Arts Reviews

At the third UK International Radio Drama Festival held last week in Herne Bay, entitled ‘And Let Us Listen to the Moon’, the entries included an Australian play about Chekhov, the limericks of Edward Lear translated into Serbian, a Czech version of Hamlet in which the palace at Elsinore is transformed into a sporting arena, and a play from Palestine in Arabic about three female political activists. Fifty dramas from 17 countries and in 15 different languages were broadcast at various venues across the Kentish town. Not quite Cannes in May — tea and scones stood in for champagne and caviar — but the festival’s success goes to show that

Moonlight is, in fact, a traditional story about identity, and finding out who you are, but it has rarely been better told, or more achingly, or while navigating a subject that hasn’t come up much at the cinema, if at all. (Being black and gay.) True enough, everyone expected La La Land to win best picture at the Oscars, but it’s Moonlight that deserved the award – and every award going (aside from the one that’s been put aside for Annette Bening). I liked La La Land well enough at the time, but someone please make it go away now. The film is written and directed by Barry Jenkins, as

Is it possible simultaneously to want a film to win an Oscar and to wish it hadn’t been made? That’s how confused I felt after seeing Elle with Isabelle Huppert – a woman for whom the adjective hard-boiled (in a French way) doesn’t even come close to her unvarying self-possession. Elle, directed by Paul Verhoeven, is about rape, violent rape, and the aftermath of rape, but this is as odd a depiction of victimhood as you can get. Huppert – Michèle Leblanc in the movie – is plainly brutalised by a sudden attack in her home by a masked intruder, in a wetsuit, who hits her repeatedly to subjugate her

Twelfth Night launched at the National Theatre this week, with Malvolio turned into Malvolia. ‘We’ve definitely upped the gender-bendedness of the play,’ says Phoebe Fox, who is acting Olivia. Otiose, one might think, since the original is gender-bent to perfection. But Shakespeare did not have to wrestle with the strict controls now demanded in the subsidised theatre. In the same feature in which Phoebe Fox speaks, Ben Power, the deputy director of the National, tells the Sunday Times, ‘There are agendas we are aware of now, and we have targets in terms of gender and ethnicity, because we want to be as diverse as possible, speaking to our audiences, reflecting

Either all the critics are wrong, or I’m wrong. According to the lot of them, and every right-thinking pundit, Moonlight, the film about a black youth discovering his sexuality, is one of those transformative films which leaves every other movie nowhere. In a just world, as Deborah Ross of this parish put it, ‘it’s Moonlight that deserves every award going’ at the Oscars rather than stupid La La Land. I don’t have any sort of axe to grind on the latter but what I can tell you is that I saw Moonlight last night, and if I hadn’t been nicely brought up and unwilling to upset anyone, I’d have been

‘Eppur si muove’ — And yet it moves. Galileo’s defiant insistence that the Earth revolves round the Sun, his refusal to submit to the Inquisition, is a familiar one. It’s the battle cry not of a reformer but of a revolutionary, a passionate teller of truths. It’s a credo he shared with composer Claudio Monteverdi. Born barely three years after the astronomer, Monteverdi faced his own inquisition. Defying those who would make music an immoveable sphere, bound in place by harmonic proprieties and structural conventions, he made works that rejected tidy formalism in favour of messy, fleshy humanity. His was music that moved in every sense, that lived as vividly