Arch of Titus, 1770s: captured by French warships, sold to a Spanish king—now reunited with its once scattered shipmates
EXHIBITION
The English Prize: The Capture of the Westmorland, An Episode of the Grand TourThe Ashmolean, Oxford, from 17th May In December 1778 the Westmorland, a British merchant ship, set sail from Livorno to London. On board, besides 4000 barrels of anchovies and 32 wheels of parmesan, was a valuable cargo of art and antiquities, books and other luxuries—the accumulated treasure of a miscellaneous group of British dealers, artists and aristocrats, souvenirs of their Grand Tour.
In January 1779, the Westmorland was captured by two French warships and ignominiously towed to Malaga, where its treasures were sold to King Carlos III of Spain. Many of the items subsequently ended up in museums across Spain and even as far abroad as St Petersburg.
This exhibition is the result of a 13 year detective search by curator José M Luzón Nogué, who has reunited over 140 of the objects, matching many to their original owners through the inventories of the ship’s crates which survive in the archives in Madrid. Among the unlucky consignees were Scottish painter Allan Ramsay and the Duke of Gloucester, brother of George III. What they lost—portraits by Pompeo Batoni of Francis Bassett and George Legge, young aristos on their gap-year; watercolours by John Robert Cozens, on his first trip to Italy; portrait busts by Irish sculptor Christopher Hewetson, then working in Rome—add up to a catalogue of classic 18th century taste.
Emma Crichton-Miller
THEATRE
BelongRoyal Court Theatre, from 26th April What does it really mean to go back to where your family come from—to go back to your roots? Where can you be a true insider? Those questions, and plenty more, course through Belong, the typically energised new play from Bola Agbaje. She burst onto the scene in 2007 as part of the Royal Court’s Young Writers Festival with the zinging energy of Gone Too Far which promptly sold out at the Theatre Upstairs, transferred to the main house and then waltzed off with an Olivier award.
Signs are particularly good for this, her third Royal Court play, not least because the central role is being played by the gifted actor Lucian Msamati. Lethally funny in the smash-hit Clybourne Park, he has since been giving Lenny Henry a run for his money in the National Theatre’s Comedy of Errors. The play is directed by Indhu Rubasingham just before she takes over as artistic director of the Tricycle, London’s foremost political theatre. She sees the play’s quasi-comic leap from London to Nigeria as something of a provocation. “It grows rather dark about identity and economics but Bola has a real knack for using humour to create characters.” And since they centre around a British MP on the run after a lost election, these characters, in every sense, promise much.
David Benedict
DANCE
Ballet Preljocaj—Snow WhiteSadler’s Wells 10th-12th May It is not hard to understand the flirtation between fashion and ballet. Fashion designers often require extraordinary bodies to display their creations; choreographers need appropriate costumes to complement the movement of their dancers. Moreover, the stage provides the best of all catwalks.
The combination of Jean Paul Gaultier’s theatrical costumes and Angelin Preljocaj’s edgily eroticised choreography in his 2008 ballet Snow White is thus a no-brainer. The ballet and its original designs arrive intact for its British premiere with Preljocaj’s company of 25 dancers delivering his award-winning take on the Grimm Brothers’ version of the fairytale. Schooled in the classical tradition, the French-born Albanian choreographer has developed a cutting-edge style, conspicuously evident here.
To a soundtrack selected from Mahler’s symphonies, the ballet explores the conflicts between the angelic and the fiendish, and between dark sexuality and romantic innocence. Echoes of other work—the Prince dancing with Snow White’s lifeless body is a dead ringer for a scene in Kenneth MacMillan’s classic 1965 Romeo and Juliet—chime happily with innovative sequences like the aerial dance of the dwarfs as they rappel up and down the side of a vertiginous mountain. Disney it ain’t.
Neil Norman
POP
Duke SpecialOn tour throughout Britain in May When Peter “Duke Special” Wilson was commissioned to write the music for a production of Mother Courage And Her Children at The National Theatre in 2009, he delivered Brecht’s text through a dozen rich cabaret numbers, ballads and battle hymns, playing it all live from the stage. Just four months later he released two more albums—a new recording of Kurt Weill’s music to an unfinished stage show of Huckleberry Finn, and The Silent World Of Hector Mann, his own song-cycle based on a Paul Auster novel. What could have been rarefied “concept” music is actually some of the sweetest song-writing to emerge in recent years.
Dreadlocked and rarely seen without eyeliner, The Duke sounds as velvety as Rufus Wainwright and as lilting as a young Paul Brady, his piano playing ripe and dirty like an old Molly house dame. He’s been operating from his base in Belfast under his Duke Special alias since 2005. These gigs will feature songs from the new album, Oh Pioneer, and the previous, which came out all of six months ago—plus gothic favourites like “Flesh And Blood Dance” and “Diggin’ An Early Grave.” It’s a history lesson, a musical romp and a porthole upon a gentle but fearsome talent who can’t seem to turn off his muse.
Kate Mossman
SPORT
Lincoln Grand Prix 12th-13th May Go to Italy, Spain and France and you’ll find a shared obsession—professional cycling. As football emerged as the most popular organised sport in Britain 100 or so years ago, many areas of mainland Europe had bike racing instead. Now Britain is catching up, with the likes of Tour de France star Bradley Wiggins leading the charge, but it is still a charmingly intimate world: fans can literally brush shoulders with future Olympic medallists and riders who usually mix it in major European races.
The Lincoln Grand Prix is the one they all want to win. Endura, the top-tanked team in Europe will be participating, as will Tour de France stage winners and Olympic medallists. Following a circuit around Lincoln the 102-mile course finishes in front of the city’s 11th century cathedral. Michaelgate, a cobbled hill leading into the Lincoln’s medieval centre, forms the decisive part of the circuit, and it is here that thousands line the roadside to cheer on the riders. This is a rare chance to see top modern sport at close quarters—and you don’t have to pay for it.
William Irwin
TELEVISION
Prisoners of War (Hatufim)Starts 9th May, 9.00pm, Sky Arts 1 Prisoners of war returning from a long and brutal captivity fall under the suspicion of the intelligence services, who believe they might have been “turned” to the enemy side. No it isn’t Homeland, the critically acclaimed HBO series which finishes its first series on Channel 4 this May, it’s Hatufim (Prisoners of War in Hebrew), the Israeli series upon which the American show was based.
At the heart of both shows are the fragile family relationships of the prisoners, shattered first by their capture, shattered again by their return. But while the American series often seems cartoonish, its Israeli source is grounded in reality and, as a result, much more powerful. The long and painfully awkward silence when the returning prisoners first meet their families in episode one actually moved me to tears.
The scene works because it tells a truth about families that all of us can recognise, and that is ultimately why the Israeli series is better than its American imitator. For America, the “Global War on Terror” itself was a bit of a Hollywood production—abstract, distant from quotidian reality. But for Israel, the fate of captured soldiers is intertwined with the ordinary fabric of life. Hatufim springs from real life, Homeland just from 24 and other TV shows.
Tom Streithorst
EXHIBITION
The English Prize: The Capture of the Westmorland, An Episode of the Grand TourThe Ashmolean, Oxford, from 17th May In December 1778 the Westmorland, a British merchant ship, set sail from Livorno to London. On board, besides 4000 barrels of anchovies and 32 wheels of parmesan, was a valuable cargo of art and antiquities, books and other luxuries—the accumulated treasure of a miscellaneous group of British dealers, artists and aristocrats, souvenirs of their Grand Tour.
In January 1779, the Westmorland was captured by two French warships and ignominiously towed to Malaga, where its treasures were sold to King Carlos III of Spain. Many of the items subsequently ended up in museums across Spain and even as far abroad as St Petersburg.
This exhibition is the result of a 13 year detective search by curator José M Luzón Nogué, who has reunited over 140 of the objects, matching many to their original owners through the inventories of the ship’s crates which survive in the archives in Madrid. Among the unlucky consignees were Scottish painter Allan Ramsay and the Duke of Gloucester, brother of George III. What they lost—portraits by Pompeo Batoni of Francis Bassett and George Legge, young aristos on their gap-year; watercolours by John Robert Cozens, on his first trip to Italy; portrait busts by Irish sculptor Christopher Hewetson, then working in Rome—add up to a catalogue of classic 18th century taste.
Emma Crichton-Miller
THEATRE
BelongRoyal Court Theatre, from 26th April What does it really mean to go back to where your family come from—to go back to your roots? Where can you be a true insider? Those questions, and plenty more, course through Belong, the typically energised new play from Bola Agbaje. She burst onto the scene in 2007 as part of the Royal Court’s Young Writers Festival with the zinging energy of Gone Too Far which promptly sold out at the Theatre Upstairs, transferred to the main house and then waltzed off with an Olivier award.
Signs are particularly good for this, her third Royal Court play, not least because the central role is being played by the gifted actor Lucian Msamati. Lethally funny in the smash-hit Clybourne Park, he has since been giving Lenny Henry a run for his money in the National Theatre’s Comedy of Errors. The play is directed by Indhu Rubasingham just before she takes over as artistic director of the Tricycle, London’s foremost political theatre. She sees the play’s quasi-comic leap from London to Nigeria as something of a provocation. “It grows rather dark about identity and economics but Bola has a real knack for using humour to create characters.” And since they centre around a British MP on the run after a lost election, these characters, in every sense, promise much.
David Benedict
DANCE
Ballet Preljocaj—Snow WhiteSadler’s Wells 10th-12th May It is not hard to understand the flirtation between fashion and ballet. Fashion designers often require extraordinary bodies to display their creations; choreographers need appropriate costumes to complement the movement of their dancers. Moreover, the stage provides the best of all catwalks.
The combination of Jean Paul Gaultier’s theatrical costumes and Angelin Preljocaj’s edgily eroticised choreography in his 2008 ballet Snow White is thus a no-brainer. The ballet and its original designs arrive intact for its British premiere with Preljocaj’s company of 25 dancers delivering his award-winning take on the Grimm Brothers’ version of the fairytale. Schooled in the classical tradition, the French-born Albanian choreographer has developed a cutting-edge style, conspicuously evident here.
To a soundtrack selected from Mahler’s symphonies, the ballet explores the conflicts between the angelic and the fiendish, and between dark sexuality and romantic innocence. Echoes of other work—the Prince dancing with Snow White’s lifeless body is a dead ringer for a scene in Kenneth MacMillan’s classic 1965 Romeo and Juliet—chime happily with innovative sequences like the aerial dance of the dwarfs as they rappel up and down the side of a vertiginous mountain. Disney it ain’t.
Neil Norman
POP
Duke SpecialOn tour throughout Britain in May When Peter “Duke Special” Wilson was commissioned to write the music for a production of Mother Courage And Her Children at The National Theatre in 2009, he delivered Brecht’s text through a dozen rich cabaret numbers, ballads and battle hymns, playing it all live from the stage. Just four months later he released two more albums—a new recording of Kurt Weill’s music to an unfinished stage show of Huckleberry Finn, and The Silent World Of Hector Mann, his own song-cycle based on a Paul Auster novel. What could have been rarefied “concept” music is actually some of the sweetest song-writing to emerge in recent years.
Dreadlocked and rarely seen without eyeliner, The Duke sounds as velvety as Rufus Wainwright and as lilting as a young Paul Brady, his piano playing ripe and dirty like an old Molly house dame. He’s been operating from his base in Belfast under his Duke Special alias since 2005. These gigs will feature songs from the new album, Oh Pioneer, and the previous, which came out all of six months ago—plus gothic favourites like “Flesh And Blood Dance” and “Diggin’ An Early Grave.” It’s a history lesson, a musical romp and a porthole upon a gentle but fearsome talent who can’t seem to turn off his muse.
Kate Mossman
SPORT
Lincoln Grand Prix 12th-13th May Go to Italy, Spain and France and you’ll find a shared obsession—professional cycling. As football emerged as the most popular organised sport in Britain 100 or so years ago, many areas of mainland Europe had bike racing instead. Now Britain is catching up, with the likes of Tour de France star Bradley Wiggins leading the charge, but it is still a charmingly intimate world: fans can literally brush shoulders with future Olympic medallists and riders who usually mix it in major European races.
The Lincoln Grand Prix is the one they all want to win. Endura, the top-tanked team in Europe will be participating, as will Tour de France stage winners and Olympic medallists. Following a circuit around Lincoln the 102-mile course finishes in front of the city’s 11th century cathedral. Michaelgate, a cobbled hill leading into the Lincoln’s medieval centre, forms the decisive part of the circuit, and it is here that thousands line the roadside to cheer on the riders. This is a rare chance to see top modern sport at close quarters—and you don’t have to pay for it.
William Irwin
TELEVISION
Prisoners of War (Hatufim)Starts 9th May, 9.00pm, Sky Arts 1 Prisoners of war returning from a long and brutal captivity fall under the suspicion of the intelligence services, who believe they might have been “turned” to the enemy side. No it isn’t Homeland, the critically acclaimed HBO series which finishes its first series on Channel 4 this May, it’s Hatufim (Prisoners of War in Hebrew), the Israeli series upon which the American show was based.
At the heart of both shows are the fragile family relationships of the prisoners, shattered first by their capture, shattered again by their return. But while the American series often seems cartoonish, its Israeli source is grounded in reality and, as a result, much more powerful. The long and painfully awkward silence when the returning prisoners first meet their families in episode one actually moved me to tears.
The scene works because it tells a truth about families that all of us can recognise, and that is ultimately why the Israeli series is better than its American imitator. For America, the “Global War on Terror” itself was a bit of a Hollywood production—abstract, distant from quotidian reality. But for Israel, the fate of captured soldiers is intertwined with the ordinary fabric of life. Hatufim springs from real life, Homeland just from 24 and other TV shows.
Tom Streithorst
