Culture

Out of a cardboard box on the exhibition poster which heralds Christmas and welcomes visitors at the gates guarding the soothing lawns of the Dulwich Picture Gallery springs a typically Quentin Blake ensemble. There are two children, three dotty adults, one of them wearing ‘specs’, and a big dog. At the top of the poster, a parrot and a bigger bird, probably a heron, both clasp some jolly red and green holly in their beaks. Once in the Gallery itself, it emerges that ‘Up With Birds!’ is the theme of the first room of this exhibition — the first of five such themes. Should a young illustrator wish to make a cockatoo look indignant, for the sake of argument, then Quentin Blake would surely be a mentor to study.

Rameau’s Les Paladins, which arrived briefly at the Barbican Theatre, was spectacular, amazing. Or rather this production was. It was one of those occasions when so much happens on stage that you can begin to wonder whether there’s something — or nothing — to hide. I had listened to it on Radio Three a few days earlier, and been puzzled by the excitement it seemed to be generating, since most of the music struck me as being well below the best of Rameau. It turned out, at the Barbican, that we were to be happily subjected to a multimedia display, in which the visuals easily dominated.

Leighton House, Lord Leighton’s home and studio in Kensington, has a growing reputation for small and scholarly yet undaunting exhibitions. And with the house itself and its collection to be relished into the bargain, size hardly matters. That said, the current special offer, occupying only one room, is centred upon a single work that, at 10 feet by more than five, is itself pretty big. Indeed ‘The Babylonian Marriage Market’ is one of the great machines of high Victorian narrative art. Its painter Edwin Long, born in 1829, was already in his mid-40s and at the time not even an Associate RA. And this one work, two years in the painting and the sensation of the Royal Academy Summer Show of 1875, was to make his name and fortune.

While it’s clear, from the ending-times of most of their performances, that neither of London’s major opera houses feels it is worth considering seriously their patrons who don’t live in the capital and have to use public transport, it often seems even clearer that most Londoners wouldn’t dream of going further afield for an opera than Bow Street or St Martin’s Lane. At least I can’t see any other explanation of why each visit I have paid to Sadler’s Wells this year has been to a theatre half-full, if that. And several of those visits have been far more enjoyable than almost anything to be found in the West End in recent months.

Hard to credit, but at the Royal Opera the new production of Massenet’s Werther begins with the prelude being played while the curtain is still lowered, no one messing around in front; and when it rises, at the point indicated in the score, we see a honeysuckle-covered wall, with a water spout spouting water, and part of a quaint old house. Old-style realism, or semi-realism, which many of us have been pleading for, if not in all cases, at least in such classic period pieces as this. When characters appear, they are dressed in period, too. Fairly soon, however, I began to wonder whether the director Benoit Jacquot, collaborating with the designer Charles Edwards, and in collusion with Antonio Pappano, had their tongues in their cheeks.

What will happen to British culture when the United Kingdom disintegrates into half a dozen warring republics? Who will protect our museums from marauding bands of looters when the rule of law breaks down? What will become of the crown jewels when the royal family is banished to Monaco? If our cultural heritage survives at all, it’ll be thanks largely to India, judging by the loving care with which three classic works of English literature have been adapted recently. Later this year, cinema-goers have two treats in store: Bride and Prejudice, in which Elizabeth Bennett is transformed into a Bollywood heroine, and Vanity Fair, Mira Nair’s distinctly Indian take on Thackeray’s masterpiece.