Culture

Genghis Khan (BBC1, Monday) was a remarkable 60-minute documentary. Normally, something filmed on such a massive scale would be stretched to last several hours over many weeks. I can only assume that the Mongolian extras work for much less than their British counterparts. Mongolians playing Mongolians, eh? In television terms that’s the equivalent of people selling you double-glazing by phone from Bangalore. And the battle scenes were terrific. The standard BBC technique is to have, say, half a dozen chaps on horses filmed from below so that 24 thundering hooves come to symbolise 10,000 warriors. Here we had, well, quite a lot of chaps on horses, sweeping majestically, or at least speedily, across the steppe.

A chill spring day in Stratford for the RSC’s launch of its summer comedies season with a new Midsummer Night’s Dream from Gregory Doran. A production to warm the heart? Certainly, for how could any half-competent staging fail to do so, and anything directed by Doran is usually rather better than that. But where so many are constantly beating a path through the Athenian forest, it’s a task of tasks to find anything new to say. On this score he chalks up few points. On the other hand, there’s perhaps some relief that no alien concept has been imposed, no abhorrent substructure excavated, no relevance insisted upon. A startling beginning will do very well.

At the Berlin Staatsoper, the evening after he conducted Parsifal Daniel Barenboim conducted Carmen, a sequence that would have had a strong appeal for Nietzsche, who advertised the Mediterranean virtues of the latter’s music over the ‘tragic grunts’ of the former. Whether Nietzsche would have approved of Barenboim’s way with Carmen is more doubtful. Though it wasn’t slow and turgid à la Bernstein, it was performed, orchestrally, in an exaggerated style. Barenboim must be, too, the most ostentatious operatic conductor since Karajan. Sitting in the stalls, one couldn’t avoid seeing his figure high above the orchestra, gesticulating melodramatically and probably unnecessarily.

‘You’re not going to write about them, are you?’ said my wife contemptuously, when I announced that I was going to devote this month’s column to the Grateful Dead. ‘They’re one of the worst.’ As regular readers will know, my wife hates all pop music with a passion, but she especially dislikes the Dead because she has so often been woken by the sounds of their psychedelic classic ‘Dark Star’ playing at maximum volume at three o’clock in the morning. But even people who love rock music hate the Grateful Dead. ‘What does a Deadhead say when he’s run out of dope?’ Keith Richards of the Stones once inquired. The answer to his little riddle was ‘God, this band is shit’.

The Flowers emporium in Shoreditch, which does such a competent job of purveying art to the chattering classes, shows an eclectic range of artists, from the geometrically abstract to the photo-realistic. Dennis Creffield (born 1931) belongs to neither extreme, but fits into that fruitful expressionist middle ground where the quondam students of David Bomberg struggle with charcoal and pigment to discover the ‘actuality’ of a subject. Flowers must be heartily congratulated on having mounted a decent retrospective of Creffield’s work, for we have seen little of it in London (besides an exhibition of the Orford Ness pictures a decade ago) since the magnificent English Cathedrals show at Camden Arts Centre in 1990.

Fox Talbot invented his ‘photogenic drawing’ process in 1834 and ten years later published The Pencil of Nature, the first book to be illustrated with photographs. There is nothing like Elisabeth Vellacott’s drawings to make you impatient with Fox Talbot’s terms. Photography, which freezes an instant in an instant, is neither nature’s pencil nor any sort of drawing. The more you study Vellacott’s delicate drawings of English and Welsh landscapes, the more you become aware of active, stretched-out time, the time nature has already taken to create this motif and the time taken by the artist to draw it, during which nature is still alive and changeable.