Barbican

Coleridge deemed the narrative structure of The Alchemist perfect. But, I wonder. A landowner quits plague-ridden London and his cunning servants pose as learned sages in order to defraud affluent locals. Ben Jonson’s plotting is certainly adroit. The action takes place in a single location within the span of an afternoon, and this concentration of forces may have appealed to Coleridge’s idea of classical purity. What Jonson’s narrative doesn’t explain is why so many dim-witted toffs are kicking around in a city abandoned by all but its poorest inhabitants. His characters’ names crassly signal their roles: Surly, Dapper, Lovewit, Sir Epicure Mammon. The chief villains, Subtle and Face, are assisted

Isabelle Huppert does nothing by halves. And she doesn’t, I think, care greatly for journalists. She expects them to ask stupid questions. Sitting before me in an airless room in the eaves of Paris’s Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, she is tiny, dressed entirely in black and more or less unsmiling. Lily-skinned, red-haired, and with a fabulous curl in her upper lip, she’s appeared in more than 100 film and TV productions. Ninety minutes after our meeting, she will be on stage. I sense she wants this interview over fast. But at the start she makes me, I must report, comatose with wonder. I have adored Mme Huppert on screen for three

Adelson e Salvini Barbican First operas by composers who later became great or anyway expert in writing them tend to be at best of biographical interest, to be revived mainly for people who are interested to hear premonitions of the achievements that lay ahead. Up to a point that is the case with Bellini’s Adelson e Salvini, which he wrote in his early twenties, and which at the time was a big local success, being performed every Sunday for a year. Performances since bel canto operas came back into fashion have been extremely rare, and the company Opera Rara’s name has never been more appropriate than when it gave a

When the Japanese conductor Masaaki Suzuki leads his forces in a performance of a Bach cantata, does he worry that the non-Christians in his audience will face the fires of Hell? That seems a bizarre question to ask any conductor of Bach’s music, especially one from Japan, where only one per cent of the population is Christian. But when I met Suzuki in Copenhagen last Friday I asked it, because the 61-year-old founder of the Bach Collegium Japan (BCJ) is part of that one per cent. He’s an Evangelical Protestant, like Johann Sebastian Bach himself. Indeed, he adheres to an even fiercer interpretation of the Bible than the cantor of

‘I like ordinary people,’ says the extraordinary photographer Martin Parr, pushing a few high-concept smoked sprats around his plate at St John, the Smithfield restaurant. Parr is Britain’s best-known photographer, but he is no acolyte of celebrity. Like the Italian anti-designers, his Seventies contemporaries who wanted to dull the sheen of modernism by elevating the mundane (or valorising crap, as I would put it), he is a devotee of the ordinary. But is he celebrating the everyday or mocking it? He never quite answers, although he does say, ‘I enjoy the banal.’ Ask me and I’d say the banal is what we want to avoid. Since 2014, Martin Parr has

There are some operas, as there are some people, that it is impossible to establish a settled relationship with, and in my case Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is one of them, in fact by far the most pressing one. I never know in advance how I’m going to react to it, and to some extent the actual performance I see is not the determining factor. I’d like, just once, to see the play and find out how I reacted to that. For Debussy offers such a vivid and sometimes perplexing counterpoint to Maeterlinck’s words that one’s reactions to the characters and their actions are always in flux — at least

How often do you get a chance to see two operas by Leoncavallo in the same city in the same week? Never, until this last week in London, when Opera Rara gave a concert performance of Zazà at the Barbican, and six days later the Royal Opera mounted its first production since the 1980s of Cav. and Pag. Both Leoncavallo and Mascagni are routinely thought of as one-opera composers. Zazà didn’t do a lot to undermine that view, and I doubt whether if it had been staged it would have made any stronger an impression. Like Pag., its libretto is by the composer: Wagner seems to have made that temporarily

Peter Mandelson, in his moment of pomp, had his portrait taken by Lord Snowdon. He is sitting on a fine modern chair. Mandy would no doubt have been aware of the ancient historic associations, through bishoprics and universities, that chairs have with power. Since it is a chair much admired by architects, Mandy also looks quite cool, although these things are relative. The chair and its footstool are known as Eames Lounge 670 and Eames Ottoman 671, and they were first manufactured in 1956 by Herman Miller of Zeeland, Michigan. Curved plywood shells are veneered with Brazilian rosewood, upholstered with shallow black leather-studded cushions and supported, at a meaningful tilt

‘Kiss me, Sergei! Kiss me hard! Kiss me until the icons fall and split!’ sings Katerina Ismailova, adulterous antiheroine of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Stalin was not amused by Shostakovich’s bleak black comedy but our culture would be poorer without bored wives like Katerina. Perhaps all that Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina and Laura Jesson needed was a proper kiss — the sort that mutes the white noise of disappointment. But a kiss is never enough in these cautionary tales of bourgeois bed-hopping. One thing leads to another and before you know it you’re knocking back the arsenic, throwing yourself in front of a train or back home listening to the

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/merkelstragicmistake/media.mp3″ title=”Kate Maltby and Igor Toronyi-Lalic discuss Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet” startat=1642] Listen [/audioplayer]You can’t play the part of Hamlet, only parts of Hamlet. And the bits Benedict Cumberbatch offers us are of the highest calibre. He delivers the soliloquies with a meticulous and absorbing clarity like a lawyer in the robing room mastering a brief before his summing-up. And though he’s a decade too old to play the prince (the grave scene sets his age at about 28), he cavorts about the stage like a ballet dancer delighting in his own athleticism. But he’s also much too nice. The darkest shades of melancholy and the raw emotional ugliness are

For nine years Patrick Marber has grappled with writer’s block (which by some miracle doesn’t affect his screenplay work), but the pipes are now ungummed and wallop! his new bolus of creativity splatters across the Dorfman stage. It’s a wordy three-hander set in the swamp of non-league football. Marber brilliantly captures the grubbiness and despairing optimism of ageing sportsmen who inhabit a golden age that never was. We meet Kidd, a hopeless but garrulous manager, as he tussles with Yates, a lugubrious old kit-man, for a controlling stake in a dazzling young talent, Jordan. The emotional terrain is lifted directly from Pinter and Mamet: male losers fighting over scraps of

The smash hit Matilda, based on a Roald Dahl story, has spawned a copycat effort, The Twits. Charm, sweetness and mystery aren’t Dahl’s strong points. He specialises in suburban grotesques who commit infantile barbarities. But his prose is sensational. No ‘style’ at all, just the simplicity and clarity of a master copywriter. He’s as good as Orwell. Mr and Mrs Twit are a pair of malignant outcasts who enjoy tormenting innocents. They keep a family of monkeys in a cage and they glue birds to trees and shoot them. You can read the story in about 20 minutes. It probably took Dahl a bit longer than that to write. And

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson loved little girls. He loved to tell them stories, he loved to feed them jam, he loved to set them puzzles, and he loved to take their photographs. On 25 March, 1863, he composed a list of 107 prepubescent portrait subjects, arranged alphabetically by forename. Below the Agneses came the Alices, including Alice Liddell, the little girl for whom he created Alice in Wonderland. Mostly good-mannered, occasionally lachrymose and stuffed full of half-remembered governess-led learning, the fictional Alice displays behaviour quite out of step with her age. Instead of doing what she is told to do by the creatures she meets, she behaves like an adolescent (though