Arts Reviews

The Power of Yes Lyttelton My Real War 1914–? Trafalgar Studios Here comes Hare. And he’s got the answer to the credit crunch. His energetic, well-researched and richly informative new work opens with an actor playing the writer himself (curious frown, Hush Puppies) as he sets out to discover why the markets jumped off a ledge last autumn. The result is less a play and more a commission of inquiry. Over many a lingering lunch Hare has leaned his inquisitive ear towards senior bankers, top journalists and leading economists. He then distilled their testimony into this fact-crammed pageant. The City’s major players saunter across the Lyttelton stage, their silk-lined suits

Dance Umbrella Cloud Gate Theatre of Taiwan, Barbican Theatre Cabane P3, University of Westminster Cloud Gate Theatre of Taiwan is not new to the UK dance scene. Yet, as stressed in an inflated, self- celebratory programme note, Wind Shadow marks a neat move away from the performance formulae seen in their previous productions. Created in 2006 by Lin Hwai-Min in collaboration with the visual artist Cai Guo-Qiang — who played a significant role in the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics — the work strives to be an example of ‘moving installation art’. As such, it comes across as a series of moving pictures that both surprise and

Two things puzzle me about vegetarians. Whenever they come to visit us, we always provide a vegetarian dish for them. But if you go to a vegetarian’s home, no one says, ‘I know you won’t like this lentil and halloumi lasagne, so we’ve cooked you steak and chips.’ Never. As for those who don’t eat meat on moral grounds, what’s their response to those animals who eat their comrades in the struggle against oppression? And they don’t mess around with battery farming either. Life (BBC1, Monday) had some of the most powerful images of ferocious fauna that have ever appeared on our screens. Admittedly, the three cheetahs attacking an ostrich

Someone somewhere recently asked me in a public forum whether I would prefer to be a singer, the conductor or a member of the audience at the concerts we give. He himself was of the opinion that he would rather be a singer, saying that the music we do is so complicated that only someone on the inside of it can appreciate exactly what the composer has achieved. If he’s right, the audience don’t stand a chance. I rushed to my own defence, saying that the guy out front has the best of all worlds, as one would expect if he is to control the performance. He is receiving the

Schmooze, schlep, schlock — all words that have such an evocative, onomatopoeic meaning and all from Yiddish, a language without a country, an army or a navy, which refuses to die even after one-third of its native speakers were annihilated by the Nazis. Schmooze, schlep, schlock — all words that have such an evocative, onomatopoeic meaning and all from Yiddish, a language without a country, an army or a navy, which refuses to die even after one-third of its native speakers were annihilated by the Nazis. On My Yiddisher Mother Tongue (Radio Four, Thursday) David Schneider, whose grandparents, a playwright and an actress, were part of the great flowering of

The Royal Horticultural Society is like the Church of England. It seems always to have been there, a fixed, reassuring point in a changing world. Even to those who do not belong to it, it seems a Good Thing and it is hard to imagine national life without it. Among those who know it, it inspires affection and exasperation in about equal measure and, like the C of E, it is troubled. In early September, the director-general of the RHS, Inga Grimsey, suddenly resigned and will leave next January. The resulting media attention alerted the world to the fact that the directorate was halfway through a ‘restructure’, cutting 10 per

A few weeks ago I was in Chichester, reviewing a fine revival of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables and suddenly experienced a great ache of nostalgia for the period immediately before my birth. A few weeks ago I was in Chichester, reviewing a fine revival of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables and suddenly experienced a great ache of nostalgia for the period immediately before my birth. Rattigan’s play, first staged in 1954, portrays a post-second-world-war England in which emotions are essentially private, polite small talk largely prevails, and upper lips are worn stiff — in public at least. Of course, the dramatist was in many ways critical of this. Yet though Separate

Scottish Ballet: 40th Anniversary Season Sadler’s Wells Theatre Scottish Ballet has been frequently praised for its stylistically impeccable and theatrically superb renditions of George Balanchine’s works. It is thus more than fitting that the company’s 40th-anniversary programme kicks off with Rubies, the sparkling central section of Jewels, his acclaimed 1967 triptych. Rubies, which is often performed on its own, highlights and encompasses the best of the Balanchinian choreographic aesthetic. Dazzling, jazzy ideas, representing the American culture that the Russian-born dance-maker wanted to embrace, develop rapidly from traces of the old classical tradition which encapsulate Balanchine’s reverence for his own past and for that balletic idiom he never refuted. Yet nostalgia

I wonder how many people still listen to plays on radio now that there is so much competition for our attention from Twitter, YouTube and the hours taken up with Strictly Come Dancing. It’s not just that we’re being taken over by techie gadgetry so that there is less and less time to do anything else. (How many photos have you got trapped on your computer with no time to sort through their nameless numbers and download on to a memory stick, let alone buy the right paper to print them, etc., etc.?) It’s also very difficult to follow the action in a radio play and get involved in the