Bette Davis

James MacMillan, Sebastian Morello, Amy Wilentz, Sam Leith and Lloyd Evans

32 min listen

This week: composer James MacMillan reads his diary on the beautiful music of football (01:11); Sebastian Morello tells us about the deep connection between hunting and Christianity (07:17); Amy Wilentz explains how Vodou fuels Haiti’s gang culture (16:14); The Spectator’s literary editor Sam Leith reviews The Virago Book of Friendship (22:38); and – from the arts pages – The Spectator’s theatre critic Lloyd Evans writes about a new play on the last days of Liz Truss and also about Bette and Joan, which includes ‘brutal’ and ‘brilliant’ portraits of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (26:37). Presented by Oscar Edmondson. Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Oscar Edmondson.

Brutal and brilliant portrait of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford

The Last Days of Liz Truss? is a one-woman show about the brief interregnum between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. We first meet the future prime minister at a nursery school in Paisley where she orders the teachers to call her Elizabeth and not to use her first name, Mary. This establishes her combative, self-righteous nature and her utter dislike of authority. Truss is like the smell of gas indoors. Even a tiny amount is too much She left Oxford with a PPE degree and became a political activist while setting her sights firmly on parliament. (By researching the CVs of every sitting member, she had discovered that one in

Heart-warming but safe biographical drama: Going for Gold, at Park90, reviewed

Going for Gold is a biographical drama about a forgotten star of the 1970s. Frankie Lucas was a middleweight boxing champion, born on the Caribbean island of St Vincent, who won a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in 1972. Although he lived in London he wasn’t picked for the England team and instead he wore the colours of his native land. He did them proud. Frankie Lucas seems to have spent 42 years sitting in a council flat, smoking weed and sulking The script, by Lisa Lintott, emphasises Lucas’s virtues and downplays his rackety personal life and his habit of smoking bales of cannabis on a regular basis. His