Equity, the actors' union, wants to stage a nationwide "Great British Shakespeare Event" to coincide with the 2012 Olympics—with every actor on the union's books getting involved. It's a scheme for full thespian employment. Equity is asking its members to write to Jude Kelly, chair of the Olympic arts, culture and education committee, urging her to support the idea; and also to Tessa Jowell in the hope of getting lottery funds. The draft letter to Kelly says that the event "could bring, for once, enjoyable and participatory work to pretty well all Equity members, many of whom languish in under-employment and often poverty." It would unite sport and art: "The maximisation of sportsmen and women would, for the first time ever, be matched by the professional rank and file of the performing arts."
Perhaps unwisely, though, Equity is invoking Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 as a precedent. This may not be the right connection, as the great actor's celebrations in Stratford went horribly wrong: the fireworks failed to fire, rain stopped play, and the jubilee clashed with a sporting event—horse racing at Aylesbury.
Spot the allusion
This issue's short story, Julian Gough's "The Orphan and the Mob" (p56), may read like high farce, but it is also riddled with cinematic and literary allusions. We are offering free copies of Gough's novel Juno and Juliet to any readers who can list all the key references. There will also be a bonus prize to the reader who comes up with the best explanation for the secret of the protagonist Jude's birth. Submissions to: fiction@ prospect-magazine.co.uk
Modernism is dead
We are no longer modern. This spring two exhibitions open simultaneously in London exploring the roots, meaning and legacy of modernism. The V&A is running its blockbuster, "Modernism: Designing A New World 1914-1939" from April to July, while the Tate focuses on two key pioneers in "Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World" (March to June). These coinciding exhibitions put the 20th century's defining ism firmly in the past. We are no longer even postmodern. The millennium helped us put all that utopian ambition behind us. But in a sense the rot had already set in by the 1930s when American modernism lost the political and social agenda that had driven it in Germany and became just another style. When Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, set to one side his civic principles to build that glass monument to corporate America, the Pan Am building in New York, completed in 1963, he turned the page on modernism's founding principles. We may have retained an appreciation of geometry, steel and clean lines, but our sense that architecture, design and the industrial machine might transform society has been lost forever.
But Welsh poetry isn't
Poetry may be a minority interest in England, but not so in Wales, land of the bards. On 1st March, when Richard Rogers's eco-designed Senedd building is opened on Cardiff's waterfront, Wales's first national poet, Gwyneth Lewis, will be standing alongside the Queen and delivering a poem composed for the occasion. Amid the other controversies surrounding the building—its design, its cost, its name—and some Plaid Cymru mutterings about the Queen's right to open it, the idea that a poet should be there has raised no murmur. Lewis is a bilingual poet, uniting the two linguistic traditions of Wales, and already her words are engraved vastly on the front of the Millennium Centre, next door to the Senedd. Among other official poems, she has obliged with a celebration of Wales's historic rugby grand slam last year and an elegy, "Maen Hir Er Cof am Gwynfor Evans," to the former Plaid Cymru leader.
