Art banishes gloom as I rush to London's museums before Covid-19 forces closure

I can date my first memory precisely: 20 July, 1969. My parents sat me before our television and proclaimed with solemn gravity: "Remember this, Ellen. You're watching history. You may live your whole life without something this important happening again." I didn't really grasp why Neil Armstrong stepping onto the surface of the moon that afternoon was so significant, but I knew it was a big deal.

Twenty years later, I was more conscious of the reasons for the history-book moment as I watched the Berlin Wall tumble. The next history maker was far less pleasant. A regular workday collapsed into horror on September 11, 2001 as our world changed forever. After that, frankly, I could have done without any more epoch-shaping events in my life. And yet here we are again.

We're all used to watching horrible diseases ravage developing countries. We give money. We say prayers. We don't imagine it will have much effect on us. Who in Europe or the US, just two short months ago, could have predicted how quickly normal life can tip into an apocalyptic drama? Who can say how far-reaching the impact of Covid-19 will be?

I suspect that, much as it was in the weeks following 9-11, the secret to fighting the dread is going to be making extraordinary efforts to keep life as normal as possible. For me, with the closure of London's museums on the horizon, that meant making my way into an eerily quiet capital to drink in the two exhibitions I'd planned to see this spring. Staying six feet away from other humans, trying not to touch anything and regularly sanitising my hands, naturally. I got there just in time. Cultural institutions locked their doors 48 hours later.

If you need cheering up, it's hard to go wrong with the exuberance of the British Baroque or the merry excess of George IV's collecting mania, now sitting in splendid isolation inside Tate Britain and the Queen's Gallery.

The Baroque was a truly international movement, starting in Italy as the Catholic church's response to the reformation. If protestants were going austere, the Pope would fight back with magnificence. The trend for enormous classical buildings, opulent decor, fanciful frescoed ceilings, luxurious clothing and complex, multi-layered music spread quickly. Even protestant countries adopted the style, though they streamlined it a bit and stripped most of the bombastic religious images out of it.

In Britain the Baroque aligns with the late Stuarts. It was the look of choice for Charles II after his restoration. He was heavily influenced by (and probably jealous of) his style-setting first cousin Louis XIV of France (Le Roi Soleil). Charles' successors James II, William and Mary, and Anne all followed suit. The Tate's show, called British Baroque: Power and Illusion, focuses on how those rulers and their courts used the style to dazzle the country with their authority.

While there are interesting lessons in political history here, at its core this is simply a beautiful collection of things to look at. There are lots of sumptuous portraits of women in billowing silk and men in flamboyant wigs. (This may be the best era in fashion history for women. For men, condemned to shoulder-length curls, tights and ballooning short pantaloons, not so much.) There's an exquisitely-wrought silver chandelier, a font cover carved by Grinling Gibbons alive with putti, fruit and veg, an enamel and diamond portrait pendant of William II that would set any jewellery collector drooling, and some beautiful examples of pottery and furniture that show off the growing interest in the exotic Far East. The silver and gold loving cup in the shape of an oak tree, topped with a royal crown, is a masterpiece of the smith's art.

An intriguing section digs into the Baroque's obsession with fooling the eye, with photo-realistic flower paintings, the famous tromp l'oiel door from Chatsworth's music room with its painted violin hanging on a nail, and an amusing box that throws scenes painted on three sides into perfect perspective when you look through the designated eye holes.  There's a whole room devoted to the architecture of Sir Christopher Wren and his followers, with models, paintings and architectural drawings. In the next the curators try to bring to life the age's passion for exuberant walls and ceilings, often adorned with life-sized gods, goddesses and royals occupying heaven. One wall has an enormous reproduction of the view into the great hall at the Naval College at Greenwich, while the others have photos and sketches of  examples elsewhere in the country.

This exhibition wasn't quite as much fun as the Victoria and Albert's take on the Baroque in 2009, which included music, costume and much more of the decorative arts. But it was still a joyous outing, made more memorable by the sparsely populated galleries.

People were even thinner on the ground at the Queen's Gallery, a little-known secret that's rarely crowded even when London's operating at capacity.

The Queen's Gallery sits next to Buckingham Palace and exists to share treasures from the Royal Collection with the general public. While the source is always the same, exhibitions vary to show off items under different themes. For a bargain £13.50, you get into exhibitions for a year (that can be as many as three if you time it right), audio guide included.

While under normal circumstances I wouldn't have jammed two big shows into one day, George IV: Art and Spectacle is a fitting companion to the Baroque. George loved excess, was one of the monarchy's greatest collectors and was a big fan of his predecessor Charles II. George was particularly intrigued by the Catholic branch of the Stuart family that still existed in exile, ousted by his own protestant Hanoverians. There's an intriguing collection of Stuart memorabilia here.

That's probably the most humble of the many collections on view. George's irresponsible spending made him an unpopular king but left perhaps the biggest artistic legacy of any monarch since the Civil War. A savvy consumer of great painting, his purchases included priceless Rembrandts and some of Lawrence's greatest portraits,  on show here. His love of adornment gives the exhibition the glittering, diamond-studded circlet of national flowers familiar from the queen's image on stamps, and a whole range of over-the-top costumes and accessories from his lavish coronation. The Royal Plate had been liberated from its usual display at the Tower; a range of golden tableware that was supposed to be arrayed behind the monarch at state banquets, in an echo of Medieval tradition.

If, as I have, you've been a visitor to all of the Royal palaces, you will have seen most of this stuff before. The charm of the Queen's Gallery is that it brings items together to tell a story. And what we get here is a view into a man of impeccable taste, with greater depth and sensitivity than his historic reputation.

He collected a range of searing political cartoons lampooning him, suggesting a decent sense of humour. He commissioned multiple, beautiful portraits of his favourite sisters and his daughter, suggesting a soft spot for at least some of his fractious family. The books, prints, maps and memorabilia from Wellington's campaigns against Napoleon, including a captured French marshal's baton of command, demonstrate his intense interest in the greatest political events of his time. His love of Jane Austen, who ... when vigorously encouraged ... dedicated Emma to him, obviously shows his excellent literary taste. The presentation copy is here, in its original three-volume form. Most poignant are white marble and gold gilt copies of famous imperial arches in Rome. George desperately wanted to go on the Grand Tour, as his aristocratic peers would have done, but as heir to the throne he wasn't allowed to do so. These items show a desperate yearning for an Italy he would never see.

My two favourite items in the show, however, were the things I'd never seen before because they're not usually on display in the palaces' public spaces. The first was a pair of Humphry Repton's famous red books. An early example of visionary marketing, Repton would bid for potential work by presenting a watercolour of a landscape as it existed and then, with the movement of a flap, the landscape as it could be with his help. His before-and-after scenes were all the rage in the early 19th century, but few survive because they were essentially working design tools. The other is a suite of Oriental-style furniture created for the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. Lifelike, small Chinese sages hold up a console table, each dressed and presented with distinctive facial expressions. On either side loom porcelain pagodas, originally made in China but enhanced in Europe with tiny ormolu dogs and bells on every level. They are gob-stoppingly magnificent and possibly worth the price of entry on their own.

Sadly, now they sit in an empty gallery, seen by even fewer people than would normally pass by in the private East wing of Buckingham Palace, where they normally live.

With only a handful of people out and about, London's museums and tourist destinations last weekend were glorious. It was like an almost-private view. I wanted to stop time, so I could experience the same at the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert. But time marched on. Covid-19 marched on. The museums are closed, and there's no telling when they'll open again. Just like the businesses that are shutting down, our cultural institutions will take an enormous financial hit from this crisis. I can only hope that while they're inaccessible, people gain a greater appreciation for what they're missing and flock back through all those august portals when this significant moment in history has passed.

Despite big budget firepower, ENO's Luisa Miller pales before a provincial Butterfly

Warning, readers: I'm climbing onto my opera soapbox again.

I've written regularly about my frustration when the modern preference for "innovative" opera staging tips over into something that's incomprehensible and just plain ugly. From its birth, opera was an art form of lavish visual spectacle. While I appreciate that artists get bored repeatedly staging the same interpretations, and smaller opera companies can't afford the spectacle that Mozart, Wagner or Puccini would recognise, I'm becoming exasperated by the major opera companies' love affair with sparse modernism and the reinvention of the original work's time and place.

In the UK, however, the less an opera company looks to London, the more liberated they seem to be to embrace traditional staging. The word provincial usually comes with negative associations: rustics from small towns aping urban sophistication and never quite getting it right. I suspect that's the way Londoners would dismiss the production of Madame Butterfly I saw at the Anvil in Basingstoke last month. But with its abundant kimonos and traditional setting, it was a classic interpretation that was easy on the eyes and far less challenging that the production of Luisa Miller I saw at the English National Opera a fortnight later.

If you'd listened to a radio broadcast of this Luisa, you'd make no mistake about which one was the big-budget, top-of-the-food-chain production.  The ENO's orchestra swells, powers, cajoles and stirs. This is one of Verdi's lesser known works but the music still moves the soul. Young American bass Soloman Howard was the best thing in the production; a spine-tingling voice and emotive acting that almost transformed the bad-guy Wurm into the hero of the story. He has the kind of headliner quality that pulls you to almost any opera just to see him. Elizabeth Llewellyn, playing the eponymous heroine, is a powerful soprano with an impressive range, and while David Junghoon Kim's Rodolfo sometimes lacked power he is a pure, sweet tenor in the classic style. Unfortunately, the love triangle that drives two of the three to a terrible death has no credibility. The acting is as wooden as the singing is lovely; I didn't buy Luisa as a sweet heroine or Rodolfo as an obsessed romantic hero.

But those issues pale in comparison to the stark, brutalist set. Luisa Miller was written as an exploration of class divisions in a 17th century Tyrolean village. (Luisa is the humble Miller's daughter, Rodolfo is the lord's heir who falls in love where he shouldn't.) But don't expect lederhosen, beer steins and sets with lavish mountain backdrops. The vast ENO stage was a brutal white rectangle with harsh light. A structure in the centre sometimes appears, just a ghost of a building made from white girders. The side walls sometimes come in and out. There's little to look at until characters start daubing graffiti on the white walls.

The lord of the manor seems to have morphed into a violent gangster ... at one point an enemy is executed in a hanging reminiscent of Catholic martyrdoms ... and the graffiti, daubed in thick black stuff that comes out of oil barrels, oozing with heavy menace. By the end it's dripping ominously from the top of the walls. Stark and horrific, the staging certainly made an impact. But it was exceptionally ugly. And I haven't even mentioned the bizarre costumes of the villagers, who seem to have been conjured out of one of Hieronymus Bosch's scenes from hell.

It was hard work.

Not so, our little provincial Butterfly. There wasn't an innovative thing about it. The set ... unchanged throughout ... would have been recognisable to anyone who saw the original in 1904. There was a charming Japanese house set in a blooming garden, regularly populated with a chorus of people in lavish silken robes. The singing was solid though not memorable, the acting occasionally over-the-top, but the total package was a delightful evening's entertainment. For about half the price of the middling tickets at ENO.

I'm not arguing that operas shouldn't evolve from their original staging. But if you're going to take chances, I'd like them to make sense. The ENO was pushing boundaries by casting a black woman as Luisa and a Korean man as Rodolfo. Why not run with that, and turn the class war Verdi wrote into an exploration of what happens when a poor girl from a rough bit of LA ends up in a relationship with a rich doctor's son? I also want operas that can attract the next generation. At Basingstoke's Butterfly I spotted a mother with her daughter, about 8 years old, dressed for a special occasion and alert with excitement. Butterfly's simple tale with its magnificent music and storybook visuals connected with a young audience in a way I can't imagine with Luisa's frightening modernism.

The ENO reportedly receives about £100 in public subsidies for every ticket it sells. That compares to £22 for the National Theatre and ... though I have no data on this ... probably a pittance for provincial companies. Surely with that amount of cash you can give me something better to look at? More importantly, if you're entrusted with public money, I think you should be aiming for entertainment that can reach a wider public rather than the shock value so beloved by opera's inner circle. 

Glorious Upstart Crow is one of the funniest things to ever bless the London Stage

If you appreciate Shakespeare, think the finest form of comedy is witty wordplay, believe that Blackadder is a masterpiece of British television, and can get to London before 25 April, you need to book tickets to The Upstart Crow. 

Now. 

You probably shouldn’t even finish reading this review. Because if you don’t catch this masterpiece’s short run you will miss one of the most gloriously funny, joyously silly yet fiercely intelligent productions to ever grace a London stage. 

The Blackadder reference is intentional, as this gem is written by that series’ scribe, Ben Elton, and he’s on top form here. And like the earlier historical romp, Upstart Crow started life as a TV series. This is not, however, one of those screen-to-stage copies that West End producers turn to when looking for quick profits (Mamma Mia, Pretty Woman) but an entirely new work. 

We’ve moved on from the TV show’s Elizabethan period to the new regime of James I, where Shakespeare needs to prove himself afresh. Naturally, his creative juices are running dry and much merriment ensues to get them flowing. 

We’re treated to the familiar leads from the original series. David Mitchell returns as the insecure, callous but ultimately kind-hearted Bard, pinching ideas from those around him before falling into genius when the spirit strikes. It’s hard to believe this is Mitchell’s first appearance on stage: his live timing is perfect and he’s remarkably moving when the action briefly turns serious and he has to do the mad scene from Lear. Gemma Whelan reminds us why she’s one of Britain’s best young actresses, banishing memories of her as a rampaging, hard-ass pirate queen in Game of Thrones and the prim sister in Gentleman Jack to give us the sweet, clever and determined Kate, clearly Shakespeare’s muse. 

History won’t allow Mark Heap to reprise his role as Shakespeare’s nemesis, theatre censor Robert Greene, as he was long dead by the Jacobean accession. So Heap comes back in a new role as a Puritan doctor channeling the spirit of Twelfth Night’s Malvolio. And Rob Rouse is back as servant, straight man and ego-pricker Bottom. 

In the best Eltonian ... and Shakespearean ... tradition, the comedy alternates between farce, slapstick and brainy wordplay. While the extreme role reversals, physical pratfalls and very modern send-ups of public transport and political correctness will get a laugh out of anyone, there’s no denying that the better you know your Shakespeare, the funnier this play is. The Upstart Crow treats Shakespeare’s work not as a sacred canon but as a living larder of human creativity, where the brilliant and the bad, the strikingly original and the shamelessly copied, all live side-by-side.

The plot gleefully mashes up Twelfth Night, Othello, Romeo and Juliet and King Lear. For those who laboured over the plays at school, your efforts will be amply rewarded as you spot the jokes and chuckle at how one story slides into another. References to many other plays pop up, including jibes about the bad ones, the cheap plotting tricks and the plagiarism. Will’s constantly noting down lines that come out of other characters’ mouths that the Shakespeareans amongst us know will go on to become classics. There’s even an explanation of The Bard’s most enigmatic stage direction, complete with a dancing bear who almost steals the whole show. 

This isn’t new, of course. Elton and Mitchell take a path well trodden, most notably by Tom Stoppard in Shakespeare in Love. One my favourite Doctor Who episodes in the David Tennant era springs to mind. But for pure, glorious, feel-good comedy, it’s never been done better than here. 

I’d expect that much of this will eventually come to the small screen as elements of a fourth series. But there’s a magic on the live stage I doubt a filmed version will be able to capture. The communal joy of hundreds of people joining in belly-aching laughter. The actors playing to the audience. The wonderfully authentic Shakespearean set design. And the dancing bear. The dancing bear needs to be seen live. 

What are you doing still reading this? Go book some tickets. Now!