Russia

You might not think that the Eurovision Song Contest (screened live from Stockholm tonight) could have any connection with how we might choose to vote in the coming referendum. Surely it’s just a string of naff pop songs stuck together with fake glitter and a lot of false jollity? The songs are uniformly terrible, the show so overproduced it’s impossible not to mock its grandiosity, the idea that it conjures up the meaning of Europe laughably misplaced. But in a programme for the World Service that caught my attention because it sounded so counterintuitive, Nicola Clase, head of mission at the Swedish embassy in London, tried to persuade us otherwise.

Great excitement for play-goers as a rare version of a theological masterpiece arrives in the West End. Doctor Faustus stars Kit Harington, a handsome, bearded bantamweight with round glasses and rock-star curls. We first meet him wearing a grey hoodie and lounging in a bedsit surrounded by cheap Catholic statuary. The druggy clothes and the religious iconography suggest a criminal Jesus-freak, possibly of Mexican origin, hiding out from cocaine dealers. Marlowe’s creation is somewhat different. Dr Faustus is a medieval potentate, a scholar of genius, a rich and celebrated German polymath admired by emperors and cardinals, who decides to exchange his earthly ambitions for the chance to wield supernatural powers

The Fitzwilliam Museum is marking its bicentenary with an exhibition that takes its title from Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile. But it turns out it was another writer of a different type of fiction who was directly involved. M.R. James, author of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, amassed some of the exhibits in his capacity as director of the Fitzwilliam from 1893 to 1908. And almost any object on display would have made a perfect prop for one of his tales, because the subject is ancient Egyptian coffins. Generally, the main character in a story by James is a retiring gentleman scholar who comes across a venerable item which

The Royal Opera has bitten the bullet so far as Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov goes, and opted to stage the original 1869 version, with no modifications or additions from his revised 1874 edition, which used to be called ‘definitive’ but which seems to be under a cloud nowadays. Rimsky-Korsakov’s version has been pushed right to the back of the doghouse, so that it might soon be revived for its historical interest. Before I launch into my praise of the new production, which is an unqualified triumph, I would like to register some reservations about the work itself, in any of its versions. It’s routinely said that the hero of the opera

Director Robert Icke has this to say of Chekhov’s greatest masterpiece: ‘Let the electricity of now flow into the old thing and make it function.’ He uproots ‘the old thing’ from its natural setting and drops it down in no-man’s land. It all feels modern. Aircraft buzz in the heavy summer air. A thunderstorm sets off a car alarm. English names have displaced their Russian originals. Telegin has turned into Cartwright. The childless but priapic Uncle Vanya has been renamed after a latex prophylactic, Uncle Johnny. Perhaps appropriately. These alterations create huge uncertainties of class, location and era. Who are these Bohemian dropouts swilling vodka in a nameless English shire

Gosh what a breath of fresh air was Andrew Davies’s War & Peace adaptation (BBC1, Sundays) after all the stale rubbish that was on over Christmas. There were times when the yuletide TV tedium got so bad that I considered preparing us all a Jonestown-style punchbowl. That way, we would never have had to endure Walliams and Friend nor the special time-travel edition of what everyone is now rightly calling Shitlock. Sherlock has a terminal case of Doctor Who disease. That is, it has become so knowing, so self-referential, so — ugh! — meta that it no longer feels under any obligation to put in the hard yards needed to

Gosh what a breath of fresh air was Andrew Davies’s War & Peace adaptation (BBC1, Sundays) after all the stale rubbish that was on over Christmas. There were times when the yuletide TV tedium got so bad that I considered preparing us all a Jonestown-style punchbowl. That way, we would never have had to endure Walliams and Friend nor the special time-travel edition of what everyone is now rightly calling Shitlock. Sherlock has a terminal case of Doctor Who disease. That is, it has become so knowing, so self-referential, so — ugh! — meta that it no longer feels under any obligation to put in the hard yards needed to