Culture

No question about it. If you had to name the 500 brightest periods in the history of human creativity, you wouldn’t include West Germany in the 1970s. What did they give us, those occidental Heinrichs and Helmuts? The Volkswagen Golf, the Baader-Meinhof gang, Boney M and a team of hyperefficient donkeys who fluked the World Cup in 1974. But with the passage of time one star begins to shine more brilliantly in the firmament. You probably haven’t heard of Franz Xaver Kroetz (b. Munich 1946). His work is elusive, undemonstrative and highly subtle and he specialises in unglamorous family dramas. His method was experimental back in the 70s. He interspersed lengthy dramatic scenes with sudden brief snapshots of his characters in revealing attitudes.

Back in the 1920s someone complained there wasn’t a play on the London stage that didn’t have a telephone in it. While it’s the lifeblood of theatre to move with the times, a mania for modish contemporaneity can only get you so far. The danger is especially endemic in theatre troupes dedicated to outreach and to widening access. New York’s ‘Theatre for a New Audience’ is plainly one of these and it was the final visiting company contributing to the RSC’s Complete Works Festival. (Injury has sadly postponed the official opening of King Lear with Ian McKellen, the RSC’s own final contribution on which I hope to report later.

Lots of new comedy this week. Mitchell and Webb are a puzzle. They had a successful sketch slot, which followed the first runs of Peep Show. Then they turned up in the ads for Apple computers. One of them (I forget which) is supposed to use an Apple Mac and the other a boring old PC. Apparently, Apple users are free, artistic, untrammelled by the petty rules of others. PC users are wage slaves, crawling their dreary way towards retirement. Some people who think themselves cool regarded this as the single least-cool commercial campaign ever. It was held to have demolished Mitchell and Webb’s own carefully burnished image of cool. Even at my advanced years, I could see that it was terminally naff.

Prunella Clough; Harry Thubron: Collages and Constructions 1972–1984 It was a privilege to be a member of the jury that gave Prunella Clough (1919–99) the Jerwood Prize for Painting in 1999. On the one hand, we wanted to draw attention to the fact that she was an immensely distinguished painter who had remained largely unknown and publicly unrewarded during a long career, and on the other we wished to recognise the high quality of her latest work, some of the finest she’d ever done. In many ways, Prunella was her own worst enemy, being of a modest and self-effacing temperament, much given to doubting her very real achievements.

L’Heure espagnole; Gianni Schicchi; Ariodante The trouble with perfection, on the extremely rare occasions one encounters it, is that it leaves one discontented with anything less. Now that I have seen Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole in Richard Jones’s new production at the Royal Opera, I only want to see these singers under this conductor repeating it. There aren’t many chances to see this opera, and when I have seen it in the past I’ve felt it to be a bit of a long-winded joke, with too-discreet music, demanding a lot from its performers, without big rewards.

Too much artist and not enough art. That’s one problem with Total Eclipse, Christopher Hampton’s play about the titans of French 19th-century poetry. Another is presentation. The show is done ‘in the round’ on a raised slipway between two banks of seats irradiated by the glare reflected from the stage. This is bonkers. The reason house lights are dimmed during a show is to create an atmosphere of anonymous intimacy in which every member of the audience can half-imagine that they’re watching the play alone. Doing it in the round kills that subtlety. You have to stare, through the shapes of the perambulating actors, at a wraparound panorama of unfamiliar faces.