Nocturnes
By Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber, £14.99)
This has been an unusually rich spring for short stories, with notable collections appearing from James Lasdun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Petina Gappah and Wells Tower (all of whose work has appeared in Prospect; Wells Tower makes his debut this month). It's a welcome trend that continues in May with the publication of Booker-winner Kazuo Ishiguro's collection, Nocturnes: five tales of musical hope unravelling. This ensemble of fading stars ranges from a sub-Sinatra crooner to a despairing Hungarian cellist; from a Swiss hotel-lobby duo to a sentimental lover of Broadway songs to a jazz musician undergoing plastic surgery to boost his appeal.
Nocturnes is a collection you'll want to read at a sitting, caught between wincing and laughing. What really lingers, though, is the melancholy that waits after each burst of action; the sadness of so much performance and so many performers, playing on, unheard, as night begins to fall.
Tom Chatfield is Prospect's books editor
Play
Cyrano de Bergerac
By Edmond Rostand, adapted by Anthony Burgess, directed by Trevor Nunn. Chichester Festival Theatre 8th-30th May. Tel: 01243 781312
To have Joseph Fiennes, Ralph's sultry, highly gifted kid brother, playing ugly old Cyrano is a delightfully extreme case of beauty becoming the beast. A few years back, the doe-eyed Fiennes would have been perfect as Christian in the same play—the nonentity cursed with good looks whom the disfigured but poetically inspired Cyrano enrols as his stand-in Roxanne seducer. But now he is donning the big plaster conk required to play Rostand's romantically unfulfilled sonneteer and swordsman in a production by Trevor Nunn that promises to be a must-see highlight of this year's Chichester Festival.
The turnaround of Chichester's fortunes and image has been remarkable. Though in 1962 it was the launch pad of Laurence Olivier's National Theatre, it soon drifted into all our gin-and-tonic yesterdays as a grace and favour home for plays by Noel Coward and Somerset Maugham. In truth there was never too much wrong with its versions of those plays, and this season has Diana Rigg in Coward's Hay Fever and Stephanie Cole in Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables. But the fustian image has gone.
New artistic director Jonathan Church has achieved this in three remarkable seasons. Audiences have redoubled (106,000 in the 2005 season, 174,000 last year) in response to a sensibly adventurous programme that mixes Coward and Rattigan with not only Anthony Burgess's glittering translation of Cyrano—first seen at the RSC in 1983—but also Schiller's Wallenstein starring Iain Glen and, in June and July, a new look at both the great musical Oklahoma! and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, a show with plenty of political paprika to spray on the interval.
Michael Coveney is a theatre critic
Concert
James Rhodes
Roundhouse, 13th May, 0884 482 8008
From a thick cloud of his own tobacco smoke pianist James Rhodes emerged this February with a story to tell. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, who are groomed from infancy to please the maestros of the classical elite, Rhodes shunned his prodigious musical talent to pursue a career in financial publishing. Periods of drug misuse and self-harming ensued, culminating in a personal crisis which, as a last resort, turned him back to music. A few thousand hours of practice and several masterclasses later we have Razor Blades, Little Pills and Big Pianos, his debut recording which, in light of its confessional, if not romantic title, was received with curiosity by critics and concertgoers alike.
While he has yet to rank alongside the world's best pianists, Rhodes has the advantage of real-life experience outside the classical bubble. Indeed, as someone supposedly transformed by music, he is living proof of its redemptive nature. He is also eager to relax the stifling etiquette we observe when experiencing performance. Rhodes plays in jeans, likes to natter between numbers and would have us all eating popcorn. Along with this easy manner, his choice of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart are an excellent starting point for anyone wishing to explore a classical repertoire across the genre divide, and the Roundhouse the ideal venue. Aside from his playing, which is beautifully measured and light for one so full of zeal, perhaps his greatest strength lies in his ability to weave life's tragedies and mishaps into a music from another time and place.
Nick Crowe was the drummer for Gay Dad
Film
State of Play
On general release
In the same way that some people measure all subsequent relationships against their first love, reviewers are often searching for a repetition of an early strike of artistic lightning. Imprinted in my teens by two conspiracy thrillers directed by the late Alan J Pakula—The Parallax View and All The President's Men—I've spent 30 years in cinemas seeking their combination of narrative tension and political commentary.
In the US movie version, Russell Crowe is the worn-out reporter on a news desk run by Helen Mirren, while the murdered aide was employed by a right-wing congressman played by Ben Affleck. This was a troubled production—Brad Pitt dropped out from playing the politician and three separate screenwriters are credited—but such mishaps have somehow conspired to create an intelligent and reflective film.
The trick, I think, is that movies of this kind grow from certain political moments. Pakula's conspiracy classics rose from the manure of Watergate and Arlington Road from the aggression of right-wing opposition to Clintonism. State of Play is similarly nourished by an era in which the George W Bush White House took secrecy and unaccountability to new levels at the same time as investigative journalism was being undermined by falling newspaper sales and the primacy of a quick, opinionated journalism exemplified by blogging.
Although there are oddities in Kevin McDonald's film—Mirren sometimes seems bizarrely to be impersonating Nighy—this film is gripping while keeping hold of a serious debate about the purpose and ethics of journalism, satisfying my 30-year desire for a Parallax déjâ vu.
Mark Lawson presents Radio 4's Front Row
Exhibition
Frank Lloyd Wright:
From Within Outward
The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 15th May-23rd August 2009
The Guggenheim Museum is 50 years old this year. In celebration, it is mounting a show in honour not of its founder or of his collection, but of the architect who designed the building and who, in doing so, changed the idea of the art museum forever. When Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to design a museum to house the Solomon R Guggenheim collection of non-objective painting in 1943, he was already, at 76, a modern master—inventor of the horizontal prairie house and the geometric Usonian home. With the dynamic spiralling snailshell of the Guggenheim, completed six months after his death in 1959, Wright triumphed simultaneously over Manhattan's grid and pompous rectilinear museums everywhere.
Instead of the usual multi-level art park, where gallery-goers wander dazed through disconnected rooms, Wright's intention was "to make the building and the painting an uninterrupted, beautiful symphony such as never existed in the world of art before." In realising this symphony, he also gave birth to the art museum as stage and spectacle, its own space an experience as exhilarating as its exhibits. Without the Guggenheim New York, there would be no Bilbao. This exhibition pursues his reinvention of interior space through 64 projects, displaying over 200 original drawings alongside specially commissioned models and digital animations. For those unable to travel to New York between May and August, or to Bilbao from October, when the show transfers, TC Boyle's racy novelisation of Wright's notorious love-life, The Women, offers some compensation—as does the spectacular Guggenheim shoot-out in Tom Tykwer's recent film, The International.
Emma Crichton-Miller is an arts writer
Also recommended
O'Horten, 8th May
A rare example of a genuinely funny art house film comes to Britain this May. O'Horten, directed by the man with the best name in cinema—Bent Hamer—was Norway's official submission to the foreign language Oscar, and focuses on the life- changing experience of retirement for a 67-year-old train engineer called Odd Horten. A witty, thoughtful delight.
