…attend a Royal Ballet performance?

B and I share a love for the ballet, though I have to admit to being less well-informed and less adventurous in my choices compared to her. I started going to Royal Ballet productions on weekend trips to London whilst at boarding school and university. Now that I am living in London, and working close to Covent Garden, it is far more difficult to resist attending several performances each season. A good production captures the imagination and draws you into a world of beauty, comedy and tragedy

Two productions stood out for me this spring – Kenneth Macmillan’s Romeo & Juliet and Frederick Ashton’s La fille mal gardee.

Romeo & Juliet, as choreographed by Sir Kenneth Macmillan, is my favourite ballet and I have seen it staged by the RB for the last three seasons. Stereotypes of traditional ballet are few; Romeo, for example appears far more frequently than Juliet does, there are no scenes with the corps de ballet in tutus, no scene added merely to show off the technical virtuosity of the dancers. Prokofiev’s score is a lyrical masterpiece which stays in one’s mind; I once found myself humming excerpts for a week after a performance.

The story, well-known to most, reaches a level of intensity with the dancers I have rarely seen even in stage performances of Shakespeare’s play. Macmillan gave his characters passion and headstrong recklessness; they appear to have no thought of consequences.

My favourite Juliet, Tamara Rojo, starred in this year’s production; she was a marvel to watch and utterly convincing as a 14-year old sheltered girl suddenly exposed to the violence of first love. Small movements in her arms and turns of her head alternately convey self-consciousness, sexual curiosity and a youthful urge to please. Her moments of despair at being forced to marry Paris and at seeing Romeo dead were heartrending.

Rupert Pennefather partnered Rojo as Romeo this year – he was, I felt, unnecessarily panned in the press for lacking the vitality and technique of the injured Carlos Acosta. True, he did not appear very confident in his many solos, nor was there much chemistry with Rojo but for all that, he made a decent hero on stage.

Youtube has several clips of the 2007 production with the Rojo-Acosta casting – the famous balcony pas de deux can be found here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGTNHHekn98.

La fille mal gardee was a different sort of performance altogether. Choreographed by Frederick Ashton at the height of his powers in 1959, it has remained a perpetual favourite with the RB and it is not difficult to see why. Watching La fille mal gardee is like drinking from a never-ending bucket of champagne – one gets a little light-headed with the buzz and cannot help smiling and laughing out loud at odd places.

Like Romeo and Juliet, it features a couple facing obstables in love but unlike the former, it is a romantic comedy set in simple countryside with a happy ending, loveable characters and no real villains. One adores the lovely Lise (the daughter of the Widow Simone and “la fille” of the title) for her simple grace and her very human wish to be with her beloved farmer Colas instead of the well-off halfwit Alain. The dancers seemed to really enjoy themselves in this ballet; there is a sparkle in their steps which is a joy to observe.

The Widow Simone (traditionally portrayed by a man) and Alain are two of the funniest characters I have seen in ballet; the former pompous and vain, the other a shy nitwit who nonetheless craves attention. Widow Simone’s clog dance is wonderfully upbeat and quite hilarious, and the first to feature ballerinas en pointe with clog shoes – you can find it on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMn2TuvW_M8

The Royal Ballet is putting up more modern ballets this spring which I sadly cannot make due to work and social commitments. By chance however, a friend offered me a ticket to an upcoming performance of Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella before the RB goes on tour this summer and of course, I could not resist…

…learn the history of the world in 15 mins each day?

Some time ago, I wrote about my day spent at the Oxford Literary Festival, and the wonderful time I had at the lecture by the British Museum director Neil MacGregor. Since then, work has pushed me to the limit and I have spent every waking minute working in the ‘war-room’ in a business hotel, worrying about work and, generally being quite one-dimensional.

I found myself craving some intellectual stimulus, anything at all to mitigate the all-consuming drudgery. A bright spot came when I found MacGregor’s History of the World in 100 Objects lectures stored in the BBC online archive. First broadcast over January to March, these are bite-sized pieces of anthropology, and political, social and cultural history using select objects as the starting point.

There are fascinating snippets about the role of agriculture and why humans decided to grow crops like cereals which were so difficult to grow, harvest and make palatable.

A description of beautiful woven and embroidered textiles which were to the early Peruvians from Paracas what porcelain was to the Chinese – works of art which acted as symbols of power and status.

A fragment of a relief showing a siege scene from the time the Assyrians were conquering lands from Egypt to Iran.

A description of gold inlaid pottery from the Jomen people evoking the sophistication of the early tribes of Japan.

I could go on and on...

At fifteen minutes per lecture, these suited my all too short attention span. And while I crave curling up with a good book and delving into the details, these lectures and podcasts allow me at the very least, to learn something new while I am busy.

The programme is currently on a hiatus and will resume in May but you can find the previous episodes on the BBC website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/

…attend a literary festival?

Twentieth of March marks the first day of spring, though one would hardly have guessed that given the rather grey skies and the incessant drizzle last Saturday. Daffodils, traditionally the first sign of spring, were thin on the ground as I walked through the gardens in Oxford. The golden daffodils which blanketed the grounds of my school in Kent and the college gardens in Cambridge were my favourite memories of spring, heralds of Easter and warmer days. Sadly, the long, hard winter has meant that one will have to wait longer this year for such a sight.

But I digress. I was in Oxford last Saturday for the opening day of the Oxford Literary Festival, which will be running till next weekend. Sponsored by The Sunday Times, the festival this year hosts a series of talks and book-signings by authors, including well-known ones like Martin Amis, Philipp Pullman, AS Byatt, Jung Chang, Tracey Chevalier, Richard Dawkins, Joanne Harris, John Le Carré.

The trip up from London was annoyingly slow and I arrived late for the first event on my itinerary – Lord Douglas Hurd (former Foreign Secretary under Thatcher and Major) and his collaborator Edward Young, discussing their new book, Choose Your Weapons. It was a fascinating dialogue comparing and contrasting the underlying philosophies of eleven Foreign Secretaries over the last two hundred years, starting with Castlereagh and Canning during the Napoleonic Wars.

Castlereagh, cautious, diplomatic, and the architect of the Congress of Vienna is the role model for all who believe in preserving the balance of power and general peace through co-ordinated efforts of all great powers. Canning, on the other hand, is the brash, noisy role model for those who believe in the supremacy of a nation's own interests and a moral obligation to spread liberties around the world. The two authors themselves were biased towards different styles, which made for a lively debate on stage and a wonderful question and answer session after. The best moments came however, when Douglas Hurd provided some comic relief with tales of his time in office, including his trick of deploying a good-looking, charming diplomat from the Foreign Office to sway Margaret Thatcher’s opinion when all else fails to convince the Iron Lady.

After a quick lunch at The News Café near the High Street, I wandered around some of the colleges, many of which I have not visited since picking colleges in sixth form (or rather, not picking, as I eventually decided on a college in Cambridge). Sadly, the boyfriend A’s college, University College, was not open to the public that day and A was not around to use his old member status to get me in, having stayed in London to work on a deal.

The rain was falling more heavily over the marquee set up at Christ Church College by the time I returned for my second event. Antony Beevor is a well-respected military historian with a number of best-sellers to his name. He has an extraordinary ability to make even dry military manoeuvres come to life; his Berlin- The Downfall 1945 entertained me for hours. He was there to talk about his new book D-Day, which describes the Normandy landings in 1944. Astute and honest, perhaps brutally so, Beevor’s observations about the Normandy advance were sometimes surprising; the British for instance, did not emerge looking very intelligent or organised.

The real highlight of my trip however, came right at the end of the day, at a talk given by Neil MacGregor, the Director of the British Museum. Since February, Mr MacGregor has been giving a series of wildly popular lectures on BBC Radio Four called A History of the World in 100 Objects, based on exhibits from the British Museum. He brought along eight items from the museum spanning over 10,000 years of human history, and described in fascinating detail the religious, cultural and political context behind each of these, stressing in particular the associations one could draw between seemingly un-connected items. For example, the first coins in the Middle East to depict a Muslim ruler were soon replaced by coins depicting verses from the Koran because of the religious prohibitions around depicting human forms, the same prohibitions that forced the Javanese makers of shadow puppets in Indonesia to exaggerate the forms of their puppets (e.g. with extra-long arms and extraordinarily shaped heads) in order to preserve an art form under Muslim rule.

Mr MacGregor is fast becoming a media star (The Times calls him “Saint Neil”) and it is not difficult to see why. He has the enviable track record of turning the British Museum around, reducing its debt and greatly raising its profile with a series of exciting exhibitions. Although soft-spoken as befitting the stereotype of an academic, his erudite exposition of history and culture in his lectures nevertheless holds one’s attention and provides many an “aha!” moment. I am now a fan and will be digging through the BBC iPlayer’s archives for previous lectures.

Having thoroughly enjoyed the first day of the literary festival, I do wonder if I should make a return trip for the closing weekend…

…watch a Molière play?

How does one translate a seventeenth century French farce and update it for modern times? Substitute Parisian society for the media-obsessed modern equivalent and include topical references to a Tory politician’s "toxic spray-on brand of fake compassion" to get a few laughs. Crank up the frothy energy, keep up the rhyming couplets, and maintain the metre. Lastly, cast a movie star as (wait for it), a movie star and watch the box office receipts take off as it becomes the hottest ticket in town.

Martin Crimp’s take on Molière’s most well known play, The Misanthrope, took a little getting used to. The rhyming can seem forced at times, the tone smug and too clever, yet it seems to capture the spirit of Molière’s most well known play.

For all the attention on Keira Knightley as Jennifer (Celimene in the original), the American movie star in London, the real star of the play was Damien Lewis as Alceste, the British playwright disillusioned by modern society and the “misanthrope” of the title. I remembered him well as Major Richard Winters in the HBO series Band of Brothers, a role which embodied the real soul of the series and its moral centre. In The Misanthrope, Lewis is far from the restrained character he portrayed previously. As A observed, he has even taken his voice a notch higher to take it from mature mellowness to a high-pitched angst.

Lewis projects the right mix of blustering anger, comic absurdity and frail vulnerability. One cares for Alceste and roots for him, even at the height of one of his hyperbolic speeches denouncing the hypocrisy of society. He remains true to his ideals in believing that one should always speak the truth, even if it exposes the hypocrisy of others and even if you suffer for it. His love for Jennifer can seem jealous and rather oppressive yet when she rejects his proposal to run away and leave the glamorous showbiz life, I genuinely felt sorry for him.

Knightley’s performance was better than I had expected. Adopting a plausible New York accent and an endearing flirty manner, her Jennifer alternates between the bitchy, gossipy movie star and the vulnerable, lonely girl who seeks solace in her love for Alceste and her old friendships. She does look impossibly thin however, in that slinky black playsuit she wears in most of the scenes.

Sadly, the play closes this week but farce appears to be in fashion at the moment, and I am looking forward to catching Noel Coward’s Private Lives sometime over the next few months.

…read The Forsyte Saga?

Five weeks ago, I took the plunge and dived into a series of six novels, barely coming up for air for long stretches as I devoured the words. Written by the Nobel literature prize winner John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (a trilogy of three novels and an interlude), and its sequel A Modern Comedy (yet another trilogy) chronicle the family squabbles and intrigues of three generations of a nouveau riche English family, the Forsytes, from 1906 through to 1928.

The prose is not particularly elegant, and is rather dauntingly ponderous at the beginning. Once past the first few chapters however, the Edwardian age came alive. I saw London anew with descriptions of carriage rides and walks through lustrous Hyde Park, Bayswater, Knightsbridge and Sloane Square. I travelled through time on the Underground tube (who knew for instance, that they had first and second class carriages for the tube then?) and took commuter train rides out to the newly developing suburbs like Robin Hill and Staines. Two of the Forsytes were active patrons of the arts and the books are filled with beautiful descriptions of the Gaughains, the Monets and other great paintings of the age.

As with any family saga, The Forsyte Saga and A Modern Comedy rely heavily on arresting plotlines and intriguing characters to keep the reader properly hooked. The story of the struggle between an oppressive, possessive, dutiful solicitor, Soames Forsyte, and his free-spirited wife Irene, dominates the first trilogy. Their feud and their subsequent divorce shape the destinies of the next generation of Forsytes, in particular Soames’ only daughter from his second marriage, Fleur, and Irene’s son from her second marriage to Soames’ cousin, Jon.

The portrayal of women shifts subtly as the “modern women” starts to emerge in the twentieth century. Irene, while repeatedly described as being beautiful and alluring, is often a passive character – her thoughts and feelings are never documented and one sees her through the eyes of the men in her life. Independently minded, she is nonetheless reliant on men for money and protection. Fleur, on the other hand, married the heir to a baronet but is seen as a real person in her own right. One hears her spoilt and rather selfish voice, her ambitions, her sorrows and her rather pathetic attempts to control the men around her.

Galsworthy was less successful in generating interest in the plight of the lower classes. Fleur’s husband, Michael Mont (incidentally my favourite character in the book), is a Tory MP who embarked on a series of experiments to better the lot of the English working class, including setting up a chicken farming community for the urban unemployed and urging children to emigrate to the New World. These attempts were amusing but sadly, they failed to fully describe the despair of the poor and unemployed in a world without social nets or adequate opportunities.

Six books may sound like a drag but I was rewarded with the hours of amusement that only a well-crafted, old-fashioned novel focusing on characters and plot can bring. I am looking forward to reading the next sequel End of the Chapter (yes, yet another 3 novels!).

...explore medieval art at the V&A, the Met and the Musée de Cluny?

Whilst working in Paris five years ago, I stumbled onto the Musée de Cluny whilst exploring the city. Housed in the former Abbey Cluny, and tiny, by Parisian museum standards, it showcased wonderful illuminated manuscripts and other artefacts from the Middle Ages. I fell in love with a series of six tapestries, called the La Dame à la licorne (The Lady and the Unicorn).

Woven in Flanders in the fifteenth century, each of the tapestries shows a lady flanked by a lion and a unicorn ; five of them each showcase allegorical symbols of the five senses – taste, hearing, sight, smell and touch, while the more ambiguous sixth plays on the theme of “À mon seul désir" (“to my only desire”). Exquisite and intricate, the tapestries awakened an interest in medieval art, which I realised is so much more than the rather dull painted altar pieces one sees as the precursor to the Renaissance and the Old Masters in European painting.

Since then, this interest has lain rather dormant, crowded out by more flamboyant eras like the Pre-Raphaelites and the Impressionists. Over the last two weekends though, I was in turn at the new Medieval and Renaissance wing at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Medieval rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of New York.

The V&A’s Medieval and Renaissance Wing was revamped at the cost of £30M, and was rightly lauded in the press for breathing new life to the wonderful medieval artefacts owned by the V&A, some of which have never before shown to the public. Airy and flooded with natural light, the gallery looks and feels like a cathedral, particularly with the beautiful stained glass panes illuminating the space within. The effect was transcendental.

Highlights include the dazzling Gloucester Candlestick with dragons at its feet, the sparkling Thomas à Becket enamelled casket from Limoges, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks, a choir screen in its entirety from 's-Hertogenbosch , a fifteenth century version of Aesop Fables in Latin and Italian, and many well-preserved illustrated manuscripts, the writing and illustration of which were the sole occupation of many monks in that period. My favourite works were the carved ivory pieces, particularly the miniature altar panels, some so intricately carved it make me gasp. My boyfriend, A, and I had fun with the many quizzes within the interactive programmes positioned throughout the gallery; we now know for instance, that pointed arches and curved bodies in carvings were characteristic of the Gothic period. We barely made it through half of the exhibits during our afternoon there, so long did we linger in each room. I will have to return at some stage.

In New York just last weekend on a quick stopover for work, I nipped into the Met to re-acquaint myself with some of the wonders within. This time around, instead of hanging out on the second floor where the major paintings are displayed, I found myself lingering within the medieval rooms. Less informative and a shade less accessible compared to the V&A, the Met still has some breath-taking pieces, like the jewelled enamel caskets and tapestries showing the four stages of men. One piece did make me smile – a tapestry depicted man, represented by a stag, being hunted and chased by hounds representing vanity, overconfidence, rashness and desire, which were released by a lady representing ignorance. Read into it what you will…