Stephen Winkley

I was terribly sorry to learn of the recent and untimely death of my old teacher Stephen Winkley. He had the bad luck to teach me in every one of my five years at Cranleigh School, and was over that time a formative influence (a compliment only to the extent that one approves of the resulting form). He taught me ancient history, led a trip to Rhodes, introduced me to Beowulf, Samuel Beckett (he directed Peter Longshaw and John Tolputt among others in a stunning staff production of Godot which opened doors), Jacobean tragedy (I was Bosola in his production of A Duchess of Malfi), and discreetly helped me prepare for Oxbridge, among many other things, some duties, most kindnesses. During a rough patch he supported me when others were naturally losing faith, but that support was based on some steely advice: he always told it like it was. Running the Sixth Form Centre he made us all feel clever and inculcated a kind of university atmosphere in which it was actually cool to compare Pinter and Orton and talk about Georgian poetry. His range of interests was inspirational. The simplest comments stay longest: 'I would defy anyone to read the last books of The Iliad and not be moved' - and so we did, and were. Beyond anything, over five years I learned from Dr Winkley (as I must think of him) a style of conversation which amounted to a civic education in itself: laconic, ironic, allusive, mischievous, hilarious and, under it all, deeply humane. One sermon he gave, citing All's Well, 'Simply the thing I am shall make me live' was, the rumour went, an attempt to reach out to a desperately troubled boy. Only later have I come to recognise that behind all the breezy off-handedness in his manner was a tremendous work ethic and a passionate, stubborn commitment to get the job - whatever the job - done properly. Beyond school we lost touch bar the odd meeting: I dropped in to see him in his College study in Winchester with no warning and he found time to chat; and I remember a fleeting crossing of paths at the Bodleian when I was finishing my thesis. 'It's on medieval romance,' I ventured. 'Oh, I am sorry,' was the inimitable response.
The years rolled past, and his majestic career took him to Uppingham. I seem to have made a habit of missing the good doctor: he left Winchester the year before I arrived; and while I made an extremely undistinguished start to teaching at Rossall School, he came out of retirement to bring that school to new life - an apt measurement of our differing abilities to adapt to a unique environment. Recently I've been looking through the headmaster's blog newsletter that he produced at Rossall, and it was a sheer delight to recognise that voice and mind at full pitch. Bold opinions, kind comments, an amazing feel for detail. How typical too that he was able to pick up on social media so quickly and effectively, while others look on such things of this century with suspicious eyes. He wrote a reference for my present job, and in a note telling me he had done so wrote 'I hope you prosper' - the last written comment I had from him. Such prosperity as I have enjoyed I owe in large part to Stephen Winkley and a fantastic generation of teachers at Cranleigh in the early eighties (among them Jonathan Leigh, Peter Longshaw, John Tolputt, Nicholas Menon). Heartfelt condolences to the family. Warm memories that will last a lifetime. Truly a teacher in the ancient tradition, who passed on not only knowledge but a manner of thinking, and through thinking, living and feeling more deeply. Salve atque vale, magister.

The Act of Killing

In 1965 the left-wing government of Indonesia was destroyed by a military coup. With the enthusiastic support of Western powers (especially the USA, UK and Australia) the army set about killing the grass-roots support of socialism: party members, intellectuals, the disaffected unlanded, unionists and their sympathizers - really anyone not clearly on board with the new project -  were all branded 'communists' and exterminated by death squads. To help them in their task, the army enlisted the support of small-time gangsters, accustomed to selling black market tickets for Hollywood films: these men became effective mass murderers, interrogating, torturing and executing 'communists' in a mass slaughter greeted by the Western press with headlines such as 'A Gleam of Light in Asia'. About 2.5 million Indonesians were killed by fellow Indonesians. Those responsible for this atrocity shared power with the dictator Suharto and are still ruling the country today. The paramilitary gangsters are feted as heroes and founding fathers of the new order. Weirdly, they insist that the etymology of 'gangster' is 'free men', and they are certainly free of the reach of justice today.

Joshua Oppenheimer started making a film with survivors of the mass killings, but this soon attracted the attentions of the police and army. He then had the idea of approaching some of the original gangsters and working with them. Anwar Congo, a man who killed some 1,000 people with his own hands, and his fellow veterans, join the director in recreating the murders of 1965, acting out scenes of interrogation in the styles of the American crime movies they love There are gangster scenes, and a bizarre musical sequence to the music of 'Born Free'. To begin with, Anwar is full of swagger, cheerfully explaining how he throttled his victims and pausing to dance the cha-cha-cha. He clearly loves the attention of his fan base and the idea of being a film star, and enjoys a kind of mythical status among the paramilitary organisations who continue to help the country's rulers govern by terror. In a bizarre TV show the young woman presenter almost swoons with the excitement of having these celebrity assassins on her show.
Towards the end of the film (which apparently took eight years to make) Anwar starts to view his actions in another light. After recreating a massacre in the jungle, which leaves  children in the 'cast' weeping and traumatised, he starts to feel some compassion for the young people whose lives he destroyed. When he himself re-enacts the part of an interrogated prisoner, he wonders 'did they feel what I did?'. 'Far, far worse,' is the obvious answer, 'as they knew they were going to die'. The final scene, in which he visits the balcony over the original paramilitary 'office' again, is indescribably powerful. Anwar, perhaps only spasmodically, does seem to be experiencing some degree of remorse. Yet with a narcissistic, apparently psychopathic individual so immersed in fictions and lies there is always the suspicion that what we see is an extended exercise in manipulative role-playing; Anwar and his cronies may be altogether beyond our normative narrative of crime and punishment. As in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, others seem untouched by regrets; yet they come over as shells of human beings, inarticulate thugs entirely corrupted by their brush with power. One pretends he didn't know. One, only 10 at the time, joins in with idol-worshipping keenness and gradually seems to perceive something of the reality of what happened.


The Act of Killing is one of the most astonishing documentaries I have ever seen, using novel and brilliantly effective techniques  to take us through a dark period of history and examine the ways in which individuals and a country examine it. By the ingenious means of showing it at a human rights event in Djakarta, Oppenheimer was able to sidestep Indonesia's censors and have it shown in public places. The West's own compliance with the regimes's brutality (the CIA officers who helpfully provided logistical and intelligence support are living in comfortable retirement) should stop us from watching it with any complacency. Paul Preston's recent research makes it clear something similar happened in Franco's Spain. Though it seems unbearably precious to talk about theatre in such a context, the recreations did seem to touch on some root of the place of 'acting' in human culture - as an instrument for engaging with and exploring in a ritualistic way areas of fundamental importance to society and the individual. Something the ancient Greeks knew but which in the days of theatre as expensive entertainment is usually forgotten.  Many of the Indonesian participants in the film are listed as anonymous for fear of violent reprisals by the paramilitary terrorist who enforce the government's will today.

Ayckbourn, Relatively Speaking

Relatively Speaking (1965) was Ayckbourn's first big hit in the West End, played by big names (Richard Briers, Michael Hordern, Celia Johnson) and earning a congratulation from Noel Coward. Radio 4 Extra broadcast a production yesterday in celebration of the playwright's 75th birthday. It's evocative of its time - the speech habits somehow conjured up the seventies programmes of my youth - and perhaps a valuable period piece in its insight into the shifting value systems of the swinging sixties. Yet for all its patina of age it comes over freshly today, thanks to the brilliant writing and deft characterisation. Ayckbourn had said he set out consciously to write a well-made play, and Relatively Speaking has the precise farcical clockwork of Wilde, and behind him Sheridan and Goldsmith. It's a delight to find oneself caught up in the elaborate machinery of this tight four-hander. The humour comes from a ludicrous series of mistaken identities, delivered quickly enough to be convincing and yielding wonderful sustained passages of dialogue which can be taken two ways. The bite comes from the hints of dark duplicity at the core of things, and the end leaves us doubting whether any enduring relationship is possible in the world the play creates. Beneath the gentility lies something deadly: Pinter's image for his plays, 'the weasel in the cocktail cabinet', applies equally to Ayckbourn. A brilliant theatrical moment in the 'father's' plan for a business trip, then topped by the lining of a pair of slippers. Only the innocent young man at the centre of it all comes over as an improbably naïve drip in the harder cooler 21st century. A joy to listen to after Sunday lunch while more intrepid souls are pounding the London Marathon, and a reminder in the days of experiment and shock drama of the enduring richness of craftsmanship and a good ear for the follies of man, ay and woman too.

Sarah Morgan Memorial Concert

I'm sorry to be missing the memorial concert for Sarah Morgan at Winchester Guildhall today. Sarah  founded the Winchester Community Choir some years ago (my wife is a founder member) and brought the joy of singing a wide repertoire of music to those without formal musical training. From the list of choirs taking part in this all-afternoon event, she clearly had a transformational effect on others in the area, and enriched the lives of many. The remarkable line-up is ample testimony to the respect with which she was held in the musical community. I'm sure it will be a wonderful event. What better memorial could anyone have?

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El chico de la última fila / Dans la Maison

A couple of weeks ago Drama on 3 broadcast The Boy at the Back, an English translation of a play by Spanish writer Juan Mayorga, a name hitherto unknown to me. It was an intriguing story of a disillusioned literature teacher encouraging a promising student with his creative writing. All very worthy, except that the writing comes out of the boy's project of insinuating himself into the house and family of a schoolfriend, snooping around in a voyeuristic way, spying on the parents' conversations and pursuing the mother. The play at the same time brings us into the house of the teacher and his wife, who runs a struggling art gallery for trendy work which  the lit teacher scoffs at.

The play is extremely clever: it examines the sources and effects of literature, upsetting the liberal humanist piety that reading and writing are good for us; it exploits the fourth wall convention of theatre, whereby we are all voyeurs of another life (this element is less strong in radio, of course); the relation of teacher and student is a witty variation on the Pygmalion myth; and throughout there are satiric observations of education, modern art, middle class life, sport obsession and business. The cleverness is anchored in a simple narrative, coming from the boy Claude's visits to the house, and charged with a sinister atmosphere as it becomes clear that this is not going to end well.

The play has been adapted into a film by Ozon, Dans la Maison, centred on a great central performance by Fabrice Luchini as the teacher, Germain. The play seems to move across to France quite comfortably - indeed, the running references to Flaubert and Un Coeur Simple made it seem naturally gallic. This time around, the teacher did seem almost incredibly foolish in his 'encouragement' of the pupil, and as ever with school dramas I wondered where all the time for these one-to-one sessions with the budding Flaubert was coming from. Claude is not sure how to end his story, and it is a doubt apparently shared by Mayorga / Ozon, as the piece tries out a number of conclusions before going for a particularly dark dénoument which once again tested credibility. Listening to the play I enjoyed not knowing how much of the boy's narrative was real, how much a fantasy - there seems to be an analogue in the imaginary numbers discussed in the maths sessions -  but in the film things were played more literally (though the device of having Germain pop up in the middle of scenes was amusing and effective). And although Claude stands out from his abysmal teenage peers for having a smidgeon of intelligence, it was hard to see that his factual observations mixed with the odd caustic remark really added up to the great gift that his teacher sees in him. Indeed what seems to be admired is a total absence of empathy or compassion, quite the opposite of Flaubert's imaginative operations. Odd that we are told so little of the boy's home background, which prompts these longings to belong to a normal family. But in all a nice piece covering many topics neatly, and an enjoyably acidic alternative to more sentimental treatments of creativity and the mentor-pupil relationship.

John Berkavitch, Shame

Spoken-word performance events - poetry slams, hip-hop recitations - are big at the moment, at any rate in the uncloistered urban scene. There's a great scene in Bad Education where the wannabe trendy head takes some pupils to a basement rap contest and excitedly joins in to general agony. Well, that's me in a few months, I'm sure. I'm a neophyte in such matters, but the name of Kate Tempest is known to me, and the text of Brand New Ancients and the YouTube trailer for me have left me hungry for more. John Berkavitch until two days ago was another name off my radar. I went to his Shame performance at Winchester on the strength of a twitter 'Don't miss'  recommendation, written by someone who then didn't turn up himself. Perhaps that is the way of things these days.

Shame began - after a brief warm-up act - with an invitation to audience members to speak in public about their most shameful experiences. After the awkward silence thus created, Berkavitch launched into his piece, a series of interlocking autobiographical episodes of cowardice, selfishness, and humiliation. Three breakdancers accompanied him in various physical theatre configurations and provided short interludes of dance moves. A backing track provided musical atmosphere without being intrusive, and there was a programme of lighting and projections provided by a simple set of projectors around the performance area. With no technician in sight, the performance must have been synchronised exactly with this scheme (which makes one wonder what would have happened if an audience member had indeed volunteered a lengthy confessional speech, or the repartee had gone on longer than expected).

I found my attention engaged throughout: variations in the types of story and age perspectives involved provided variety under the overall thematic heading. There was a great deal more humour than the publicity material would lead one to expect, which made me reflect on how much comedy is indeed based on addressing our fears of disgrace. Visually I thought the physical side worked very well, conjuring up scenarios without overdoing things: I liked the coffee machine (though couldn't see the point of these café interludes) and the bike, in particular. The miming of things like tight suits and a young boy's anger was subtle and delightful. There must have been a great deal of technical preparation involved, yet the piece felt fresh and spontaneous. There seemed to be a mismatch between the realistic, often mundane, text and the heightened language of the visuals; I'd expected something more trance-like or hypnotically rhythmic in line with my unformed ideas about what hip-hop poetry might be. A small audience made me embarrassed about Winchester's provincial indifference to experimental work, but then again there was a kind of club feeling between us which helped with the intimate feel of the work. And while I enjoyed - if that is the word - the stories, I didn't feel the show did anything with the idea of shame or really explored how it informs and shapes us, besides recycling examples of it. No one took up the renewed invitation at the end to share embarrassing scenes from their life with the others, but I left feeling that spoken word events, with exciting stage movement and  lighting and projection designs like this, are something we should be looking into imitating at school level. Theatre has a valuable role as a forum in which we can confront and work through matters that are important and difficult on a personal level. Reverence for the canon, after all, soon becomes an easy excuse for not thinking or creating anything new, a way of hiding from oneself under the excuse of culture.

Winchester Death Masks

In the Early Life of Thomas Hardy (1928), there is a note dated 1888 about a builder and plasterer named Thomas Haviland Voss. Amongst his other labours, 'Voss used to take casts of heads of executed convicts ... Dan Pouncey held the heads while it was being done. Voss oiled the faces, and took them in halves, afterwards making casts from the masks. There was a groove where the rope went.' (This might refer to the rope of the gallows; or to the cord put under the plastercast to help extract it from the face.) The casts of executed murderers were valuable material to phrenologists, who studied the formation of the head in the belief that the shape of the skull gives valuable information on the character of its owner (a ceramic head for phrenological study is in the classroom opposite mine, and a daily object of envy).

William Palmer

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Winchester Prison apparently gave 28 death masks to the local museum. Where their provenance was before that remains a mystery, though the donation may have been an act of civic munificence on the part of Dr Henry Giles Lyford, prison surgeon and subscriber to the Winchester Museum Fund.

Whatever their origin, a selection of these masks are now on display in the City Space area of the Winchester Discovery Centre. Not all are of murderers. The first is of one 'Eustache', former slave in St Domingo who, in the slave uprising there (1791-1803) apparently saved some 400 white people from being killed. A life of loyal service to new masters followed, ending with a period in Paris in which Eustache was observed giving regularly and generously to the poor. What would psychologists call this behaviour pattern today? Extreme empathy? Phrenologists of the time labelled it 'Benevolence' and observed that the middle forehead, where our generous instincts allegedly have their physical manifestation, was appropriately large. Next to Eustache are a series of individuals seemingly untroubled by empathy,

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including William Palmer, 'Prince of Poisoners', who made a career of killing to cover his debts. His victims included his wife, brother, mother-in-law and four of his own children. The Inscription reads 'The first cast of William Palmer. Taken by William Bally phrenologist of Manchester the 14th June 1856 Stafford'. Next to Palmer is the murderer Courvoisier and next to him James Blomfield Rush, responsible for a notorious nineteenth-century outrage, the 'Murder at Stanfield Hall'. An excerpt is given of the exhuastive documentation and analysis of his head, which must have accompanied other details of his execution. Far from his worldly triumphs, the half-mask of Napoleon Bonaparte lies in a case nearby. The exhibition is completed by two anonymous casts: one looks like an execution victim: I saw, or imagined perhaps, a groove round the neck and the expression is set in a grimace. The other is small and ungrooved; perhaps something about its shape excited the curiosity of  surgeon who had a cast taken. Or perhaps the life had been remarkable in some way that we will never know.

Phrenology is now as dead as its models, but it is impossible not to look for the mind's construction in the face, and even without the accompanying information one might surmise that William Palmer was not of a kindly avuncular persuasion. Drs Lyford and Bally and their colleagues must have gone over these items painstakingly with compasses, noting down measurements with the same solemnity as a psychologist would write up data today. The results would then be tabulated and compared. Though what practical proposals could ensue from the knowledge gained? Perhaps some kind of eugenics system was hatching in advanced minds, whereby those endowed with ominously unbenevolent heads could be quietly terminated or isolated in some way. At the practical end of things, I imagine being Mr Pouncy holding the head of a Dorchester deceased convict and feeling Mr Voss's plaster or wax fall around my hands. What did a cast cost, though, and who paid for it? Was it simply a regular part of hospital procedure (casts of hands, too, were made, we are told). Did the bereaved (or in Palmer's case, any surviving family members) have any entitlement to object to their wretched kinsfolk being given a death beyond death?  And was it Voss or Pouncy, I wonder, who closed the victim's eyes?

Portraits in Winchester

Robbie Wraith, 'Tina Wraith'

There is an exhibition of portraits going on in Winchester at the moment, shared by various Jewry Street spaces. The Gallery in Winchester Discovery Centre has a selection of portraits by members of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. Rather than commissioned works, these are paintings from the artists' private collections, under the heading 'Family; Familiar'. Portraiture is a good example of 'The more you know, the less you know'. Direct and up-close images allow you to scan a face far more than you ever can in real life; and the more you observe, the more you want to know about the sitter. What is their story? Where is this room? What did they do the day before, and what thoughts went through their mind during the process of being portrayed? Around a still moment in a life, we weave a narrative. It's a journey pthat recently inspred a National Portrait Gallery publication, Imagined Lives. In this exhibition, the text accompanying the pieces helped to piece out the human story behind it, sometimes rather touchingly.




There is plenty to admire in a formal sense - a mixture of media, from popular oil to egg tempera (Anthony williams's fascinatingly lucid and detailed 'Portrait of Caroline' (2011), to an Anthony Connolly pencil sketch and a charcoal sketch by Robbie Wraith of his wife Tina, which I found arrestingly delicate and engaging - my breath-catching moment of the show. I liked the mysterious play of angles, surfaces and reflections in Michael Taylor's 'Woman Cradling Glass Vessel' (2010), and the optical tricks in the same artist's 'Couple', in which his wife's hair is parted to reveal a painting he made of them at the age of 17 entitled 'Flying'. Carpets lift, impossible apertures emerge, but all somehow contribute to the emtoional pull of the whole work. Paul Brason's 'Eighteen' confronts us with a young man of presumably that age, a Vermeer-like cast of light from the window falling across the door behind and bringing out the folds in his black shirt. There's an air of vulnerability mixed with confidence that made me think of Titian's 'Ranuccio Farnese', which is the highest praise of which I'm capable. Brason's small portrait of Roy Strong had an immediate, affectionate feel. I was fascinated by the story behind Toby Wiggins's 'Self-Portrait after George' (2013). The artist has for years been intrigued by the self-portrait by George Spencer Watson (1869-1934), and eventually made his own self-portrait modelled on it, painted in the same room and house as the original. But all the pieces are impressive, and make a fine riposte to anyone still claiming the art of painting is dead, or in recession.
Downstairs in City Space, an exhibition '9 out of 10 Believe' presents a series of figures, portrayed by three different artists: Mark Michael (satirist), Evelina Dee-Shepherd (realist) and Ben Mousley (expressionist). I found it hard to get into this: there was too much text for my taste, either as part of the images themselves, or accompanying the individuals; and the knowledge that what we were told veered from biographical fact to complete fabrication was irritating rather than compelling. The general air of attempted cleverness clouded any sense of the personal. Well, most of the work is sold so others clearly 'got it' better than I did.

Also in City Space is 'Winchester Death Masks', but this merits a separate post.

Kim Lim

Outing to Roche Court today, the New Art Centre sculpture park which is always beautifully atmospheric, whatever the weather (in today's case, grey and rainy). Craig Martin's colourful teapot looked strikingly cheerful in the drizzle, Gormley figures surprised you from behind a hedge, and Richard Long's path of flint and David Nash's burnt wood pieces looked satisfyingly at one with the Wiltshire landscape. In the gallery is the work of Kim Lim (1936-1997), a new name to me. I found the pieces instantly engaging: most of the work on show is sculpture in different types of stone (marble, Portland and granite) dressed and incised with simple flowing lines, creating a harmony of mutually respondent curves and receding planes. The exhibition was evocative of deep time, mass answered by space, the beautiful surface of stone given a rhythm by fissures and simple shapes. The work carries suggestions of Eastern philosophy, though apparently this artist was inspired at least as much by Cycladic sculpture, and Indian and South East Asian art as well as ancient Chinese vases: the common quality is a deep response to simple form, primal matter and simple but exquisitely judged decoration. Lim was Chinese-born but studied in St Martin's, settled in Britain and was married to William Turnbull. Her work could be placed in a minimalist context, suggesting through taut economical means elemental qualities of air and sea; it has the strange quality of the best minimal art and music of being cool and mathematical yet at the same time emotionally affecting. Equally the work could be set alongside Moore and Hepworth and an engagement through material with the flow of air, sea and earth. Above all it invites a meditative relationship, taking us to an experience of shapes and sensations in which contextual matters drift away. Nice to have the company and expert commentary of Kimvi Nguyen, who was especially taken by the 'Twelve Grey Colour Chart Paintings' (2013) by David Batchelor in the Artist's House. There is always exciting work to discover at Roche Court, and the idyllic setting between Stockbridge and Salisbury creates a viewing experience beguilingly different from that offered by the busy and trendy London galleries.

Tate Modern, Richard Hamilton

Had a mind-expanding visit to the Richard Hamilton show at Tate Modern yesterday. I have to admit I knew very little of this artists beyond the iconic 'Just what is it ...', which gave me a vague association with 'pop'. But there was clearly much more to him than that. More comprehensive coverage is no doubt on offer elsewhere, so I'll just note down things that stuck. The assemblage of forms in the reconstructed exhibitions for the ICA in Room 1 brought out a love of material forms and a cool scientific sense, both of which informed the later spaces. Hamilton's fascination with pop iconography is coupled with a kind of analytical detachment which stops it acquiring the party spirit of, say, Peter Blake. There seems to be a kind of deconstruction of the corporatist world, but whatever critique is being made is oblique: Fun House (1956), festooned with movie images and accompanied by a jukebox seemed to fill the idea of fun with question marks, and felt like a journey back to The Twilight Zone.

Moving through the rooms, I loved the way Hamilton's mind would seize on something and play with it, sometimes for years. For example, he was struck by some photos of Marilyn Monroe which she herself had semi-erased, and built this into a collage which suggests the vulnerability behind the celebrity image. A painstaking perspectival adaptation of different makes of car tyre across time had all of Uccello's obsession to it, and the same beauty in the drawing, later harnessed to computer treatment of the data. Hamilton was fascinated by perspective and space, from early paintings recording the phenomenon of viewing landscape from a train window and sem-abstract paintings where dots are surrounded by different spatial fields, through to a late installation inspired by a German hotel looby, with a double staircase reflected in a central column.

An array of different techniques in the works on show manifest Hamilton's lifelong interest in the technology of art (he was one of the first to use computer modelling). The artist's reverence for Marcel Duchamp was inspiring, and rather touching, and makes him an artist more attuned to European developments than many of his contemporaries. It was a reverence that led to a reconstruction of 'The Bride stripped Bare' and a meticulous English version of the notebooks and other written materials associated with that work. A wry detachment in the strongest pieces again suggests Duchamp, too, and when this is lost the work weakens: I found the hospital installation in  which a televised Thatcher is literally talking down to an invisible patient from a TV screen rather shrill, and the equation of landscape art with Kleenex rolls and excreting 'caganers' (for that is what they are) never seemed to get anywhere beyond a few obvious statements about advertising imagery. By contrast, 'Swingeing London' is endlessly mysterious in its absence of apparent attitude, and brought to mind Gerhard Richter (in this same space not long ago) in its ambiguous authorial presence.

Not that Hamilton couldn't do politics. The triptych of Northern Ireland works stands up well, I thought: the formal patterns and sense of human fragility suggested interesting layered dialogues between the pieces. The room of various pictures of Hamilton by his friends (my, what a starry set) was curiously self-effacing, a kind of opposite of art as self-expression - art as submission. Gunslinging Tony Blair towards the end was fun, but the concluding series of conflated museum and domestic interiors, using techniques from oil paint to software, seemed to concentrate the strengths of this tirelessly imaginative creator: technical invention and control, deep fascination with spatial relations, a negotiation of space between private and public and an anti-romantic impersonal presence. The net result is to feel more involved in the contemporary world, without feeling called upon to validate one's sincerity through noisy emotive gestures - a hugely refreshing feeling in the age of twitterdom. A really strong show which taught me a lot about an artist who brought us pop but a great deal more.

Cézanne and the Modern, Ashmolean

The Ashmolean, Oxford is giving the inaugural European outing of the important North American collection by Henry and Rose Pearlman. Cézanne is the centrepiece, taking up the whole of the first room. The works on display illustrate the remarkable tensions which energise Cézanne: two drawings of a scene from The Aeneid reveal uncertain draughtsmanship combined with an obsession with form. And a remarkable series of watercolours bring other opposites into view: solidity against space; the figurative verging on abstraction; the freedom of the eye and the controlling hand. The oil painting of Monte Ste-Victoire, with its characteristic choppy brustrokes, conveys an effortful gathering together of a myriad sense impressions. Cézanne dramatises the act of looking, the intellectual processing of sensory impressions. I was struck by 'Three Pears' (initially bought by Degas), a beautifully tender observation of the sensory qualities of fruit and plate, balanced by an intense formal sense of complementary forms and patterns.

For some reason the Pearlmans didn't acquire Picasso and Matisse; but it was rather refreshing to see early modernist works without the presence of these two Masters. There were works by Lipchitz, van Gogh, Soutine, Modigiliani, Degas, Sisley (a lovely account of a river scene , colours rippling across the pictorial plane) and a remarkable relief piece by Gauguin, 'Te Fare Amu'. The show as a whole brought across the sense of intense exploration and excitement in the early twentieth century, as new pictorial vocabularies were being forged. And it convinced in its assertion of the centrality and patriarchal status of Cézanne. The opening reference to Virgil and the striking watercolour of a skull, together with references to the minotaur and the primacy of canonical genres throughout (portrait, landscape, still life) all reminded the viewer of modernism's deep roots in, and engagment with, the classical meditearranean tradition.

Grimm Tales

Post-MND theatre trip to London with Fireflying Jess. The basement of Shoreditch Town Hall is the setting for a promenade / immersive production of Grimm Tales, in a version by Phillip Pullman. Five stories in three different rooms, delivered by a small company of actors in a frills-free style. Plenty of good things to take away from this. I loved the décor: woodchip and stones on some floors, an array of low-level lightbulbs strung across the low ceiling, candles in jars, suspended desk lamps with coloured bulbs, simple and evocative stacks of old chairs, rooms arranged for in-the-round- and traverse performance. And I loved the Poor Theatre style of simple props calling on the audience's childish imagination: a crutch becomes a gun, a trunk a ship, and simple sacking and a busticated umbrella are transformed into effective puppets. Costumes included some gorgeous dresses and entrancing economical touches: brushes for a hedgehog's back, a fur coat for a wolf. I liked being whisked around different rooms: it was a reminder of Punchdrunk's The Drowned Man, except in this case you don't spend time wandering around empty spaces wondering what you're missing. The five stories were Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel,The Three Snake Leaves, Hans my Hedgehog and The Juniper Tree (our favourite: puppetry, music, live sound effects, great use of space).

The acting itself was what it needed to be: clear, without irony, direct. Sometimes the lines were so simple it left the performers without much room for maneouvre and ti was hard for the stories to get into a rhythm. It struck me that the characters are calling out for a large gestural performance, while the small spaces call for something more nuanced and intimate, and this left the actors in a curious place, giving a kind of parlour-room panto. Except that these stories are much, much darker than panto, and this was the strong hand of the evening - a gathering sense of darkness, culminating in the genuinely spooky final story. Pullman's text (Carol Ann Duffy has already done one) does the strange thing of having actors as simultaneous characters and storytellers. So a bride, say, would have a line like 'You must promise to die when I do, she said', with the 'she said' stepping out of the part momentarily. Odd, perhaps it just takes getting used to. After the show we were invited to look around various rooms lovingly designed to suggest other stories: a creepy little dormitory for seven dwarves, a spinning wheel (Rumpelstiltskin), corridor of mirrors and a glass-encased bed for Sleeping Beauty. Theatre blended into art. Disney fell away to reveal the shadowy world of these odd tales. Other notes: I would have liked more music. But perhaps that's just because I was reminded of Kneehigh Theatre's The Wild Bride, with its fabulous bluesy score. And I guess likeing the sparseness and imagination and wanting a high production value live music accompaniment is asking to have it both ways. £35 seemed a a little steep for a small-scale show, but that's London for you. Glad I went, at its best this show was immersive in the fullest sense of the word. Will steal, or try to.

Translations (and a rant)

Before seeing English Touring Theatre's production of Translations at the Oxford Playhouse, I came upon a book in the drama section of Waterstone's called Mis-directing, by Terry McCabe. Its subject is that of the theatre director as auteur, whose 'interpretation' of a play ends with some ghastly set of gimmicks being imposed on it, elevating the director at the expense of the author. I recently endured an execrable production of As You Like It, in which the director had decided to set the play among asylum-seekers, as a demonstration of its relevance to today's issues. But As You Like It has nothing whatsoever to do with modern immigration: if the displaced characters are trying to get anywhere it is back to where they started, exactly the opposite of the asylum-seeker. The imposed idea is not supported by the text. The Forest of Arden is a peaceful meditative place - at least, for the nobles wandering around there - and this idea was simply smashed by the various searchlights and noises that went on in this assault on Shakespeare's piece. Above all, the play is - like all Shakespeare's comedies - about love. But the young anorak-wearing actors in this version never got anywhere near the emotional currents of the piece, and had evidently spent far too little time actually exploring the words. They had not received the direction that would actually have helped them. False accents abounded. Chemistry was there none.

This is the world of the auteur-director, finding some clever angle on a work that doesn't need it instead of telling the playwright's story clearly. There is far too much of it about: a recent Grange Park production of Bellini's I Puritani was a similar train-wreck, with an army of 'creatives' crawling all over it with their clever ideas. Unlike the actors, though, the singers were good enough to deliver the music clearly and distract us from the various silly things they were being made to do. It's tempting to think of oneself as a creative auteur type. In a recent production of A Midsummer Night's Dream I started with a set of concepts probably every bit as bad as those described above; but in the rehearsal process they thankfully fell away as the actors learned the scenes and got on with telling this magical tale, and the production was all the better for it. It's Shakespeare's play, I realized, and our job is just to help it along.


So it was a relief, and a joy, to witness Friel's great play Translations in the hands of director James Grieve, who had clearly seen it as his task to serve the author and get the situation and characters over as clearly as possible. From the opening image, a lovingly detailed set of the yard one got a sense of careful attention to period accuracy. Characters came over richly, the rhythms of the writing were superbly handled, and the key changes were meticulous: we were taken through broad comedy, romance, festivity, pathos and tragedy with absolute smoothness. As a result a play which perhaps borders on being over-clever in places came over as a masterly exploration of the human lives and feelings caught up in great and tragic historical and political processes. Wonderful performances from a cast including Niall Buggy and Ciaran O'Brien and John Conroy but above all a great ensemble production. ETT a company at the top of its game. About work of this quality there is strangely little to be said.