Ten stories that give us a better Napoleonic experience than Ridley Scott’s new bomb

My hopes were high for Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, and they were comprehensively crushed. I can turn a blind eye to tampering with history if it produces a great story. For a compelling epic that brings past ages to life I can forgive oddities in casting, inaccuracies in set design or the occasional bit of wooden dialogue. But the end product needs to be a tale that sweeps me back in time and gives me emotional insight into the characters. 

No such storytelling happens here.

By attempting to cover 28 years of intricate politics, almost constant war and one of the most complex romances in history, Scott gave himself a monumental challenge. He answered it with 157 minutes of vignettes that I suspect only made sense when you know the story already. If you do know it, sadly, you can only be irritated by how badly it’s told.

The film did, however, get me thinking about Napoleonic storytelling. Who’s managed to breathe the greatest life into this controversial character and the world he created? Here’s my personal shortlist of stories on big and small screen, and on the page. And because this is my list, there’s a lot more focus on stories driven by character development, passion, or the non-military aspects of Napoleon’s career. (My husband wouldn’t contemplate this exercise without the film Waterloo and the Sharpe TV series.) Most of my choices, interestingly, don’t feature Napoleon as the protagonist but tell his story through the eyes or the adventures of others.

By choosing to focus on shorter time periods, or on the impact his actions have on others, these all do a much better job of spinning a tale than Scott’s misfire.

DÉSIRÉÉ, 1954 FILM

The scope of Scott’s film was problematic, but this classic shows it can be done. This story covers almost the exact same timeline and plot points as Scott’s attempt, but far better. The story is seen through the eyes of Napoleon’s first fiancée, abandoned for more helpful alliances in his climb to power. She remained in court circles, however, because her sister had married Napoleon’s brother Joseph, and she married the French general who would go on to become king of Sweden. Using the third party observer trick delivers some poignant insight into Napoleon’s political machinations and Josephine’s inability to bear a child. This is the kind of Saturday afternoon TV film fare I used to lap up with my history-loving grandfather. I suspect this is one of the first seeds that planted my lifelong love of looking at history through the eyes of women who were there but don’t take the headlines in the history books. The film is strong on relationships and all the battles are background events, so won’t appeal to some. Marlon Brando is a bluff, practical Napoleon and Jean Simmons an admirable heroine. Skip Ridley Scott’s attempt and watch this on YouTube (the full film is available) instead.

THE ETHAN GAGE ADVENTURES, BOOKS BY WILLIAM DIETRICH

Indiana Jones re-imagined in the Napoleonic Era. Gage is a wise-cracking American scholar, gambler and sharpshooter who ends up returning time and again to work for Napoleon despite a problematic relationship. His adventures are driven by Napoleon’s interest in history, foreign cultures and the occult, meaning Gage is often on the trail of some legendary object said to have powers that will solidify the Emperor’s position. These are entertaining romps that are also fabulously well-researched, and probably the best take I’ve seen on the can’t-live-with-or-without roller coaster that was Napoleon and Josephine’s relationship. 

MONSIEUR N., 2003 FILM

Antoine de Cannes exploration of Napoleon’s life on St. Helena is fascinating. Most people focus on either his climb or the defeat at Waterloo; here we have an extraordinary ego having to confront failure and consider what went wrong. Richard E Grant gives one of his best performances as Napoleon’s jailor, delivering scenes in both French and English as required. And there’s a plot twist at the end which, though highly implausible, is such a great story you will wish it were true.

NAPOLEON’S LAST ISLAND, BOOK BY THOMAS KENEALLY

The Balcombe family features heavily in Monsieur N., particularly daughter Betsy. The family patriarch was an East India Company official living on Saint Helena and the family became friends with the Emperor and his companions, providing a bit of warmth and understanding in contrast to the strict regime imposed by the military guards. This insightful and well-researched novel tells the story of Napoleon’s St. Helena years from Betsy’s perspective.

WAR AND PEACE, BBC MINISERIES 1972

There are many versions of this epic tale, including Tolstoy’s original book which I confess I’ve never been able to get through. Too much introspective angst for me. Both the BBC’s 2016 version and the 1956 film are lavish productions that delight the eye, but I prefer this classic from the days when the Beeb took adapting novels seriously. Anthony Hopkins leads a sprawling cast of tremendous stage actors who drive home all the emotional turmoil of a world turned upside down by Napoleon’s ambition.

NAPOLEON, A LIFE IN GARDENS AND SHADOWS, BOOK BY RUTH SCURR

Scurr looked at a world full of Napoleonic biographies by men who delved deep into battles and politics. She wanted to do something different, and felt there was plenty of unexplored territory. This biography takes the fascinating framing idea of the gardens in Napoleon’s life, from a small student’s plot when he was an outsider at his military academy through the grandeur of his imperial projects to his last stubborn attempt to control nature at St. Helena. Each is a starting point to dive into what really made the man tick, how he managed his most intimate relationships and what he wanted from the world beyond military victory. There’s a lot here on culture and philosophy, reminding us that Napoleon was a polymath and prodigious scholar, not just a charismatic general.

MASTER AND COMMANDER: FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD, 2003 FILM

Napoleon doesn’t appear in this one at all, but it’s his voracious European ambitions that drive the whole plot. Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany are on top form as best friends sailing the high seas. Lots of sea battles and action balanced with quiet moments of humanity and the fascinating team dynamics of keeping people sane and working together under the pressures of war. A much under-appreciated film. The film is a mash-up of a couple of Patrick O’Brian’s 20 Audrey-Maturin novels, which would come up in anyone’s list of the best historic novels set during the time period. I spent several years happily ploughing through them because of the number of reviews that compared O’Brian’s characterisation and observational skills to Jane Austen. Which leads us to…

PERSUASION, BOOK AND 1995 BBC FILM

This is my favourite Jane Austen novel and though there’ve been multiple adaptations the 1995 version with Ciaran Hinds and Amanda Root stands head and shoulders above the rest. This was Austen’s last complete novel, and both the main characters and their love story are more mature than in the other, more frequently-produced tales. Again, Napoleon makes no actual appearance here but the whole plot is driven by his actions. His wars provide the opportunity for opportunistic men to climb in the navy, and build fortunes with their percentage of captured prizes. The promising but poor young man who deserved no attention returns as a rich captain, now worthy of society’s consideration. Will his attentions go to young, fresh women as people expect, or does the love of his youth survive? Beautifully filmed in and around Bath, where the book is set.

VANITY FAIR, BOOK AND 2004 FILM

One of the best novels of all time, brought to glorious creative life in a lavish production that was the first to show off Reese Witherspoon’s brilliance behind as well as in front of the camera. Anti-heroine Becky Sharpe can be a tricky role to play: you should find her despicable, but also deeply compelling. The climax of all the action is the Battle of Waterloo, where some characters’ fates are made and others destroyed. And before that, we have the glorious spectacle of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, from which so many officers rode directly to battlefield and death.

BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, 1989 FILM

I bring Napoleon back as a main character for my last pick. Silly, juvenile, cast adrift from all reality and only a small part of the bigger film, this is still better Napoleonic story telling than Ridley Scott’s 2023 effort. Just in case you don’t know the plot: two high school dummies swot up for their history test thanks to a time machine; things go wrong and they end up bringing significant characters from history … including the Emperor of the French … back to the modern day. Napoleon cheating children at bowling is both more joyous, and a more searing character insight, than anything in Scott’s jumbled procession of vignettes. Watch it on YouTube. You’ll thank me.

Museums should take a page from Hockney’s book and embrace immersive spaces

I have been deeply sceptical of the new wave of “immersive experiences”  turning fine art into a light and sound extravaganza. It’s not the new media that bothers me as much as the fact that these are inevitably commercial endeavours, popping up in some urban space, rarely if ever associated with the cultural institutions that own the art they’re using as the backbone of their attraction. They also, ironically, tend to set up in big cities where people actually have access to original art, rather than in distant towns or rural places where cultural experience is rare. In a world of declining funding for the arts, where a distressing number of people never set foot in museums, these digital exhibitions feel like a dangerous diversion of cash and attention from our cultural institutions into some producer’s flourishing pension plan.

As a communications professional, however, it felt dangerous to ignore this increasingly popular evolution in storytelling. A show focused on David Hockney soothed some of my anxieties. Hockney has always been interested in incorporating new technologies into his work, from his Polaroid camera as a tool for collages in the ‘70s to his ravishingly beautiful iPad creations today. He works in vivid colours and likes to go large. Splashing a Hockney up on giant screens feels a very natural evolution. 

Most importantly, just as in the ABBA Voyage show I wrote about last, the living artist worked with a broader team to make this. David Hockney: Bigger and Closer (Not Smaller and Far Away) is a bona fide work within the artist’s creative CV, not a cash grab from some production company trying to exploit any artist with tea towel and fridge magnet popularity. Does that invalidate any production based on a dead artist? Not necesssarily. But it does sprinkle this one with the creative fairy dust of authenticity.

The experience is entirely entertaining, often educational and occasionally emotionally stirring. The last is down to the technology that has made these things so popular. At Lightroom, a venue in Kings’ Cross created for immersive video (from the folks behind the innovative Bridge Theatre), there are more than 1,400 speakers, 28 projectors and a digital canvas size of approximately 108 million pixels. Your average cinema screen is between two and four thousand. It’s like standing at the bottom of an enormous well, its sides looming more than two stories above you, being bathed by sound and light. The illusion is not only unbroken by the corners of the room, but projections carry onto the floor. When they combine gorgeous visuals with powerful music … for me, most notably, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde with images from the set designs Hockney did for the opera … they’re tickling your tear ducts.

This isn’t a single story but a series of vignettes, some short as a pop song and others pushing towards eight minutes. It’s storytelling crafted for the age of short attention spans. The content plays out over an hour but doesn’t feel like it because of the quick pacing and Hockney’s enlightening narration. It runs on a continuous loop and though you’ll buy a ticket for specific entrance time that doesn’t deliver you into the room at an official start time. You’ll join in mid flow and, roughly an hour later, realise you’re seeing a repeat. You could, if you so desired, stretch out and watch everything again and again; the venue is deeply casual on timings and once you’re in, you’re in. 

This system, of course, radically simplifies staffing needs. Flip the switch, run the video on a continuous loop, scan entry tickets and keep an eye on the room to make sure everyone is OK. I doubt any fights would break out at an immersive art experience but you never know: competition for the benches in the centre of the room is quite fierce. Management concentrates the greatest number of employees behind the bar, where you’re free to buy drinks you can carry in to the room with you in plastic cups. (If you hang out in the bar upstairs, you can have a glass.)

I suspect each visitor will have his or her own favourites from the vignettes. After the opera segment … I had no idea Hockney had done so much stage design … I was most drawn to segments about his love of the English countryside. It’s not all painting; in one powerful section he’s rolled a wide-screen camera down a straight (probably Roman) road in his native Yorkshire. He captures the exact same stretch but in four times of year: verdant spring, sleepy summer, blazing autumn, snow-draped winter. One season projects on each wall, the four cameras moving in time. It’s magical. 

His house in Normandy, so familiar to anyone who saw the magnificent Arrival of Spring show at the Royal Academy two years ago, gets a new spin demonstrating to us how he actually creates his art. His iPad, Hockney explains, captures and remembers every stroke. So when he’s finished not only does he have a painting, but a video that shows the whole thing building with every dot, dash and squiggle. As someone who’s trying to do a little painting myself, this bit, and several other times the replays showed up, was fascinating.  I also enjoyed his reminiscences about LA, a town bathed in light and colour but almost unknown to painters when he moved there. The bit on different kinds of perspective was interesting but seemed to miss the general population mark; it was the one part that started to feel worthy and academic.

This is a child-friendly, stress-free and uncomplicated story. While the section on swimming pools throws up a few naked male bottoms, there’s no discussion of the free-wheeling sex and bohemian lifestyle that made Hockney an edgy rebel in his early days. (And made my mother squirm so much when she had to include him in art history lectures to 16-year-old girls in a convent school.) We may see some of those early paintings  here, but it’s all presented through the filter of the avuncular elder statesman of British Art who’s now best known for giving us pastoral idylls in Yorkshire. 

If you think art should be challenging, you’re going to hate art as an immersive experience. If you think it’s important to introduce art to children from their earliest years, you’re going to love it. I have rarely seen so many little people at an artistic event, and I’ve never seen them so beguiled. The camera shot of the day, if I’d had a telephoto lens, would have been a little girl leaning forward against the wall, arms spread out, face turned up and mouth open as if drinking in the cascading colours. Other visitors wouldn’t welcome children at a traditional art exhibition, the kids wouldn’t enjoy it and few parents would want to splash out the £15 - £25 needed to get them in. The rules of the game are different in this immersive world.

Ultimately, this all feels less like an art exhibition and more like a film about an artist. In the same way Charlton Heston’s scowling stroll The Agony and the Ecstasy once lit a fire in my young heart for Renaissance Italy, perhaps these immersive experiences will spark kids to want to go to a museum and see the real stuff. Because as entertaining as this was, it’s a sideline and not the real thing. While I found much to appreciate, this show didn’t soothe my worries that money is going to the wrong place, and that if we don’t fund proper culture we’ll lose it.

After my Hockney: Bigger and Closer experience my frustration has shifted away from the producers capturing the cash of cultural opportunity and towards the art museums that I feel are missing a trick. Science museums around the world were quick to install iMax cinemas when they came out. Now those in-house screens pull in families with a steady diet of space and nature documentaries. Installing experiential spaces similar to Lightroom’s facilities in the National Gallery, V&A or British Museum would put the revenues for this trend into the hands of people who need it more, and have the responsibility for preserving our heritage. If these display spaces were museum-based, after their digital experience visitors could spill into galleries to see the real thing rather than walking into the rather soulless re-development that is the new King’s Cross. And the museums would also have a flexible, dramatic space easily flipped for cash-generating private events. Sadly, I’m not aware of any museums jumping on this trend; everything in the immersive art world seems entirely commercial.

So … check them out, but if you’re lucky enough to live in a city with proper museums, then do yourself a favour and go see the real thing.

My misgivings about immersive art pushed me to the very end of the Hockney show’s run before I jumped in. If you want to see this, you’ll need to move fast. Bigger and Closer runs until 3 December, after which it cedes its projection room to an adventure to the moon narrated by Tom Hanks.

Reality may be over-rated. Abba Voyage suggests technology and creativity can do even better.

The next time I'm in a conversation with someone fretting over the death of creativity in the face of modern technology, I'll meet them with two words: Abba Voyage.

Much has been written about this blockbuster show in London's East End, which has been reliably selling out the 3,000 places in its arena (1,650 seats and 1,350 packed onto a dance floor) since it launched in May of 2022. It's as good as everyone says.

Show veterans talks about the stunning realism, and I have to join that chorus. These aren't just four avatars (here called ABBAtars) performing music. Everything has been calculated to reinforce the feel of a live show. Giant video screens offer close ups of the performers you're watching at a distance. A live band with backup singers adds to the rich musical soundscape and interacts with the digital stars. There are breaks for costume changes and pauses while each band member talks to you. Not only is it the real Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny and Anni-Frid coming up with and delivering the words, but they acknowledge with wry humour the technology that allows them to be here and look so good. 

They're in on the joke.

It's their personal involvement, I suspect, that hammers home the authenticity. They drove all the creative decisions. Spoke the words. Sang the songs. Wore the motion capture suits to ensure the movements were theirs. (Except for one dance routine that ... as fit as she's remained ... would have been well past the capabilities of the now 78-year-old Anna-Frid.) Could you deploy this technology to bring The Rat Pack, Prince or Maria Callas? Sure. But I suspect you'd never approach the authenticity that hands-on involvement brings here. 

In every way that matters, this is an ABBA concert. Which is something that a great many of their fans have never seen, given that the band broke up in 1982 and hasn't performed live together since. That's despite the fact that the Mamma Mia franchise has made them a greater phenomenon now than they were the first time around, especially in the States, where they were never that big in my youth. 

Another realistic touch is the inclusion of a few songs only superfans are likely to know (The Visitors, Eagle), and the latest stuff that's not been accepted into the canon yet (I Still Have Faith in You). That last one was very poignant, as was the final touch of the show which clearly counts as a spoiler. I won't blow it for you, but it's the icing on this very sweet and moreish cake.

Reviews have underplayed the incredible lighting design, which is worth a visit even if you're not a fan of the music. Those of you who go into raptures over Yayoi Kusamana's light installations need to get to this show, which is clearly influenced by that artist's work. In the arrangement most like her Infinity Mirror Rooms currently on at Tate Modern, strings of lights rise, fall and alternate colours in the open space before you, reflected to infinity on giant screens around you and behind the band. It's breathtaking. In other noteable pieces circular baffles drop from the ceiling to dip, sway and swirl with lights zipping around their edges. At other times strips of light zoom continuously around the whole arena. These effects make you part of the show, whether you're in the seats or shaking your stuff on the dance floor. 

At other times the lights combine with the high-resolution screens wrapping around the stage to create some staggering illusions, particularly one where the band, in Tron-style costumes, seems to be singing in outer space. The graphic design is so perfect that comets wink in and out as they cross behind the rings of a planet. It comes as no surprise to discover that the production comes from Industrial Light and Magic, the Star Wars people.  

It's all possible because the arena was purpose built, designed to accommodate the creative vision of the band for each song. And like a real concert, lights and video take over at points as the band retires to take a rest or change costumes. They're digitally generated so don't need to, obviously, but that's another small touch that adds to the reality. Another advantage of the digital production, of course, is that there's little need for a "backstage". Most of the arena's footprint is what you see, either in the entry concourse or the performance area. 

It is all, evidently, a bit like a giant flat-pack, designed to be quickly disassembled and moved somewhere else. Although with crowds streaming in, there seems little point to bother before their permission runs out and they're forced to give way to a housing development in 2026.

Given the enormous care with which this has all been crafted, I suspect there are plans for it to run and run. Three glaring omissions ... Take a Chance on Me, Super Trooper and Money, Money, Money ... suggest the ability to refresh the show so that returning fans get something a bit new, just like seeing a live act for a second time. Most professional reviewers have suggested those three numbers have been created and are sitting on the digital shelf just waiting for the point when ticket sales need an injection to be added in to an updated show.

A few additional logistics points:

• The arena has its own exit on the DLR, in between Canary Wharf and Stratford, called Pudding Mill. We backtracked through Stratford on the way home. Slightly longer but a better chance of a seat. 

• The prompt 7:45 start time with no warm up acts (now there's an improvement on a live concert!) and no intermission means that you're probably heading home before whatever is playing at the 02 lets out. We stayed up in town because we were worried about the commute home but we could have easily made it.

• The arena opens at 6 and promises a range of dining options. Don't believe them. It's one food stand with carb-heavy fast food options and no place to sit. We should have gone a bit earlier and headed over to the collection of street food vendors next door, where I suspect we would have gotten a much nicer dinner.

• They sell re-fillable water bottles for a much higher price than the regular plastic ones. Unless you're desperate to get a branded bottle, skip this. There are no obvious refill points, other than standing in the always-long bar and food stand queues, and once the show starts it's so compelling and goes so fast you're not going to want to leave for a refill anyway.

• The standing room dance floor was PACKED. If you don't like crowds, this is not the way to go. They all looked like they were having a blast but it definitely wasn't for me. 
  

__________

If ABBA is your thing, don't miss my review of the mad and wonderful ABBA Museum in Stockholm. Quite possibly good enough to plan a whole trip around.