The Habit of Art

I like to think this is what K and I both have, but in an active, positive sense, not in the passive, resigned sense that W.H. Auden expresses in Alan Bennett's excellent new play at the National Theatre... which we saw on Thursday night - at the cinema!

The National Theatre have been running a new initiative with their last few productions, called NT Live, whereby live performances are beamed into cinemas around the country and around the world. We were slightly wary of the idea - the magic of the theatre surely comes largely from being there, with all the electricity generated by the living interaction of the actors with each other and with the audience - but we really wanted to see the play, and were having problems finding any available Travelex £10 tickets (somehow these all just evaporate the moment they are released for sale - I am sure there is a way of playing the system, but I haven't figured out what it is yet) and didn't fancy bankrupting ourselves for a seat in the gods...

So partly out of defeat and partly out of curiosity for this newfangled technology we booked tickets to see The Habit of Art down the road at the Ritzy. And it was absolutely brilliant!! There was no less a buzz as we all waited through the countdown for the performance to begin, and rather than the fixed view of the stage which I imagined would be what we saw, we had an absolutely privileged view of the action from a variety of camera angles. It was often very close in to the actors, so you didn't quite get the sense of set which you do when you're at the theatre itself, though the cameras did give wide shots of the stage at the beginning and during the interval. The strangest thing was the interval, when the cameras turned on the audience, and there were we, another audience, watching them, but they couldn't see us... Slightly bizarre.

But the play itself was fantastic!! So so funny and poignant at the same time. I hadn't realised it was a play within a play - perhaps I had read this, but forgot - but effectively the play is a cast of actors rehearsing a new play about Auden and Benjamin Britten, and an imagined encounter between them soon before their deaths, after decades of estrangement. I loved the sense of theatre - so to speak - and how theatre works which was encapsulated within the 'rehearsal' bits, where the play moves out from the intimate focus on Auden, to comment self-referentially on the play itself, on the National itself, on the whole process of making art, how it's the work that counts and what lives on... Really really excellent. Another classic from Bennett, who really is a master of his game.

There were students in the cinema (some annoying ones, who left after about 10 minutes), including a girl sitting behind K taking notes. I loved how this initiative made the theatre so accessible. As a schoolgirl and student I used to get cheap standing tickets at the National, and just lap up the performances - Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, with Felicity Kendal, really sticks in my memory for being a moment when I awakened to how wonderful the theatre was - and this idea of beaming plays into cinemas makes that available to people who can't afford the National's prices, or who live a long long way from where these landmark productions are happening... The list of international venues which broadcast The Habit of Art last Thursday was long in all senses of the word!

London Assurance is the next one, another play we have been having difficulty getting affordable tickets for. Can't wait!

Another busy week...

Capilla de los Condestables, Burgos Cathedral © KR

You might recognise this picture - it was the image we used for our Christmas greeting last year. We liked it so much, we used it for the December picture on our calendar. It's a photo K took of one of the beautiful openwork domes in the Cathedral at Burgos, where we visited last May - an example of the Islamic influence on the art of Christian Spain through the prominent eight-pointed star. I think you can just about see that the central detail is a figure group showing the holy family gathered round the infant Christ in the manger -

framed within a fiery halo that looks more like a wreath than sculpted stone. This dome is in the Capilla de los Condestables, founded at the end of the 15th century, and full of amazing sculpture.

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The weeks are just zipping past at the moment. On the one hand this means that the Christmas break is just around the corner, on the other it is scary how much work I need to finish before then. Sigh. This week I have worked very long days and been out every night. At the start of the week, we had two opening events for the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, which look absolutely stunningly beautiful and amazing - what a triumph. On Wednesday I attended the Khalili Memorial Lecture at SOAS, annually part of the Islamic Art Circle lecture series, and on Thursday it was a pre-Christmas gathering of the Islamic Art discussion group I am part of - we had not managed to meet up for months (normally we try to meet once a month), and while the meeting's 'assignment' was ostensibly my report on the conference in Córdoba, we pretty much decided to keep it as a friendly gathering and gossip at an (overpriced) Lebanese restaurant in Soho. Friday, thank goodness, was an evening off - though I had a good long chat with my sister. Looks like she might have part-time work at the Hebridean smokehouse, so I'm anticipating a neverending supply of gorgeous hot-smoked salmon!!

Then last night we met up with Cornelius after our usual Saturday in the library (we have been working in the National Art Library the last few weeks, a gorgeous Victorian library and one I love working in, even though it's a bit like going to work on a Saturday...) to see A Serious Man at the Ritzy, followed by the pub. I enjoyed the film, and thought it was an excellent piece of film-making by the Coen brothers, but I still don't know what really happened... The final visual metaphor of dark clouds on the horizon indicating, I guess, that real life does not have happy-ever-after resolutions... But I am a bit fed up of seeing films that just abruptly end - the week before, we went to see The Castle at the NFT, an adaptation by Michael Haneke of a fragmentary short story by Kafka. After about two and a half hours, this abruptly cut to a black screen and the voiceover, "This is where Kafka's fragment ends". And that was that. In that case, it somehow worked. In my mind, the wonderful Ulrich Mühe - der landvermesser - is endlessly lost in the surreality of that frozen world, endlessly trying to obtain an entré to the castle...

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K got his new glasses on Monday. The bridge of his old pair snapped while we were in Oxford in October, visiting Bob and Bev for the weekend, and since then he has been carrying around a bottle of superglue and his even older pair of prescription sunglasses, for when they unexpectedly snap again. This happened as he was cycling home one day, but fortunately the tight hat that he wears to keep his ears and head warm also served to keep the glasses in position on his nose! So eventually he organised himself an eye test, discovered that his sight had drastically worsened (probably to do with the eye strain during writing up his PhD - this happened to me too, when I developed migraines for the first time), but now finally has a new pair of large round tortoiseshell specs that I think make him look rather like Alan Bennett. I'm still getting used to them, but they're an improvement on the pair he threatened to get, which made him look like David Hockney. Which one of those two distinguished artistes would I rather live with...? A good question!

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We're not impressed with a leaflet that Lambeth Labour party have put through the door today. It basically spins their involvement in our Residents' Association's fight against the planning proposal from Lambeth College, to imply that they have been leading the charge on the part of their poor embattled residents. Which is not true. Actually they have done nothing, other than lend a seemingly sympathetic ear (when our reps could actually get in to see them), then say in the last meeting that they supported the College's application. They are turning us and our cause into an election issue, because the Labour party are so clearly going to lose resoundingly at the next General Election, whenever that's called for. They've touted themselves round Brixton Hill Court today in a blatent attempt to get us all to vote for them. K has taken down the two posters they stuck up on the public notice boards.