Theatre

"The costumes are a fusion of antiquity and modernity which succeed in locating the play precisely nowhere." Thus wrote Lloyd Evans, theatre critic of The Spectator on a certain play - i doesn't matter which one because they do it all the time. This band of new directors seem to want to be as creative as the playwrights or composers of operas; they want their work to be as outstanding as that which they are interpreting. So they set an opera in no-man's-land.
I have seen three operas in the past few years and each one was set nowhere, as Lloyd Evans said the play he saw was set. First there was Salome by Richard Strauss. It was a mess. You wouldn't have been able to follow the plot unless you had read up about it beforehand. There were no famous arias and the music was at times quite dull. Yes, you did have the dance of the seven vails which does have some exciting music. But that was all. Then there was Wozzek by Berg. I have tried hard to appreciate Alban Berg but find his music quite tuneless; not as tuneless as Schonberg but tuneless just the same. It was set in a sort of baked beans factory. It had a murder and everyone was dressed in bright costumes. But it was quite a sordid plot (if you could follow it) and there were no arias that were at all memorable. Recently I saw the Welsh National Opera's take on Turandot, "Puccini's greatest work" I'm informed. It was, as I should have expected, set in another no-man's-land. It had two arias that were worth hearing - "None shall sleep" being one of them - and the rest was quite dismal (the plot, of course, was ridiculous as many operas and ballets are but you expect the music to lift you to that plane of excellence where you "willingly suspend your disbelief"). People wore modern outfits - and this was supposed to be ancient Japan. Or was it China? It didn't matter where it was because the directors and designers decided to set it nowhere.
This is the last opera I shall attend.I used to like some operas but with the advent of the modernising directors and the modernising designers I'd prefer to stay at home and watch "The Killing".
By the way, Wozzek died when he fekl into a heap of tinned beans.

Oldies

Here we go again. Health n' Safety. When you are getting on in years you not only have to put up with care-home inattention and care-hospital ill treatment and not being able to touch your toes, you also have to put up with people telling you how you should be living. The latest comes from some Pshychiatric Committee (?) who have declared that all people over 65 should be MOT'd - well, sort of. They should be "screened" to see how much alcohol they drink. Where are we? Mecca? These Pschyatric loonies believe that old people should enjoy only about a half a glass of wine per day or half a pint of beer (I don't think they used "enjoy"; they probably meant "force-fed"). It's enough to drive you to drink.
You live to 65 and then retire to enjoy life without the discipline of the boss looking over your shoulder and telling you off. You're free at last. Why not celebrate by having a couple of pints or, in my case, a couple of (large) glasses of red wine? But looking over your shoulder now is that haggard witch "Elf n' Safety".
I recall, many moons ago, Cliff Mitchelmore interviewing an "expert" on health matters; it was a programme called Tonight if my memory is correct (it often isn't these days what with all the health and safety junk I read about food, drink, excercise, eyes, cancer, heart etc). They were talking about potatoes and the expert said "O, potatoes, shouldn't eat them, very bad for you with all that starch". Then Mitchelmore said "What about the well-known 'chip buttie'?" To which the expert replied: "Certain death".
A couple of years passed and the humble potatoe became something that was good for you. Didn't some wiseacre in government advise us all to eat five potatoes a day?
Health advice comes at you like a sine curve: one day its up and the next day it's down. Potatoes kill you then potatoes save your life.
So two fingers to Health and Safety and pass the bottle please. I've always thought pschiatrists were crazy - now I'm sure of it.

Drabble

I am looking at a photo of Margaret Drabble in this week's Spectator. It was taken some time ago because she looks quite young. She is sitting very upright on a chair, fingers of her right hand in the air poised above a typewriter, left hand resting on the side of the typewriter. She seems about ready to type but she is thoughtful; her face is young but already has a look of womanhood about it; there's a bandana round her head and her hair, what little can be seen of it, is centre-parted like a headmistress's. She does have that headmistressy look about her. Perhaps that's the reason I have taken a disliking to her. Not just now but for years. Why?
Francis King reviews her new book of short stories (old stories, new collection) on the page opposite her photo. He met her when she was about to be published. They had lunch with his publisher at Wiedenfield and Nicolson. "I found myself facing," he writes, "a woman, attractive but not beautiful." Later the woman publisher says to King: "There's someone who already knows what she's going to do - and, by golly, she'll do it."
Which, of course, she did. Novels, essays, editing the Oxford companion to English Literature.... and so on.
I think I must be jealous of her success. Yet she doesn't carry her success too well. I feel she is proud of her achievements to such a degree that she seems superior. And not in a nice way. In an "Oxford way". Because she is "so Oxford", isn't she? She has that air of superiority that a good many Oxford students have. I don't suppose they know they are developing it while students but something happens to them and they come away with a chip on their shoulders.
I looked for a poem by D.H.Lawrence about Oxford and superiority but all I could find was this:
"How nice it is to be superior!
Because really, it's no use pretending, one is superior, isn't one?
I mean people like you and me -

Quite! I quite agree.
The trouble is, everybody thinks they're just as superior
As we are, just as superior -"

Etc.
There's a smugness about her I feel, an intellectual smugness. She is "so Oxfordly" smug.
Can't say I like her sister much either. I've heard they hate each other which goes some way to making me feel better about the rather nasty way I feel about her.

Sports

I was looking forward to seeing the film "Only Angels Have Wings" which I saw a few years ago and remember it for its wit and for Cary Grant who, incidentally, David Thomson rates the best film actor of them all. He is always a bit goofy in Howard Hawks films, especially so in "Monkey Business" and "Bringing up Baby", and here he is quite goofy at times but more of the office bully type as he is in "His Girl Friday". So I set "The Box" to record it since it was playing at 1.00 p.m.. But what did I find? Instead of the film the BBC decided to show tennis. So I, no doubt, have recorded Murray versus some French bloke instead of the film. I don't like Andy Murray. He is just too dull a creature. And what is so important about the contest at Queens club that it takes up half the afternoon on TV? But, of course, a British tennis player is taking part and surely, in BBC-think, surely all of Britain will have their eyes glued to their TV sets. It's pathetic. Anyway, Murray is Scottish and proud of it so why should we of the other three parts of Britain be cheering him on? He'll probably vote Scottish Nationalist when the time comes for a referendum.
But, God help us, we've got the Wimbledon affair soon. Let's hope Murray doesn't make it past the first or second round; it's bad enough watching the primas donas prance about the place - and I mean the men, don't watch women at all (unless they're worth looking at like that unpronounceable Russian beauty) - without a dullard like Murray taking up prime time on TV.
I'm afraid that most sportsmen are pretty dull people; they usually just talk about sport and nothing but sport. Strangely enough, though I don't like watching boxing much except when heavyweights are trying to kill their opponents, but I always find what they have to say interesting. They too usually only talk about boxing but it's the fact that they've been there bashing away for an hour or so and being bashed too that makes what they say interesting. The new one, the British fighter who's just won something or other - he's a really good talker. Tommy Farr was a wonderful talker on boxing and boxers. I think boxing films are the only sport films I like. Always have. "Gentleman Jim" and "Rocky" come to mind.
Imagine a film about tennis players. I know it's been done but d'you think I'd go to see that?
George Bernard Shaw liked to put the gloves on occasionaly; in fact he wrote a novel about a boxer. I have it hear on the shelf: "Cashel Byron's Profession". Rather good too.

Naipaul

What a beastly, cantankerous old so-and-so V.S.Naipaul is. Has he got anything good to say about anyone? Maybe he appreciates his housekeeper for little things like making him a cup of tea - and maybe some other "little things", knowing his proclivities. But he doesn't seem to have anything good to say about writers. And now he's off again on one of his diatribes against other writers. This time it's women writers. He dismisses Jane Austen and accuses women of having a "narrow view of the world" and suggests that there is no writer of the fairer sex who is his equal.
I can think of quite a few because I'm not a fan of Naipaul (liked one of the books written by his brother Shiva better). I tried "The House of Mr Biswas" twice and found it rather tedious.
Yet I do have a sneaky sort of liking for the old sod. He is so arrogant and antagonistic towards writers that he has become a kind of "performance artist". Whenever he is mentioned by other writers, journalists usually, he is regarded as someone who is beyond the pale, someone people shouldn't take any notice of, someone who is so filled with his own vanity that he is disgusting. Why do they write so much about him then? Like moths to the light which can kill them, these writers are drawn to Nailpaul maybe hoping that he will try to kill them (metaphorically) so that they can join that long list of great wriers he doesn't like - Dickens for example who he finds unbearable; Hardy who he also finds unbearable; Henry James who he thinks is "the worst writer in the world" and Joseph Conrad about whom he says "I have trouble with some of Conrad's books".
I like him for his honesty. He tells us what he believes. I agree with him about Conrad, I too have trouble with his books; and I find Henry James difficult to take these days; and Thomas Hardy I have always had difficulty with. Then there's his view of women writers. I have to say I'm in sympathy with him to a certain extent: there's always, to my mind, a touch of Mills and Boon about most women writers (of fiction, that is). "Sentimental" Naipaul avers. Mmmm! may be something in that!
But Dickens unbearable! I draw the line there in my small admiration for V.S.Naipaul.

4 Rooms

I could not believe my eyes. In the TV programme "4 Rooms", people take along to a studio some item they think valuable and a game is played: they meet four professional "dealers" in artifacts, usiually works of art (or things that their owners believe are works of art). It's then a game show. The dealers tell the visitors what they'll pay for the item..... it's more complicated than that but it's not worth going into here because I wasn't so much interested in the game but in the things people brought along to be offered for sale. And in one in particular: a wall with a Banksy work on it. Graffitti in short. Two young bloked wanted £300 000 for it. £300 000 for a wall with graffitti on it? That was not the most amazing thing about it. Surrealistic depths (or heights, depending on your feeling towards graffitti on walls, art, Banksy etc) were reached. The most amazing thing was that one of the dealers offered them £240 000 for it. And there was more amazement to follow. They turned the offer down.
Now, they had spent only £20 000 on it, removing it from its original place i.e. part of a larger wall, and transporting it to the studio. Surely if they had been in their right minds they should have accepted the offer. But no. They thought they were going to get more for it elsewhere. And in retrospect, I think they may have been right. Because the dealer who offered them this massive amount of money told them that he already had someone who was interested in it.
Which brings us to the meat of the matter. There must be market in such things. It turns out that Banksy is not only regarded as a serious artist but his stuff sells as well. I'm flabberghasted. I thought scribbling graffitti on walls was against the law. Which, no doubt, is why Banksy never signs his work. How then can he sell them? And those who do try to sell them: how can they if they're not signed? I mean, anyone could have done them.
But it seems I'm on a different planet from the art world. Tracey Emin is bad enough with her unmade bed, then there was the pile of bricks in a gallery in London; then there's Ligetti in the music world; and now, the wall. £300 000 for a wall with graffitti on it. Give me strength. Where did I go wrong?