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