Culture

Really, it isn’t me who decides what TV programmes to review. It’s my wife. Like, the other night I’d started watching Ricky J. Dyer’s fascinating documentary I Love Being...HIV+ (BBC3, Monday) about pozzing up, the disgusting gay underworld perversion of deliberately getting yourself infected with the HIV virus by seeking unprotected sex with known carriers, and the wife came in and said, ‘Oh God! We’re not watching this, surely? Huh, this is just the sort of stuff you’d watch, because we know you’re gay really...’ So to shut her up I had to dig out some art programmes I’d ordered up instead.

In a dark corner of the Museum of Natural History in New York there is a diorama of a giant squid caught between the jaws of a whale. It is huge, vivid and quite alarming — two mighty beasts tussling, and never a victor. This is the spectacle which gives this film its curious title: as a young boy, Walt Berkman was taken to see it by his mother but he was too frightened to look, except through his fingers. At 16, he returns and gazes at it head-on. We are in 1980s Brooklyn. The aforementioned Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and his younger brother, 12-year-old Frank (Owen Kline), are pitched into a crisis when their parents announce their separation. Joan seems already to have mourned her marriage, but her husband Bernard (Jeff Daniels) is furious, and blames his wife.

The Old Country, an Alan Bennett play that dates back to 1977, covers much the same ground as An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution. The central character is clearly based on one of the Cambridge Spies — in this case, a former Foreign Office official called Hilary, who is rotting away in the Soviet Union while pining for the comforts of home. This figure — the ruling-class dissident overcome with nostalgia for the country he’s betrayed — clearly fascinates Bennett. Does he see a parallel between his experience as a semi-closeted homosexual and the secret life of the Cambridge Spies? Or is this figure simply a handy way of dramatising Bennett’s own ambivalence about Britain — loathing it and loving it at the same time?

Three fine exhibitions are currently gracing the public galleries of Bath, and even though the new spa is shamefully late in opening, art-lovers are spoilt for choice. In fact, these shows are well worth a day trip from London if you live in town. Bath is a relatively easy hour-and-a-half’s journey from Paddington, and the rewards are considerable. Apart from the distinguished beauty of the city itself, all mellow Bath stone rising in proud tiers on the surrounding hills, this trio of shows provides an uncommon range of visual stimulation and entertainment.

Has Harold Pinter become too dominant a figure? I’m not just talking about the trophies he’s picked up in the past 12 months — the Wilfred Owen prize, the Franz Kafka prize, the Nobel prize, the Europe Theatre prize — but, more worryingly, the fact that so many new British playwrights seem content to ape Pinter’s idiosyncratic style. There was a time, not so long ago, when a writer wouldn’t be regarded as having arrived until he’d discovered his own voice. Typically, this process would involve him in an Oedipal struggle with the most important writers of his age, a phenomenon famously documented in The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom’s study of the romantic poets.

Phoenix Dance Theatre is ‘25 years young’, as a filmed documentary shown halfway through last Thursday’s performance reminded us. The notion of youth is a relative one, particularly in the performing-arts world, where a quarter of a century is often regarded as a respectable old age, synonymous with a well-established reputation, a sound history and, arguably, a string of successes. Indeed, 25 years down the line, Phoenix remains a vibrant dance company that thrives on the collaboration with cutting-edge performance-makers. I was not surprised, therefore, to attend a programme, intriguingly entitled Stories in Red, that encompassed a wide variety of styles, techniques and forms; after all, artistic eclecticism has long been one of the company’s distinctive traits.