Arts Reviews

Longborough Festival Opera, refuge for British Wagnerians fleeing unidiomatic musical performances and idiotically irrelevant and insulting productions, has rounded off its Wagner canon with its first Der fliegende Holländer. Next year a new production of the Ring begins, so presumably the small stage is considered inappropriate for the three Wagner dramas with indispensably large choruses. Not that Holländer can do without a chorus in Act Three, and very impressive it is in this production by Thomas Guthrie, but we only saw the townsfolk, and I think the Dutchman’s crew was pre-recorded, though perfectly synchronised. The conducting was, as always, in the sure and inspired hands of Anthony Negus, and the

Oh, what a beautiful morning! In Jo Davies’s production of Oklahoma! the audience spends the overture staring at the side of a barn. Then, as birdsong rises from the orchestra, corrugated-iron doors slide open on a dustbowl farm of the 1930s. Aunt Eller (Claire Moore) is fixing a tractor, and a wind pump spins slowly against an orange dawn sky. It’s mildly surreal: the light falls as if in one of those New Deal-era western landscape paintings, with a jagged, David Smith-like sculpture of pitchforks and shovels serving as a tree. And then, with throwaway ease, Dex Lee as Curly launches into that greatest of all Broadway opening numbers. Davies

The National has made its largest stage available to one of the nation’s smallest talents. If Brian Friel had been born in Dorset rather than in Co. Tyrone he’d have enjoyed an unremarkable career writing episodes of The Archers with the odd stint on Emmer-dale. He’s a champion witterer whose plays lack suspense, pace, depth or spectacle. His characters are constantly and infuriatingly nice to each other. Occasionally they rise to mild irascibility, or a spot of vituperative teasing, but that’s about it. When he needs a crisis he turns to external sources, to destiny or to happenstance, and his plays often end with dreadful sufferings being visited on russet-faced,

Back in the mists of prehistory, when I was eight, dinosaur films followed a set pattern. The dinosaurs themselves would be cheerfully unpalaeontological; women would wear improbable outfits; volcanoes would explode. Then, in 1993, courtesy of Steven Spielberg, came a sea-change. Jurassic Park was that cinematic rarity: a science fiction film that succeeded in influencing the science it was fictionalising. The story of a theme park populated by resurrected dinosaurs, it offered a portrayal of Mesozoic fauna that was as close to authentic as could then plausibly be achieved. For the first time, computer-generated imagery was used to portray dinosaurs as scientists had come to envisage them: agile, bird-like, smart.

Tracy Letts begins his trailer-trash comedy Killer Joe with the corniest of platitudes. A runaway druggie named Chris Smith needs $6,000 to stop ‘some guys’ from killing him. He asks his dad who declares himself skint but together they plot to bump off Mrs Smith, Chris’s mum, and collect her life insurance. Interesting idea. Luckily there’s a hitman available who works as a cop and goes by the sobriquet, ‘Killer Joe’. (Note to police forces everywhere: an officer whose nickname suggests a second career as an assassin may be worth investigating.) Joe wants payment up front and the penniless conspirators offer him Chris’s attractive sister, Dottie, as a ‘forward loan’.

We had a long drive back from the north-east last weekend. Six hours or so, including a stop halfway, just past Britain’s most crepuscular town, Grantham. My wife does the driving because she thinks I’ll kill us all. My job is to feed album after album into the car’s admirably old-fashioned CD player. I rarely play more than three or four songs from the same album because my wife gets tetchy and says something like ‘This is too noisy’ or ‘This is boring, change it.’ So I’m kept pretty busy. Every time I remove a CD, the car’s ‘entertainment centre’ reverts to its default position of playing Radio 4. And