Arts Reviews

I love Shakespeare. But when he pulls on his wellies and hikes into the forest I yearn for the exit. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a moonlit, sylvan location populated by a syrupy crew of hectic fairies, humourless bumpkins, panting maidens and swooning aristocrats in disguise. Shakespeare wrote it during his apprenticeship and he had yet to learn that several romances are far less interesting than just one. The result is a cloying, over-busy fantasy whose highlight is a love potion that makes a sprite called Titania fall in love with a donkey called Bottom. If you find the passion that flowers between a Sloane-y dryad and a pack animal

This article was first published on Apollo magazine’s blog Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) was the star lot at Christie’s ‘Looking Forward to the Past’ sale on 11 May, smashing the record for the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction. What else could you have paid for with $179.4 million in the art world? 1) Three 5-year renovations of the Picasso Museum in Paris (at €52 million a pop). 2) At least 252 versions of the painting that fetched the lowest price in the ‘Looking Forward to the Past’ auction; Francis Picabia’s Sans Titre (Visage de Femme) (price realised: $701,000). 3) More than 42% of the new Whitney Museum building in New York, which cost $422 million. 4) 1,204 of

Orson Welles would have been 100 this month. When he died in 1985, aged 70, the wonder was that he had lasted so long. His bulk was so immense, his productivity so prodigious in so many areas, his temperament so exorbitant, that he seemed to have been part of the landscape for ever. Never was ruined greatness so visible. The other great auteurs maudits of this century, Abel Gance and D.W. Griffith, disappeared into silence and oblivion. Eisenstein simply died young. Not Welles. Every time he trundled insincerely through some commercial for cheap liquor (he, the great bon viveur; he, for whom the very word commercial was an insult when

Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate, has again refused to write a poem to commemorate the birth of the new royal, Charlotte Elizabeth Diane. Rod Liddle has written his own poem about Duffy, asking why she took the job of Poet Laureate if she doesn’t like writing verse about royals. But this still leaves no one around to write a verse befitting the occasion. So we are inviting Spectator readers to do so, and will make this the Spectator Literary Competition: it will be formally announced in next week’s magazine. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 20 May.

Writers and producers have shown little appetite for putting the coalition on stage. Several reasons suggest themselves. In 2010 wise pundits assured us all that the Rose Garden duo would squabble and part long before the five-year term expired, and theatre folk were persuaded not to gamble on a ship that might sail at any moment. And the conduct of parliamentarians has been pretty unhelpful to dramatists. Chastened by the expenses scandal, MPs have reinvented themselves as models of probity and self-restraint. The Commons has been all but free of sin. Eric Joyce cracked a few skulls. Nadine Dorries bunked off for a fortnight in the jungle. The occasional ex-minister