Culture

Someone once had an excellent idea for a film to scare the pants off us: what if Gregory Peck (who represented nothing but good sense and respectability) adopted a baby boy, and that cute ickle shock-headed newborn turned out to be Satan? And Satan wanted Mummy and Daddy dead, so he could inherit everything they had — in fact ultimately inherit the earth and bring about his true aim, which we call Armageddon? What if the only thing Peck could do, to stop him, would be to murder him — or try to? Wouldn’t that be a great movie? Well, yes, it would and it was. The Omen has been making people jump out of their skins for 30 years. And now it’s been remade, but with one crucial ingredient missing: surprise.

There was an unexpected outbreak of common sense at Chelsea Flower Show this year. I looked hard for the usual silliness to laugh at, but I was hard-pressed to find much. (There were the celebrities who clutter up the place on Press Day, obviously, but the general public who visit Chelsea are mercifully spared those.) There was much sober purposefulness and little evident desire to épater le bourgeois. Most emperors had obviously decided that the weather warranted them wearing their oldest and warmest clothes. Was it the absence from the show of Diarmuid Gavin and his contrived spats, perhaps, or the fact that the show’s sponsor was Saga Insurance for the first time, or did the chill breeze of current commercial reality wither any desire for wackiness? I cannot say.

Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is proving to be one of the enduring operas of the 20th century, despite its inconvenient length, or brevity, and thus the problem of what to pair it with for a full evening. I have always tended to think of it as a work of extreme orchestral sumptuousness, which provides a background to the ritual-cum-drama being worked out between Bluebeard and his latest wife Judit, ending, as it begins, in tears. Their mode of communication, Judit a kind of mythic nag, Bluebeard stonewalling, is almost elevated chanting, which gives an emotional distance to the incidents we watch, and means that, however much we register the pain on both sides, we aren’t much moved by it. That, anyway, is how I have usually responded.

Listing page content here I can’t make up my mind about Shared Experience. Since 1988, this company has been adapting classic works of literature, transforming some of the greatest books in the Western canon into visceral pieces of physical theatre. The results are distinctly mixed. On the one hand, the plays are rarely more than crude summaries of the original novels, almost as if they’ve been designed to help GCSE English students revise for their exams. But on the other, they’re undoubtedly theatrical, retelling these famous stories on stage in ways that are often very imaginative. Jane Eyre, which is the most famous example of Shared Experience’s work, is a case in point.

Staging the 1890 classic The Sleeping Beauty in the 21st century is not an easy task. Recent studies, discoveries and even philological reconstructions have heightened historical and stylistic awareness among dance-goers, thus generating expectations that cannot be easily overlooked. Yet philology and historical accuracy alone turn any work into a dead museum exhibit, at the expense of its vibrant theatricality. New ideas must thus be sought to enliven the old text and to make it viable for contemporary audiences.

Listening to The Archive Hour: Down Your Way Revisited on Radio Four (Saturday) made me wonder why the network got rid of the programme in 1995. It had been running since 1946, with a simple formula of interviews and music, the idea of a producer called Leslie Perowne. It visited towns and villages across the country, and in its heyday attracted an audience of ten million a week. It avoided controversy and looked for the good in people and places, and while some thought it bland and cosy, most liked it. It occurred to me that when the awful Home Truths on Saturday mornings is eventually replaced, Radio Four could do worse than reviving it.