Culture

Places, like property prices, go up and down. Margate, in the most northerly corner of Kent, is just beginning the uncertain journey upwards again. The county’s largest resort, it has acres of ribbed brown sand and a harbour enclosed by a pier, ending in a lighthouse. Margate thrived when Turner painted there, and London workers arrived by daily packet for a waft of ozone, cockles and jellied eels. There are tall terraced houses in Regency stucco and Georgian brick, and knapped-flint cottages; a gloriously kitsch Winter Gardens, a shell grotto and the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital, sponsored by George III. There is also the wreckage of mass tourism — bingo, Butlins, arcades, the boarded-up wastes of Dreamland Fun Park and a defunct Lido and Scenic Railway.

So, to cut straight to what you really want to know without having to wade through several paragraphs of plot-rehash followed by the director’s CV and his favourite seasonal vegetable, will you like this film? Hell, how should I know? I don’t know the first thing about you. But I will say this: OK, The Devil Wears Prada is no Pour Toi, Un Bon Morceau de Fromage (André Labourious’s seminal masterpiece about a morsel of cheese drifting aimlessly around Paris in the rain) but it does have its merits. True, when Meryl Streep isn’t in a scene the film tends to die on its arse somewhat, and as a satire on the fashion industry it flags in quite a few places, but there are some good jokes in it.

It’s more than three years since there was a production of Wagner’s ultimate masterpiece, Tristan und Isolde, in the UK, and I have been looking forward eagerly to Welsh National Opera’s revival of the one they share with Scottish Opera. Yannis Kokkos, who was the original designer and director, pays tribute in the programme to the great Swiss designer Adolphe Appia, and his sets, spare, concentrating the action and suggesting a lot that isn’t to be seen on stage, are rather similar to the ones that Toscanini used in La Scala in 1923. For me, they are virtually ideal, lovely to look at and enabling the singers to move freely but ensuring that every gesture they make tells.

It all sounds very kinky, really, bringing together the two Sir Johns under one roof; Sir John Betjeman, so amiable, house-trained and telly-friendly, and Sir John Soane, so arcane, Dumbledore-ish and stridently innovative. But I have to say I think it works rather well since, in such close proximity, each of the knights brings out the best in the other. There’s a marvellous feeling of being in a burrow in the way the exhibition is done. Left, right and then a breakneck turn into the cursed forest of blasted architectural fragments leads you to a warm and cosy Bag End painted some shade of Farrow & Ball or other.

There’s something different about Tai-Shan Schierenberg’s new show at Flowers Central: it has a title, Myths. This may not sound like much — and Schierenberg shrugs it off — but when an artist abandons the neutrality of New Paintings for a title with so much historical baggage you suspect something is afoot. And when you enter the gallery and find paintings of the Black Forest intermingled with his usual English subjects, you can guess what it is. Despite his name — his mother was Chinese and his father is German — Schierenberg has passed until now for an English painter.

It’s very pleasant to be able to greet a small show at the V&A after the relentless stream of blockbusters we’ve seen in Brompton Road in recent years. Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design is confined to one gallery and consists of 60 drawings displayed in two banks of angled cabinets down the length of the room. Above the display cases animations of the drawings are projected, bringing Leonardo’s static designs to life in the manner of a computer screen saver. Is this necessary? The show itself is so low-key I presume the organisers felt it advisable to include a bit of technological back-up to amuse the punters.