Cyrano

June 21, 2026

We went to see Cyrano de Bergerac at the Noel Coward Theatre. It was pretty good: the adaptation is lively and Adrian Lester is a really good, convincing Cyrano. The last time I saw this play was 36 years ago with Edward Petherbridge, who definitely emphasised the poet in Cyrano, whereas Lester leans more to the warrior, but he’s balanced and reflects the character well. If I can risk sounding like a old git, I appreciated his delivery: I think some contemporary actors, used to TV and film, don’t really know how to project into a live theatre, but Lester’s voice and diction are exemplary, crystal clear to the back of the auditorium.

The play, to be honest, is a bit old-fashioned. The first scenes are unnecessarily confusing: the last act could be cut almost entirely. There are some creaking old dramatic devices at work: the people who are always interrupted just before they speak the words that would change everything: a character who gets a fatal wound and then walks and talks for another forty minutes before suddenly doing an elaborate, prolonged death. The big problem is with the credibility of the character’s motives. Roxane knows Cyrano all her life, but never suspects she might fancy him until she discovers he wrote all those words, when she instantly realises she loves him. She declares explicitly that she loves the man who wrote those words ‘in spite of his face’ even while she still thinks it was handsome Christian, sounding more as if she were a character in a logic puzzle than a real person.

And what about Cyrano? His refusal to declare his love, his committed support of Christian? Roxane is allowed here to briefly suggest his behaviour is manipulative, but a modern audience, with darker and more sophisticated ideas than the Victorians, can’t help wondering whether Cyrano’s behaviour is perverse in a deeper sense, with him getting a certain secret pleasure out of the idea of his beloved in the arms of another. Still, the number of times the story has been borrowed and updated shows it is an appealing archetype.

Anyway, I recommend this production.

Meet the Ancestors

June 16, 2026

I have finally got around to sorting through some of the photos we inherited from my mother and constructing a family tree. This is an interesting process.

Here we have my eight great-grandparents. These people, therefore, represent the set of genes from which mine are a random selection. Two of them lived long enough for me to have known them when I was a child – Fred Hankins, my father’s father’s father, and Susan Plumb, my mother’s mother’s mother.

I wish I knew more about these people, but there are already too many bits of information to mention here. I’ll just say that Annie Magnus looks like a robust lady, and my word she must have been. Starting when she was seventeen, she gave birth in 1899, 1900, 1903, 1905, 1907, 1909 (my grandfather), 1910, 1911, 1913, 1915 and 1918.

The Armed Man and more

June 3, 2026

Last Saturday we went to hear Karl Jenkins conduct The Armed Man at the Royal Festival Hall – he also played some extracts from Palladio and Adiemus. Good stuff: to me Jenkins, along with others such as Michael Nyman, stands for the welcome return of serious orchestral music that is melodic, not austerely intellectual, and not film music (though I suppose most of Nyman’s stuff is for films.

It’s true that Jenkins relies a lot on bright, uptempo stuff and there tends to be relatively little dramatic development within pieces: they set a mood and stick with it (maybe a bit like film music after all). He has also been a little brave in taking inspiration from other cultures – you don’t have to be extremely woke to wonder whether there’s something a bit off in people singing in a fake African language. We also had muezzin singing (why not, I suppose). On the whole I think Jenkins is just respectful enough to his sources to get away with it.

A very enjoyable afternoon, anyway.

Cosy

May 3, 2026

I see that Philippa Perry is publishing a ‘cosy’ murder story. It features a character apparently based on the Rev. Richard Coles, a neighbour and friend and also of course another celebrity who has written cosy murder stories. Perhaps Richard Osman pops round from time to time?

Now I don’t read detective stories. I don’t want to rant about celebrities using their position to stick their elbows in the faces of more deserving writers. All of these people are clever, talented, and genuinely interesting. But they don’t have to struggle to get their fiction published. Couldn’t they use that opportunity to do something just slightly more ambitious than cosy village murders? Apparently not: it seems they still want to avoid even the most minimal literary risk. Shall we draw on our intelligence and complex life experiences to craft a novel with insight, originality and flair? No, no: what if it flopped? Let’s stay cosy. I suppose we should perhaps be grateful they didn’t all produce more godawful celebrity children’s books.

Really, guys, raise your game, as you are surely capable of doing.

Plaza Prizes

April 20, 2026

This report in the Guardian suggests that the Plaza Prizes has closed down in chaos, with judges and prize-winners unpaid. I have occasionally featured these contests in my lists in recent years, most recently in July 2025 which seems to be when the problems arose. The competitions seemed reputable – I hope none of my visitors been affected by all this, and if so, I’m sorry.

Turner and Constable

April 9, 2026

This show at Tate Britain has a fantastic collection of works by both artists (but no Haywain, no Fighting Temeraire). There was a rivalry between the two, who were almost exactly the same age: sometimes friendly, sometimes with an edge. Turner was more radical and achieved recognition much earlier. He travelled more, and was more adventurous both in his range of subjects and in his techniques. Occasionally his love of drama led him to produce paintings that are slightly absurd or virtually incomprehensible (Moses writing Genesis in a weird foggy bubble). Constable’s rural scenes are much safer, but there is an insistence on the real that perhaps veils a hint of darkness. Constable preferred to paint direct from life until he realised that ‘six-footers’, which could only be painted in the studio, were what got him attention.

Turner is often mentioned as a precursor of Impressionism, but here we can see that Constable was also given to a free, loose style, especially later on in his career. When the Pre-Raphaelites came along, all of that was dumped: though they respected the older painters’ attention to Nature, they rejected ‘sloshy’ painting in favour of sharp edges and a realism filled with clear detail. I like the Pre-Raphaelites, but this exhibition makes it seem they took British art down a dead end, diverting it away from what might have been a British school of Impressionism and some memorable art.

Ram’ses

March 31, 2026

It is a strange quirk of fate that the best-known of the Pharaohs is probably Tutankhamun. That’s surely because his is the only ancient Egyptian burial treasure that has survived more or less intact, showing something of the incredible wealth and beauty of these funeral hoards. He was, however, a minor monarch, young and short-lived, at the end of a failing dynasty.

In the next dynasty, by contrast, and not all that long afterwards, there lived what may actually be the greatest Pharaoh of all: Ramesses II – or Ramses, it seems both variants are equally accepted. I’m going to make matters worse by calling him Ram’ses. At Battersea Power Station there is currently an exhibition devoted to him, and we visited.

While Tut’s treasure has attracted blockbuster crowds all over the world, Ram’ses’s funereal collection, probably much more opulent, was lost to tomb raiders, though his mummy was discovered later. So what can you feature in an exhibition? The curators have actually done fairly well. Luckily Ram’ses commissioned hundreds of statues and monuments during his unusually long reign, and in fact it’s one of his portraits that features in the famous poem Ozymandias (his name in Greek). So the exhibition features a number of depictions of the Pharaoh and his family, especially his first and favourite wife Nefertari (he had hundreds of wives and concubines). We can also see depictions of him in battle, with his pet lion running alongside his chariot. Ram’ses scored many solid victories, but the one he was proudest of, the battle of Kadesh against the Hittites, is generally regarded as more of a draw.

The exhibition does rely on a number of artefacts from earlier and later periods. Most of the jewellery here (not all that much gold, in spite of what the publicity says) is the sort of thing Nefertari might have worn, but actually from decades or centuries before or after her time. This is OK given the amazing stability of Egyptian culture, which changed little over three thousand years. In fact one interesting thing here is the way Ram’ses reconditioned statues from long before, having a thousand-year-old lady recarved to represent his mother: we also see art made for Ram’ses that much later kings appropriated in a similar way.

Less grand than other exhibits but highly interesting are a few ink sketches on stone by some of the artists who worked for Ram’ses. These are less formal than typical Egyptian art and convey a more vivid sense of the artist’s individual humanity.

All in all, well worth a look.