to simply that of masterpiece. It is done in Shostakovich’s orchestration, and with Stravinsky’s setting of the final chorus for the Old Believers (or call them Fundamentalists to get them in perspective). With David Pountney as director, one expects the action to be updated, and the sets, variants on a single collection of intimidating props, suggest 1920s architecture and painting.