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How to get your husband to do the vacuuming
This column nearly didn’t happen. Just as I sat down to write, disaster! My dishwasher lost its connection to the internet. This meant I could no longer view real-time feedback about its water consumption on the app. Nor could I start my dishwasher remotely from my office, timing it perfectly so it would be ending the drying cycle when I got home. This facility is, of course, almost entirely pointless. I use it all the time.
Thus I was nearly resigned to cancelling this column in order to spend the next six hours fixing the problem. Fortunately, resetting the router fixed the glitch straight away, which is why you are reading this now.
I am obsessed with this nonsense. I recently spent half an hour ‘upgrading the firmware’ on my lavatory. Yet this world of connected devices (aka ‘the internet of things’) exposes us to many vulnerabilities. It’s not just the firmware or software, however: the component most vulnerable to exploitation is the Y chromosome. Men need to be on their guard against an irrational yet persistent belief that our manhood is enhanced by displays of technological prowess. Why?
The Acheulean Period of human development lasted from 1.5 million to 110,000 years ago, encompassing both homo erectus and early homo sapiens. The most distinctive archaeological feature of this era is the profusion of hand-axes, the stone heads of which have a symmetry and elegance which far surpass any practical function. This finding has given rise to the ‘sexy hand-axe’ theory in evolutionary psychology (Kohn and Mithen, 1999), proposing that elegant hand-axes, worn on the male waist, had become a status-signalling device in sexual selection. In the Palaeolithic era, being able to say ‘My father was a toolmaker’ wasn’t a political statement – it was a pick-up line.
Given how long the Acheulean period lasted, it should not surprise us if some vestiges of this belief were ingrained in our psychology (apparently male strippers frequently wear toolbelts). If so, it may have significant implications for the division of labour in modern households since, whether they like it or not, men may be hardwired to use displays of technical aptitude as a status signal.
Men may be hardwired to use displays of technical aptitude as a status signal
It is common to read analyses of gender imbalance in the home which claim women work twice as hard at domestic chores than men. In truth these studies are a little skewed, as they tend to omit from the definition of housework those tasks performed mostly by men: driving home from Cornwall at 1 a.m., putting up shelves or – that most male-dominated of all activities – killing a wasp. There was even a 1980s feminist joke: ‘Why did God invent men? Because a vibrator can’t mow the lawn.’
But all of this is set to change. And the reason is simple. Because of the sexy hand-axe instinct, it is possible for women to get men to perform any domestic task provided it involves complex technology or fancy equipment. Here’s a simple tip. If you want your husband to do all the cooking, do not under any circumstances buy him a recipe book: instead, get him into Japanese knives. After his 48 hours spent on YouTube exploring Damascus Steel and the Wootz forging process, you’ll have your own pet Jamie Oliver. Likewise if you want him to do the hoovering, do not explain how it’s done. Buy a robot vacuum cleaner instead.
We are, I predict, a decade away from an unplanned gender revolution where women go out to run the fixed-income trading desk at Goldman Sachs, while men stay home trying to get Alexa to talk to the fridge. It won’t be perfect. Women won’t return home to a newly laid dinner table or the welcoming smell of a freshly baked cake. But the hallway lights will come on automatically as soon as they open the door.
Dear Mary: How do I get my friend’s wife to keep her distance?
Q. Every year my husband takes two weeks’ prime salmon fishing on a Scottish river. It’s a really nice holiday with a comfortable lodge and a cook. Around Christmas time we start inviting couples to come to stay as our guests, usually by email. Some of them tend to be slow to respond, which is annoying because you just want to know if they’re coming so you can ask other people if not. I feel it would slightly spoil the invitation to put at the end: ‘Please get back to us with your decision as soon as possible.’ Do you have a more subtle idea?
– Name and address withheld
A. Jolt them out of their complacency by opening an extra Gmail account in a Scottish name such as Kirsty Macgregor. Get Kirsty, posing as the lodge manager, to chase the invitees. Kirsty can press them for a decision either way, while you and your husband can personally duck being equated with stress.
Q. My girlfriend has recently moved in with me. All was going well until I discovered that she thinks nothing of stealing my socks – day in, day out. She obviously feels no compunction as she helps herself in front of me. I confronted her and she seemed baffled. She said she grew up in a household where no one expected to retain ownership of a pair of socks for more than a week, and family members simply helped themselves from a large ‘sock box’ in the vestibule. According to this logic, my socks are now ‘family socks’ and apparently I am welcome to hers as well. I have no desire to share: mine are expensive – a mix of cashmere, woollen-blend and professional sporting socks, and I am careful about keeping them matched – whereas hers are of poor quality and inevitably odd.
– M.M., Lake, Wiltshire
A. There is nothing for it but to keep your socks in a locked drawer. Offset the hostility of this act by purchasing 12 pairs of high-quality cotton socks for your girlfriend from a quality brand in one distinctive colour (the late Duke of Devonshire wore exclusively yellow socks) so that at least she can have a reasonable expectation of retaining a few matching pairs.
Q. An old friend has a wife who talks too close to one’s face. It would be bad enough if it happened only when sitting side by side at dinner but she does it standing up as well. How can I ask her to distance herself without causing offence?
– S.W., Taunton
A. Hold your hand over your own mouth while interacting with her, saying: ‘You must excuse me. I become rather inhibited when anyone comes close to me as I tend to eat a lot of garlic and always feel I must be giving offence. Do you mind if I push my chair right back/stand at a distance to you?’
Should you bother decanting wine?
We were almost having a symposium and I was invited to define Toryism in one sentence. I replied that one book would be easier: the late Roger Scruton’s On Hunting, which ought to be subtitled: ‘From Horse-Shit to Heaven: the Search for Love, Order and God.’ ‘But what if you leave out God, and therefore heaven?’ said one fellow: ‘What would be left?’
‘What indeed. Many learned Tories – Dr Johnson, Salisbury and Quintin Hogg being obvious examples – would have given a simple answer: nothing.’
Those of us who have to do without God and yet avoid the abyss of nothingness can only fall back on eupeptic pessimism. Edward Fitzgerald’s Omar points the way: ‘A jug of wine and thou.’ That made us think about wine and philosophy, a suitably Scrutonian juxtaposition. You can enjoy wine without being troubled by deep thoughts – or any thoughts, for that matter, as countless millions of Toby Belches have discovered over three millennia. But it is also possible to regard a glass of wine as a Hegelian synthesis. Think of the number of theses and antitheses which have come together in the dancing dialectic to create that final product. The magic of terroir, the long maturation of experience and tradition and the increasing influence of science, which means that there are fewer and fewer bad years, while other regions improve their viniculture. This is just as well, given the world’s increasing demand for the stuff. Leaving aside its use in many religions, drinking wine is a secular sacrament.
My new friend Nicola Bodano is a one-man synthesis. For years, he has been interested in oxidisation. At what point does contact with the air cause wine to deteriorate? There is a widespread assumption that good red wine needs some exposure to oxygen and ought therefore to be decanted, while good white wine can also benefit. But that would apply to fine wines in their maturity. As for really old wine, it is more a matter of open and pour. Most oenophiles assume that an ancient bottle will also have a very brief life.
Most oenophiles assume that an ancient bottle will also have a very brief life
Nicola disagrees. At least for mature wines, he thinks that decanting is often unnecessary. To publicise his views, he set up ‘No decanting’, whose members meet in a club and enjoy the gastronomy while assessing some excellent bottles and inter alia discussing Nicola’s theories.
He is from Sardinia and has applauded for many years as the standards of Sardinian wine have steadily improved. I will report on some of his discoveries at a later date. Recently, however, we were at the other side of Italy: wines from Puglia and Abruzzo. In these cases, the question of decanting did not seem relevant. These were young and fresh wines ready to face the world and bring pleasure.
We started with a dry Moscato: an excellent aperitif which was equally good with a caciocavallo cheese. Trebbiano d’Abruzzo followed and then a Montepulciano d’Abruzzo 2021, a big wine which will certainly keep. The same was true of a Primitivo Riserva and a Poggio Negromaro.
These bottles made me think of that vastly civilised region: landscape, architecture, the Adriatic; the kitchen and the wine cellar. Lecce is one of the most attractive small Italian cities. In 1944, an American general was in charge of the Salento area. Charles Poletti, clearly of Italian origin, was not satisfied with Salentino reds, which are usually very good. He wanted rosé. The local proprietors followed instructions: the Yanks drank Four Roses Bourbon. Leone de Castris went on to produce Five Roses Salentino, and the other evening we drank a 1946. It ought to have been long dead. Yet it still had some structure. We did indeed open and pour – but it lasted for the necessary few minutes. A fascinating experience.
RFK Jr and the curious birth of ‘brainchild’
‘No, RFK didn’t have a tapeworm eating his brain,’ declared my husband in the rare tone he adopts when he knows what he is talking about. I’d asked him as a doctor about something Robert F. Kennedy (last week sworn in as America’s health secretary) had said in 2012, according to a report in the New York Times last year. A problem experienced in 2010 was, he had said, ‘caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died’.
‘No, if it was cysticercosis,’ my husband insisted, ‘it would have been a larval form of the tapeworm forming a cyst in the brain. They don’t eat the brain.’
We’d reached this conversational backwater via Damian Thompson’s remarks in last week’s Spectator about the recording of Bach’s 371 chorale harmonisations on a Steinway piano – the brainchild of Nicolas Horvath. What a strange term it is. How, I wondered, is a brainchild delivered when it comes to term? My own brain turned to Alien and the creature bursting from John Hurt’s chest.
The first known use of brainchild was 1631. At the beginning of Ben Jonson’s play The New Inn, the landlord of the Light Heart boasts of the inn-sign of a feather outweighing a heart, as ‘A brayne-child o’mine owne!’.
The original brainchild must be Athena. Zeus, after lying with the goddess Metis, feared the power of any child she bore, and so swallowed her down. He developed a terrible headache, only relieved with a blow from a double-headed axe. Out jumped Athena, fully armed. So much for delivery. As for conception, Oliver Sacks, that imaginative neurologist, suggested that the musical ear-worm should really be a brain-worm, after it bores its way, ‘like an earwig, into the ear’. There he exploits the idea that earwigs are so-called because they burrow into the ear – which they don’t, as Robert F. Kennedy may be glad to hear.
Have I been blacklisted by the binmen?
Monday, and Camden council have yet again failed to empty my food waste bin. They never miss my rubbish or dry recycling – it’s only ever the smelly stuff. I give my neighbour’s brown bin a little kick. Emptied! This feels personal. I call the council. ‘Look, this is a nightmare,’ I say. ‘This is the second week in a row. Are we on a blacklist?’ Pause. ‘Our operatives are too busy to keep lists,’ says the lady. Hang on – you mean if they weren’t so busy, they would?
Things my husband and I have bickered about this week: my devotion to an ugly but comfortable pair of rubber pool slides the colour of NHS hearing aids; a particular sort of belch he does; a particular sort of cough I do; whether or not I am ‘cruel’ to confine our spoilt, idiotic cat to the ground floor of the house at night, thus making her ‘sad’.
My husband, Giles, is the restaurant critic of the Times, so we eat out a lot. This week we go to Pinna in Mayfair. Eating out is now a necessity if nothing else: cooking at home is out of the question as the unemptied food waste bin overflows with no room for even a single extra potato peeling. More than ever I wish I owned a pig. Left to our own devices my husband and I will argue about anything – the pool slides, the cat – so we often invite friends to distract us. On this occasion we take with us Sadie Holland and her husband, the history podcaster Tom. Sadie and I discover a shared fascination with ladies on Instagram who video themselves clearing up other people’s hopelessly untidy houses. I then discuss with Tom what we would do in the event of an apocalypse. He has clear ideas for reactivating castles in the north-east of England: it’s all very on-brand.
A photoshoot for a newspaper feature I am writing. Groan. I don’t mean to sound like a diva but I am in my forties and would prefer to get old and fat in private. Colourful frocks and kabuki make-up were fun when I was 26, but these days they make me feel like Grayson Perry. This particular picture set-up needs human props so I text my friend Charlotte to ask if she might do me a favour and be in it. Charlotte is the daughter of the late Stuart Wheeler, who made a mint in spread-betting, bought a castle in Kent, gave five million quid to the Tories, then very publicly changed his allegiance to Ukip. Enormously tall, he drove about in a lavishly dented car with a massive purple Ukip sticker on the side, while often wearing novelty T-shirts with things like ‘I’m the king of the castle’ written on them. Charlotte, also blessed with height, is dementedly passionate about two things: netball and running the Camden ‘Bike Bus’, an initiative that seeks to teach children to cycle to school safely. While cycling with her charges, she blows a whistle like a motorcade outrider and wears a luminous onesie in day-glo yellow, pink, green and orange. Sometimes she paints her fingernails to match. She texts back quickly that she is bang up for being a prop in my photo. ‘I am VERY excited to have my picture taken,’ she texts. ‘I am like my father. All media is good media.’
Monday again. I’m going to lie in wait for those recycling bastards. It’s laundry day so I am wearing a pair of tracksuit bottoms with a hole in the knee, a hoodie from Plymouth Aquarium, my son’s Queens Park Rangers football socks and the hearing aid pool slides. After four hours of lurking at the window I finally hear the rattle of the approaching council pig bin. I scurry outside with a broom so I can sweep leaves as a cover for my surveillance. I want to see what’s going on but I don’t want them to know that I am snooping, or I may find my food waste not only not taken but posted back to me through my letterbox. Along comes a young man with a nose ring, wearing overalls and ambling past one brown bin in every five. He sees me and stops to take my food waste. Hallelujah! ‘Thanks,’ I say. Casual, like I haven’t been fantasising about this moment all week. ‘No worries,’ he says kindly to the strangely dressed old lady standing in the street, sweeping at nothing. I reach for my phone and make a note of the time. Get used to this face, kid.
I was convinced by the cholesterol sceptics
It’s never a good thing when your cardiologist sounds alarmed on the phone. Come in tomorrow, he said: we’ll get you on the table. He wasn’t talking about cracking my chest, thank Christ, but threading a wire in through a vein to get a look at the heart, blow up a tiny balloon to stretch the artery, and maybe leave behind a metal tube or three.
I wasn’t keen on that last part. Then I thought: serves me right. I should have avoided all those bacon sandwiches and steaks fried in butter. ‘The wages of sin is death.’ Probably should have taken the statins, too. But if you are, understandably, unwilling to take a fistful of pills every day for the rest of your life, there are some medical mavericks to confirm your decision. If they are wrong, though, their advice could end up killing more people than Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot combined.
As the great smoker and drinker Christopher Hitchens put it, when you get a serious diagnosis, you cross ‘from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady’. He wrote that after being trolleyed out of a New York hotel room barely able to breathe, chest filled with ‘slow-drying [cancerous] cement’.
I feel a fraud when people ask, solicitously, if I’m OK. I’m not Julie Burchill, consigned to a wheelchair, possibly for life, or Roger Lewis, dropping to the ground in a Morrisons car park without a pulse (he survived). I have no symptoms, no elephant squatting on the chest, not even shortness of breath. But the first symptom of a heart attack is often a heart attack. Lying on a chilly operating table, I could see the problem on a big screen: a couple of arteries pinched at numerous points, one narrowed to a thread all the way down. So how did I get here?
Much of the medical profession agrees on what constitutes the primrose path of dietary dalliance. The puffed and reckless libertine sits on the couch all day and eats like Donald Trump: cheeseburgers, for example. Saturated fat – dairy, red meat – raises blood cholesterol. The notorious ‘bad cholesterol’ – LDL – enters the artery wall, where it goes rancid and pulls in a swarm of the immune system’s white blood cells. They clump together, narrowing the artery. These fat-filled plaques can pop like a pimple. Then you get a clot, and collapse in a supermarket car park. This is the lipid theory of heart disease and there’s a huge amount of evidence that lowering blood LDL with statins stops the process.
Ten years ago, various doctors looked at my sky-high cholesterol numbers and told me to take them. Naturally, I didn’t listen. Like most people, I have a large capacity to avoid facing unpleasant facts. Atherosclerosis is a silent killer: a slow-moving, distant, hidden threat, not the tiger about to pounce that our brains evolved to fear. It’s all too easy to find an alibi for carrying on as before.
Joseph Mercola, whose message is ‘Forget cholesterol’, is not a cardiologist. He’s an osteopath
If you’re searching for an excuse not to act, google ‘heart disease’ and you’ll get a flood of opinion denying conventional medical wisdom. Cholesterol doesn’t damage arteries: it heals them. The problem isn’t fat: it’s sugar, or carbs. Go ahead, enjoy that cheeseburger, just without the bun. You can even learn that the heart isn’t really a pump at all: the blood will go round by itself (someone killed a dog to demonstrate that). Some of the people saying these things are doctors, a few are even cardiologists; some have no medical qualifications at all. But they are all excellent communicators.
Joseph Mercola wears a white coat and a reassuring ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor’ expression in his publicity picture. His message is ‘Forget cholesterol’. High LDL, he says, may even be good for you. But ‘Dr’ Mercola is not an MD, let alone a cardiologist. He’s an osteopath. Still, he has one of the internet’s biggest health sites. He’ll sell you an indoor tent to shield you from ‘harmful electromagnetic frequencies… the perfect solution for health-conscious individuals’. $499.97, with free shipping. His main business is antioxidant supplements that a (real) doctor who blogs as ‘the sceptical cardiologist’ says are ‘useless… Mercola sells so much snake oil it is mind-numbing’. Mercola has said that he tells the truth as he sees it: ‘People call me a snake-oil salesman, of course… I don’t think there’s a justification for it.’
Though he appears on Mercola’s website, Malcolm Kendrick is a proper MD, a GP, even if he’s not a cardiologist, and he flogs no supplements. He is persuasive because he cites detailed evidence for his arguments. His book The Great Cholesterol Con helped to persuade me not to take statins a decade ago. ‘Statins kill people,’ he writes: they can cause cancer, ‘dissolve’ muscle, destroy the kidneys, ruin the brain and might give pregnant women ‘horribly deformed’ babies. They can even ‘cause’ heart disease. He says: ‘The misguided war against cholesterol, using statins, represents something very close to a crime against humanity.’ (The argument about Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot can work in reverse.)
If, as Kendrick writes, statins have a ‘complete lack of any benefits’, then why do most doctors believe in them? His answer: Big Pharma. Kendrick claims there are links between ‘all prominent cardiologists’ and pharmaceutical companies that put profits before patients. ‘Imagine how much money they would lose if we could actually prevent, or even cure, cardiovascular disease.’ These are the beliefs that get Dr Kendrick labelled a fringe theorist and are what I find most off-putting about his cholesterol-scepticism.
No doubt my cardiologist makes a nice living, but I don’t think he’s part of a vast conspiracy to give me medicine that will make me sick. For the time being, then, I’m taking the statins. I’m also trying not to be such a ‘pudgy puff-ball’ (as Alan Clark said of Ken Clarke). The other piece of advice from the cardiologist was: don’t read too much about diet, you’ll only get confused. Eggs used to be bad; now they’re good. Milk might be OK too (unless you’re Japanese). Saturated fat is moving out of dietary hell and into purgatory, though the evidence is ambiguous.
I’m on the Mediterranean diet. Unfortunately, this means eating like a Sardinian peasant 100 years ago, not loads of pizza and pasta. So show me the steep and thorny way to heaven and – I say this with the utmost reluctance – pass the kale, please.
Paul Wood and cardiologist Dr Christopher Labos joined the latest Edition podcast to unpack the truth behind cholesterol:
Is Britain ready for blasphemy laws?
In its infinite wisdom, the Labour government appears to be reconsidering the introduction of a blasphemy law in the UK. It has picked up this idea despite it being so idiotic that it was even rejected by the last Conservative government.
That well-known theologian Angela Rayner has decided to set up a council to look into the question of ‘Islamophobia’. As mentioned, there was a push to do this during the Conservative era, when a committee including some of the worst people then in public life – Dominic Grieve, Naz Shah, Anna Soubry – looked into the same thing.
Their scholarship foundered, as it always will, on how you protect Muslims without simply protecting the feelings of Muslims. Because for some Muslims, what they ‘feel’ and what ‘is’ are one and the same thing – to say a thing is offensive is to deem it so – and there is much that may offend them. Allow me to cite just a few examples from recent weeks that might signify the problem.
Until recently, there was a rather brave Iraqi refugee who had found sanctuary in Scandinavia. Unlike many Iraqis who have found sanctuary in northern Europe, Salwan Momika, a Christian turned atheist, was not a fan of Islam’s holy book. In fact, he seemed to feel that the Quran and attempts to implement its teachings into governance was one of the things that had wrecked his country of birth; and so in 2023 he decided to burn a copy in Stockholm. He went on to burn more copies at public demonstrations.
Mr Momika was a man of flair as well as conviction. He had a penchant for lighting up a cigar at the same time as he lit up a Quran and these displays brought him a certain notoriety, as well as negative attention. In August 2023 alone he was charged in the Swedish courts on four occasions with ‘agitation against an ethnic group’. Last month he was livestreaming from an apartment in Södertälje when a group of armed men came in and shot him live on air.
The idea of a blasphemy law is so idiotic that it was even rejected by
the last Conservative government
This is the moment when many modern westerners might look away. Who are we to say? On the one hand, Mr Momika was clearly a provocateur. On the other, he was also asserting a right that Europeans used to hold dear: the right to be able to have a view and express it. Besides, since when was being a provocateur a bad thing – let alone deserving of a death sentence?
Sadly, Mr Momika overestimated the tolerance limits of modern Europe for free expression when it comes to the question of Islam. For while his burning of a Bible would have passed without incident – indeed would doubtless have been defended as a right by all the deracinated churches of Sweden – the people who shot him clearly saw things differently.
So the trouble that could not be addressed in the Swedish courts was addressed by an armed gang instead. That that appears to be a feature of 21st-century Europe.
Last week, an incident took place in London when a man is alleged to have burned a Quran, this time outside the Turkish embassy in London. Another man is alleged to have promptly attacked him while holding a knife. Both men have been charged, though the alleged Quran-burner was first remanded in custody before being released on conditional bail.
By now anyone with a sense of awareness, or even merely the survival instincts of the species, has probably worked out the rules. You may march through the centre of London or Stockholm week after week supporting groups that want to annihilate the Jewish race – but don’t get caught upsetting Muslims. These are the rules of the game and everyone knows it.
Which is why it also came as a non-news news story this week when we learned of the killing of Muhsin Hendricks of South Africa, a 57-year-old gay imam. He was certainly not the only gay imam in the world, but he was the first one to be openly gay. That on its own caused a certain amount of comment. Indeed, he often said in recent years that his life was in peril. He was one of those brave, fascinating and forsaken figures of the modern age who said at one and the same time that Islam is a peaceful religion and that he lived in constant fear for his life.
His life was ended last Saturday, a short while after he had officiated a wedding ceremony between two lesbians. A pair of men approached his car in broad daylight and shot him dead.
You might say that ‘gay imam murdered’ is an unsurprising story. As unsurprising as ‘Quran-burner shot during livestream’. Except that it should be surprising, really, shouldn’t it? After all, the rules of the game are either on the terms of the men of violence,or they are on the terms of the countries they are in. And if the terms of the country they are in say it is still illegal to shoot or stab people, then you might ask why it is so easy for these vulnerable targets to be picked off one by one?
Doubtless Rayner’s Islamophobia council will be able to get to the bottom of all this – there is nothing I am aware of that the woman cannot do. But while her council of experts looks into how to protect the feelings of Muslims, perhaps they could also look into how to protect the sensitivities of others? Iraqi refugees and gay imams included.
My Valentine’s Day car crash
Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, is not a MAGA groupie, but a believer in the Nato alliance. He knows about working with allies. Yet he says that the Americans should go right ahead with Russia, the murderous aggressor, without bringing Ukraine, ally and victim, or the Nato member states, into the talks. This is President Trump’s will, he says. Compare with the Middle East. Would Rubio – or Trump – say that Hamas, the murderous aggressor, was the key player, and should therefore have bilateral talks with the US whereas Israel, ally and victim, should just sit and wait to be told later what is happening? Trump helped bring Hamas to heel by announcing, before his inauguration, that they would have all hell to pay if they did not release the hostages. In the case of Vladimir Putin, however, he has issued no threat, and no condemnation of the invasion or of hostage-taking (though Putin has taken more than ten times the number of hostages held by Hamas, most of them children). What has Putin got that Hamas have not? Well, nuclear weapons, for a start, of which we deprived Ukraine by treaty when the Soviet Union broke up. But that does not seem to be the motivating factor in Trump’s mind. Like Joe Biden in the Gaza case, he seems to believe in the magical power of a ceasefire. As in Gaza, that would benefit only the aggressor.
At this difficult time, it is a great pity that Ukraine has no senior spokesman here. The Ukrainian ambassador in London, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, is perhaps the greatest hero of this war, but he is effectively exiled by President Zelensky, with whom he fell out. The general speaks no English and hardly says anything in public. He might as well be under house arrest. The case for Ukraine needs to be made urgently, publicly, privately, daily. Otherwise, the Trump version passes unchallenged by the people who really know.
Last Friday, I set off from home to go hunting in Dorset. It was almost the first sunny day for a month. As I drove round the M25, I suddenly heard a great thump and the airbags in my car enveloped me, so that I could not see out. I felt the car veering out of control and then another bang against what may have been the central reservation. Then more veering, and a third, lesser bang. The car stopped, full of fumes. Now I could see again. I was on the hard shoulder. About 150 yards ahead, a car lay upside down. The road was strewn with objects including, poignantly, one of those Valentine’s Day bunches sold at service stations. Finding I could open the door, I climbed out on to the bank. Very quickly, police and ambulance arrived and attended to the driver of the overturned car. Then they came down to me with the good news that his injuries were minor. They escorted me to a second ambulance for various tests. All were clear, but they rightly insisted that I come to hospital for a scan. I had to recover my luggage, which was embarrassing and heavy since it contained two pairs of hunting boots in their trees, hat, whip, spurs etc, a hunting coat as yet unbrushed, and three bottles of champagne, miraculously unharmed, for my hosts. ‘What were you off to do?’ asked the young paramedic with a stud in her nose. I felt nervous, since the NHS has been known to take it out on hunting persons. ‘Riding,’ I mumbled. ‘I know what,’ she exclaimed as she handled the kit, ‘you were going hunting!’ I made a gruff sort of noise. Then she declared that she played polo, show-jumped and was terribly interested in hunting though she had never done it. I wanted to kiss her (but didn’t). I sat in A&E with coat, boots and bags for four hours, and was treated and discharged without any adverse discoveries. For all this, I thank the Higher Power, all my rescuers, especially the horsey paramedic, and Audi’s sturdy car. I am afraid, however, that it is declared by the insurers to be ‘beyond economical repair’.
In her new book about her mother, Pamela Berry, Harriet Cullen recalls the embarrassing year of 1956. After the Suez debacle, the prime minister Anthony Eden – for whom Pam had it in – went to Jamaica to convalesce. On his return, the tabloid headline read ‘PM visits Britain’. As Sir Keir jets off yet again, I suggest it be dusted down for his return.
Sad news of the premature death of Joe Saumarez Smith. When very young, he was my education correspondent at the Sunday Telegraph, before going on to higher things as a tremendous gambler on the horses, making (and sometimes losing) fortunes in various gambling-related businesses. Eventually, he ‘gave something back’ by becoming chairman of the British Horseracing Authority. Joe will always have a place in my heart because of an incident when he was a grumpy adolescent, for which I must first set the family context. His father, John, was the distinguished manager of Heywood Hill bookshop in Mayfair. John was a true bibliophile, but also considered a bit of a snob. One day, when a friend of mine was working there, two of his ideal people entered the shop separately but simultaneously. One was Sir Alec Guinness; the other was Debo Devonshire (wife of the proprietor). John was in an agony of welcome because he wished to defer equally to each. As a result, he went into such physical contortions that he actually fell over among the piles of books. Now back to Joe: another friend of mine had Joe’s parents to stay in the country and they brought their teenage boy. As they left, they signed the visitors’ book, with sullen Joe adding ‘Crap weekend’. The joy of the story depends on knowing the difference between father and son.
The village quiz in aid of our parish church in Sussex recently took place. One round of questions concerned Sussex. The following question raised the biggest cheer: ‘How many hours has the Duchess of Sussex spent in the county whose name she bears?’ The nearest guess was two and a half. Most unfair: the right answer is six.
Who lost Ukraine?
In the America of the 1950s, one question dominated foreign policy: ‘Who lost China?’ The Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War and the defeat of America’s ally, the Kuomintang regime, provoked agonised debate about the principles that should guide statecraft – the balance between containment and pushback, the relative importance of winning hearts and minds or prevailing by strength of arms.
The question that we might ask today is: ‘Who lost Ukraine?’ Of course, the war between Kyiv and Moscow is not over. Ukraine’s army continues to fight with a tenacious courage that is inspiring. Volodymyr Zelensky’s diplomatic efforts to maximise support for resistance are unflagging. But all the winds blowing now are ominous for Ukraine.
The negotiations between US and Russian officials which started in Saudi Arabia this week – with Ukraine not just sidelined but shunned – seemed to portend a division of territory to suit Vladimir Putin, not Ukraine’s people. The demand from Team Trump that the US get its hands on mineral revenues from Ukraine in return for military and financial support seems grimly transactional rather than mutually beneficial. And the US President’s claims that Ukraine could have resolved this conflict far earlier, and thus bears responsibility for its people’s suffering, are chilling.
Faced with Trump’s actions, European leaders, not surprisingly, have responded with outrage. They feel they have contributed as much to the war effort between them as the US has done. They are naturally fearful, too, that they have the most to lose from a poor settlement with Putin because they live on Russia’s doorstep.
Those fears are not irrational. Any deal which allows Putin to end the war claiming victory will only embolden him, possibly putting other countries at risk of destabilisation at best, incursion at worst. Putin has made it quite clear that he considers the break-up of the Russian empire after the end of communism in the 1990s to be an epochal tragedy. The Baltic states – formerly Soviet territory and now Nato stalwarts – are particularly vulnerable. So long as Russia was exhausting its military reserves in Ukraine, it could not turn its attention elsewhere. When the fighting ends and Russian forces are given the chance to regain their strength, Moscow’s gaze will be cast covetously elsewhere.
But while Europe’s leaders might fear Trump’s motives and Putin’s ambitions, they cannot escape responsibility for where we are now. The support they, and the US, have provided since 2022 (it is roughly half each in monetary value, if you include all European contributions) has managed to keep Ukraine on the battlefield, but has fallen well short of what would be required for it to prevail over its much larger enemy. Armaments, reinforcements, air power and missiles have been supplied slowly and grudgingly by European nations who have claimed to will Ukraine’s victory, but have not guaranteed the means.
The nations of Europe offered a future to Ukrainians they were
not prepared to underwrite
This infirmity of purpose towards the defence of Ukraine’s sovereignty predates the 2022 invasion. Putin got away with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 with hardly a whimper from Europe. Germany signed the contract for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline after that outrage. When Putin lined up his tanks on the Ukrainian border in late 2021, Germany continued to build dependence on Russian energy by closing down its own nuclear power stations. At this point, Boris Johnson’s government quickly reacted with the gift of arms to Ukraine – yet the first flights carrying supplies had to be flown around Germany because Olaf Scholz did not want to be involved.
Belatedly, Germany became a significant donor of arms to Ukraine, but the damage had already been done. For decades, Europe was happy to shield beneath America’s military umbrella, preferring to spend revenues on social programmes. It was not until the first Trump presidency that it began to sink in that the US would not put up with this arrangement forever. Trump was lambasted for complaining, at the 2018 Nato summit, that the US ‘loses big’ out of Nato membership. The then Nato secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, called his comments ‘unacceptable’ – the same language used by European leaders to describe the speech by Vice-President J.D. Vance to the Munich Security Conference last week. Yet by 2018, only three Nato members other than the US were meeting the target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence – which was supposed to be a condition of Nato membership.
So when it comes to asking who lost Ukraine, it is not enough to lament Trump’s propitiation of Putin or America’s retreat from its responsibility as a global superpower. The countries which held out the promise to Ukraine of EU and Nato membership – the nations of Europe – offered a future to Ukrainians they were not prepared to underwrite with an iron will.
The lesson for all of us is that democracy does not secure victory by finely worded communiqués and European Council resolutions, but by a resolution on the battlefield Europe has been too scared to show.
Why the SNP can’t lose
What does a party get after nearly two decades in office, collapsing public services, an internal civil war and a £2 million police investigation? Re-election, again – perhaps with an even bigger majority. Last spring, under the hapless Humza Yousaf, the SNP’s grip on power in Scotland finally appeared to be loosening. But eight months on, the nationalists have managed a remarkable turnaround. The party now has a 15-point poll lead and it looks as though John Swinney will remain in Bute House at next year’s Holyrood elections. ‘The caretaker manager has got the job permanently,’ says one rival.
The party’s change in fortunes owes less to Swinney’s skill as an operator and more to the spectacular collapse of Scottish Labour. As delegates meet in Glasgow for their party conference this weekend, the mood could scarcely be more different to their last shindig. Back then, Labour was topping the polls in both Edinburgh and London. Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, was hailed as ‘the next King of Scotland’. When Labour consigned the Tories to history on 4 July, he pledged to do the same with the SNP. ‘The strategy was to ride on Keir Starmer’s coat-tails to success,’ reflects one party veteran. ‘But the problem of riding on someone’s coat-tails is if they go off a cliff, you’re going off with them.’
Scottish Labour’s woes are a tale of two Budgets. The first, in October, was delivered by Rachel Reeves; the second, in December by the SNP’s Shona Robison, Scotland’s Finance Secretary. Reeves gave Scotland an extra £3.4 billion in new funds; Robison duly spent the money and demanded even more. But in this game of tax and spend, accountability has not been apportioned out equally. The SNP got the credit; Scottish Labour the blame. A trifecta of past pledges on winter fuel, pension rights and the two-child benefit cap all came back to haunt Sarwar in Reeves’s Budget. Baffled and infuriated, his MSPs curse a narrative in which they are the villains and the SNP the heroes, protecting the vulnerable. Sarwar acknowledges that his conference speech on Friday ‘has to be a big moment’. Aides have spent hours sweating to get the words right.
Labour’s polling in Scotland is only half of the 35 per cent it won in July. Support has drained away in all directions: unionist rivals and the SNP have taken equal chunks. Swinney has revived Alex Salmond’s original playbook, running a low-key, passably competent administration. The aim is to keep Sarwar on the back foot by constantly forcing him to choose between political expediency and fealty to Starmer. For now, the nats intend to keep ‘wheesht for indy’, preferring instead to bash Westminster. Unionists fear that if a sympathetic Labour government can’t dent support for independence, nothing will. Reeves gave Scotland its largest real-terms funding settlement since devolution – and Labour’s polling duly collapsed. ‘We said we’d put the constitutional issue to bed,’ sighs one minister. ‘But having the SNP there always keeps it awake.’
Scottish Labour and the Tories are both also nervous about what they call ‘the great unknown’ – Reform UK. Nigel Farage’s enterprises have traditionally struggled north of the border. But after mustering 7 per cent in July, Reform’s Holyrood polling has since doubled – enough to win a dozen seats at the next election. Fans and critics alike describe Reform as ‘the plague on all your houses’ or the ‘pissed-off party’, tapping into anti-establishment feeling. Scrapping net zero is the party’s USP: its best polling is in oil-rich Aberdeen. It has nearly 10,000 party members in Scotland. Some 1,200 alone are in Glasgow, where Reform aims to achieve a victory which eluded generations of Catholics – evicting the last elected Tory from the city council in 2027.
Like Scottish leaders before him, Anas Sarwar is discovering that his fortunes rise and fall in Westminster
Like successive Scottish leaders before him, Sarwar is discovering that his fortunes rise and fall in Westminster. Having put blood, sweat and tears into electing 37 MPs last year, he must now watch them from afar making his life harder in Holyrood. ‘It has divided loyalties,’ remarks one ex-adviser. ‘Anas got them in, but the whips determine their future from here.’ At least one new boy has decided silence is not an option, though. Brian Leishman, the MP for Grange-mouth, has bitterly attacked Labour’s inaction on the closure of his local oil refinery. Others are angered by Labour’s family farms tax. A new ‘rural growth group’ aims to coordinate MPs who are concerned: at least 25 of Labour’s rural Scottish seats will be affected, especially those with tenant farmers.
Labour’s Scottish MPs and MSPs are united in their resentment at being shut out from the decision-making process. Once, Labour was ruled by a Tartan Raj. Now metropolitan Englishmen dominate. There are just two born-and-bred Scots in the cabinet (Ian Murray and Pat McFadden). Morgan McSweeney, an Irishman, is a rare example of Celtic genius in No. 10. One Scottish Tory contrasts Starmer’s first ministry with Tony Blair’s: Donald Dewar, Robin Cook, Gordon Brown – ‘the public wouldn’t recognise figures of that calibre in this intake’.
After a decade in which the Scottish Labour party was variously obliterated, hijacked and dismantled, such criticism may be overblown. New talent can be found in MPs such as Kirsty McNeill, Gordon McKee and Blair McDougall. But the simple fact is that Starmer’s No. 10 is working to a very different timetable to that of Sarwar. Ahead of next year’s Senedd elections, Scottish Labour must compete for Downing Street’s attention with a vocal Welsh caucus who are also demanding time, attention and resources. ‘Reform is a threat to us everywhere,’ admits one MP.
In Scotland, Donald Trump is now more popular than Starmer. For Scottish Labour MPs, their hopes rest on the supertanker of the British state turning around by 2029. For Labour’s MSPs, there is pessimism about what can be done in the next 15 months to help stop their polling from plummeting further. ‘The fear is we are yet to reach rock bottom,’ says one.
James discusses Starmer’s Scottish headache further on the latest Coffee House Shots podcast, alongside Michael Gove and Katy Balls:
In defence of deaccessioning
There’s more than a grain of truth in the popular caricature of a curator as a mother hen clucking frantically if anyone gets too near her nest – not that her eggs are about to hatch, let alone run. The recent threat of the British Council to ‘deaccession’ – to put it more bluntly, sell – its 9,000-strong collection of British art has caused a predictable flurry in the curatorial world. Doesn’t the British Council know that public art collections are sacrosanct and must be preserved for all time?
When I was director of Glasgow’s museums and art galleries, I remember talking to my committee about my long-term plans for the city’s great permanent collection when the leader of the council, Pat Lally, commented drily that there was no such thing as ‘permanent’. He wasn’t proposing to sell it all. Quite the reverse. He was the most imaginative politician I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with and wanted this massive asset to be used as much as it could. He encouraged and enabled me to create Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art, the St Mungo’s Museum of Religious Art and Life, and to convert the beautiful McLellan Galleries into a major international exhibition venue. All he was doing was reminding us of a fact of life.
His comment made me think. Of course everything changes, and our so-called ‘permanent’ collections are in themselves records of such changes. Museums have collected coins to chart the rise and fall of kingdoms, not just to accumulate comprehensive collections of metallic cash. Had Darwin not collected every type of barnacle, he might not have been able to prove his theory of evolution. Without collections, great artists like Vermeer wouldn’t have emerged – as they did much later – from the disregard of their contemporaries. Our perceptions of history, science and art are forever changing, so how can any collection in itself be regarded as ‘permanent’?
Over the past 50 years, art itself has changed beyond all recognition. How can a banana stuck on a wall with a bit of tape be regarded as a work of art? And yet just such an object sold for $6.2 million in 2024 because enough people thought it was exactly that – unbelievable as it might seem to anyone with eyes in their heads and any knowledge of the art of the past. The buyer, the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun, emphasised this object’s transience by eating the banana immediately after he’d bought it. So much for permanence!
Museums have become the banks of the art market
In 2012, I wrote a pamphlet called Con Art, explaining how all this madness came about, from Duchamp’s theft of the extraordinary Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s ‘Urinal’ – which he stripped of its profound meaning – to the nonsense of today. Art can’t just be a found object, still less a mere idea. Conceptual art is a con. Now bitcon art – I wish I’d called my pamphlet that – is one of the most expensive things around. The only ‘permanent’ thing about much contemporary art is its price.
This is something else that’s changed. When people today look at a work of art – however old or recent – they see pound notes or dollar bills, not the art itself. This is a problem peculiar to visual art. Anyone reading a poem or a novel, listening to a piece of music or watching a play or a film, values it for its aesthetic effect, for what it means, not for its price. But money now is all that many see in art, which is one reason why the British Council is tempted to sell off its ‘permanent’ collection to settle a one-off debt.
Why has money become so dominant in art? The reason is simple: all the other art forms are infinitely and affordably reproducible, perfectly suited to their burgeoning audiences. But visual art has remained singular – the unique creation of individuals. This is why many think art is a relic of a past age and has no future at all except to make money.
The marriage of money to art has had a long history. Since the 17th century, works of art in the increasingly materialist west began to be regarded as good investments. Art became gilt-edged and gilt-framed. But art was still bought to be looked at, lived with and enjoyed. The absurdity of the current situation is that people now buy works of art not to look at but purely as investments, to be stored in tax-free bonded warehouses around the world, and sold on at a profit, their purpose fulfilled.
The most famous names in contemporary art – I won’t name them to give them even more unmerited publicity – have become in effect brands, their teams of workers churning out supposedly unique objects which are never seen, let alone judged by anyone. People who buy a Rolex watch, a Louis Vuitton bag or a pair of Louboutin shoes, want them to be seen, not hidden away. These possessions might be used just to show off, but at least they still exist in the land of seeing. Now art doesn’t have to be seen at all to exist.
Public collections have played a crucial role in elevating art into the invisible realm of international finance. Absurdly, the taped banana was produced in a limited edition of three, one of which is in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The presence of an artist and his or her work in a museum’s permanent collection guarantees the status and therefore the implied quality of their productions for all time.
Doesn’t the British Council know that public art collections must be preserved for all time?
Museums have, over the last half century, become the banks of the art market. Their permanent collections provide the credit rating for art sales. Ironically, this has given museum collections enhanced protection. The last thing art dealers want is for museums to begin to sell their collections of contemporary art. This would suggest that their curator’s judgment was fallible, or at least changeable. And what if the financial value of these ‘de-acquisitioned’ items wasn’t sustained? Think of the effect of that on an artist’s prices.
Pat Lally was right. Nothing is permanent. Not even museum collections. That is why I came to prefer the word ‘lasting’. The job of a curator is to find, promote and collect works of art that are lasting, that excavate and evoke feelings that reach deeply into what it means to be fully human. To identify truly lasting works, curators’ judgments need to stand apart from all transient social, political and financial pressures.
What’s more, adopting such a deeper, longer-term ambition for art is vitally necessary for contemporary culture. For the last two decades of his life, Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the greatest photographers of the last century, gave up using his camera to capture the ‘decisive moment’, and took up the much slower process of creating images by drawing. As he explained to me, ‘Our world is spinning out of control. We have to slow things down.’ We need art to slow us down, value transience more.
So, what should curators do with their impermanent collections? They need to select what is still of lasting benefit to their public, and deaccession what isn’t by offering it first to other public collections. If any curator anywhere thinks an object still has a social use, then that public need should take precedence. The British Council could, if it sees no more use for its collections itself, adopt this procedure and offer their works of art to public collections worldwide – since they were founded to promote interest in British culture abroad. Then, if the British Council has anything left, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t sell these items back to the sphere of private ownership from whence they all originally sprung.
Then curators, instead of flapping, can concentrate on their main task, which is to enable us to see art not because it happens to be in their collections but because it will endure. This is a priority, for the main task that lies ahead of all of us is to make our world last.
Proudly dumb – and all the better for it: The Monkey reviewed
The monkey is an organ-grinder’s monkey toy. Wind up the key jutting out of its back, and its lips will part to reveal two rows of yellow grimacing teeth. Then its clockwork arms will wheel up and down, banging a little drum as fairground music plays. And then someone nearby dies in an extremely gory freak accident. Maybe their head will be sliced off in a knife-twirling incident at a teppanyaki restaurant and slide gently on to the grill. Maybe they’ll fall through the stairs and into a box of fishhooks and then set their head on fire over a gas hob, and then run outside and impale themselves on a wooden spike. Maybe some huge Rube Goldberg arrangement of faulty wiring and loose roofing tiles will cause their body to explode in a shower of soft crimson globs. But what’s for certain is as soon as the monkey plays the drum, someone dies.
A few decades ago, this would have been the premise of a dumb, disposable horror flick. A Final Destination film, possibly with one extra gimmick. But the genre has been in a weird spot lately. As the rest of mainstream cinema trails off into an endless stutter of reboots and sequels, horror is suddenly very respectable. The last decade has seen a series of ‘elevated’ horror movies, from David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows to Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar, to last year’s Longlegs, written and directed by Osgood Perkins, who also wrote and directed The Monkey. Elevated horror looks good: lush cinematography, lots of slow and menacing shots instead of cheap jump scares. In traditional horror films, our characters are thin stereotypes who mostly exist to stand around screaming before being killed; elevated horror is populated by psychologically complex figures whose personal traumas intersect with the horror plot in interesting, nuanced ways. In other words, elevated horror, for the most part, sucks.
The problem with all this psychological depth is that horror is already a way of peering into the human psyche. It works through weird symbols, shadows, the parts of ourselves that are inaccessible to reason, which is why it’s so powerful, and why people are always so eager to start blanketing it in interpretations. But trying to jam these weird symbols together with plodding, bog-standard psychological realism doesn’t really do much to elevate it; instead, I’m just left feeling as though the film doesn’t have much faith in its own metaphors. If it did, it wouldn’t need to deploy big flashing signs that say ‘THIS IS ABOUT TRAUMA’ for half its runtime.
Unlike so many po-faced prestige horrors, The Monkey is actually funny
But here, The Monkey was a pleasant surprise. It’s in luscious 35mm and starts with a fucked-up family unit in the late 1990s – both of which are massive red flags. Hal and Bill are the twins of a chaotic mother and a father who went out one day for cigarettes and never came back. One day, they find the mass-murdering monkey among the heaps of their dad’s abandoned stuff in the attic; after a few turns of the key, their entire lives are ripped apart, and when we rejoin them in adulthood, they’re still living with the consequences. This sounds full of meaning. In the end, though, the film turned out to be loudly, proudly dumb.
Unlike so many po-faced prestige horrors, The Monkey is actually funny. There’s a vague theme, something to do with absent fathers and the generational legacies they leave behind, but it’s never developed so earnestly it gets in the way. It all feels lightly tacked on: this is a film about watching people die in increasingly baroque and unlikely ways. Which is exactly as it should be.
Tedious and threadbare: Unicorn, at the Garrick Theatre, reviewed
Unicorn, Mike Bartlett’s new play, involves some characters in chairs discussing a sexual threesome. That’s the entire show. Polly (Nicola Walker) is a drunken crosspatch who wants to spice up her loveless marriage to Dr Nick (Stephen Mangan) by bringing a blonde lesbian into the bedroom. Nick, a dithering twerp, doesn’t care if it happens or not and he lets his gobby wife talk him into it. She’s desperate for a bit of girl-on-girl action because she detests straight men (apart from Nick) and she dated women before she got married. It’s not clear why Nick puts up with this charmless windbag who treats him like a naughty spaniel and pouts angrily whenever he speaks.
Polly tracks down a gormless poetry student, Kate, and persuades her to join their triangular orgy. This is another puzzle. An attractive youngster like Kate has no reason to facilitate the sexual fantasies of two needy, bickering has-beens. Kate offers many explanations for her behaviour. Too many. She lost her parents early and she yearns for a family. She belongs to a new generation of sexual pioneers. She’s a randy hedonist who fears death and wants to seize pleasure while she can. The more reasons she gives, the clearer it becomes that her character makes no sense.
Nick’s romantic motives are another mystery. He and Polly are presented as equals in cupid’s marketplace but the visual evidence suggests otherwise. Surely Nick could pick up a svelte young medic from the hospital where he works. With his dreamy eyes and dark curly locks, he has the melancholy air of a violin maestro or a philosophising hermit. Polly, by contrast, looks like an Avon Lady who got sacked for drinking the nail varnish.
After many time-wasting postponements, the menage is finally consummated and the show ends on a happy note. Most of the delays are excuses for satirical speeches about orgasms, rough sex and kinky fetishes. Small boys would enjoy sniggering at this stuff. And the characters deliver tirades about gender fluidity, planetary meltdown and the vices of Caucasian males who enjoy beer and cycling. Feeble targets, stale attacks. Much of the script feels like comedy material that isn’t strong enough for the stand-up circuit.
You could listen to it like a podcast, in dribs and drabs, while you’re doing the ironing
Both Mangan and Walker carry themselves professionally and behave as if they’re committed to these tedious, threadbare characters. Erin Doherty, as Kate, overdoes the dim-witted cockney routine and honks out her lines like Arthur Mullard. At one point, Nick asks her how old she is. ‘Oim firty necks mumf,’ she rasps. The show is bound to prosper at the box office because it makes no demands on the audience. There’s virtually nothing to watch on stage and the dialogue has no subtext. The characters keep explaining at great length how they feel about each other and about the position they’re in. It would work perfectly well on radio. If the producers released an audio version you could listen to it like a podcast, in dribs and drabs, while you’re doing the ironing. That’s the level.
Charles Bukowski is a dead poet making a comeback. Born in Germany in 1920, Bukowski was raised in LA and he produced a large corpus of fiction and poetry that reflected his life as a cynical, hard-drinking drifter. Time magazine called him ‘the laureate of American low life’. He never achieved popular acclaim while he was alive but his work is starting to find new audiences. At the Riverside Studios, Art Theatre London presents a selection of poems and short stories dramatised for the stage.
The results are astonishing. This is authentic storytelling at its best. The material is weird, raw, nasty, hilarious, unpredictable. Just like real life. Bukowski could never have survived a creative writing course because he breaks all the rules. He doesn’t care which genre he’s using. He can’t decide who the main character is. And his endings are erratic and unsatisfying. He’s like a teenage genius who can’t be bothered finishing his homework.
Most of his characters are smart, articulate outcasts in surreal situations. An office worker returns home to find his flat being burgled by two nuns who pinch classical-music records. A character falls in love with a shop-window mannequin and tries to explain his new passion to his distraught girlfriend. Some of Bukowski’s poems are read out as well, but they seem a little contrived and pretentious. Twee, even.
The direction, by Anya Viller, feels deliberately clumsy. The sets are tatty and incomplete. The crude soundtrack barges in and makes the actors impossible to hear at times. The structure of the evening is shambolic. Poems and stories are thrown together randomly, as if by lucky dip. Who organised this show? No one. But the costumes look great. And the handsome young cast are a joy to watch. Despite its lack of polish, this is a thing of wonder.
How to write a piano concerto
My Piano Concerto, The World of Yesterday, began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic: would I like to write a score for a movie about a concert pianist writing a piano concerto. As I looked at my concert diary, blank but for Zoom calls, it seemed like a wonderful way to keep me busy. I’d never wanted to write a piano concerto (how to begin?) but the characters and outline of this film gave me a handle: an ageing Austrian baroness and a young American composer in the early 1930s; she commissions him to write a piece and invites him to compose it at her castle in the Alps; she becomes more and more dissatisfied with his efforts, and more and more psychotic in her behaviour; he escapes across the mountains with his life, and his sketches under his arm; a year later the piece is performed.
There’s more to the macabre story, but its use of a piece of music as a key character, intrigued me. I set to work immediately, jotting down a waltz theme of lush, Korngold-inspired decadence to represent the Baroness, and a tune of bright, white-note, interwar Americana for the composer. ‘The final scene will be the performance of the last four minutes of the concerto onstage, ending with rapturous, ecstatic applause,’ said the director. OK, so it had to be loud and flashy and energetic. ‘Yes, everyone going full-tilt. Brass, percussion, soloist…’ Months passed and the whole project stalled. Then the pandemic began to pass, and concert dates began to start up again, so I decided to step aside. But, like the character in the film, I had a thick pile of sketches under my arm, and plenty of material for a concert work. Four orchestras agreed to co-commission the concerto – the Utah, Singapore and Adelaide symphonies, along with the Hallé, with which Sir Mark Elder and I recorded the work in May last year.
I quickly shed the specific storyline of the screenplay but the flavour of its era remained as I continued writing. The ‘world of yesterday’ unforgettably conjured up in the eponymous book by Stefan Zweig, was a portrait of an even earlier lost Viennese world of coffee and culture, of intellectuals energetically discussing broad ideas in the last broad years of Franz Josef’s empire. Zweig wrote a musical book, not because of the many musicians described in it, but because we experience it as atmosphere more than information. It seems to evoke harmonies rather than history; it is at heart a song without words. As with the movie’s exact plot I put it aside too once I’d sprayed its perfume into the room, but the scent remained: roasted coffee beans, ink on unfurled newspapers, clothes heavy with tobacco.
How does one write a piano concerto in the shadow of so much history and so much genius?
As I thought about this some more, another ‘world of yesterday’ came to mind: a concert pianist writing a piano concerto. There was a time when to be a pianist and not a composer, however modest, was a rarity. Indeed, in the 19th century it would have been almost unthinkable. And the piano concerto form, from Mozart through to Bartok (via Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninov and Prokofiev), was the public face of such pianist-composers. It was their calling card as they travelled around to play concerts, displaying to audiences both their keyboard skills and their personal, musical voices. A sonata was usually for a private or even solitary occasion; a concerto always required an orchestra, and thus an audience. The main reason Mozart wrote so many more piano concertos than Haydn was that the latter did not have a performing career and therefore had no opportunity to play them.
But then a 21st-century question arises: how does one write a piano concerto in the shadow of so much history and so much genius? A mountain range of peaks – so many composers (not least the form’s very creator, Mozart) wrote their greatest music in this medium. There seemed to me two traps to try to avoid: the risk of regurgitating examples from the past – tired figuration dusted off and redressed for the new season, the virtuoso’s fingers forced into another’s gloves; or else simply inserting the soloist as part of the orchestral texture, a team-player so anxious not to sound derivative that they end up sounding intimidated. This latter pitfall is harder to evade after a century when composers have frequently used the piano as an orchestral instrument.
To ‘live in the present moment’ is an idea present in all religions and philosophies across all ages: the past and the future are fantasies; one is lost behind, the other may never be found; only the present exists. That’s all very well on a retreat, and it’s a nifty way to stay sane and focused in the office, but we delve into art and culture precisely to expand reality. We attend concerts and museums and theatres to escape into an amplified world of enchantment. Science fiction captivates us with its impossible dream worlds of the future, but for me it’s the books looking back to credible history that resonate most strongly. A past from my childhood, or to relive lives I never lived in the first place.
Classical music is always a world of yesterday. Even in (most of) the most contemporary works, the ink has already dried on the page. We are always interpreting something from the past. That’s the enchantment. Those are the memories we create. It’s the furnishing of the home for which we become homesick. Zweig wrote his memoir about the old world in the New World (Brazil); he remembered Vienna before the first world war as he lived during the second… until he could no more. He and his wife took their own lives as the home and the culture that he had immortalised burned with hatred and devastation. Nostalgia can be a dangerous charm; it can both delight and destroy.
The White Lotus is off to a shaky start
The White Lotus, now back for a third series, could perhaps be best described as Death in Paradise for posh people. Most obviously, this is because its plots revolve around murders in an idyllic location – only with a far bigger budget, a much starrier cast and several episodes per story. But there’s also the fact that it follows the same pattern every time.
So it was that season three began this week, rather like its predecessors, with some lovely scenery, a dead body and a caption reading ‘One week earlier’. After that, we duly watched a bunch of rich, good-looking Americans arriving at a luxury White Lotus resort where they were welcomed by the resolutely smiling staff and a nervous manager, before gazing round and marvelling at the beauty of it all.
Following Hawaii and Sicily, the marvelling this time was directed at the beauty of Thailand, where the programme’s creator, writer and director Mike White turns his winningly satirical eye on the cult and jargon of wellness. Not that his latest group of guests needed much encouragement to ‘focus on self-care’ – because, again like their predecessors, they’re a complacently entitled lot. Indeed, when it comes to characterisation, the new series seems like variations on a well-established theme – not all of them major.
Jason Isaacs, for example, plays a driven plutocrat, somewhat incongruously called Timothy, who’s trying (and failing) to put work out of his mind temporarily in favour of some quality time with his wife and three children of varying degrees of social awkwardness. So far, these children appear to have only a single trait each, with one son priapic, the other introverted and the daughter moonily spiritual.
We also get a trio of glamorous middle-aged women, led by TV star Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), who constantly (and accurately) assure each other how great they look, while evincing an unmistakable brittleness. In the role of a couple inexplicably together are the raddled Rick (Walton Goggins) and his much younger British girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), who he clearly didn’t pull thanks to his good-humoured charm.
The first episode felt mostly like an extended exercise in throat-clearing
There is, however, one difference from the previous series. Presumably (and understandably) confident that anyone who saw them is likely to trust him to deliver the goods eventually, White proceeds here much more slowly than before. As ever, these are obviously People With Secrets. Already, one of the middle-aged glamour pusses has developed a habit of retiring early to her bedroom with a load of wine and look of heartbreak. Timothy is now fielding calls from a nosy journalist apparently investigating some dodgy business dealings. Rick was last seen scrolling through photos of the resort’s elderly female owner on his phone. Yet in the past, setting up these little mysteries surely wouldn’t have taken White an hour.
As one of those trusting viewers, I’m in for the long haul. Even so, by the show’s admittedly high standards, this first episode was definitely disappointing. While The White Lotus’s customary qualities of visual splendour, top-drawer acting and beady observations of American smugness were gratifyingly in place, the result felt mostly like an extended exercise in throat-clearing.
Largely unnoticed by the TV commentariat, Channel 5 has been carving out a successful niche for itself as a broadcaster unusually content to serve a middle-aged, Middle-England audience. On Thursday, for instance, it brought us yet another of its gentle pictures of life in Yorkshire (a county it’s weirdly obsessed with); a documentary on the pros and cons of frozen food, with particular reference to the potato waffle; and Clare Balding taking a stroll along the banks of the river Dart. And all that before James May’s Great Explorers genially tackled Sir Walter Raleigh, setting out to explain how ‘one young Devon lad rose to dazzle Elizabethan England’.
By the end, the programme had served up a lucid, apologetically myth-busting biography of Raleigh as a man who didn’t put his cloak down for Queen Elizabeth, didn’t bring the potato to England and didn’t begin the British Empire. (‘Join me next week when I spoil Captain Cook,’ said the ever-affable May in closing.)
It was, though, in no rush to do so. Along the way, May stopped off regularly to investigate such Raleigh-related subjects as the astrolabe and the flintlock gun – which in practice meant that he met a series of middle-aged blokes with names like Alan and Charlie who’d made these things their hobbies and were more than happy to talk about them in some detail as they pottered about. Meanwhile, Raleigh’s sideline as a pharmacist allowed for plenty of cheerful jokes about haemorrhoids.
All in all, then, my advice for anybody looking to escape the moronic inferno of modern life would be not to bother with an expensive wellness retreat in Thailand. Just watch Channel 5 for a few nights instead.
Soothing and glorious: Fashion Neurosis reviewed
Sometimes the mind needs to take a break. And I can’t think of a better stopping-off place than the soothing, gloriously bonkers discussions on the Fashion Neurosis podcast, hosted by the British fashion designer Bella Freud. Its premise is that Freud, daughter of Lucian and great-grand-daughter of Sigmund, encourages guests to recline on her couch and talk over any and every aspect of their relationship to fashion. Her mellifluous, affirming manner is much more soft soap than wire wool, but this is not territory that requires a Robin Day, and the concept proves a surprisingly fruitful route into family history, personal stories and high-grade gossip. The pool of guests is a commendably eclectic one: they have thus far included Nick Cave, Kate Moss, Cate Blanchett, Zadie Smith and the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Alongside the audio of each interview, there is a little video of Freud and her subject talking: the fact that interviewees are lying down somehow renders them more innocent and unguarded than usual, like rambling children at bedtime. Even those who favour low-key apparel reveal moments when fashion has delivered a notable thrill or anxiety. Knausgaard, who exudes a thoughtful melancholy, arrives clad in his out-there-meeting-people outfit of black jeans, black T-shirt, black shoes and, for winter, a black sweater. In his early teens, he said, he annoyed his father by shaving his head and getting a cross-shaped earring in each ear. When his father saw the new look, ‘he said, “Well, you look like an idiot.” And that was kind of what I wanted to achieve, I think.’
Still, his father delivered his own visual disturbances. As a local teacher and politician, he had once dressed ‘like a proper, proper adult’ in tweed suits with elbow patches, an authoritative costume which the ten-year-old Karl Ove found ‘safe’. Then when his parents got divorced, his father started drinking heavily, inviting people over, and adopted a new, almost hippie-ish style which, ominously, involved ‘tunics’. To the late teenage Karl Ove this sudden parental flamboyance signalled, not liberation, but a scary disintegration of the known order. Perhaps that’s why he prefers his own clothes to speak quietly. This was, he said of the interview, ‘my first therapy session ever’.
To others, such as Kate Moss, the dressing-up box was always a reliable source of unalloyed joy. Moss lies on the couch rocking a carefully chosen combo of sheer tights and towering Vivienne Westwood heels, and reminisces dreamily in her sexy little croaky voice about outfits she has known. The curtain gradually goes up on her world of like-minded glamour addicts, and their zest in costuming themselves. The model and Rolling Stones’ muse Anita Pallenberg used to come round to her house, she says, and ‘we would spend all night in my wardrobe, doing “looks”.’ You can tell when one of the guests here is immersed full-time in fashion, because they freely deploy the verbal construction I call ‘the fashion singular’: unlike sartorial civilians, you’ll hear them speaking of ‘a red lip’ or ‘a platform heel’, as though the concept is already reverentially placed on a designated plinth in their mind.
Perhaps my favourite guest was Nicky Haslam, the interior designer and playful arbiter of good taste, who is better value than ever aged 85. When asked what he is wearing, he immediately says, ‘Head to toe Primark!’ and then he’s off, gamely admitting to everything, including tinting a quiff on his head and his pubic hair with eyelash dye, having a facelift – ‘God, yes!’ – and calling Jean Shrimpton ‘gangly and hideous’ before she became a star model and one of his best friends. He remembers the Duchess of Windsor, whom he adored, and ‘poor Marilyn’ (Monroe), answering the door just a few weeks before she died, clearly troubled and ‘an absolute wreck’. I’m looking forward to hearing who comes on the show next, but if Fashion Neurosis ever has a spin-off, I think Haslam alone could probably sustain at least one interview a week.
Over on Radio 4’s Word of Mouth, the author and host Michael Rosen was wondering what happened to the Cockney backchat of his childhood: when accused of some minor crime, his schoolmates used to respond, ‘No I never!’, a formulation that has largely vanished now. Some had sinuous routes to meanings that left him baffled even at the time: ‘It’s taters out!’ one would say regularly, a piece of rhyming slang whereby potatoes, or ‘taters in the mould’, led one to ‘cold’.
But this ‘old’ cockney speech has gradually been replaced by ‘multicultural London English’ or ‘New School Cockney’ which mingles the previous argot and accent with new words and rhythms. Rosen joins the founders of the Modern Cockney Festival, Andy Green and Saif Osmani, to discuss the evolving diction of London’s working class, why pie and mash should get ‘protected regional status’ as a dish, and the need for pushback against the routine depiction of cockneys in films as gangsters and villains.
The programme left me thinking, too, about that streak of teasing subversion in rhyming slang, and the days when the sly fun of perpetually messing with words wasn’t only for the poets.
Regents Opera’s Ring is a formidable achievement
I saw the world end in a Bethnal Green leisure centre. Regents Opera’s Ring cycle, which began in 2022 in Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden, has found its culmination and completion at York Hall, a rundown public bath better known for championship boxing. Tower Hamlets security staff scan you for concealed weapons on the way in, which is not exactly typical at the opera. Still, the Ring is not a typical opera – and isn’t art supposed to feel dangerous?
But once you’re inside – and as long as you’re not seated within earshot of the bar staff, who clatter and chatter throughout – Caroline Staunton’s scaled down production transfers seamlessly; in fact, the sightlines are better. The same 24-piece orchestra, the same catwalk stage surrounded on three sides by the audience, the same white minimalist settings by designer Isabella van Braeckel. And the same rather facile relocation of the action to the contemporary art world, a universe that’s surely far more alien to most viewers than the swords and spears of Wagner’s myth.
Ultimately, I’m not sure that the concept matters very much, and anyway, it recedes as the cycle progresses. What we really want to know about any new Ring is whether Wagner’s enchantment endures; whether he still pulls you in with that first E flat of Das Rheingold and throws you out, shaken, after Gotterdämmerung into a world that no longer feels quite the same, at least until your dreams return to normal. The answer here has to be yes. On its own terms, the Regents Opera Ring cycle is a formidable achievement.
It certainly has a strong cast. No one undertakes a Ring cycle lightly but from the very start of Das Rheingold (three self-assertive Rhinemaidens, and an Alberich, Oliver Gibbs, who sang throughout with an eruptive, pitch-black physicality) the singing kept on exceeding expectations. By the end, well, Brünnhilde carries everything and Catharine Woodward’s performance – from the boisterous biker girl of Die Walküre through a painfully believable awakening in Siegfried, to the final scene, where her singing was as sunlit and exalted as her demeanour – would thrill any Wagnerite. Her exchange with Waltraute (Catherine Backhouse) seemed to freeze time; but then, this Brünnhilde is the daughter of a particularly self-possessed and eerie Erda (Mae Heydorn)
On its own terms, the Regents Opera Ring cycle is a formidable achievement
If any one performance stood out from the whole, though, it was Peter Furlong’s Siegfried. In Staunton’s conception, he is a youth with a mental disorder (his horn call is a symptom of a seizure) and an air of puzzled vulnerability, sung by Furlong with intense attention to the text and a vaulting, hair-tingling energy. We’ve seen that Staunton’s Alberich is a disruptor – a perversely creative force – and as Hagen, Simon Wilding is more sinister and restless still. Staunton departs from Wagner’s text to turn him into a serial killer, but by this stage you swallow it, just as you swallow her notion of an uptight, pre-defeated Wotan, played by Ralf Lukas as if he were a tetchy Radio 3 producer. Lukas assumed the role last year after the death of Keel Watson, who left large shoes to fill (a tiny scrap of his performance can be heard on a Regents Opera excerpts disc).
Almost every characterisation offers something fresh and thought-provoking: an emotionally scarred, ardently sung Siegmund and Sieglinde (Brian Smith Walters and Justine Viani), a genuinely creepy Fafner, and the most persuasive (I don’t say relatable) Fricka I think I’ve seen. The gains from this sort of chamber-scaled Wagner were very evident: there’s a lieder-like clarity to the words, plus the thrill of physical proximity. Ben Woodward conducted and there was never any question of the singers being overwhelmed, while his skilful reduced orchestration (which included an organ) brought out echoes of Wagner’s romantic forebears – Schumann, Schubert, even Mendelssohn.
Get down to that leisure centre, keep an open mind, and pack your imagination
The downsides? For Wagner, the colour and dynamic range of a full symphony orchestra wasn’t merely incidental. It was (his words), ‘the soil of endless, universal feeling’, and at the moments when he demanded them, you really missed the percussion and harps. It’d be a bleak day if reduced Wagner became accepted as the norm. Similarly, Wagner’s big visual effects are unachievable and Staunton’s production finds work-arounds rather than really convincing solutions. Like most stagings in the round, any sense of immersion is undercut by the sight of the audience and at any given moment you have only a partial chance of seeing what’s happening on a performer’s face, or hearing their voice in its unobscured directness.
Still, that’s the deal here. No one pretends otherwise and as with any serious attempt to engage with the Ring the emotional, spiritual and intellectual pay-off is still far beyond anything you’ll encounter in the normal run of opera. Or, for that matter, TV, cinema or straight theatre. Get down to that leisure centre, keep an open mind, and pack your imagination. But you were going to anyway, weren’t you?
The new Civ is gorgeous and richly rewarding
Grade: A-
It has been nearly ten years since addicts of the empire-building simulator Civilization – or Civ, as players call it – have had a fresh fix. Was it the original Civ that cost you a first in your finals? It’s back, and this time round it aims to cost you a promotion at work. You’ve both grown up. Prepare to lose very many hours to its attractive blend of diplomacy, resource management, city-building and strategic ultraviolence.
Your path through history comes in three linked chunks: you’ll play through the ancient world, then carry forward some of your progress into the age of exploration, and then do the same again in modernity. What’s more, your leaders no longer have to be historically or geographically appropriate. If you want to set Benjamin Franklin on a hostile takeover of Confucian China, now’s your chance. Level him up quick and get a buff from those bifocals.
I asked Harriet Tubman to build an empire in ancient Egypt. Regrettably, she turned out to be useless as pharaohs go. She was wiped out by the neighbouring tribes long before she got round to building any pyramids. Diversity hire, amirite? I had a bit more luck plonking Xerxes into ancient Persia. Before long we were descending on our neighbours like the wolf on the proverbial fold, and soon Nineveh and Tyre were, well, one with Nineveh and Tyre.
The graphics are gorgeous – rivers, mountains and valleys open out tile by tile as your scouts explore – and the gameplay is rich and various and outstandingly one-more-try-ish. Its whiggish premise that humanity moves, as a rule, from barbarism to civilisation rather than in the opposite direction looks increasingly quaint. Still, what are games for if not escapism?
Lauren Mayberry is terrific – but it’s not music for middle-aged men
There are nights when one realises quite how much effort the business end of showbusiness must be. On a bitterly cold Monday night in Philadelphia, Lauren Mayberry – over from Glasgow, and halfway through a month of criss-crossing the USA – took to the stage to survey a crowd of maybe 500 people, in a venue that holds 1,200.
A good proportion of those 500 people were just like me: middle-aged men. We have every right to be there, of course, and one suspects Mayberry was glad they bought tickets. But I bet she was disappointed some of the remaining 700 or so tickets had not been bought by young women, for this is who this show is for.
Mayberry’s day job is as singer for the Scottish trio Chvrches – pronounced Churches – and this tour was to promote her first solo album, Vicious Creature, which sounds very much like an album written with young women in mind rather than old men. ‘I wish you would stop calling me every time/ You need validation for the qualities you want to hide’, she sang on the opening ‘Crocodile Tears’. Had that lyric been written for middle-aged men, it might more plausibly have been: ‘I wish you would stop yourself from calling me every time/ You’ve forgotten how to programme the thermostat so the heat comes on in the morning.’
Vicious Creature treads similar emotional ground to Self Esteem’s breakout album Prioritise Pleasure. ‘Sorry Etc’ even appears to share Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s anger at how band life treats women: ‘I killed myself to be one of the boys/ I lost my head to be one of the boys/ I bit my tongue to be one of the boys/ I sold my soul to be one of the boys.’
It was not, though, a rageful show. Backed by two musicians and a fair few gigabytes of backing tapes, Mayberry was charming and charismatic – plainly her voice was double- tracked at times, but she was also obviously singing. A cover of the Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ was fabulously potent, if evidently unfamiliar to most of the crowd. It will bring the house down when she tours the UK later this spring. The rest of the set was simply the album, in full, but it was strong enough that the show never dragged. You want sparkly electro pop? Have ‘Change Shapes’. Fancy a Robbie Williams-ish ballad? Try ‘Something in the Air’. Jerky art pop? That will be ‘Punch Drunk’. It was terrific – go to see the UK shows, which I suspect will be fuller.
Curiously, Mayberry was louder than Thou. Curious because Thou play extreme metal, and their album Umbilical was one of last year’s triumphs. Which particular micro-variety of extreme metal they are I will leave to those who can differentiate their blackened doom from their grindcore. Suffice to say that their music proceeds at a slow and monstrous plod, with singer Bryan Funck growling unintelligibly in the accepted style of black metal, and occasionally staring blank-eyed at the back wall of the room – a Johnny Rotten taken beyond anger into apathy.
I realise I am not making Thou sound terribly attractive, but the appeal of music such as this in a club is almost entirely physical: it is monolithic, unyielding and overwhelming. Often, at these kinds of shows, I spend the first ten minutes wondering why I chose to come, before the narcotic effect of the immense slabs of noise kicks in and I realise I am nodding my head in a half-daze. And so it was with Thou.
Charming and charismatic, Mayberry was terrific – go to see the UK shows
The quintet, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana – home to the equally unbiddable Eyehategod – play a music so stripped back it’s like looking at a car chassis rather than the fully upholstered vehicle a normal band offers. Yes, there are two guitars, bass and drums, being played with full force, but there is no concession to self-indulgence: almost no guitar solos; drums and bass in lockstep, thudding with an almost dubby intensity.
I’m not going to dwell on the lyrics. Partly because I couldn’t hear any of them, and partly because, having looked them up, I am not sure they will necessarily help my case that Thou are truly a great band. There’s only so much ‘Kneel before the empty tomb/ I am the scourge, I am the open wound’ one can quote with a straight face.
Not that you really needed the lyrics to parse the meaning of the music: life is really not very nice, so here’s something physically painful to remind you of the fact. Unmelodic, uncompromising, unattractive and wonderful.
I’ve had it with Pina Bausch
My patience with the cult of Pina Bausch is wearing paper thin. She was taken from us 16 years ago, and I had hoped that the aura of divinity around her memory might now be fading. But no, it only burgeons and having joined with Terrain Boris Charmatz to honour her creations, the official keepers of her flame Tanztheater Wuppertal are back in town to present one of her later works, Vollmond (‘Full Moon’), to ecstatic standing room-only congregations in her temple at Sadler’s Wells. What a bad, bad influence the Blessed Pina has had on dance, providing inspiration for hundreds of her imitators to pull the wool over our eyes by peddling their own pallid versions of her formulas.
With an intolerable duration of well over two hours, Vollmond contains many of her familiar tropes, and then some: a set consisting solely of a large, immovable stone boulder against a black background; downpours of rain cascading from the flies forming a shallow pool in which the cast frolic, splash and slide; outbursts of frenzied emotion and nonsensical spoken monologues lacking what T.S. Eliot described as an ‘objective correlative’ or reasoned connection to anything else; tediously repetitive rituals that involve odd noises or pointless rules; men running at great speed across the stage into the wings, women floating about in ballgowns and stilettos; a lot of panic, a lot of robotic parading, a lot of discarding of clothes. No relationships or continuities are established; the principle seems to have been to give rein to the first thing that comes into the performers’ heads, a surrender to instinct and the unconscious.
The programme further suggests that what is intended is a meditation on the manifold role of water in our lives (but nobody drowns, and mercifully urination does not feature). It struck me as merely a succession of random vignettes, most of them the stuff of an infants’ school playground and some of them even sillier, accompanied by a hodgepodge of recorded music. Tragically, a great deal of time and effort has gone into the staging of this tripe: I am full of admiration for the cast of a dozen or so, who perform these inane antics with total commitment and split-second timing worthy of the circus ring. But please don’t bandy around that word ‘genius’.
What a bad, bad influence the Blessed Pina has had on dance
Among the several activities of the admirably entrepreneurial Carlos Acosta – still occasionally performing at the balletically venerable age of 51 as well as running the beleaguered Birmingham Royal Ballet and a new dance centre in Woolwich – is the artistic directorship of Acosta Danza, a troupe drawn from his native Cuba and focused on contemporary work of a generally Hispanic nature. It seems to be establishing itself as a regular feature of the British scene, and has been appearing for a brief season at the Linbury Theatre.
The programme, entitled Folclor, may have been a curate’s egg, but there can be no question of the electrifying excellence of its dancers. Cubans aren’t overly concerned with precision or nuance – they move with a thrilling lack of inhibition that looks spontaneous and almost dangerous in its impetuousness. They are ready for challenges bigger than those they faced here. Pontus Lidberg’s Paysage, soudain, la nuit is an anodyne pastoral, relentlessly cheerful and tiresomely bland; in contrast, Norge Cedeno and Thais Suarez’s chaotic Hybrid was full of arcane symbolic pretensions drawn from the myth of Sisyphus and his vain efforts to roll a boulder uphill. What hit hardest, however, was Rafael Bonachela’s Soledad, a steamily erotic duet charting the brutal end of an abusive relationship through a complex of emotions supercharged by the impassioned dancing of Laura Rodriguez and Raul Reinoso.