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Where are we?

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 7th May 2008

Tinderbox
Bush

The Year of Magical Thinking
Lyttelton

At the Lyttelton Vanessa Redgrave has created a monumental portrait of grief in The Year of Magical Thinking. Joan Didion’s bereavement memoir sold stackloads in America but did less well over here. It starts abruptly one evening in 2003 when the novelist’s husband drops dead in front of her. She’s plunged into instant denial followed by months of mental turmoil which takes her to the brink of madness. Her husband was a celebrated screenwriter and when the LA Times phoned asking her to confirm his death she hesitated. ‘LA is hours behind New York. Maybe he isn’t dead there yet.’ Her daughter, by a ghoulish coincidence, was also in hospital having fallen into a toxic coma. Didion ordered the TV in her room to be turned off lest she wake to the bad news about her dad. Returning a day later she found the television’s mute screen plastered with a notice: ‘Father dead. No TV.’

The monologue is at times hard to engage with because it requires an intricate knowledge of America. You have to guess, for example, what NRP is and only when you learn that its breakfast show is called ‘Morning Becomes Eclectic’ do you realise it’s a cross between Woman’s Hour and Poetry Please. And Didion’s reverence for her own experience becomes a touch stifling. One longs for a dash of healthy cynicism. A British author faced with bereavement doesn’t say, ‘How will I get through this?’ but ‘How many words will I get out of it?’

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A world elsewhere

Henrietta Bredin

Henrietta Bredin visits Oslo's new opera house and finds it impressive, both inside and out

Distinctly lacklustre

Andrew Lambirth

Radical light: Italy's Divisionist Painters 1891-1910
National Gallery, until 7 September, Sponsoered by Credit Suisse

What about the Iraqis?

Lloyd Evans

Black Watch
Barbican

Whatever Happened to Cotton Dress Girl?
New End

Divas
Apollo

Inspired and thrilling

Michael Tanner

Le nozze di Figaro
Royal Opera House

Here be monsters

Peter Hoskin

The Mist
15, Nationwide

Between the lines

Kate Chisholm

The Afternoon Play: Address Unknown (BBC Radio 4)

McCain is in for a terrible shock if he wins

Reihan Salam

Reihan Salam says that most Republicans have no idea how much the American social landscape has changed. They should learn from Obama’s Google-like appeal

Welcome to the United States of Amnesia

Mary Wakefield

Gore Vidal tells Mary Wakefield that America has forgotten its constitutional roots, and explains why Bobby Kennedy was ‘the biggest son of a bitch in politics’

Old school ties

Taki

Taki lives the High Life

This Middle East summit is a distraction that will achieve little

James Forsyth

The Annapolis Middle East summit won’t produce anything more than a commitment to hold another meeting. But the real worry is that Condoleezza Rice’s intense focus on the Israel Palestine question could distract her from more pressing matters in Iraq, Pakistan and North Korea.