Twelfth Night Matinee 22nd March 2017; Vanessa Bell

2^nd March 2017 – a Matinee performance of Twelfth Night

Vanessa Bell at Dulwich Picture Gallery

It was a strange afternoon, weatherwise. I walked to the underground station in pouring rain; I emerged by the Thames in bright sunshine. I walked across the river by the footbridge from Charing Cross Station, the next bridge downstream from Westminster. Then along the Southbank, with its confusing proliferation of concrete modernist buildings, to one of the biggest of them – the National Theatre.

There was a matinee performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, beginning at 2pm. Forty minutes or so into the first half, the terrorist atrocity was perpetrated about ½ mile away, in Westminster. The show went on.

Impressions of Seville

Impressions of Seville

The 100-metre tall bell tower of Seville’s cathedral (La Giralda) has a unique means of ascent. Instead of the usual medieval staircase, winding upwards or downwards narrowly and unevenly and endlessly, there is a brick ramp. It goes up (and down) at angles, and is much to be preferred to stairs.

Il Trovatore and Amadeus - live cinema streaming

Il Trovatore and Amadeus – Screening and Casting

Twice in one recent week I’ve sat in a cinema and watched live broadcasts. The first was from the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden (Il Trovatore). The second was from the National Theatre (Amadeus).

Both were excellent productions (in the main), and I’m not going to add to the many ecstatic reviews which each has garnered. I am writing about three things: race, age and camera work.

Expressionism at the Royal Academy

I Don’t Know Much about Abstract Expressionism and I Don’t Know What I like

There are two related terms “Expressionism” and “Expressivism”. The former belongs to Art or Culture; the latter to philosophy.

Expressivism is a theory of ethics, or morality, that holds that our value judgments, for example, “lying is wrong”, do not, as the jargon has it, have “truth value”, in the manner of an empirical observation or a mathematical proof. There is no objective truth of the matter – only an expression of feeling. “Lying” bad grunt; “truth telling” (presumably scientific truth) good grunt. Or “Boo”; “Hooray”.

Spanish Renaissance Towns near Granada

A Little Tour round Spanish Renaissance Towns

Duende, according to the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca, is the mysterious, almost violent, force that animates the best of artistic performance, especially flamenco:

“Dark sounds….a mysterious force that everyone feels  and no philosopher has explained… the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.”

What's your Literary Cliche for 2016?

What’s your Literary Cliché for 2016?

The leader of the pack is probably Yeats’s Second Coming, with its apocalyptic lines about a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Very few liberal/left commentators on recent political events have been able to resist the poem’s choice phrases:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

…

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

This is all “woe is us” stuff, offering on its surface nothing but unsubtle pessimism. Certainly the poem is usually wrenched out of its historical context – the end of WW1, and the turmoil of events in Ireland and Russia, and, most especially, out of the context of Yeats’s own idiosyncratic and mystical beliefs in unfolding epochs supplanting one another- the “gyres”. By his calculation, an epoch of “progress” was doomed to give place to something savage and reactionary. The fact that over the next decades this actually happened in the West has lent credence to Yeats’s accidental prophetic powers, if not to his philosophy.

Some Things to bear in Mind about Trump

Some things to Keep in Mind about the Trump Election

Everyone (including the victor, his supporters and sympathisers) is in some degree of shock following the victory of Trump. Many who are both shocked and dismayed are in the UK (and may most include most in the UK, but who really knows). How, we ask, did this happen? By which we mean, how did a man of such views and of such a character get the support of so many? A conservative victor running on an isolationist political ticket and a protectionist economic ticket might have been a cause for great regret, but not for the reaction, bordering on revulsion, which Trump has summoned forth.