Culture

The Last Ship, a musical written by and featuring Sting, is touring Europe, Australia and America. The show is a class-war parable set in Newcastle during the 1980s. A team of shipbuilders are about to complete a new vessel, the Utopia, when a bossy government minister, Baroness Tynedale, arrives at the docks to deliver bad news. With her bright- blue suit and posh hectoring voice, she’s a pantomime Mrs Thatcher and she announces that the yard will be seized and flogged to private investors. The shipbuilders establish a Marxist committee and plot to overturn her evil scheme. A gripping start. Plucky Geordies pitted against yuppie scavengers from London. The show even features a song about the competing merits of collectivism and monetarism. Then it all implodes.

No one ever joined a rock band because they didn’t want to be recognised. Being adored matters to stars, sometimes too much, but that only makes those who love them care even more. That could be heard in the cries of ‘We love you, Mac!’ at a glorious night in Regent’s Park. Echo & The Bunnymen’s singer Ian McCulloch – who was once famous for pronouncing on how much better his band was than any other – has not had an easy time of it in recent years. Unlike his peers in the Cure and U2, he’s not playing to 50,000 people at a time, though his band were regarded as every bit their equals – perhaps their betters – in the early 1980s.

The only problem with presenting a blazing masterpiece such as Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements as a curtain raiser is that it will make anything that follows it look pallid or insignificant. And that’s what blights English National Ballet’s new triple bill, which starts with a massive blast of electricity and ends in a big slow yawn. Symphony in Three Movements formed part of the astonishing festival that George Balanchine masterminded in 1972 as a homage to his close friend and artistic inspiration Igor Stravinsky, who had died the previous year. Presented in one week were 31 ballets to the composer’s scores, 21 of them new, ten of them by Balanchine himself.

Georgia Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility, which advertises itself as ‘a fresh take for a fresh generation’, has its work cut out. Not only is the Jane Austen novel beloved but there’s also the shadow of Emma Thompson’s sublimely deft 1995 version directed by Ang Lee (with its unforgettably magnificent ugly-cry scene). This one has no such grip on the book, and is considerably drearier and less affecting, but it’s not bad  bad. It’s not Carrie Cracknell’s Persuasion, after which we decided she should never be allowed near Austen again. On this occasion the ‘old take for the old generation’ cannot be surpassed – although well done, fresh generation, for having a go. Top marks. One doesn’t wish to be discouraging.

No critic sets out to be a reactionary, even though it’s much easier that way. There’s no real satisfaction in rejecting novelty on sight; no joy in measuring a living performance against your record collection and coming down, every time, in favour of the dead Nazi. I get that. Still, it’s a plain fact that in three decades of regular opera-going, I have never – not once – seen a live production of Carmen that locates the action in 19th-century Seville. Or one that centres the visual elements – mantillas, sunshine, picture-postcard Spanishness – that directors tell us (and how they tell us!) have become such clichés.

‘I probably got a one or two seconds look at him before he delivered the first blow,’ recalls Sir Salman Rushdie. For the next 27 seconds, on 12 August 2022, the man whom Rushdie will refer to only as A. (‘for asinine’, he explains) tried to kill the writer on the stage of the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. A. slashed through the tendons of Rushdie’s right hand, cut his thigh, stomach and chest, incised a gaping wound in his neck and finally stabbed him in the right eye.

‘Old age’, Bette Davis once reportedly remarked, ‘ain’t no place for sissies’ and neither is Queen at Sea. It’s a film that unflinchingly explores dementia, intimacy, consent, which is basically everything your average sissy wants to run a mile from. (I’m your average sissy and wanted to run a mile from just the synopsis.) But while it’s a tough watch, and a shattering watch, it’s also tender and affecting and the cast – Tom Courtenay, Anna Calder-Marshall, Juliette Binoche – are outstanding. It’s one of those films to file under: ‘Glad I’ve seen – never again.’ It’s directed by Lance Hammer, whose Ballast (2008) was an indie phenomenon but who then stayed quiet for 16 years.

The Children by Lucy Kirkwood is a life-or-death drama about three ageing boffins invited to fix a broken atomic power station and save Britain from nuclear disaster. There’s one snag: radiation poisoning will end their lives. Should the old crocks accept the kamikaze mission? The setting for this macabre tale is a cosy farmhouse occupied by 64-year-old Hazel (Meera Syal) and her chattering Irish husband Robin (Declan Conlon). Their colleague Rose (Kerry Fox) shows up after many decades working abroad and she urges them to join the suicidal engineers working on the radioactive site. The stakes are low because the characters are too old for their love lives to matter much The script contains a lot of chit-chat that relates only tenuously to the main story.

Phrenology, eh? It’s cobblers, plainly, but Robert Schumann didn’t know that and his biographer Martin Geck tells how in 1846, near Dresden, he submitted to a full once-over from Europe’s leading cranium-fondler Robert Noel. Noel clearly knew his patient, because his analysis echoes what anyone who knows Schumann’s music might say about the personality of this supreme romantic. Noel detected ‘sense of form – modesty – strength of purpose’. Touchingly, he also detected ‘anxiety that stands in the way of happiness’. Then the clincher, the observation that grabs straight at the heart of any Schumann fan: ‘emotional through and through’. Well, we Schumann-lovers will take all the back-up we can get.