Culture

About ten minutes in to Thirteen Lives, Boy came in and asked me whether it was any good. I said: ‘Well, it’s quite interesting, actually. I think they’ve got the actual cave divers playing themselves, so the acting is really dull and uncharismatic and a bit unconvincing but at the same time it gives the drama a sort of echt documentary feel…’ Boy, peering at screen: ‘But that’s Viggo Mortensen. You know, Aragorn from Lord of the Rings. And Colin Farrell, who you liked in In Bruges.’ Me: ‘Oh.’ What I still can’t work out is whether my gut response reflects well or badly on the finished product. If you’re making a movie about a real-life event such as the rescue of 12 boys and their football coach from a flooded cave system in Thailand in 2018, does your main duty lie with the drama or with the truth? Director Ron Howard has opted for the latter, with mixed results.

The Barbican’s big summer show is billed on the website as ‘the sold-out musical sensation, Anything Goes’. The term ‘sold-out’ is a strange way to describe a production that’s keen to get your business. You’d be forgiven for clicking away and hunting for a show with seats available. What the Barbican means is that this is a revival of an earlier production that did great business. And that may explain why tickets aplenty are available even on a busy Friday night. This version stars Kerry Ellis as the showgirl, Reno, who falls in love on a transatlantic cruise ship. Virtually every number is a classic. If you read any couplet from the title song you’ll be humming the melody all day. ‘In olden days a glimpse of stocking/ Was looked on as something shocking/ But now God knows …’ Cole Porter was one of the few composers who wrote the lyrics and the music for his shows, and he enjoyed mocking his rivals Rodgers and Hammerstein: ‘It takes two people to write a musical?’ Several hands contributed to the book, including P.

How do you manage a dictatorship? By producing ‘a succession of miracles’, according to Louis-Napoléon, that ‘dazzle and astonish’. In 1852 he inaugurated his Second Empire regime with a strategy of soft power predicated on the assumption that the loyalty of politically volatile Paris was to be won not by violent repression but by visible magnificence and grand designs. This wasn’t an original idea: it followed the policies of le Roi Soleil and Bonaparte, not to mention the Roman emperors. It worked again for Louis-Napoléon because, as well as such jaw-dropping follies as Charles Garnier’s extravagant opera house, it extended to Haussmann’s lavish investment in socially useful boulevards, sewers, housing and parks.