freelanceintellectual.com

Her Naked Skin by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, at the National Theatre

Bain Collection, Library of Congress

We so wanted this play to be good, my friend Amanda and I: the subject deserves a good play, and astonishingly this is the first new play by a living woman to be performed at the Olivier (although the qualifications make it clear it's not actually the first play by a woman performed there). You could only wish Her Naked Skin well. But it was less than satisfying, somehow.

Again I wondered whether a little too much emphasis was placed on the visual engineering of this production, just as I did with the Revenger's Tragedy only a couple of weeks ago. Yes, you might say as Michael Billington did in the Guardian that the play is "excitingly staged" - the row of cage-cells raised above the revolving floor dominate the scene throughout, and the varying angles we were shown did at least allow cell interior scenes to be clearly distinguished from collective prison scenes. There was a feeling, though, that all this was being done just because it could be done; and we certainly wondered whether this play was really suitable for the Olivier at all. I think it would have worked well in the much more intimate Cottesloe. To be fair, I didn't feel, as I did when watching the Revenger's Tragedy, that the lavish efforts put into equipment meant insufficient attention had been paid to the tone of the production.

The performances were strong, with the exception of the actor playing Keir Hardie, who entirely failed to conjure up a righteous, committed radical and gave us instead something like a mild, bumbling but well meaning Liberal lord. Lesley Manville played Lady Celia Cain well, showing us a woman with a real emotional deficit but whose surface coolness prevents her from accepting herself and saying yes to what she needs. Jemima Rooper played I thought the easier part of Eve Douglas, the working-class girl who gets involved in the suffragette struggle and with Lady Celia. It was a silent, monosyllabic part of a rejected, misunderstood and underestimated girl, but she played it as well as you could hope for. Susan Engel gave real life, too, to the doughty campaigner Florence.

The problems were with the play. The first issue I had was with the language: early on, one of the suffragettes uses the word feminist, a word which may have been in use by the time the play is set - just before the First World War - but which surely was not commonly in use among the women imprisoned for smashing windows. Was it? Of course, as a spectator you can have it both ways: even if use of the word is well justified by deep historical research, unresearched scepticism from the audience about things like this is to be expected and in my view avoided by the playwright. On a more mundane level, no male prison officer in 1913 could possibly have read the sports section of a newspaper, even if he wanted to - this kind of thing disrupts both the historical illusion and your trust in the playwright.

The main problem, though, was what I'd call a general lack of depth. Some of the scenes - between Lady Celia and her husband, for instance - lasted hardly a minute or two, giving no time for real connection between the characters, or for revelation. The problem of drama is how to see inside characters' minds simply by looking at what they do and hearing their words, and deeper interaction is needed than this, if that's to be achieved. What happened between Eve and Celia that made Celia finish the affair? Why did she finish it? We couldn't say. Nor did the play get underneath what we all know, or think we know, about the suffragette movement. It didn't surprise us or say anything new, and at the end I didn't understand any better why Celia and Eve became suffragettes than I did at the beginning. This play is a sort of monument, really, something to make us meditate for a while on the suffrage movement and pay our respects to it. But as well as being a monument to the past, it stands as a reminder of our own time's obsessions, because by choosing to focus on a lesbian affair between women of different classes Rebecca Lenkiewicz is very much a playwright of today: these are our interests, the kind of thing graduate students are researching into right now and that Sarah Waters writes novels about. For me, though, that was a very comfortable approach to take: we were never made to feel the challenge and the shock of the suffragettes' civil disobedience and how they were treated. Even the force-feeding scene I thought lily-livered. The Olivier audience could have taken much more discomfort than they were subjected to, and I think should have been. I remembered a similar scene in a BBC drama on the same subject when I was little - I think it must have been one of the series Shoulder to Shoulder produced by Verity Lambert. The memory of that is much more shocking and affecting than anything in Her Naked Skin.

What was interesting was how much better the play got in the second half when its focus narrowed from the politics to the personal. Had we had more of that - learned more about the characters, understood their changes and differences - it might have been a more substantial evening. As it was, we were left with a play of two halves which didn't quite meet or gel.

Michael Billington was much more positive than me, but how he could call the force-feeding "one of the most horrifying scenes on the London stage", I don't know. Paul Taylor in the Independent mentioned the blinding in King Lear, which in my is much more horrid, and Philip Fisher, too, ejoyed himself more than I did. Georgie Hobbs is even further away from me, though. Can she really have thought this play "horrific"? Unlike her, I felt the portrayal of the brutalised doctor let us off a hook, somehow: the play would have been much effective politically had we had more sympathy with the non-suffragette characters. I did feel contrary to her view, that we were indeed given an "easy feminist ride". I think the West End Whingers are spot on, though, and they even mention Shoulder to Shoulder and Sarah Waters, too.

Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett

David Orban/CreativeCommons

I enjoyed this book. I've tried Dennett before, and not succeeded: Kinds of Minds was a book I found difficult to read, section not satisfactorily flowing from section, sentence not flowing from sentence so that its argument was hard to follow. Breaking the Spell certainly doesn't have that problem. It's true that occasionally you need to re-read a pair of sentences to make sure you've understood the way they hang together, but that's really just a question of prose style - I'm not sure Dennett always reads what he's written back to himself when editing (something I'm guilty of myself sometimes, and which does affect readability). But overall this book is very reader-friendly, and approach Dennett is committed to, as shown by the passage I quote later in this post, about Foucault. I found Dennett's writing absorbing, and read very quickly indeed.

Dennett's strategy has two planks to it. At the book's heart is an attempt to construct a tentative hypothesis of how religion came about and why it survives today. It's a natural history of religion, a study of it as a natural phenomenon. As well as that, it's a sustained argument in favour of such a project, and argument that further investigation of the questions Dennett identifies is an urgent and vital project if we're to understand religion and avert the dangers it may present.

It is high time that we subject religion as a global phenomenon to the most intensive multidisciplinary research we can muster, calling on the best minds on the planet. Why? because religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about. It affects not just our social, political and economic conflict, but the very meanings we find in our lives.

Dennett usefully insists that religion has not always existed: like language, it must have arisen at some point in the history or prehistory of mankind. He imagines it as arising out of a hard-wired instinct to attribute intentions and agency to all kinds of things - to see everything that happens as the result of some conscious being. The cosmological argument, that says God exists because the universe must have a cause, a first mover, is an intellectualisation of this instinctive belief. Dennett argues, using a meme-based analysis, that certain religious ideas survived better than others because they met deep psychological needs better, or because they had features making them more memorable or impressive - one of which he suggests might, paradoxically, be obscurity.

John Searle once told me about a conversation he had with the late Michel Foucault: "Michel, you're so clear in conversation; why is your written work so obscure?" To which Foucault replied, "That's because, in order to be taken seriously by French philosophers, twenty-five percent of what you write has to be impenetrable nonsense." I have coined a term for this tactic, in honor of Foucault's candor: eumerdification.

In time, people "domesticated" religion, deliberately shaping it and defending it from attack by shielding it with protective ideas - for instance, that doubt is caused by the devil.

It's all interesting, and I was happy to read Dennett for hours on the ways religion might be good for health or contribute to success in important challenges, how it might help small communities evolve an ethic of cooperation that could assist their survival. I think he succeeds in sharpening or thinking, as he puts it, and setting out the broad programme that a naturalistic religious studies movement should follow. Good stuff. He goes on to examine moral and political issues relevant to religion: the importance of understanding the roots of terrorism, for instance, and for religion to take responsibility for the evils it gives rise to.

Any vicious cult that uses Christian imagery or texts as its protective coloration should lie heavily on the conscience of all who call themselves Christians, for instance. Until the priests and rabbis and imams and their flocks explicitly condemn by name the dangerous individuals and congregations within their ranks, they are all complicit. I know many christians who are privately sickened by many of the words and deeds done "in the name of Jesus," but expressions of dismay to close friends are not enough.

I think there's a slight problem with the book, though. At the beginning Dennett mentions its American bias, not apologising, but giving a warning about it. Actually I saw little evidence of American bias (he even mentions Manchester United at one point); anyway, what bias there was was mild. There is, though, a tactical assumption that the reader is an American fundamentalist, which makes Dennett painfully exhaustive in his pleas for the reader to critically examine questions like why people believe in God (rather than simply answering them biblically), even though any reader with a mind just slightly open will not need such exhaustiveness, and true fundamentalists will not benefit from it. Perhaps my approach is pessimistic, but I think the study of religion as a natural phenomenon is something that will only interest brights like me and Dennett and truly thoughtful believers, and I think the book would have been even better had he accepted that and just got on with talking to the converted. Unlike Dennett I see nothing wrong with that. He might have made more progress in his inquiry that way, and his argument might have embodied more completely the change of perspective he wants to argue for. I can imagine his counter-argument: that the thinking he's asking for should be an inclusive project carried out by those who are committed to religion as well those who are not. I can see the sense in that. Even so, I think the extent to which Dennett looks over his shoulder at possible objections from evangelicals diverts him from the more important discussions I'd like him to have taken further.

It's a good book, this, though. Anyone who's interested in this area will probably also like Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a racier, more daring and in the sense that troubled me about Dennett, less circumspect attempt to hypothesise about the origins of religion. Both books are cracking contributions to this post-religious field.

The Revenger's Tragedy at the National Theatre

Meredith Farmer/CreativeCommons

I wasn't wowed by Melly Still's production, but I did enjoy it. It begins with a bang: drums crash us into a wordless prologue in which Antonio's wife is raped in the dark underground of what seems and sounds like a club. This is how we're immediately introduced to one of the stars of the production: the set. It's a thing of three parts - the club lounge, a more neutral chamber and the house of Vindice, the protagonist revenger himself, played here by Rory Kinnear. The set is impressive both visually and practically (it contains corridors enabling characters to scurry within it as in a warren) and I liked it - I did wonder though whether a bit too much emphasis was put on the look of the production rather than its feel.

The famous, four-hundred-year-old Revenger's Tragedy is a relentless gore-fest, with Vindice, whose betrothed has been murdered for refusing the advances of the tyrannical Duke, contriving to slay the Duke and his sons by a mix of luck and skill. It ends up with a body count more familiar in a video game than in a play. There's long been a debate about whether Tourneur wrote it, or Middleton, and the National plumps fashionably for Middleton, but I doubt this'll ever be settled. The publicity sells it as "ferociously dark" - and it might have been played that way. But it wasn't, really. Although Rory Kinnear is undoubtedly a good thing - his hilarious turn as Sir Fopling Flutter in The Man of Mode last year stole the show, though I thought Tom Hardy and especially Nancy Carroll were its real stars - I wondered whether casting him and using his comic ability to bring out the potential humour in The Revenger's Tragedy was really the best way to go. Ferocious darkness, this wasn't. I agree with Susannah Clapp that the production shows a certain lack of confidence in the play.

Take the killing of the Duke, by means of the poisoned skull of Vindice's dead love, dressed up as a doll to fool the Duke who thinks a woman is being sent to his room. The idea seems ludicrous - how could anyone be fooled by that? And the scene is initially played for laughs, very effectively. But I really think it's possible to play it full-bloodedly, giving ironic distance no quarter - and surely that kind of commitment is needed if "ferocious darkness" is to be achieved. Technology - lighting, projection perhaps - could help make the contrivance here something other than silly. If you're going to choose the highlight the play's comedy, though, it could hardly be done better. Vindice's character changes are made the most of, wigs, hats and all, and I especially enjoyed his reapparance in the guise of himself, impoverished

I've e'en forgot what colour silver's of.

and hired to kill his own false identity.

There's quite a bit else to like. Elliot Cowan's Lussurio lives up to his name as an amoral lounge-lizard, and Katherine Manners and the excellent Barbara Flynn do good work in the arguments between mother and daughter over money and morals. It's easy to overestimate the quality of famous actors but you really do feel in surer than average hands when Flynn is on stage.

The Revenger's Tragedy is an interesting rather than a great play. It's a moral tale for those who would rule, I think: seek or use power corruptly, and your sins will in the end destroy you. And it's as much a warning for rebels as for rulers, because, as Antonio shows at the play's end, assassins threaten all power and may themselves suffer revenge. Strong and honest government is needed to avoid cycles of vengeance and feuding, as is still being learned in Belfast and Baghdad.

Michael Billington didn't like the "preliminary tosh": I think he has a point that it obscured to some extent the content of Vindice's opening speech. Charles Spencer in the Telegraph loved the production. Russell Bowes was a bit harsh on Katherine Manners I think (I quite fancied her) but I agree with him about Melly Still's epilogue which balanced the prologue and I thought served the sense of a restorative ending rather than undermining it. Alistair Smith's feeling in The Stage were much like mine - he too thought the comedy chased away the darkness.

The Buckingham Arms, Petty France

Kake Pugh/CreativeCommons

It's sad news, this. When I was a civil servant (yes, I'm afraid I was, and for a fair while, too) I used to be a regular at the Buckingham. And a fine pub it was, too. The beer was Young's - I usually would order the ordinary bitter as a session with my mates (well, I'm think of one in particular) could easily extend to five or six pints, and some standards are required even in the governance of the country. He'd be on the Special. The beer was excellent, which was why the Buckingham was repeatedly listed in the Good Beer Guide, but there was much more to it than the beer. There was something special about the feel of this pub.

Occasionally I'd stand outside in warm weather; but rarely, because the interior was so cosy. On entering on a Friday night, say, you'd find the one, long room packed, but service was always quick as anything, and usually you could at least find a place to prop your pint on the shelf that ran along the side, on one of the high tables people would stand at, or at the bar. But soon you'd notice that seats became available inside the big bulging bow window at the front, in a comfy armchair or on one of the cushion-backed benches against the wall. One settled there, you wouldn't want to move - that was one of the most comfortable spots in the capital. Alternatively, soon you'd be able to sit round a table towards the back, again on Victorian-style cushioned benches and stools. There was a time when the Buckingham was full of smoke, of course. Well, the disappearance of the smoke was a change I welcomed. But it was also full of talk: the talk of disgruntled, passed-over officials and their mates from the Ministry of Justice, say, of men in well-worn suits and women in pin-stripes. There was a lot of talk of politics and a lot of laughter. And the only sound was talk - or, well, talk mingled with the sound of glasses being collected and crisps being munched. The Buckingham was that most delightful thing, a pub without piped music. The simple sound of voices is the perfect one for a pub - once you realise this, you never want anything else - and that's what you got at the Buckingham. There was a resident dog, too, a big, lazy, creamy-white thing whose breed I couldn't tell you (I was always awful at that sort of thing; I should have got the Observer's Book of Dogs when I was little, I suppose) but who lay on his side and tended to get stroked a bit as the evening wore on. The Buckingham was the ideal London pub, a place I regularly took visitors to London - Americans loved it - and where all sorts happened. My friend Sappho and I once sat next to a pair of horticulturalists designing a garden for an RHS competition, and by the end of the night we'd mucked in with our own ideas.

Well, that's all gone, now. The Buckingham, as I found out when I took a friend there the other day, has had a "makeover", a word that makes any true pub-lover's heart sink. The comfy benches have been torn out, replaced by nasty, narrow, cheap floral pouffe-type seats, and the old-fashioned tables have been replaced by horrible clunking things that look as though they came from IKEA, with sharp edges. Some of the tables and seats are raised up high, of course, in an effort to appeal to youth, I suppose - no one seemed to want to sit at those tables. In fact, there were not many people there at all, at eight on a Friday night. Time was, you'd feel lucky to have a seat at that time. Now, there's plenty of "choice" of places you wouldn't especially choose to sit. The walls are covered, sickeningly, with quotes from authors like Dr. Johnson, although he'd have snorted with derision at the clichéd decor and with disgust at the subtraction of pleasure from this tavern. The beer was a little too chilled, I thought, and my friend and I were treated to the awful sound of Blondie coming from the newly-erected speakers, put up perhaps to fill in for the lack of human warmth. Predictably, it wasn't loud enough to listen to, but was too loud to be ignored. Piped music like this really is an offence against music as well as against conversation, I think. The dog is gone too, of course. There'll be no stroking him any more.

It's a real loss, this, made all the more bitter by the nasty, sarcastic attitude of the surly bloke I presume to be the landlord, who explained the changes to me by saying "we're going after customers now, mate," (I looked around me somewhat ostentatiously at that point, which seemed to rile him) and advised me mockingly to frequent Wetherspoons pubs in future, making it obvious from his tone that he has the same contempt for that chain as he had for me - although by the state of his pub, he's no right to take that attitude. The man's a vandal and a fool, and deserves to lose money. In fact, we ended the evening at The Speaker, a quite terrific pub where I'm glad to say it's certainly not last orders .

I'm not alone, as you can see here. One day I hope the Buckingham will be restored, and others will know what it once was. It's not worth visiting now, though. I'm not against all change; but I do hate it when something unique, vital and real is destroyed to make way for something tacky, samey and fake.

Grotesque, by Natsuo Kirino; translated by Rebecca Copeland

yumahaton/CreativeCommons

What is this book? On one level, it's a crime story, a murder mystery of a sort, a serial killer novel, even. But it is so much more than just that. It's the story of two prostitutes, Yuriko Hirata and Kazue Sato, apparently murdered by the same man in Tokyo within the space of a year. The main narrator, Yuriko's sister, is never named in the book, but she's a plain, middle-aged, middle-class public employee, who tells us what she knows of her sister's and her friend's youth, how they resorted to prostitution, and what she can piece together about their strange ends.

At any rate, it seems that something happened with those two. Two people who were such complete opposites in looks, intelligence, and circumstances end up as prostitutes and then get killed and abandoned by the same man? The more you think about it, the less likely it seems that you could find an account more bizarre. The incidents with Yuriko and Kazue irrevocably changed my life.

The narrator and Yuriko are "half": their mother is Japanese, their father is Swiss. And neither fits neatly into the society around her. Yuriko is beautiful, stunningly so, head-turningly so, mesmerisingly so, and this accident is the central fact dominating her sister's, the narrator's, life, as she feels permanently and relentlessly subject to unfavourable comparison. We see how this feeling of never being quite pretty enough, and never quite clever enough to overcome that deficit, makes her turn her in on herself. Her growth is restricted, perverted even, like one of her grandfather's bonsai trees. But we also discover in time and as the viewpoint shifts that Yuriko's beauty is her own curse as well as her sister's. Sexual attention is the only attention she will ever gain; sex, the only kind of love she will find.

That was the first time I noticed that the men who embrace me, every single one of them, end up with an expression of emptiness when they are done, as if they have lost something. Maybe that is why I am always in search of a new man. Maybe that is why I am now a prostitute.

Both sisters know Kazue from their schooldays at the elite Q High School, where the painfully thin, almost ugly Kazue strives for social acceptance and success. But she, too, will be disappointed. Kazue's story is one of the hopelessness of aspiration for a Japanese woman: no matter how hard she tries, no matter what she achieves, she is just a woman, and can only find success or happiness on men's terms.

If you promise not to believe a word of it, I'll let you see what she wrote. But you really must not believe it. It really is a complete fabrication. A number of the Chinese characters she used in the journal were written incorrectly. And then there were places where she left out characters, and others where the characters she wrote were just plain ugly or else really hard to decipher. I've rewritten those parts.

This is the story of the narrator, too. It's the story of her own childhood, how the oppressiveness of the society around her and in which she is never noticed by men, nor accepted by other women feeds malice within her. It's the story of three woman made monsters in a monstrous world. Sounds like a pessimistic, misanthropic  view of Japanese life? It certainly is that.

I hate the orange colour of the train. I hate the gritty wind that whips through the tunnels. I hate the screech of the wheels. I hate the smell. Usually I wear earplugs so I can avoid the sounds, but there's not much I can do to avoid the smell. And it's always worse on rainy days. It's not just the smell of dirt. There's the smell of people: of perfume and hair tonic, of breath and age, sports pages and makeup and menstruating women. People are the worst. There are the disagreeable salarymen and the exhausted office ladies. I can't stand any of them.

The novel is scathing about corporate sexism: Japanese firms are portrayed as a recruiting women simply as workhorses and then promoting them on the basis of their looks; women are fodder to be dated, propositioned, or sexually harassed while management looks the other way;  if they don't play that game, they're to be ignored. Ultimately, in the office or in the street, they're to be bought. The whole of Japanese society is seen as exploiting women in this way. They work to support men; their existence is conditioned entirely by their sexual appeal and usefulness to men.

I got up on time this morning, boarded the train, changed to the subway, and worked like an aggressive career woman in one of the biggest corporations around. At night I transformed into a prostitute sought out by men. Suddenly I remembered the argument I had had earlier with Arai and stopped short. I'm a company employee day and night. Or is it that I'm a prostitute night and day? Which is it? Which one is me?

I was completely captivated by this book. I could hardly put it down, as they say, and easily read more than a hundred pages in a session. It's not because of suspense, either, or shocks. Not at all. Natsuo Kirino is just such an assured story-teller that the narrative powers you along whether you're reading about the antics of bitchy schoolgirls, of miserly parents, of a mad grandfather, or whether you're reading the searing, shocking confession of a murderer, a Chinese immigrant adrift after desperately escaping poverty and the frightening crowd in his own country. The way Kirino handles multiple narration is amazing: each new world (the main narrator's, Yuriko's, from her diaries, Kazue's from hers, the murderer Zhang's, even Kijima's from his letters) is convincing and distinct; perhaps Kazue and the narrator are the most similar, but even here I never felt disorientated. Each narrator draws you in within a page, and none becomes tiresome: not once did I feel I'd become bored of one narrator or feel a wish to return to another. The way Kirino teases us with the narrators' unreliability is fun, too - she knows we know it's a trick that's been done many times before, but even as she jokes with us about it, she makes it all work.

A permanent virgin. Do you know what this signifies? It may sound wholesome and pure to you, but that was not actually the case. Kazue articulated it brilliantly in her journals, didn't she: to miss the only chance one has to have power over a man. Sex is the only way a woman has to control the world. That was Kazue's twisted view, at any rate. But now I can't help but wonder about whether or not she was right.

I find it difficult to praise this novel enough. It's much more than genre fiction - the blurb on the book's cover calls Kirino a "crime writer", but you might be disappointed if you picked this up hoping for a mystery or a thriller. "Who killed Kazue?", you're left wondering. All I can say is that Tokyo killed Kazue. This book is a caustic social commentary, a bitter shout of anger at an unchangeable world. It's also a sophisticated, full novel of character and place, a dark, troubling vision of the relationship between men and women, of Tokyo and of Japan. A serious and highly readable novel.

Christopher Fowler shared my enthusiasm in The Independent last year; and Christine Thomas thinks Kirino gives Murakami a run for his money - I very much agree. Sophie Harrison in the New York Times was a bit sniffy about the translation - I'm not. Yes, the novel occasionally seems slightly "foreign" rather than reading like mother-tongue English, but that may be inevitable - anyway, it works very well. And I think Elisabeth Vincentinelli was ungenerous in Time Out New York to say the book is only of "middling literary quality" It's not.

Shaw's Pygmalion at the Old Vic, directed by Peter Hall

©Tristram Kenton

I snuck into this because my friend Alan couldn't go; and I'm glad I was offered the spare ticket, because this production deserves the good reviews it's had. There's nothing flashy about it. Far from it. In some ways it's an aggressively traditional, 1913-style production, using the Old Vic stage to its fullest stand-up-and-beg potential, with curtain and lights down and something like Elgar - quite possible actually Elgar - playing between acts. Nor was there anything fancy about the way the play was presented. Tim Piggott-Smith did ramp up (I don't go so far as to say camp up) Professor Higgins's self-centredness into a complete boyishness, not incredibly but markedly. Benedict Nightingale in the Times thought he went a bit too far. Otherwise, parts were played straightforwardly and well. I'm not the first reviewer to say that Tony Haygarth spoke quickly as Doolittle, and once or twice I felt his most political and thought-provoking lines risked being lost; but ultimately there's no doubt this part came over as strongly as you would hope, so perhaps Haygarth and Peter Hall know something I don't. Maybe their approach stopped his speeches lapsing into sententiousness. The difficulty with Shaw of course is that sometimes what he writes is so long-winded and declamatory that modern actors need to work hard, and be clever, to make his work work with modern audiences. I realise David Mamet tell us we must simply trust the play and present what is written, but I can well sympathise with actors who feel that may not be enough with Shaw.

Michelle Dockery has been much praised as Eliza. My only reservation is that her appearance in the opening scene in Covent Garden is so much what we expect. All evening my friend Stephen and I thought it was difficult to keep My Fair Lady out of mind: when Higgins talked about women, we expected him to burst into song, just like when he spoke about being accustomed to Eliza. But in the first scene, for the only time, I felt that this production deferred too much to the influence of the famous musical and film. Eliza sounded more like Audrey Hepburn as Eliza than she did a London flower-girl. A shame, that. Overall, though, Michelle Dockery was very good. She did make this incredible part and incredible transformation credible, and her feelings in the final confrontation with Higgins were coherent and believable, the logical outcome if a real woman were put through this experience - more believable than Professor Higgins's feelings, arguably, though I blame Shaw for that rather than the cast. Where Michelle Dockery won the hearts of the audience was in the scene at home with Professor Higgins's mother: the first, faltering debut of Miss Doolittle the lady was a brilliant piece of comic theatre. It's a one-gag scene, essentially, and a familiar gag at that, but here Michelle Dockery really could trust Shaw, and the result was uproarious, tears-in-the-eyes stuff.

And what a welcome revival this is, of such an interesting political play. The worst thing about My Fair Lady - a terrific musical, don't get me wrong - is the way it has sugared and romanticised this story and put the social and the political in the background (I notice Michael Billington called the musical "sugar-candied": I promise I read his review after I wrote that). Dolittle is an especially important character as far as the politics is concerned, since his speeches are the ones that challenge and question, albeit in an ideologically incoherent, just vaguely leftist way, received social opinions and liberal wishful thinking of the early twentieth century (though Higgins's mother and housekeeper are also important characters, representing voices of dignified incipient feminism and of social conservatism). I've never seen a production before, but I remember when I read this play in the 1980s when I was studying political drama how similar to the German naturalists and others this play felt, technically and structurally (Michael Billington in the Guardian mentioned the Scandinavians, Ibsen and Strindberg), yet how much more politically diffuse it was, too. Shaw is I think more a gadfly political provocateur than, say, Brecht, who much more impressively fuses theatrical technique with ideas to produce a socialist drama. Shaw, on the other hand, sometimes feels like a bad imitation of a more red and engaged Oscar Wilde. Comparisons with German political drama are inevitable (for me at least), because of the theme - Brecht's Mann ist Mann also explores the possibility of changing a person's personality, as of course does The Good Person (or Soul) of Sezuan - but in a way the traditional presentation of this production forced those comparisons. The lowering of the curtain between acts gave the play a modernist feel: these were tableaux as much as they were acts in any classical sense.

How relevant to us today is Shaw's reworking of the Pygmalion theme? We live in a society now that is less divided by class markers like accent, breeding and dress than it ever has been - although as someone with a conspiciously northern English accent I do not for a moment minimise the effect on our lives of the way we're heard and the overtones of our speech.  Our divisions today are more between the moneyed, vulgar though they may be, and the struggling, who may be quite genteel; between those who own houses and those who don't; between private and public sector workers; and between races and nationalities. I think a production that sought to bring out contemporary relevance might focus on the conspicuous consumption involved in kitting Eliza out in expensive frocks and shoes. More importantly, it would bring race into the room. Today's Eliza is black, she lives in South London, and she has a child. I have no problem whatever with a traditional production like this, but I also think Pygmalion could usefully be remixed and reworked by contemporary writers to hit us harder today. Perhaps one day it will be.

The other aspect of the play that can be neglected if we focus too much on class politics is what it says about the relations between men and women. In this area the play fits our 21st century Mars-and-Venusy preoccupations better, though some feminists might argue that this shows how far the backlash has driven us since the 1970s and 1980s. Pygmalion is partly about a woman's journey to independence by fighting against men of all classes who attempt to control her. But Eliza achieves that independence by conforming more to expectations of femininity than she had when she sold flowers. And she achieves it partly by becoming conscious for the first time of a desire to feel socially superior to a scullery maid. I couldn't help thinking of Ladette to Lady, the recent "reality" TV show which gives young female tearaways the chance to leave a self-destructive way of life behind to become finished debutantes. I think the show is far from funny, ultimately. You can reasonably object to it as suggesting women should fit an excessively traditional mould and simply be nice gels. Or you can see it as genuinely offering a life-changing opportunity to just one or two young women whose self-esteem rises dramatically as they realise they can have class if they want it, and can become their own Elizas or (like Pygmalion) sculptresses of themselves.

Oh, and the Old Vic could really do with a few dabs of WD40. The West End Whingers spoke too soon in May.

The Edge of Love, directed by John Maybury

© Lions Gate Entertainment

I expected to hate this film; but of course if you begin a review like that, it means you mustn't have hated it at all. Why did I expect to hate it? It was something to do with its starring two supposedly stunning actresses. I thought it would be too superficial, about too-glamorous characters, a varnished version of the home front. And it was something to do with its being about a renowned poet, and my fear that it might, again, glamourise the poet's life or give no feeling of the importance of poetry. When the film opened my expectation of hating continued, as Keira Knightley came, over-lipsticked and powdered, into view.

It didn't turn out quite to plan, though, so I ended up as disappointed as one always is when hatred's unfulfilled. I quite liked this film. Yes, there are flaws in it, and it has limitations: it's given away by its small scale, the budget not stretching to produce a jury in the courtroom, for instance, or even barristers, so that a criminal trial had to be portrayed as though the judge asks all the questions. It was a smallness that made me feel sometimes as though I was watching one of those films made for BBC Four. A film just as well watched on DVD as in the cinema, then. 

Small details intruded occasionally too. I'm as keen on stockings as the next man, perhaps more so, but arguably there is an excess of them in this film, and I found it impossible to believe that a woman who had to borrow money for food would, in Wales during the war, deliberately burn holes in her (too modern-looking) stocking with a cigarette. Worse, even, Sienna Miller couldn't decide whether Caitlin pronounced her husband Dylan's name the Welsh way, or the English, or indeed whether she herself was Welsh, Irish, or what. And would the police at that time really have protected the head of a suspect climbing into the generous back of their car? I don't think they bothered much about health and safety back then.

But I managed to forgive it all. The performances I thought were good, Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller persuading me of their friendship in spite of I thought a dodgy, over-artistic script in the first half-hour. They almost made me forget - Sienna Miller especially - that these women were too flawlessly beautiful for real life. Cillian Murphy was also not bad as Killick, the wronged husband of Vera Phillips, who goes to war and runs mad and jealous when he gets back. Matthew Rhys's performance is best, though, and this is what beat all my expectations: in a story that would have been interesting even had one of its main figures not happened to be a substantial poet, we were made to believe we saw this poet in front of us, and given insight into him. It's not a flattering portrait. Thomas comes across as selfish, child-like and self-indulgent, treacherous and cruel. But you do also understand his magnetism. What's even better is that you get some sense, some at least, of the presence of poetry in his life, the fact that it's a practical job that must some time be done, and of its importance to him. Finally, I found myself caring about all the characters, wishing that betrayal had not smashed this unusual foursome.

Yes, there was far too much singing (always a danger in films about Wales, the East End or Liverpool) yes, I was unnecessarily distracted by Suggs, and yes, the cine-style flashback at the end seemed strangely post-war and out of place. But it's a film worth watching.

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

When I was in New York in May, reviews of this novel were all over the New York Times and the New Yorker: it was clearly the book of that moment. And when Martha Kearney revealed not long after on Newsnight Review that she was reading it, I realised it had gone transatlantic. It seems that this story of the migrant experience in New York and of cricket - cricket - has broad appeal. In publishing terms, at least as far a literary fiction is concerned, Netherland is a triumph. In terms of pure literary achievement? A fairly interesting draw.

The story takes place between 1998, when the narrator Hans van den Broek first moves from London, where he works as an analyst for a merchant bank, to New York,  and his return about five years later, and it's a slightly unusual story in that the main action - the determining action, the development that drives van den Broek back across the Atlantic - is kept in the background, subsidiary to the important foreground events we care more about. After the attack on September 11 2001 van den Broek's English wife Rachel decides she can no longer live in New York - she needs a feeling of existential security for their son Jake - and can no longer live, either, with Hans. She moves to England; and the plot resolves when some years later she accepts Hans back into her life and the family is reunited in London.

It's what happens in the interim that is the real interest of this novel. Hans used to play cricket as a young man - we are treated to plenty of his childhood reminiscences of cricket, cycling, his mother and her lover in the Hague - and while alone in New York he decides to pad up once more and play for a club on Staten Island. It's a wild kind of cricket, played in long grass so that lofted strokes, to Hans's purist distaste, are essential, played by a mixture of immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, from Jamaica, St. Kitts and Trinidad, a cricket in which strange things happen.

    The man stopped ten feet from Chuck. He held the gun limply. He looked at me, then back at Chuck. He was speechless and sweating. He was trying, as Chuck would afterward relate, to understand the logic of his situation.
    The three of us stood there for what seemed a long time. A container ship silently went through the back gardens of the houses on Delafield Place.
    Chuck took a step forward. "Leave the field of play, sir," he said firmly. He extended his palm toward the clubhouse, an usher's gesture. "Leave immediately please. You are interfering with play. Captain," Chuck said loudly, turning to the Kittitian captain, who was a little distance away, "please escort this gentleman from the field."

This is the first appearance in the novel of Chuck Ramkissoon, an excellent creation who carries this novel. As a Trinidadian, Ramkissoon is fond of relating wisdoms from his Caribbean childhood, and as a new New Yorker on the make, he  is fond of mixing in all types of business from the marginally dodgy to, as we later discover, the definitely dangerous. But he's also a man with a dream, an American dream to bring the joy of cricket to that country, or rather back to America, because Chuck argues that the game was popular in America's infancy and has unaccountably fallen out of favour to the "aerial game" of baseball. He's a man of big plans and big visions, who wants to build a cricket stadium on an old airstrip in Brooklyn and transform America through the great old colonial game - the global game.

"I'm saying that people, all people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they're playing cricket. What's the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match. Cricket is instructive, Hans. It has a moral angle. I really believe this. Everybody who plays the game benefits from it. So I say, why not Americans?" He was almost grim with conviction. In a confidential tone, he said, "Americans cannot really see the world. They think they can, but they can't. I don't need to tell you that. Look at the problems we're having. It's a mess, and it's going to get worse. I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims? Chuck Ramkissoon is going to make it happen. With the New York Cricket Club, we could start a whole new chapter in U.S. history. Why not? Why not say so if it's true? Why hold back? I'm going to pen our eyes. And that's what I have to tell the Park Service"

It's a crazy scheme, of course, from a crazy character, but the scheme and the man are worth four fifths of whatever you pay for this book. Perhaps one of the best novelists - I'm thinking of William Boyd, perhaps because of the global sweep of Netherland as well as its comic element - might have made more of Ramkissoon, made him a deeper character, allowed him to change or at least perhaps fail. Even so, Joseph O'Neill can be pleased with having invented him.

Otherwise, the novel is well constructed and stylishly enough written - very much with an American audience in mind, although the author is Irish, and worked as a barrister in England. But in some ways it's disappointingly bland. The story of the marriage for example, of Rachel's inexplicable (seen through husband's eyes) withdrawal and strange return - it's all quite English, quite middle class, quite male and quite dull, ultimately. I found Rachel quite an empty character, her personality conveyed only by the fact that she's a lawyer who supposedly talks and thinks in predictably lawyerish ways. And once you start to consider the emptiness of one character, it occurs to you that there are other vaccuums here, too. Hans himself is empty: we only know him through the way cricket, New York and Chuck project on to him. He brings nothing to the novel, really. And there are other ways in which the novel is at times uninspired. There are many unnecessary recollections from childhood from both Hans and Chuck, none of which I thought generated heat or light. I often found developments overdetermined, overexplained by Hans, as though the author feared the credibility of his action and needed to inoculate the reader against disbelief by pointing to clear chains of causation. And I tired very, very quickly of the occasional cameo characters - particularly "the angel" - who are clearly meant to give an impression of the wackiness of New York life but who made me feel as though I were reading an earnest effort from an American short-story magazine.

Not a great novel, then; on this evidence I wont be looking forward to O'Neill's next work anything like as keenly as I will Edward Docx's. But the odd one does lift: the character of Chuck is what makes the book worth buying. In paperback, I'd suggest.

Christopher Tayler in the Guardian agreed with me about Hans and Chuck as well as the "denizens of Chelsea" and the novel's occasional feeling of contrivance, and Stephen Amidon in the Sunday Times agreed with me about Hans and Rachel's garden-variety marital malaise. The Economist was unimpressed, and I think Benjamin Kunkel in the LRB is right that the novel is emarrassed by money. One of the annoying things about it (overdetermined and explained away, possibly, by parallels with The Great Gatsby) is the way money is nothing at all to be worried about. I'm always a bit critical of novels and films in which the characters are freed from the scarcity that rules most people's lives.

Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, Tate Modern

cosmicautumn/CreativeCommons

A very mixed exhibition, this; very mixed. The earliest paintings on show, Tiznit and Quarzazat, promised interesting things, with their thick monochrome lines, though with the exception of The Geeks, which prefigured Nini's Paintings in a later room, the early automatic writing pieces - Criticism and Academy - were really no more than random scribblings on walls. And the whole exhibition would prove to be like this: rooms containing terrifically energetic paintings full of colour and style would alternate with much thinner works which relied on what seemed to me a misjudged reliance on handwritten words. I quickly got fed up of what I'll call Twombly's scrawls.

Room 2 was full of them. The painting Olympia, for instance, was remarkable only because the word "Olympia" was scrawled on it in I think crayon; and the other works, especially the empty Poems to the Sea, were simply unintelligble pencil scribblings consisting of  horizons, numbers and lines vaguely reminiscent of the look of poetry overlaid with ugly splodges of white paint. Truly missable, these. Murder of Passion and The Italians were really just larger-scale versions of the same thing.

Yet when Twombly stops obsessing about words, or references to words, and focuses on colour and shape, his work comes marvellously to life. The Ferragosto series of paintings, the product of a hot Roman August in 1961, were much more expressive works, thick smears of paint claiming your attention and holding it. The fourth work in the series really does suggest the sultry oppressiveness of the Roman sun and the final work with its bloody mass of scarlet and red-brown paint goes beyond that, creating a passionate, even violent feeling. Looking at these, I wondered how this artist could have produced such shallow works as the scrawls I've already mentioned. And things continued in much the same way. While the large panels making up the two versions of Treatise on the Veil - the first version a black painted board bearing a few minimalist lines and measurements in white wax crayon, the second a lighter, greyer, less sharp counterpart - attract the eye and make you think, but by this stage I'd lost trust in Twombly and my mind wandered from them, frankly.

Then come the best works of the lot. Nini's Paintings are a series of four large panels covered in crayon lines, arranged loosely in waves, suggesting some sort of mythic notation or calligraphy: finally, a brilliant justification of Twombly's interest in the purely visual aspect of writing, the interest that seemed so sterile in Paintings to the Sea. I especially liked the first of the panels, with the rich mix of brown, orange and blue lines weaving through each other and most of all the final panel at the back of the room. This was much more sombre, a grey background filled with black, grey and Prussian blue waves of crayon. These works, for me, achieved a loosely geometric and satisfying effect that reminded me of Bridget Riley's work in the 1990s. Terrific.

Passing quickly through a room of unprepossessing sculptures (one was simply a cardboard tube painted white), pausing only long enough to wonder where the fragments of Rilke were that the Tate's blurb reckoned covered Orpheus (Du Unendliche Spur) - they didn't as far as I could see - I arrived in front of works which made sense of combining painting and poetry. Hero and Leandro is a work consisting of four panels: the first captures the force and energy of a wine-dark classical sea while also reminding us of those Japanese wave-paintings, I thought, while the second and third panels settle into a calmer vision of resignation as Leander's life is lost in the water. Finally comes a small frame citing some lines from Keats, rounding the work off as a wholly successful reference from one art to another. Painting in Two Parts I thought also captured this tumbling sea, this time wine and dark green.

And if they weren't enough, Untitled (A Painting in Nine Parts) is a stunning piece. First shown in Venice, it consists of nine panels, each a study in green and white, each conveying a feeling of immersion, of standing water full of algae and plant life, and adding up together to an insistent exploration of the possible combinations of two colours. Again, here, the incorporation of poetry (Rilke again) works brilliantly, supporting and intensifying through words the visual world produced by the colours:

in the ponds broken off from the sky
my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

Twombly quoting from Robert Bly's translation of Fortschritt.

The Bacchus paintings in the final room were less absorbing, though their bold sweeps of red paint suggested the potential for a meditational, Rothko-like vibe that had just been missed somehow.

Some of these works will fade very quickly from the mind, then; most of the scrawls and sculptures are intensely forgettable. But there are works here - Nini's Paintings, the Painting in Nine Parts, Hero and Leandro, the Ferragosto works - that fully make the case for Twombly as an abstract artist of real substance.

PS: I wish I could have illustrated this review with a photograph from the exhibition rather than one from New York: but Tate won't allow photography and is taking its time to work out whether to allow me to use its press images.

Hearbeat Detector (La Question Humaine) directed by Nicolas Klotz

© Trinity Filmed Entertainment

What a strange film. Kessler, played by Mathieu Amalric, is a psychologist working in the Paris office of a German chemical firm, when he's asked by a senior manager to investigate the behaviour and state of mind of the chief executive, Jüst. As he gets closer to his subject the shared past of this concern becomes more mysterious to us as well as to Kessler; and it becomes clear that everyone - Kessler, too - is damaged by their past. It's a film not easily summarised in terms of plot but which generates a strange, increasingly oppressive atmosphere. I enjoyed it, at least for most of the two and a bit hours it lasts.

I liked the way the script refuses to explain what Kessler is doing dancing in an abandoned warehouse with young colleagues and ex-girlfriends: we're left to piece together the shards of this man's emotional life. And overall, although Kessler is in shot nearly all the length of the film - every scene contains him, or nearly, to the textent that I began to wodner about the symmetry of his eyes - we begin to realise we neither understand not know him, the growing realisation of this disconnect revealing a clever filmic play with what in fiction I'd call third person narration. We think we inhabit the mental world of the character we see most, in cinema: but Heartbeat Detector subverts that in the way its screenplay and direction combine. What relationship did Kessler have with the secretary, Isabelle, he kisses down in the archive? Or with the young man he interviews early on? He is as unknown as any of the other characters. I also enjoyed the daring way the film lingered on undramatic scenes - a song, for example, which outlasted our expectations considerably. In some ways Heartbeat Detector is a subtly successful experimental film.

The effect is spoiled at the end, though, by a dimly insistent and portentous moral message. I'm not against political art, or an argument that modern corporate life in some ways squeezes out our humanity. I'm not even against bringing in the Holocaust (though it's one of those lazy wheel-ons that bring instant significance, like child abuse). I can even forgive the ill-judged and wholly disproportionate implied comparison between mass redundancy and genocide. But I did feel in those last, excessive twenty to thirty minutes that something pedagogical and sharp was being repeatedly hammered into my skull; and it hurt. The title, too, I'm afraid to say, is a highly selective translation meant to intensify, to an English-speaking audience, the message and he moral of the film's final section. But I didn't want the pain in my head intensified. La Question Humaine is a better title and more respectful of audience intelligence.

A shame because of the haunting effect of the first hundred minutes.