I WROTE in my most recent column about some of the reasons why theatre is so necessary (April 1): it feeds the entertainment industry, it acts as a communal meeting place and it helps us to understand ourselves and the world around us. Now, however, we have to find substitutes. What is startling is how quickly companies have responded to the current crisis by making their work available online; from Shakespeare’s Globe in London to the Schaubühne in Berlin, a huge range of productions is available.
This raises the question of whether a screening of a play can ever be more than second best. I vividly remember being despatched to a cinema in Chelsea to watch the first ever NT Live broadcast, in June 2009, when Nicholas Hytner’s production of Phèdre, starring Helen Mirren and Dominic Cooper, was shown in 73 cinemas in the UK and 200 around the world.
As I came out, I bumped into a well-known director who said: ‘Michael, that was better than it was in the theatre, wasn’t it?’ I hesitantly agreed that there was a certain advantage to seeing the actors in close-up in a chamber play by Racine filled with claustrophobic passion.
These days, I tend to go to live screenings of work from the Metropolitan Opera in New York or our own Royal Opera House and I’ve often thought of my director friend’s remark. The screenings give one access to work that, for reasons of distance or cost, one would not otherwise get to see.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
