Mr Robot

Verily, we live in a golden age of television. My Freeview box runneth over with dramas being recorded, to be consumed from a nearby sofa unhealthily soon and close together: currently Homeland, River, The Last Kingdom, Fargo, The Returned. More to follow, I have no doubt. Meanwhile there is Amazon Prime and the brave new world of streamed series available through online retailers (I haven't dared subscribe to Netflix: probably I would give up reading altogether). Here I can report mixed results: I gave up on Hand of God after a few episodes, probably on the grounds of the sheer unpleasantness of the leading duo, the mad judge - brilliantly played by Ron Perlman, mark you - and his psycho sidekick, a pairing without the charm of Walter White and Jesse, who must have been in the mind of the production team. The Man in the High Castle scored higher on whatever undemanding barometer I was using and I look forward to the full season in November. Yesterday I tried out episode one of Black Sails, terrific stuff probably aimed at viewers less than half my age. I shall be surrendering to its frantic plot-driven charms in due course.

But my latest binge has been the hackers-take-on-the-corporate-beast saga Mr Robot. This took me back to one of the first TV series to grip me, The Changes, based on the trilogy of novels by Peter Dickinson. I used to come home from school avid to see this drama in which a collective lunacy leads to the smashing of machines and the pursuit of the technologically literate as witches. Years on, nervousness about our own Frankenstein creations grows: witness Humans, the Channel 4 series in which robots, or 'synths', produced as domestic helps, start to exhibit traits which makes them indistinguishable from their human masters (in other words, the only story you can ever really have in a drama about robots). In Mr Robot, post-2008, post-Snowden, post-Ashley Madison, machines are both enemy and friend. Enemy, when they take the form of massive databases storing  personal information and the world's debt; friends, when they are laptops used by brilliant hackers to bring down the beast.

Mr Robot is the story of Eliot (Elliott?), IT worker by day in a computer security company, and hacker by night, obsessively driven to hack into anything that takes his interest, but using his powers to do good, nailing the runners of a paedophile network, for example, in the illustrative opening scene. The story leads him into battle with the dragon E Corp, which actually calls itself in some kind of postmodern metafictional irony, Evil Corp. Eliot runs into a group of hackers who are bent on deleting all records of debt (think, though: your money is itself a debt that the bank owes you; your current account is from the bank's point of view a liability) and thus freeing the world from the grip of neoliberal capitalism. In another irony, this idea is itself a debt to Fight Club, a detail much noted by Amazon reviewers. In fact, Mr Robot is full of this kind of intertextual reference and in a long line of enquiry about the collapsing categories of virtual and real (Borges saw it all coming in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius). Mr Robot himself is the architect of this ambitious scheme, and it is suggested pretty early on that he may be a product of Eliot's imagination.

About halfway through, the plot of Mr Robot loses direction and it becomes instead a trawl through Eliot's inner demons. It goes inwards just when it needs to go outward and explore the actual world a bit more. There are other annoyances: Eliot himself fits too neatly into the caricature of the brilliant IT nerd, and the team of hackers are similarly the usual gang of the variously disenchanted, airlifted in from some eighties movie by the looks of it and strangely undisturbed in their work by the attentions of the NSA. Their brandname of fsociety is distressingly juvenile. Sympathy for Eliot largely evaporated in my case when, as part of some daring break-in scheme, he has to behave in an absolutely foul manner to a blameless employee who is only being friendly. A psychotic executive is brought in to spice things up in a sub-plot that is hard to follow. The end, as we must expect in these cases, is a submission for a second season.

Still, many good things too. Excellent performances all round. One thing I notice in series these days is a much more sophisticated use of music and sound design to build atmospheres. This was part of the shocking and moving effect of a scene involving a car and a prison. for a while I thought it was all too binary, good little guys in denim pitched against the men in suits. But then I realised that the series is smart enough to see flaws in the Great Hacking Scheme, too: namely, once you have toppled the Capitalist Monster what are you going to put in its place? (In the final scenes, I wondered where all the plebs and execs partying actually got their money from). There are two brilliant passages of rapid condensed media studies discourse on the world as we experience it being essentially fake, a mind control system created by big business for its own ends. Lyotard, Chomsky ... eventually, ideas from anywhere get packaged as entertainment. And finally there is the irony of seeing an anti-corporate drama commissioned and streamed by the corporate giant Amazon (A Corp?) for our own entertainment, pushing away the real world for a while with a commercial fiction.  Illusion upon illusion. I watched this series the same week that Talktalk were humbled by a hack, first ascribed to some jihadist group but now, we are told, allegedly conducted by  game-obsessed teenagers. Perhaps Dickinson's luddites were right all along. Off to the garden shed to find a mallet. Down with machines and their sinister codes, and back to a life of honest toil in the fields of Old England.

Strange Arrangements, Drifters

A sailor is washed up on – we suppose – a desert island, and tries to find his way around with the help of an instrument of some kind. Its glimmering red and blue lights are the first thing we see. He meets another castaway and, soon afterwards, another. It appears the sailor’s new companions have whiled away their time on the island by taking refuge in their imagination, and he soon joins them for a fantasy voyage on a raft made up of planks and poles. Over the hour that Drifters lasts, this fantasy world morphs and shifts; puppet characters appear, chests divulge strange contents, and there is a spectacular sea sequence involving huge rolls of tarpaulin (or something like it) which for a remarkable moment rolls up into something like two giant ocean creatures who dance a curious duet. A darker final sequence hints pretty broadly that this is no ordinary island but some kind of Dantean circle, Davey Jones’s locker, an undersea ghost world whose inmates must live on fantasy alone.

Drifters is quite a feast for the senses, with atmospheric use of lighting and ambient sound. It speaks, too, of the essence of theatre, where a paper bag can become a living thing, and the debris of the sea can transform itself, with a little imagination, into a forest, a cavern, a ship, a home. Drifters was a good lesson in how theatre does not need to imitate the realism of film and television. On stage, you can achieve more by going in the other direction, using the crafts of mime, puppetry and evocative movement to create with the audience's participation an alternative world. It was a fine masterclass in these arts. I would, though, have liked some kind of plot. I felt I was seeing a sequence of well-though-out routines created, presumably, through improvisation in the studio. But without some kind of narrative arc, bringing its own drama of twists and turns, it was difficult for the show to gather momentum or make us care greatly for the characters. Story really is a wonderful and important thing, and putting it to one side creates a challenge for performers and audience alike. As a celebration of the imagination through theatrical means, though, Drifters undoubtedly succeeds; and I shall certainly be looking out for the next production by Winchester-based company Strange Arrangements.

John Plender, Capitalism

The capitalist system, which we live and breathe, rests on a remarkable logic: a group of selfish individuals, each one seeking  private happiness, produces a society where the greatest possible number get what they want – or something like it. Through the magic of the free market, Adam Smith’s too-oft-quoted ‘invisible hand’, selfishness actually produces its opposite, a functioning and prosperous society broadly advantageous to its members. Private acquisition agglomerates into public good; from competition comes community; greed spawns gregariousness, or at any rate its mercantile analogue. This central paradox, which has its origin in utilitarianism’s pursuit of the maximization of pleasure across society, is quite dizzying when you think about it. How can the pursuit of A, by the alchemy of the market, produce not-A? Yet this system, based on the private pursuit of capital and so known as capitalism, has achieved remarkable things. Over two centuries or so, it has raised the living standards of most of the world and dramatically reduced global poverty. The technology, medicine, comforts and luxuries many of us take for granted today would have seemed a miracle even a generation ago.  No other economic system is available as a credible alternative: feudalism has disappeared into history, leaving only a quaint residue such as the peerage system and the royal family; communist central planning collapsed dramatically (economically speaking: central planning in other areas, such as education, is pursued ardently across the bureaucratised West). Other than capitalism, what economic system is going to bring, say, a Bangladeshi or a Somalian the standard of living I enjoy – running water, hygiene, education, all the rest of it? If you agree that they are as entitled to these things as I am  (and what rational basis could there be for disagreement on this point?) what is there to do but to espouse the market as the most likely source of this development? Capitalism has triumphed over its rivals and has a long list of achievements to its credit.

Yet gung-ho, Gordon Gecko ‘Greed is Good’ celebrations of capitalism are rare these days; and Capitalism is presently assailed by many critics, from many shades of the political spectrum (only a very selective observer could say they are all ‘left wing’). For one thing, the fact that it is posited on human selfishness makes it ethically dubious, whatever the alleged long-term beneficial consequences of this greed may be. Moral intuition and religious systems alike persuade us that avarice is a vice, corrupting of the self and damaging to others. And the model of a rational consumer going into a free market , and thereby helping it to function efficiently for the good of the majority, exposes itself to critique at every point: are we really rational consumers? Do we not desire and buy things on a whim, yielding to the tide of fashion, or sometimes - perhaps regularly - in an act of madness?  And what does it do to us psychologically, ethically, to think of ourselves as essentially ‘consumers’ anyway? To make us into non-stop consumers, a massive advertising industry is necessary, playing on every conceivable fear, anxiety and fantasy to make us think that buying stuff will make us happy. And to make all that stuff that we are duped into thinking we need, the planet is steadily raided for its resources, polluted and spoiled. We are consuming the earth we live off; and if that sounds eco-hippy, then capitalism’s purchase of the channels of information in education and the media has been a success. And how free, we may then ask, is the alleged ‘free’ market, where government intervention and policy massively influences trade and production, favouring some in the market at the cost of others? How can we call it efficient, we may persist,  when it is so obviously inherently unstable, with a rollercoaster of booms, busts, frenzies, and recessions? And rather than the greatest good of the greatest number flowing from this market - a market so intrusive and ubiquitous we now carry it around with us on our phones - we see instead ever-widening gaps between the haves and the have-nots as goods are unevenly distributed, partly because the governments that might do something to distribute wealth more equitably are themselves owned by the rich who want to keep their treasure hoard to themselves. Consumerism, materialism, waste and pollution, injustice and inequality, the destruction of the planet and the trivialisation of the human spirit. Capitalism’s defenders face too many sane and sagacious critics to be blandly complacent.

John Plender, thankfully, is anything but complacent, and interested in serious debate. Capitalism leads us through the subject with great dexterity. As a writer for The Financial Times and a member of various financial groups and forums, Plender is what one might think of as a member of the establishment. Yet far from the closed-mindedness  one associates with this rather fictitious group, Plender shows common ground with many anti-establishment critics. He does not believe the mess of 2007-08 has been anywhere near cleared up through improvements in analysis, assumptions and regulation – indeed, he fears another and bigger crash is on the cards. He points out inequitable wage differentials, and notes the waste of human resources as the talented young are drawn into the financial sector and away from productive parts of the economy; and his brilliantly lucid analysis of the Eurozone crisis is pretty severe at the behaviour of the northern countries towards the south. In an interesting chapter on the art market, the author clearly feels commodification, the equation of financial value with other kinds of value, has to stop somewhere. Capitalism is not a defence of the status quo and makes clear that capitalism needs to get its house in much better order if further gains are to be delivered and catastrophe avoided. Like Erasmus on the Catholic Church, Plender believes the system needs to reform from within, not be dismantled and replaced with an unclear substitute.

An attractive feature of the book is the use of literary sources to investigate topics. It is refreshingly historically grounded. So we have passages of Defoe and Addison on the London Exchange, Goethe’s Faust as a commentary on externalities and social dysfunction, and apposite quotations from Dickens, de Tocqueville and many others besides. The author is open to the ideas of many different kinds of economist, too. Like Ha-Joon Chang, Plender thinks it is a pity that many economists today take the Chicago school as a comprehensive explanatory model and ignore other perspectives. Certainly some young students of economics I meet come across as acolytes of a faith rather than serious analysts of events. How satisfying it is to find here a range of writers being drawn on and engaged with: across pages 282-4, for example, we come across Marx, Keynes, Friedman and Raghuram Rajan in a discussion of public debt. Capitalism might perhaps have said something more about the psychology induced by capitalist ideology; and somewhat surprisingly there is no chapter specifically about environmental damage, which the author himself mentions as one of the greatest challenges to be faced. This is also not the book to read it you want to find out what ‘derivative’ or ‘futures market' means, since the author has to take some things for granted just to get going (that said, some terms are defined deftly along the way). However, no one book on this huge subject can do everything and the topics covered by these chapters, from the nature of money itself to debt, speculation, banking and gold are described with style and insight. I learned a lot from Capitalism and would certainly recommend it as a guide to a subject, and debate, which is far too important to be left to economists, establishment or otherwise.

The Glass Menagerie

We greatly enjoyed The Glass Menagerie at the Nuffield, the first show to be directed by Sam Hodges since he took over as Director there in 2013. Tennessee Williams's 1944 play is strongly autobiographical: would-be writer Tom Wingfield (TW, note) longs to escape from a home in which everyone is in flight from reality: his mother, a suffocating, domineering southerner abandoned by her husband and taking resort in fantasy and nostalgia; his sister Laura, who has dropped out of school and business college and occupies herself going for walks, playing phonograph records and looking after her collection of glass animals, her 'glass menagerie'; and Tom himself, precariously employed in a shoe warehouse where he is known as 'Shakespeare' for his dreamy hobby of writing. The summit of this heartbreak household's ambitions is a 'gentleman caller' who will fall for Laura and spirit her away. The play leads up to this great event and its repercussions for the family. Does it end happily ever after? Remember, this is Tennessee Williams we are talking about here.

There was a strong design element to the production, credited to someone evidently so eminent that he is known simply as Ultz. The stage, framed by moving boards, resembled a film screen, picking up on Tom's escapist obsession with going to the movies. Tom himself spent most of the time either in front of the stage or in the audience, leading us through his 'memory play' as it played before us. Subdued colours and dim lighting produced a monochrome effect suggesting memory haze and early film. There were captions, slides and live streaming of Tom himself, and a set of metal steps for the fire escape from the family's apartment, also representing the escape route for Tom and a kind of bridge between past and present. Lighting and sound were used to tremendous atmospheric effect, and there were some ravishingly beautiful moments with candles, windblown curtains and the glowing glass unicorn.


There's always a danger that such directorial and designer cleverness overwhelms the play, or suggests a lack of confidence in it - as I think happened in Lyndsey Turner's Hamlet - but here the ideas were thought through and brought out Williams's poetic vision without distracting from it. Acting throughout was terrific. Dannie Lee Wynter played Tom with a caustic confidence, gradually revealing his character's insecurities and tragic inadequacy as family provider. Belinda Lang portrayed his mother Amanda with great understanding, showing a character who is at the same time insufferable yet understandable in her anxieties. The scene between Laura (Pearl Chanda) and her gentleman caller Mr O'Connor (Wilf Scolding) was totally compelling, touching and finally devastating. All in all, a remarkable piece of ensemble acting and a bold, committed production. The Nuffield moves towards Christmas fare now, but I'm very glad we caught this, and thankful I listened to two people who recommended it. Why some people in Winchester think you have to go to London to see good theatre is a mystery which passes understanding.

Flare Path

A flare path (as I learned while watching the play) was the line of lights that illuminated a runway to enable WWII Bomber Command pilots to take off and land - dark before and after, and perilously visible to enemy night fighters as well. Terence Rattigan knew a thing or two about flare paths: he was a tail gunner in RAF Coastal Command, and wrote the play during service (and put a tail gunner in it). Indeed, the manuscript was nearly lost when his aircraft was damaged in combat. In Flare Path the play, we see RAF officers and their crews staying with their wives in a hotel in Lincolnshire, close to their airbase. For all the  jovial banter and stiff upper lip, they know they could be called out at any moment without notice, to be sent on missions from which they may not return. Dramatic action comes from a love triangle involving actress Patricia, her old flame fading film star Peter Kyle and her husband Teddy, whom she married recently without passion, apparently despairing of making a proper go of it with married Kyle and seeking respectability. Teddy does not know about her previous relationship, and telling him is simply unthinkable.  (Teddy later confesses he suffers, as any sane person would one might think, from 'funk' while flying a plane and being shot at). Patricia is torn between her loyalty to pilot husband and her romantic attraction to Kyle, a dilemma resolved in perhaps a rather predictable way, given that the play was performed in 1942 (the fact that Kyle is a naturalised American and thus a non-combatant is a sort of lingering hint). Other plots weave across this one, including a marriage between a barmaid and a Polish count, who insists on her being addressed as 'Countess'. Count Skriczevinsky speaks hardly any English, source of much good-natured mirth. Does he love Doris as a wartime pleasure, or for ever? Doris isn't sure. Before, during, and after the men are called on a night mission, a goodly amount of pink gin is consumed. Comedy leavens the deadly serious central subject.

This production by the Original Theatre Company brought out the play's strengths to great effect. Rattigan had a genius for exploring the depths of emotion swirling away beneath English reserve, and an apparent belief in the victory of traditional decency over personal gratification. He had a sympathy for those who cannot live up to ideals their culture sets for them which still touches the heartstrings today. He was also a great craftsman, and Flare Path moves irresistibly through exposition and development to two climactic moments. One of these is based on reading a letter. Rattigan liked the dramatic power of documents. One thinks of Crocker-Harris reading the inscription to his book in The Browning Version, the newspaper report that crowns The Winslow Boy, and the rather different one in Separate Tables. Less conducive to modern tastes is the sentimentality. The final scenes just seem too soft, but to a wartime audience who of course did not know how things would end, there must have been fairly strict boundaries to what was palatable: Rattigan had difficulties even getting the play put on because theatre managers felt the public did not want a piece about war. Then there is the  patronising habit of making working class characters figures of fun (and shrewish Maudie, with her endless prattle about bus timetables, is hardly even fun today). No point being too stern about this: after all Shakespeare had his rustic clowns to give us a break from the verse of the nobles. The idea that only the educated few have complex interior lives has a long ancestry. Back to the show, there was terrific ensemble acting throughout, and no point really in picking out individual names.


The performance was compelling and finally very moving, partly because it turned one's mind to the historical realities. I'm sure my Battle of Britain veteran grandfather would have approved, and I'm glad his grandson knows a bit more now about the life that crews and officers endured. Although in many ways a period piece, Flare Path - when given a production as strong as this one - still does a vital job of bringing its fast-receding period to life. Presumably theatres in 1942 would not have had the sound and lighting effects that we enjoyed at Theatre Royal Winchester. But then they would not have needed much help in imagining them. The play ends with a wartime song, 'I don't want to join the airforce'. I suppose in its original London run, the audience, stirred but not shaken, would have joined in.

Roger Scruton, Culture Counts

In Culture Counts, Roger Scruton mounts a defence of the heritage of high culture of the West against what he perceives as its enemies: fanatical Islam (only glancingly referred to), the operations of the market (briefly discussed near the end) and, above all, the attitude of 'repudiation' advanced by multiculturalists in the universities. He argues that the literature, music and art handed down to us - or at any rate the best of it - contains a body of emotional and moral knowledge that is intrinsically valuable and provides the imagination with a purer and better air to breathe in than the popular confections of the moment. The purpose of education in the humanities should not be to benefit the student with a set of instrumental skills, but rather to look after the culture itself by training a fresh set of guardians to look after it. The criticism we teach and practise should be to do with elucidating the aesthetic value and moral lessons of works. Despite the depredations he sees wrought by the multiculturalists, Scruton sees hope in the efflorescence of traditional practice in neoclassical architecture, music that returns to pre-Modernist tonality and writing that is similarly embedded in the conversation of canonical works.

One strength of Scruton is always the writing. He frames his arguments clearly and gracefully in a rhythmical prose that is a pleasure to read and a standing lesson for the tone-deaf scribes of the journals. His style is precise but also conveys deep feeling. Consider the phrasing and cadences of this sentence from his description of the decline of architectural teaching: 'Students of architecture were no longer to learn about the properties of natural materials, about the grammar of mouldings and ornaments, about the discipline of the orders, or the nature of light and shade'. Whatever one's views on building design, that is a beautiful summation of the essence of the classical view. The author is particularly strong at explicating philosophical points. I came away from his discussion of the different kinds of knowledge, for example, with that pleasant sensation of having had my mind tidied and cleared. And similarly with the passage on the thin crust of normality, with barbarous instincts beneath and the serene air of art and spiritual empathy above, and in many other instances. Some points are made in a single striking sentence: the few pages on Foucault, for example, ask us to consider whether that thinker can help us at all in elucidating the truth-value of any part of a governing discourse. He can be very funny, as in the attack on Le Corbusier. And I warmed to Scruton's sense of battling against the powers-that-be in academia. Though I am out of touch with the academic world now, I sense that his kind of traditionalism still has little purchase in the modern seminar and lecture hall. The book is an interesting contrast to John Carey's What Good are the Arts, which had the peculiar quality of an author sounding cross at the very idea of a higher culture, even though he was clearly on the winning side. One has to look hard for Carey's enemies - presumably Scruton and a few senior members of Oxford college common rooms - but Scruton's are at any rate easy enough to discern. I wonder if both authors overstate the influence of university courses generally.

Some parts of the book left me with reservations. Perhaps the weakest part is his chapter on teaching, with its wildly romantic vision of children rote-learning and acquiring a love of medieval Latin and the classic texts. There is no sensible suggestion here how such a programme could possibly be implemented, and I don't even see what he imagines happening in a lesson. Most of what he posits, concerning the slow acquisition of moral truths, would happen on a subliminal level anyway rather than by direct instruction. The chief enemy of promise in schools is not an academic culture of scepticism, but the dominant discipline of accountancy, which demands that any piece of work should be judged against a hyper-rational scheme which breaks down skills and 'objectives' into specific categories, each carrying percentage points. It is an insane approach to the business of learning (for a business is what it has become in all sectors of education), and has nothing whatever to do with the way the mind works or how culture lives. But unfortunately it is the system which dictates the practices of every single school and teacher in Britain today. Next to this one can gaze at Scruton's vision and sigh a little. But he must know that his kind of education has no chance whatever of taking effect, and so the chapter really reads as the indulgence of a fantasy.

Nor am I sure what our author would like to happen at university level, except for a mass removal of feminists, Marxists and the like. He castigates universities for adopting a programme based on various kinds of scepticism; but perhaps it is the job of a university to be sceptical. There are some well-aimed shots about some kinds of study which simply deaden the mind because the only tolerable answers are those known in advance; and the point that the so-called liberalism of some kinds of theoretical inquiry is simply a way of excluding anything off-message seems hard to counter, at least at an abstract level. It does seem to be the case that the same dismal left-wing dogma is preached across many university courses. What alternative is being offered, though? Elevating selected cultural artefacts to the 'high' category carries its own dangers. It misses the internal tensions which the great works and their creators leave us with. Is it repudiation to point out that in our greatest literature we also find anti-Semitic caricature? What are we to make of the fact the The Faerie Queene carries in its sumptuous verse the notion that the Irish are savages and should be exterminated by some kind of murderous robot? Is this a denial of our heritage? The issues seem to me rather to be things worth discussing. His reading of texts as embodiments of moral lessons seems painfully reductive (the single example of what we are meant to take from King Lear is most unconvincing. Nor do I see that one has to choose between Scruton's kind of reverence for art as embalming the best that has been thought and said on the one hand, and the hard-edged world of modern criticism on the other. I can be moved by King Lear one day and read a cultural materialist discussion of it the next, without the second experience damaging the first. This is, to be sure, a cognitive challenge, but the human mind is well equipped to perform distinct and even opposite operations at the same time.

Scruton's view continues a tradition from Arnold, Eliot and Leavis, and it is important that this tradition persists. In this book at any rate it seems to be deeply informed by a sense of some lost world of collective values, located chiefly in the shared beliefs of religion. Around Scruton's writing there hovers the yearning for community, for a way of thinking that confers membership in a society resting on firm foundations, at peace with itself. I simply have no idea where in history that world is to be found. I gained a great deal from this book, and would recommend it as a stimulating read; but I do not find myself sufficiently enchanted by the lament for an imagined golden age to seek membership of this particular club.

Hamlet (Cumberbatch)

We went to see Hamlet in what is rapidly becoming my favourite way of seeing London productions - streamed from the theatre onto a cinema screen, cutting out the expense and fatigue of travel and bringing you up close to the acting. It was particularly appropriate to this record-breaking-sold-out-within-minutes production directed by Lyndsey Turner and starring Benedict Cumberbatch. For this show had so many cinematic effects, it felt like watching a film turned into a stage play and then turned back into a film again. Lyndsey Turner was working with Designer Es Devlin; their last collaboration, which I saw in the NT Lyttleton, was Caryl Churchill's A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. Both productions in their joint vision have featured a large and well-stocked banqueting table and large amounts of earth (in neither case required by the texts, both of which can be performed on a nearly empty stage). The Turner-Devlin Hamlet was set a vast palace interior and used Richteresque ambient music to underscore the emotions of the scenes. There were chases under strobe, freeze frames and a stunning dust-storm at the end of the long first half, leaving the palace a half-sunk ruin for the second, symbolising the moral decay of Claudius and Denmark no doubt. Heaven knows how many lighting cues there were; the whole thing was certainly visually exciting to watch, with a wardrobe ranging from evening dress to modern military and a delightful large toy fort.

I start with the look of the thing because that did, over time, become a distraction. Shakespeare's verse is deeply visual because it was written for a less furnished stage than a lavish London show would dare to put before us. A clever design can accentuate the feelings of a work, but it mustn't work against the words themselves. Here it did. when Claudius is giving his first speech on the death of the old Hamlet and his marriage to Gertrude, we shouldn't be gawping at ornate evening dress and weird table props. There were moments when what we saw and what we heard took us in different directions. For example, we saw in mime Hamlet put on an Indian head-dress in what appeared to be an affectionate, playful scene with Ophelia. But then we saw Ophelia reporting Hamlet's appearance (2.1), 'My lord, as I was sewing in my closet'. But what she was describing was not what we had just been seeing at all. What were we to make of this? Was the idea that she was making it up? But why would she do that? Then there is design and stage business when none is really needed. Consider the brief scene about the fight for a scrap of land in Poland, setting us up for 'How all occasions do inform against me' (4.4). It's an odd afterthought of a scene in any case, and hardly needs a whole military camp with soldiers in tents blowing on their fingers to bring it alive. This is theatre adapted to the hyper-visual world of the modern audience, I suppose. But it must first and foremost adapt itself to the text. The Players scene (shortened to lose the dumb show) didn't work simply because in order to see the lovely mini-stage on the stage we couldn't see Claudius, and everything is meant to be about his reaction (the camera helped us cinemagoers a bit).


All this can be justified by theatre's constant need to recreate itself, and the changing expectations of a younger audience (it was great to see some youngsters at Vue Cinema when we saw it, apparently there of their own volition and not part of a school trip; if Cumberbatch brought them and cool visuals held them then that's an undiluted good). But that brings me to a further grumble. If you're going to bring Shakespeare to the people, then it really should be Shakespeare, untampered with. In this showing, the opening battlement scene was lost and sort of transposed into Hamlet's meeting with Horatio; but that first scene, amongst other things, establishes Horatio's character as the studious sceptic, a foil for Hamlet's more intuitive cast of mind. Polonius was heavily cut. His first speech amounted to 'He hath. my lord. I do beseech you, give him leave to go.' In the text you'd get in a bookshop, we get: 'He hath, my lord, wrung from me my slow leave / By laboursome petition ...' and so on in leisured rhetorical fashion. Notice how this speech characterises Polonius as a windbag, a trait developed in his advice to Laertes (also edited), his spying on Laertes (cut entirely), and his meeting with Hamlet (reduced). In this production, Polonius was in fact turned into a model of concision, making the Queen's exasperated 'More matter, with less art' quite meaningless. Shakespeare's character of Polonius had been turned into a fairly nondescript elderly courtier. But of course, we must concede, Shakespeare's company cut, and we must regard the texts we have as flexible things, at best approximations to what the first audience heard. Still, I don't think flexibility should reach to simplifying and modernising the words themselves. Instead of 'Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off', we got 'nightly colour'. Why? Is 'nighted' really too brain-achingly tough to figure out, especially when he's wearing black? Accents shifted. Claudius gave 'comméndable' in the modern stress, against the metre of the line, but the correct 'perséver' a couple of lines later. We heard, or I think I heard heard, 'Things rank in nature possess it merely', and I contend that the missing 'do' matters. In Gertrude's description of Ophelia's death the 'hoar' leaves were kindly translated for us into 'pale'. Unless I am mistaken, every mention of a Polack was nervously corrected to 'Polish'. Everything was delivered in the modern naturalistic style: Gertrude's 'I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid' had at least two heavy pauses breaking up the line, just to take one example among many. Well, this is Shakespeare today and it can bring lines alive in unexpected ways. I don't think I'd ever really registered 'The sun no sooner shall the mounains touch' (4.1) but something about its delivery on this occasion put the image vividly in my mind. This is why one goes to Shakespeare repeatedly. I wonder if there will be a swing towards a more verse-oriented delivery of Shakespeare in coming years. Perhaps I should forget these reservations and get into the flow. Perhaps. But orchestras don't change Mozart's notes, and art galleries don't alter their masterpieces to make them easier to a modern sensibility. There is something indicative of a deep lack of confidence in altering the thing you are bringing to the public, however slightly. Wedges continue to have thin ends.


All that being said, I did enjoy this Hamlet and was glad I went. There were some excellent performances. Ciaran Hinds was a menacing Claudius, and Karl Johnson was brilliant, doubling as Ghost and Gravedigger and getting both parts across vividly. Sian Brooke was an affecting Ophelia, making her frankly tedious mad scenes into something touching, especially when she went to the piano, and Matthew Steer was an amusing Rosencrantz. Benedict Cumberbatch himself was full of vocal and physical energy, bringing across Hamlet's relish of exercise both mental and physical just as he is saying he has had enough of it all. In fact his action-packed performance perhaps diverted us from the point that the play revolves around his hesitation, his in-action when it comes to the moment of vengeance. But this is just hard to get. How many in a modern audience are worried that they might go to Judgement unconfessed? Yet the failure to kill Claudius while he is a-praying revolves around this. Cumberbatch made sense of the soliloquies and his Hamlet overall was humorous, genial and engaging.  I did find the music, the antics, the imaginative staging, the cool visuals exciting. And there were moments which came across effectively and poignantly - 'there's providence in the fall of a sparrow' struck me as a particularly well-tuned moment. But after the immediate excitement had faded I felt the production tried a little too hard to be like a movie and lost the intimate verbal drama of Shakespeare's creation. Somewhere at the back of my mind was a speech by Steven Berkoff reported in the paper that same day, on how young actors these days don't know or care about the history and traditions of their craft. I don't know whether that is true, but practitioners can always benefit from opening themselves to older styles. Also in my mind, a letter to the paper a while back wondering why it is that while musicians work hard to fathom what Beethoven meant by a phrase or passage and try to bring it out in performance, productions of plays and operas often push the author to one side and 'interpret' their material into some bizarre places, and sometimes out of recognition. There must be an answer to that, but I can't think what it is. Perhaps it's to do with markets, directors and designers needing to have a brand. We mustn't overstate the role of the 'creative team' as it's unfailingly called these days. I love directing plays, but I can't see it as a creative act comparable to writing one. Shakespeare is the Creator we should be left thinking about. All unresolved issues pattering round the brain. Hamlet, more than any other work, at least gets you thinking.

Last Judgment Tympanum, Autun

The Last Judgement of Autun, completed about  1145, speaks to us across the centuries. We may not see this great sculptural composition today with the same wonder as medieval pilgrims, many of whom were lepers come to venerate the relics of their patron saint Lazare and pray for a miraculous cure. But we can still feel a great impact from this mighty subject – Christ in judgement, the dead rising from their coffins and being gathered into Heaven or Hell according to their merits. And we can give ourselves time to experience the emotional power, or affect, of what we see. Partly, this is carried by individual episodes, like the horror-movie scenes of the damned being seized by giant hands, lifted bodily and thrust into strange containers by sneering demons; or the almost comical sight of the saved in the New Jerusalem opposite, looking contentedly out at the view below. But the expressive force of the Judgement is also a matter of its formal means: the power of Christ is communicated by his massive scale, his hands magisterially outstretched and his gaze concentrated ahead, as if it is we who are being appraised for eternity. The bold symmetry of the figure of Christ equates him with cosmic harmony, the order of the whole universe as represented by the sun and moon beside him. As we look, we feel Christ’s Majesty in the strain of the supporting angels, and we sense the subservience of the Apostles to his right in their strange, elongated bodies. Throughout, we get a sense, so frequent  in Romanesque art, of teeming tumultuous action – look, for example, at the balletic bodies of the angels with their great summoning horns, loud enough to awaken the dead, as twisted and coiled with energy as any jazz trumpeter. Indeed, having mentioned jazz, we might also pick up a curiously modern visual drama: the stretched figures remind us of Giacommetti, the crouching, huddled, leaning and clinging bodies are what we’d see in a Pina Bausch dance work. After the five hundred year hiatus of perspectival naturalism, modern art gazes into the unconscious and picks up where medieval culture left off.

We could spend much longer taking in the formal qualities of the work. Indeed one approach to this art is to concentrate on our immediate response to line, curve, relationships of mass, formal patterns, the play of light. This is what an artist like Antoni Tàpies chiefly took away from this art, and used in his own work; Meyer Schapiro’s description of the Moissac tympanum is an example of patient, slow looking over every visual detail, relating part to whole and savouring its formal, plastic properties.  What can we say of the style of Gislebertus (to take that for the moment as the name of the artist)? First, that he clearly let his imagination work on the subject he was given. Notice the differentiation in the risen, whom we see process along the lintel. The blocks of stone they stand on are their tombs, yanked open as God’s Second Coming pulls them back into the fierce, blinding light of Judgement. The divine mandorla in which He appears, presiding over the whole Cosmos, is an explosion of energy like a second Big Bang. Among the saved we notice a group of small figures – children! – gathered ecstatically around an angel, two bishops with croziers, a monk, and two pilgrims with bags bearing the symbols of the cross and the scallop, to show they have journeyed from Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela respectively.  On the other side, the scene of the angel rejecting one of the damned evokes a strong compassion. It reminds me of Masaccio’s Expulsion in the Brancacci chapel. Some accounts of the history of art have it that Masaccio and his fellow Florentines rediscovered complex human emotion in art after centuries of rigid medieval poses and faces; but a good look at Autun makes clear that this neat narrative is, to say the least, simplified. The Autun Last Judgement is full of recognisable human psychology: the apostles crowd towards God like sports fans hoping for an autograph (are they pleading on behalf of the judged? ); the gracious, leaning figure of Mary on God’s right signifies her infinite grace; the demon and St Michael are intent on their battle for a soul, and the terrified figures cling to St Michael’s feet as they cower from the three-headed serpent. All these incidents are bursting with character and energy. Even the figures in the outer archivolt, which illustrates the times of the year with the zodiac, have a realistic feel to them. They seem intent on, and happy in, their work.

Symbols have a history. Scholarship has related many of the iconographic details of this Last Judgement to eastern influence; the arrival of Byzantine motifs, such as the appearance of Mary in a Judgement scene – this is the first example in the West – reminds us of the fruitful interaction of national styles that marks the Romanesque period. The whole scene, too, is a wonderful example of how medieval art takes Christian ideas so literally: weighing souls is not a metaphor, but a real weigh-up on a scale; and it seems from this sculpture that there is no way of getting into heaven except by being physically pulled up, or pushed and dragged in through a convenient window. The tymapanum takes our gaze to the hidden mysteries of heaven and hell; but it also brings those places vividly down to earth.

As well as its artistic qualities, The Autun Last Judgement is also a remarkable artistic feat. The central scene of Christ and the angels is carved onto 13 separate blocks of stone, and the upper and lower registers around them take up 16 more. To support this huge weight, the lintel is made from two parts and supported by central column. It seems likely that the main figures were carved at ground level and further work was done in situ, when the stones were in position, to make possible exact continuity across limbs and drapery, concealing the joins beneath. The point of the whole exercise was not to create a work of art to be admired, but to instruct and scare the populace. The various inscriptions make this clear: above the damned, for example. The Latin means ‘May terror cover those who are in bondage on account of earthly error and the horror of this scene shows them their lot’.  And above Christ: ‘I alone dispose of all things and crown merit. Those who are led astray by crime will be judged and chastised by me’. In its time, then, this work had a powerful ideological function: for all its brilliance, we may say, it was a tool of control by the Church over the minds and imaginations of the faithful. It was there to scare, but also to comfort, as the poor and humble could imagine the bliss of being with God in paradise, wearing fine linen and living in a palace in the company of angels.

In later centuries, amazingly, this sculpture came to be seen as crude, and the church canons plastered over the whole tympanum in 1766, erasing the Virgin’s face and breaking off Christ’s nose to make an even surface. This act at any rate saved it from the attentions of post-revolutionary anti-clerical destruction (of which Cluny was a victim) and the work was discovered (literally, dis-covered) in 1837. It should be seen as a part of a greater whole, for the rest of Autun Church contains more superb stonework, among them a stunning capital carving of the hanging of Judas. Gislebertus, who ‘signs’ the work ‘Gislebertus hoc  fecit’,  is usually credited as the sculptor, though Linda Seidl argues that he was in fact a member of the ducal family responsible for the acquisition of the saint’s relics. Whoever he was, we may feel he occupied a very different world from us. Yet we too have our devils – think of the Joker in Batman, for example – and social media is energetically used every day to shame those who have strayed from the path of correct behaviour. Perhaps we are not so distant from our medieval forebears as we may think.

Don Denny, ‘The Last Judgement Tympanum at Autun: Its Sources and Meaning’, Speculum, 67:3 (July, 1982), 532-547.

Denis Grivot, Twelfth Century Sculpture in the Cathedral of Autun (Colmar-Ungersheim, 1980)

Meyer Schapiro, Romanesque Architectural Sculpture (University of Chicago Press, 2006)

Linda Seidel, Legends in Limestone: Lazarus, Gislebertus and the Cathedral of Autun (University of Chicago Press, 1999)

 

 

The Apse Mural of St Climent de Taüll (c.1123)

‘Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so,  Amen. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.’

This is part of the vision of St John’s Book of Revelations. It is given artistic expression in this mural painting from the apse of St Climent de Taüll, a small church in the mountainous region of the Vall de Boí in Catalonia. As we stand before it, we are confronted by image of Maiestas Domini, the Majesty of the Lord. One moment, we regard him, static, immutable, seated on a rainbow, in the immaterial realm of the divine. But the next we imagine Him swooping down from heaven towards us, the highest authority in the universe administering the justice our deeds deserve. This is not the kindly God of modern faith, but a terrifying King, the heavenly judge, the Pantocrator - ruler of all, Creator and Destroyer, Alpha and Omega, beginning and end of things. His right hand is raised in blessing, but the blessing is also a reminder of his divine power. Vast in scale, surrounded by the energy of his mandorla, crowned with a nimbus bearing a crucifer, God is regally dressed in tunic and gem-studded mantle. He stares directly at us, his feet resting on the earth as his footstool. His left arm holds open the Book, with the reminder ‘Ego sum lux mundi’, ‘I am the light of the world’. The small, illiterate, peasant community who gazed on this in their little mountain church in the twelfth century must have felt a dread which the modern viewer can only imagine.

This image is a theophany, a vision of divine truth. It does not record any specific episode but gives visible form to the invisible truths of God’s nature. Around God on the upper register are various figures and creatures, pulsing with energy as, in counterpoint to God’s frontal pose, they twist and lean and gesture to the Godhead. Revelations helps us to decipher them:

...  and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle. And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.

This is the tetramorph, the group of four beasts which medieval theologians took to represent the four evangelists. As we see it, the lion is bottom left, its feet held by an angel. This is the symbol of St Mark. The calf is on our right, again held by an angel. This is St Luke. Above these images we can read ‘St Marcus EG’ and ‘S Lucha EG’, ‘EG’ standing for ‘Evangelist’. On the row above them, we see the beast which ‘had a face as a man’ (Matthew) holding the gospel, and opposite him an angel holding an eagle, symbol of St John. The six wings are given to the Seraphim and Cherubim at the extremes of the upper image. The monks who used the church for their hours of service would have provided the chant, the processions and liturgy to make up the acts of the Church, of which this and the other church paintings formed a part. This is an important point. The images we view as ‘art’ today were only a part of the total and ongoing act of worshipping and contemplating the divine. To the monks, as they continually pondered the mysteries of the deity, the image would have held endless  levels of symbolism. Just as in their books we find annotations constantly relating one text to another, Old Testament to New, the scriptures to the patristic commentaries of the Church Fathers, so Romanesque imagery can generate multiple layers of interpretation: the four circles in which Mark and Luke are represented, for example, suggest the four wheels of the Chariot described by the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel (1:5-21); and on the summit of the arches above the painting we see a Dextera Domini, the right hand of God. This pointing hand is symbol of witness, protection and power. Next, in an axis radiating out to the viewer, is a seven-eyed Lamb of God, emblem of Christ’s sacrifice. If we turn to Revelations chapter 5, we find references to seven seals, seven eyes and seven horns, representing ‘the seven spirits of God sent forth into all the earth’.  With the Pantocrator, these other images – the hand, the Lamb - make up a slightly different image of the Trinity from the one we are used to. So we have the Apocalypse, the Trinity, and an Old Testament vision all superimposed before us. We also know from remaining fragments that the surrounding arches also contained the figures of Cain and Abel and the story of the poor man and Lazarus.

Beneath the Absolute realm of the Upper register we have the Temporal realm of five apostles and Mary. They bear witness to the vision of God above, and stand, in a fully frontal pose, in a highly stylized arcade, itself symbolising the Universal Church and the Celestial Jerusalem. Mary holds a chalice, the vessel of the Eucharist, and next to her, on the other side of the window, John holds up his book. A detail to notice is that these sacred objects are held with covered hands, a detail of liturgical practice we can see elsewhere (for example, the mosaic of Justinian at Ravenna): note the covered hands of the angels bearing the gospel and St John’s eagle in the upper register. Beneath the apostles would have been a third register, representing the lowest world,  that of earthly creatures, depicted in a highly stylized geometrical form. But of this only some faint traces of zig-zag pattern remain.

The St Climent de Taüll paintings (there are some others, and the whole church was originally covered with them) are, then, rich in imagery which unlocks for us a medieval world in which just about everything was seen through the lens of symbolism. But we can also experience them in purely formal terms. We can respond to the symmetrical face of God, with its piercing eyes and dramatic arched eyebrows, to the juxtaposition of His severe, rigid posture and the ecstatic figures around Him. The bold linearity, the expressiveness of the arabesques and curves – in God’s long hair, for example – or the ‘flying folds’ of the drapery can all speak to us across the centuries. We can sense how the figures are pushed forward by the bands of colour behind them and sense how the whole composition is transforming natural elements like limbs and heads and pulling them in the direction of geometric abstraction. Scholars have identified stylistic influences from Byzantine, Mozarabic (art influence by Arabs, who still occupied much of Spain at this time) and Islamic art. At the same time, it can seem surprisingly modern. Artists such as Picabia, Breton, Picasso and Tàpies have all drawn inspiration from the anti-naturalistic, expressive resources of Romanesque art.

St Climent de Taüll itself, as we noted earlier,  is the church of a village in the Valley of Boí, up in the Spanish Pyrenees. This small area has one of the most concentrated amounts of Romanesque art in the world. Much of it was uncovered and identified in the early twentieth century and this painting, with several others, was transferred to canvas by Italian experts and moved to Barcelona. This was partly for conservation, but mainly because American collectors were already showing an interest in purchasing it, in an early, unregulated art market, and Barcelona was anxious to preserve this extraordinary art as a part of its national heritage. The expedition sent out in 1907 to make an inventory of the surviving artefacts was commissioned by the newly founded Institute of Catalan Studies and the project formed part of a renewed interest in the Catalan heritage, comparable to the study of national traditions taking place elsewhere (the movement to record English folk music, for example).  In the original church a copy was made; this has since been moved in its turn, and replaced by video mapping. Meanwhile, the original can be seen in Barcelona’s MNAC (National Museum of Catalan Art). Few viewers will wail in dread at the sight of the Pantocrator, perhaps, but it is still hard to be indifferent to this potent reminder of the intensely emotional art of medieval master artisans: the anonymous creator of this painting is simply known as The Master of Taüll. The apse of St Climent is classified as fine art today; but it is also reminder of the power of the medieval Church over the minds and imagination of the faithful.

 

Video mapping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lfTMf0shJw

 

Further Reading

Manuel Castiñeiras and Jordi Camps, Romanesque Art in the MNAC Collections (2008)

The Catalan language entry in Wikipedia is very helpful and detailed.

Frederic Chordá, El Abside de Sant Climent de Taüll (Madrid, 2012). Stresses the multiple possible significations of the image.

Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World

How to See the World is an introduction to the new academic discipline of the study of visual culture. Visual artefacts in the form of fine and decorative arts have been studied in universities for about a century, of course, and before that in salons and art academies. What makes 'visual culture' as a field a new departure is its focus on mass and popular imagery, which now has an unimaginable range and volume in the age of digital media. How to See the World takes us through some of the perspectives this new analysis can take. 'How to See Yourself' takes us fairly speedily from classical portraiture to modern artists such as Cindy Sherman and the ubiquitous selfie. The emphasis here is on how the self is radically unstable, and a matter of performance rather than essence, in tension with traditional social categories. ''How We think about Seeing' is an update on brain science and what it tells us about perception and processing of visual information; we see with our bodies, not simply the retina. Further chapters look at the story of mapping for military purposes from the nineteenth century to the contemporary drone; early film and its conjunction with industrialisation and the train; the rise of the modern megacity; the changing climate; and mass political protest. All of these areas of life have generated, exploited and explored the expressive and interpretive capacities of visual culture. To orient oneself in the modern world, we need to develop skills in reading images from street art to museum-housed installations to instagram snaps and video clips circulated as memes. To be active participants in our own culture, we need to be adept at using these visual codes ourselves.

I had some problems with this book, not least in finding some definition for the discipline itself. It seems to draw on many other fields: the ideas on the performative self, for example, are familiar from feminism and gender studies; the psychology of perception is central to Gombrich's Art and Illusion; and the survey of the giant city draws heavily on authors like Mike Davis.  Mirzoeff acknowledges a debt to the work of John Berger, itself drawing on Walter Benjamin. Sometimes the book felt like familiar ingredients given a slightly new twist rather than an exciting new departure. Visual culture is so vast that it surely takes in just about anything, from a school whiteboard to a weekend watercolour. Unsurprisingly, the book as a whole felt like a disparate gathering of thoughts on subjects the author is interested in (and on which he is clearly very well informed). It's not always easy to find a thread running through a chapter; rather, one item seems to auto-suggest another. 'Divided Cities', for example, uses this suggestive heading to hurtle us through Berlin, the American South, South African apartheid and Israel-Palestine in a few pages, without time to look in any detail at any of these scenarios. In these stretches, it reads as a sequence of riffs rather than an over-arching composition.


Despite these reservations - perhaps I was looking for a more traditional thesis-style book - I must admit found this a riveting read. Mirzoeff has an immediately engaging style, unencumbered by theoretical jargon. Every page offers some fascinating nugget of information, such as the surprising but convincing link between Impressionism and early industrial smog. He conveys a passionate curiosity and is an example of an academic for whom the wall between academic observation and practical action is, like other walls mentioned here, one to be dismantled. He is clearly fascinated and inspired by social protest movements, from the Arab Spring to Occupy, and sees in the visual traces such actions produce a hope for the representation of popular interests in a world in which the 99% are generally excluded by corporate media. Visual Culture is for Mirzoeff something we should do, not simply study. Only through imagining the effects of climate change can we hope to address it; and this imagining necessarily takes the form of the actual making of images. The record of mass protest in Egypt stands as an example of visual artefacts which the regime cannot erase. The commitment to action in the book makes it a refreshing change from the traditional world of formal art criticism, often  confined to a reflective discourse within the space of the museum. If the structure of the book doesn't fit the usual academic conventions, perhaps that is part of the point. 'Once we have learned how to see the world,' he concludes, 'we have taken only one of the required steps. the point is to change it.'

Educating Cardiff / The Catch

Reporting on an evening's documentary television ...

Educating Cardiff (episode 1) took us to Willows School, recently turned around, we were told, by ebullient headteacher Joy Ballard and her team. The focus in the first episode was on Year 11, the GCSE year, although we did get a charming look at a Year 7 class being assured that the sun did indeed rise in Wales ('it's the one thing that turns night into day'), even though it didn't always feel like it; and the same class, I think, were involved in fantastic act of brinkmanship around the lunch break ('We're not finishing until this problem's solved'). The teacher in this case, and the one we saw most of, was Mr Hennessy; probably the most arresting moment of the programme was learning that Mr H himself had left school with just two GCSEs. He remembered crying in the kitchen with his mother the day results came out. He knew first-hand how things could go wrong, and went well beyond the limits of duty in trying to make sure that a group of truanting girls rocked up to their classes and took things like mock exams seriously. One of them, Leah, even got a wake-up call from Mr Hennessy each morning. We saw a lot of Leah, a bright girl who didn't see the point in school, although she was inspired by drama (the drama classes looked wonderful, by the way, and the rescue line they offered Leah was thought-provoking at a time when drama and indeed anything creative / expressive gets so little official support.) The other truant girls didn't seem to get so much attention, but that might have been editing. We also met Jessica, the oddball swat who actually wants to use classtime to study. Jessica was more comfortable with adults than her peers, diffident, introspective, not a great mixer, 'quirky' to use the word of the head ('I'm quirky too'). In a great move, Ms Ballard made Jess editor of the school newspaper, and she and her deputies promptly set about interviewing aspiring reporters, collecting comments in a suggestions box and proudly distributing the paper when it was complete. Both Leah and Jess got good news on results day. Leah could go to college and study drama, Jess got a string of As. Ms Ballard's governing style was matter-of-fact, arguing a reasoned case for turning up to school rather than bawling at her charges. I suspect anyone with Oxbridge airs and graces in this environment wouldn't last five minutes. Mr Hennessy stepped neatly into the tough-teacher-with-a-heart-of-gold persona that a series like this needs. The programme was edited from presumably hours and hours of film taken by hidden cameras. Classes looked quite bewildering exercises in crowd semi-management. There were terrific moments of wit (I loved the comment that a group of shuffling teens coming across the playground to school looked like a bad outtake from Reservoir Dogs). Some bits, like a roving reporter eavesdropping on a staff meeting (as teachers bizarrely discussed their fear of crabs and beetroot) had the feel of being staged. But beneath the charm the picture was troubling. Teachers seemed to be working with a population of children who were entirely disaffected. Where do you start with that? We saw nothing at all outside the campus, but it is only when family life is taken into account that the whole picture can emerge. I understand that Willows is in a very tough, very run-down part of Cardiff. What are the likely prospects for these children? What are their parents' expectations? As ever, the music pulled me whichever way the producers wanted my heart to go. I hope we'll meet a Welsh speaker before the series is done.

The Catch took us to a very tough place indeed, the fishing vessel Govenek as it sailed through a storm to trawl in the Atlantic, two hundred miles off the Cornish coast. I realised I knew nothing about fishing at all. For example, I didn't know that the men are not paid a regular wage. Instead they share the income from each catch, and are at the mercy not just of the tides and weather but also of constantly fluctuating prices. It was because foreign vessels had flooded the market and driven down prices that Govenek's crew had to stay out in the storm and go deep into the Atlantic (the eleventh, whatever that means), in the hope of catching enough to cover the costs of the trip. In the event, they came across a school of turbot and netted (hey, is that where that metaphor comes from?) £50,000 worth. (The selling is done at auction to supermarket buyers, with Govenek represented by an agent. There is a mark-up of over 50%  by the time it arrives in the shops.) While crews are usually different for each voyage, skipper Phil has a loyal team who sail with him regularly, trusting his judgment and putting up with his occasional irate visitations to the deck, hurling crates around and stomping off in a blizzard of expletives. The crew also had under their wing novice seaman Loui, from Essex, an interesting young man with a background in home schooling, no qualifications, an adoring mum and an obvious desire to put on a good show and be accepted as one of the boys. He made a good enough job of it to be allowed the honour of casting a grappling hook (or something) and getting invited back for a second trip. The Catch made it clear that this trade is serious, dangerous business. 'What's the worst injury you've seen?' 'Death. Death over the side, by drowning.' Phil remembered a man going overboard. He reached him in the water but didn't have the strength to get him back on board. 'He's still out there somewhere.' Great television. Humbling. Willows and the Govenek. Which would find me more of a useless burden, I wonder? And who would jump in to save me? (Why, Phil or Mr Hennessy, of course, two of Britain's last real men.)

School Swap: The Class Divide

School Swap was a two-episode documentary in which small contingents from a private and state school swap places for a week, to see how the other half lives (or, in the case of the privately educated, how the other 93% lives). In episode 1, the Headmaster of (private) Warminster School travelled with three of his pupils to (comprehensive) Bemrose School in Derby. And in episode 2 Derby visited Warminster. There were shots of the children in class, at the homes of their host families in Derby or the small dormitory at Warminster, and we got at least a glimpse of the workings of the two institutions.
Of course a series like this is primarily entertainment, not research. You never know how spontaneous scenes are, how much was shot again, what scenes were selected out for not following the gameplan, and so forth. Nonetheless, I found School Swap more enjoyable and illuminating than many documentaries, and less obviously manipulative. There were several thought-provoking moments. One of the private schoolboys, entered as a lower tier candidate for maths at Warminster (meaning he could not get higher than a C) was regarded as a potential A 'at least' at Bemrose. Was his school too anxious to stream, one wondered? Brett from Derby seemed positively euphoric in his dorm at Warminster, dressing for a formal dinner with evident pride and being motivated by some simple remarks on his potential and the need for hard work. Had no adult said this to him before? Both heads came over as warm individuals; Jo (Derby) made some insightful comments on how privately educated children take up a disproportionate number of top university places and jobs in the professions. Self-confidence, built through relentless positive messaging, seemed to be the answer. I liked her comment on the Warminster children already adopting the nonchalant Oxford walk. She was sharp, but not chippy, and completely devoted to the children of her community. Full credit to Warminster Head for giving a history lesson at Bemrose, too. Speaking of which, the teaching seemed to be much the same in both schools, though the extra discipline at Warminster (made possible by smaller class sizes) was remarked on with admiration by Brett.
School Swap had its weaknesses, of course. Most obviously, it was an experiment that decided its conclusion in advance: private schooling is better because the days are longer and crammed with goodies. Filming techniques underlined this message. Warminster was forever bathed in golden light and surrounded by ethereal music as the camera soared celestially upwards as we contemplated the transcendent beauty of the campus. It is, we were told, 'exclusive', a word delivered with no apprent sense of irony. Bemrose was shot much more from ground level. No ethereal music accompanied the punishment room, or the session on nutritional eating, though to be fair the street-fest we saw looked a lot more fun than hymn practice at a Warminster assembly. Parents on both sides were remarkably absent, though they are surely the most important figures of all.  Warminster Head's comment that 'we have two education sectors in this country: private and state' is technically true but disguises - as he would know - a mass of complications. State education differs widely according to distribution of wealth; state schools in affluent areas are de facto largely private, serving those who can afford to live in the catchment area. And whatever school they use, families will still be differentiated by wealth: parents with money can afford after-school music lessons and drama clubs and the like, and those without can't. Did Warminster have to go all the way to Derby because the local comps weren't grim enough? I welcome the project to have joint clubs for both schools, on equal terms, but it's hard to see how that could work across such a great distance. Still, collaboration and some measure of integration across sectors is surely, both morally and practically, the way forwards. There was no time to examine how well children at either school were served by the national curriculum, but perhaps that is the subject for another documentary. And while Bemrose was shown working brilliantly to address the socioeconomic problems of its intake - the breakfast club for disaffected boys and the pastoral mediation session were inspirational - Warminster seemed to have no problems whatsoever to deal with besides the Head not having room for his dessert at dinner. That can't be true, surely? No one is perfect. Was there no case of homesickness, obsessive helicopter parenting, individuals not fitting into the vision? You believe the good things more when you hear about the not-so-goo things.
All the same, School Swap was a good two hours of television, and while at the project stage it might have expected shock and confrontation, it delivered instead a heartening mood of curiosity and genuine burgeoning friendship. When the ethereal music was over, one could only reflect that there are losses on all sides when the young from different backgrounds are separated during their schooldays, which is exactly when they should be getting to know each other. I don't think it's a question of private establishments having a superior approach to the business of educating, much as they love to philosophise about their art: of course Bemrose would have lectures and clubs and dinners if it could afford them. It really does seem to come down to money. Class divide, indeed.

Pallant House: Conscience and Conflict

Merlyn Evans, Distressed Area (1938)

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was an internal conflict; but it was also a crucible in which the world forces of left and right met each other, and thus a battleground for competing international ideologies. In England, we are familiar chiefly with the literary responses - Auden, Laurie Lee, George Orwell. Last year's exhibition Conscience and Conflict showed us the waves sent out through the art world by what now feels like a dry run of WWII.


The closeness of art, society and politics is made clear in a photograph in the vestibule, 'Artists painting a hoarding in Bouverie Street, London, 17 Feb 1939' (John F Stephenson). They are painting the slogan,  'Send Food to Spain'. Bouverie Street was one of the 22 hoardings made available by London County Council. Soon it was defaced by Sir Oswald Moseley's blackshirts.


During the Spanish Civil War, artists found themselves committed to a public cause, and thus to a publicly available artistic language. Art was also stepping in where politicians feared to tread: in 1936, Britain and 24 other countries signed a non-intervention agreement, terrified of the conflict escalating. France and Britain maintained an arms embargo, and the Republicans could only buy weapons from Soviet Russia, while the Fascists were supplied by Fascist Italy and Germany. Many organisations were founded to send aid to Spain, and we get a poignant sense of grass-roots activity in Clive Branson's documentary paintings: Noreen and Rosa (1940), studying a volume from the Left Book Club; Daily Worker (1939) showing a newspaper seller in Battersea and Selling the Daily Worker outside Projectile Engineering Works (1937), the point of the last being the attempt to create a feeling of solidarity among the factory workers for their Spanish comrades. Henry Rayner's drypoint etchings, There is no Peace, There is no Shelter make a more direct appeal to human compassion.


The war coincided with the Surrealist movement, which had an important exhibition in June 1936, on the eve of the conflict. One might have thought that the art of the unconscious would have little to say to, or about, the political. On the contrary, there was an intense and precise engagement. Papier-mâché masks at an anti-Chamberlain protest mark surrealism's presence on the streets. A surrealist pamphlet provides an acute analysis of the situation: 'We know that capital will not respond to socialist democracy with only constitutional means; we know that violence is not only the weapon of the proletariat; Britain's policy is implicitly pro-fascist, it freely allows Portugal to arm fascists'. Perhaps the most iconic picture today to come from this engagement is Miró's 'Aidez Espagne'. This was originally intended as the image for a one-franc postage stamp, but the French government didn't issue it. Surrealism captured, too, the monstrous and desolate, in Edward Burra's Medusa, or the faceless nuns of John Middleton's works, drawing on Jung's female archetype and at the same time pointing the finger at the Catholic Church's complicity in fascist atrocities. This theme is addressed in other works, such as André Masson's La Messe a Pampelune (1937) and John Banting's Absolution: Spanish Civil War (1937). Beyond the surrealist ambit, John Armstrong's tempera paintings of bombed-out buildings in scorched plains are more powerful for being drenched in Mediterranean colours: the light associated in art with gorgeousness and the relish for life here illuminates only a splintered emptiness.


Not all artists were sympathetic to the Republicans: the modernist Francis Rose (1909-79) was strongly pro-Nationalist. His satirical The Reds are Really Not Bad Sorts, or the Tastes of War (1936) bristles with contempt for what he must have seen as a communist menace. For Rose, at least, the right side won, and the exhibition ends with a reminder of the misery of war: Clive Branson's Hut Against Trees, Prison Camp in Spain (1938) has tremendous further impact when we learn from the label that he himself was imprisoned in Spain. Many ghosts hover over the gallery, among them John Cornford, dead at 21, and Julian Bell, volunteer ambulance driver, brother of Quentin, daughter of Vanessa, who suffered a breakdown on hearing the news of his death. Or Felicia Browne (1904-36), artist and communist, the first British volunteer to die in action, whose sketchbooks were brought back from the Front and stand as testament to the high emotions and high ideals recorded in this wonderful and revealing exhibition.

Tate Britain: Barbara Hepworth

When does art become over-familiar, so ingrained that a surprise response becomes impossible? Hepworth's smooth, primal forms, Moore's landscapes morphed into human form; walking around Tate Britain, where I spent many hours many years ago, I found myself nostalgic for the time when the modern pressed itself into my consciousness, when it wasn't familiar or embalmed in reverence.

Tate Britain's Hepworth show was a fruitful re-introduction to this stern yet serene creator, giving us a clear account of stages in Hepworth's artistic career. Room One introduced us to direct carving: while the classical way was for a sculptor to model in clay and then leave it to assistants to cast the work in bronze, in the 1920s a number of sculptors (Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska among them) carved directly into stone. This method was not, it seems, all that revolutionary, and was in fact taught in art schools; but it was associated with decorative rather than fine art. This is always a tricky distinction;. Is John Skeaping's charming Fish (1929-30) a mantelpiece item, while his (attributed) torsos, because they are sort of Grecian, 'fine'? Whose values are at work here?  But perhaps, albeit sceptically, one can detect a kind of higher seriousness in the austere figures which look back to archaic and classical forms next to the charming animal sculptures by contemporaries like Alan Durst, Ursula Edgecumbe, Elsie Henderson. Who were they?  We wonder how fame's trail was blazed, exactly. How many artists, like Leon Underwood, were just not that interested in the networking and self-promotion that lead to a place in the galaxy? How meritocratic is the art history we tell ourselves?

Anyway, I found myself fascinated as much by the kinds of stone as by the works themselves: anhydrite, polyphant, white alabaster, Hoptonwood, Bath, Corsehill - each one suggesting something to the artist's mind by its heft, grain and texture. There is always the magic of working against the stony matter, too: hard, cool Parisian marble becomes the warm soft bodies of Hepworth's Doves (1927). There is a strong sense of contiuity with other epochs, in the seated, inwardly asorbed female figures with their ancient geometrical hair (Contempative Figure, 1928). While the block of stone is suited to bust and seated figure, its grain and curve following sometimes a twist in the body, wood tends towards the vertical. But it, too, steps out of its time: Standing Figure (1929-30), with its stylized face and blank eyes recall the kouroi of Egypt. This was a time, we remember, when artists were finding in the so-called 'primitive' a path away from the oppressive canons of academic tradition and the vacuity of modern life.

Room Two, 'Studio',  is about the partnership, artistic and personal, of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. A work of art makes us wonder about the process of its making, and one of the best ways of tracing that process is to become, imaginatively, the artist herself. And so, in front of Head (1930-31), I feel the Cumberland alabaster in my hand, my body latched on to its vast geological history and the landscape it comes from, my skin answering to its smoothness, my mind's eye picking up the face pushing outwards from within the stone. Carving is unearthing, dis-covering. Everything leads to a kind of simplicity which resonates, which has presence. Modernity makes its mark room: in the Cubist abstraction of Two Heads (1932), in the formal experiments of the Mother and Child series (1934), or the Freudian moment in the phallic imagery of Two Forms (1933) and Standing Figure (1934). Yet at the essential, mystical level, the view is always in the direction of the primal, the prehistoric, the work which bypasses the rational historic mind and speaks to our instincts, as a cliff-face or a cloud may speak to us.
Room 3, International Modernism, puts Hepworth in the context of abstract artists of the period: Alexander Calder, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Piet Mondrian, Auguste Herbin. There are pages from the magazines through which their work became visible.  And here are the kinds of pieces I auto-associate with the name 'Hepworth': smooth, polished, elemental forms (simply called 'Forms'); smooth and gleaming, like distended eggs, tapering standing figures like megaliths; distillations of sand-dunes, the undulations of landscape, forms in a rock pool. The base becomes part of the work. There is something theatrical going on, a feeling that that stones have a mysterious life and speak to each other across quiet spaces. Serenity, purity of a ritual kind takes over from the roughness and mess of ordinary life. Here, and in the next room, we find the family of wooden carvings, hollowed out, painted, strung like Aeolian harps - expressions of the feelings of a landscape, dream versions of caves, tunnels and subterranean streams.
We move into a room of larger wooden sculptures, from the hard tropical wood guarea. These are inspired by a visit to Greece, soon after the tragic death of the artist's son Paul, aged 23. We are invited to perceive a funereal quality to the sculptures, and perhaps there is one, or is that simply a case of reading what we know into what we see? Before we leave, there is a reconstruction of a pavilion for a 1965 exhibition in the Netherlands, with the bronze works exhibited there - looping and folding concentric bands, petrified ripples.
I didn't mind seeing Hepworth indoors. Of course these works take on another dimension in a landscape setting, but sculpture shouldn't depend on a particular environment, and I thought they kept their charge in the soft-toned spaces of the Tate's downstairs galleries. The main weakness of the exhibition was the rather anxious promotion of Hepworth as an international modernist - which she was, but there isn't enough here about Cornwall and the St Ive's community, as if that would make her seem parochial to London gallery-goers; and the more her modernity was stressed, the more I saw the prehistoric and the turning away from modern life. But that is a paradox within Modernism itself. More importantly, the exhibition let the sculptures do their work, speak to the spirit, and quicken our response to the earth, the land, the undulations of that wave, that hillside.

John Finnemore, Teddy Lester

John Finnemore, author of Teddy Lester Captain of Cricket (London: Chambers, 1916), you have given me a joyous lifelong memory. I discovered this book as a boy in my uncle's house. Its orange boards and thick flaky paper intoxicate me still. Now I have rebound Captain of Cricket, I have one other  title in the series, and I search for more whenever I'm in a second-hand bookshop. Teddy, easily the best cricketer in Slapton School, takes the reputation of the house seriously and comes down hard on bullying. He is firm but fair and does what is right. Frank Sandys, brilliant new boy, bowls with a queer shuffling run. His stock ball is a googly (odd, since that is meant to be a surprise delivery), occasionally mixed up with a straight fast one. Ito the Bat is Japanese and bowls with a bizarre action, hence his soubriquet. Teddy and his chums play cricket, in a strange form of the game where bowlers 'find a spot' and become unplayable. They stroll around Slapton school and save the country. Their teachers barely exist.

Penny for your thoughts, Ito, old man.

Who were you, John Finnemore? Wikipedia says there is nothing left now but census returns, and reconstructs your (childless) life with Emma, teaching in Welsh schools, and eventually making real money from writing. I imagine you in your elementary classroom, speaking Welsh, dreaming up Boy's Own plotlines. Is there really nothing out there? No school archives In Aberystwyth, no letters, no manuscripts? Why did you buy a house with fifteen bedrooms?

John Finnemore, you died aged 52. Your books are rare finds today. You are not listed on goodreads, but you are a good read. When I pass by an empty cricket ground, sometimes, at dusk, I stand quite still. The whole of Slapton watches with hushed breath. Everything depends on this last wicket stand, and Frank Sandys is shuffling in to bowl.

Erika Langmuir, A Closer Look: Still Life

This short book, one of a series produced by the National Gallery, is a very helpful introduction to the genre of still life painting. The author explains its beginnings in the Greek xenia (offerings to guests), now known only from description, and Roman wall paintings, like those preserved at Herculaneum and Pompeii. In the medieval and Renaissance period the naturalistic depiction of flowers and objects was justified by their inclusion in narrative paintings, though there are fascinating instances of stand-alones like Gaddi's painting of a cupboard with eucharistic objects in Santa Croce, Florence. The genre really comes into its own around 1600. In just a few pages we get a clear idea of the essential elements of the Dutch still life and the Spanish bodegón, and the subgenres of flower painting and breakast piece. There is an interesting comparison of still life elements in paintings by Caravaggio and Velazquez, in which the author is not shy of expressing an opinion (avoiding the flat even-handedness that can mar expository writing). Other questions are contemplated: how are we to understand the symbolism of a still life, obvious in the case of a vanitas but in other cases more obscure to the modern viewer? What internal dramas are evoked in these mesmerising compositions? I like the thought that often the still life bypasses thought and speaks directly to our sensuous response to the world. The great Chardin is touched on - I would have liked more on him, remembering the wonderful RA exhibition - and there are close engagements with works by Cezanne and Picasso. Because the book is centred on the NG collection, it does not take us further into the twentieth century or into other media like photography and video. I am reading Charles Sterling's book on Still Life, which is superb but weighty with knowledge and lists of painters I have never heard of. This book provided a useful summary of the key episodes of the story. Erika Langmuir, former Head of Education at the NG, has a gift for clear yet passionate writing, and the series as a whole (rebranded as A Closer Look) is beautifully produced.