Arts Reviews

It seems that the fuss which surrounded the appointment of Stephen Layton as organist and choirmaster of Trinity College, Cambridge some 15 months ago has not gone away. Rumour and Lunchtime O’Boulez have it that some of the fellows of Trinity itself have finally become queasy at the high-handedness of their colleagues, to the extent that they want to ‘roll back’ the terms of Layton’s employment. One wonders how the legality of such a move might play out, but then the whole point of this story is that Trinity gets what it wants in every situation, because it is stinking rich. My original complaint, made in this column, was that

For a hundred years or so, the director of the Tate Gallery has normally been a major figure in the art world. Sir Norman Reid, director in a dynamic period between 1964 and 1979, increased the Tate’s exhibition space and acquired, for example, an important group of paintings by Mark Rothko. Sir Alan Bowness (1980–8) made many significant additions to the collection. He helped father both Tate Liverpool (a precursor of Tate St Ives) and the Clore Gallery at Millbank. He also initiated the Turner Prize. A comparatively minor figure was the bibulous bohemian J.B. Manson, theoretically responsible between 1930 and 1938. According to his immediate successor, Sir John Rothenstein

Fifty years ago, the Royal Court theatre detonated its second H-bomb. The first had been Look Back in Anger, in 1956. The next was The Entertainer, John Osborne’s follow-up play, which opened 50 years ago in April. Out were blown the West End play’s French windows and in came the kitchen sink. The memorable first line of the play — ‘Bloody Poles and Irish! I hate the bastards’ — set the tone for an unsavoury evening which ushered in a whole new drama movement. Noël Coward loathed it. The shock back in 1957 was perhaps not so much the play itself but Laurence Olivier’s part in it. Here was the knighted

The phrase ‘English song’ is often met with suspicion, bringing with it a whiff of the morris dance, the come, follow follow and the hey nonny no — and the work of Roger Quilter, composing in the first half of the 20th century, is no exception to this reaction. However, for those with ears to hear and prejudices to shed, there are rare treasures to be  found when a new recording of his complete songs for solo voice and piano is released at the end of February, sung  by baritone Mark Stone, accompanied by the composer and conductor Stephen Barlow. ‘Quilter and I go back a long way,’ says Stone.

Here he is. One of Britain’s leading young directors. Tall, sturdily built, mid-thirties, with a mop of thick dark hair and a starter beer gut obtruding discreetly beneath the woolly slopes of his green jumper. Ed Hall, son of Sir Peter, is best known as the founder of Propeller, a company that specialises in all-male productions of Shakespeare. He takes a seat opposite me and his shiny popping-out eyes give his round face the genial eagerness of a well-fed spaniel. We tuck into our lunch and he answers my questions with rambling, effusive paragraphs of luvvie-speak which are engaging, easy on the ear and at times faintly earnest. We begin