Archive for the ‘General’ Category

But this was no Sibelian silence: Osborne has been busy elsewhere, chiefly in Bosnia and the Caucasus, using music to help children traumatised by war. Then his name suddenly seemed to vanish from the concert programmes. UNTIL TEN years or so ago, Nigel Osborne was at the forefront of Britain’s avant-garde. Rosalind Paul catches the eye in a minor part – her innate sense of fun and neatness of movement is a joy to watch. In the climactic submission speech, Northam maintained Kate’s dignity, but did not display the twinkling sense of irony that might have made her subjugation slightly less unpalatable.Taming of the Shrew is part of the Exeter Festival, and runs in Rougemont Gardens until 14 August, with matinees on Saturdays Box office: 01392 493493. When things eventually settled down, Mark Healy strode about as the gallumphing Petruchio, while Anna Northam had a spat or two as Katherine.The ensemble work was generally good, despite the fact that the set has some long and high entrances and exits.

An overbearing young buck does a deal with a wealthy citizen to take his free-thinking daughter off his hands for a dowry. The vexatious female is bundled off to a husband who bullies her, denies her food and clothes, turns up for their wedding in rags and odd boots and humiliates her until she capitulates in such a wholesome fashion that everyone in earshot wants to throw up.To make matters worse, Shakespeare’s prologue, which puts the proceedings at a distance by making them the dream of a drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, has been omitted from this production.On the opening night, the heavens opened in reproof, delaying the start (in five years of outdoor shows on this site, only one has been rained off). The play is the story of the subjugation of Kate, a fiery woman of independent views, into a submissive wife who would agree that white is black if her husband said so. Would it have been better to have circumnavigated this hoary old potboiler? Kinder to pretend that it did not exist?
Consider the plot. Continuing through the Shakespearean repertoire, the company has arrived at the stumbling block of The Taming of the Shrew. In previous productions, the setting – an 11th-century Norman castle moat – has provided an inspired backdrop for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and has been gloriously flooded for The Tempest. I’m not sure we would want to see Shakespeare staged and acted the way he was four hundred years ago either..

THIS PRODUCTION by the Northcott Theatre in Exeter’s Rougemont Gardens marks the fifth year of open-air Shakespeare performances in the city. “Designers specialised in certain settings,” as Scholl explains. “One might do only palace interiors, and another parks.”Did this hectic aesthetic represent the taste of the time, or more Vsevolozhsky’s personal taste? Either way, it makes you question the issue of theatrical reproduction. The Kirov exercise is historically interesting, entirely worthy and probably extremely costly, but it is a fossil exhibit, rather than an event coming to life. Designed by Genrickh Levot, the scenery is so decorated as to become oppressively leaden; but the decor improves with successive acts, and different designers – five in all, according to the custom of the time. It certainly made sense for him to choose a time-span from the 16th century to the 17th, so that the finale’s painted apotheosis of clouds includes Apollo as a reminder of Louis XIV the Sun King, the creator of a new, civilised order through the arts and establishment of ballet.

But what costumes, what fussiness, what a quantity of clashing colours and different shapes.The garland dance with adults dressed in red and white and children in blue and white produces clear French-tricolour patterns, but elsewhere there is such confusion it is hard actually to see the dance.This is particularly problematic in the Prologue, with its mass of characters, all with contrasting costumes, positioned within the ornately carved walls of a throne room. As the Maryinsky Theatre’s then director, the francophile and playwright Ivan Vsevolozhsky co-wrote the libretto of The Sleeping Beauty with Petipa, and designed the costumes. This brings the Prologue back in line with the Royal Ballet’s, although our Sleeping Beauty is not always more authentic in other areas.This revival’s biggest handicap, to my mind, are the original designs. More successful is the restoration of the Tom Thumb and Cinderella divertissements, as well as the Fairies’ symmetrical formations in the Prologue, where they once again appear with cavaliers.

Like many in his family he lived with diabetes, a disease that in some sufferers causes a certain disdain for mortality; death is always close. He took the title for his first novel from Ecclesiastes: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The Unique Selling Proposition of the Hemingway lifestyle, as marketing analysts would call it, might seem to be the promise of early death – not the easiest sell.His writings are full of the sense of restless, empty celebration that came to many who had survived the First World War. After he escaped being blown up at the age of 18 in Italy, thanatos was his strongest urge It may have been even more primal than that.

His books, his life are saturated with gore, which is shed at every possible opportunity. Ketchum, Kilimanjaro, Key West and Havana are easily built into a style – faded colonialism, the outdoor life, the bright splashes of colour of the African bush, French cafe posters and the bullring.Yet there is one element that seems to be missing from the Hemingway range: thick, pulsing, dark red arterial blood. Hemingway’s writings could hardly be said to dwell on interior design; there is quite a bit of fucking, but not much shopping.However, Thomasville, the furniture company that has released the Hemingway range, sees him as a brand, not just a writer and a dead human being, and you can see its point. Nor was he any proto-Martha Stewart, living as he did in a state of total disarray. But he was always suspicious of commercialisation, and rightly so; during his lifetime Buick asked for happy endings for the televised versions of A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises and To Have and Have Not (they were refused). It is true, perhaps, that there are few others who could so easily be co-opted to consumerism (Kerouac’s Kar Kabin? William Faulkner’s Tragically Southern Fried Chicken? The Henry Miller range of.. never mind). Literary lifestyles sell, if suitably marketed.But it is strange in many ways that, if America is to choose a writer to turn into a line of soft furnishings, it should be Hem.

F Scott Fitzgerald, by means of his character Jay Gatsby, was unwittingly responsible for the return of baggy white trousers in the Seventies, just as the popularisers of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited ensured that a whole generation cannot look at a teddy bear or a bow tie without recalling those wistful days of the early Eighties. He lives on in Hemingway Inc, a company run by three of his children and sharply disdained by his granddaughter, which licenses a range of products for sale. This is “the business of peddling Hemingway as if he were a QVC home-shopping network item”, wrote Lorian in GQ magazine.Of course, he is hardly the first great writer to be turned into a nice range of gentlemen’s casual wear and some desirable household objects. An auction house is even offering one of his shotguns for sale, which seems a little tasteless in the circumstances.Hemingway is now an industry, a lifestyle, no longer just a writer. He did not design the Hemingway furniture range, or the spectacles, fountain pens, or any of the vast range of other consumer durables that are being marketed under his name He did not write The Hemingway Cookbook. To the best of our knowledge, he never envisaged the Hemingway lookalike competitions that will be under way this weekend in Key West.

So what is there left to discuss?
I well remember the day President Clinton travelled to meet President Assad in Damascus during the last Israeli Labour government. And already Mr Barak has made it clear that Israel is not going to concede on any of these critical issues. Jerusalem, he’s said, must remain the united and eternal capital of Israel, major Jewish settlements will remain, and Palestinian refugees and their descendants obviously cannot be expected to return to the Arab villages (many destroyed by the Israelis in the years after 1948) which they left, or from which they were driven, in 1948. He wants to merge the Wye agreement – which would give Yassir Arafat 13 per cent of the West Bank – with “final status” negotiations which include the future of Jerusalem; Jewish settlements on Arab land; and the Palestinian refugees of 1948, that should have been completed three years ago. we say now, as we have always said – that peace should be based on complete withdrawal from the lands occupied in 1967, and on the full restoration of the rights of the Palestinian people.”
But it is already clear that Mr Barak’s vision of peace is mightily different from this.

a peace without occupation, without destitute peoples, and without citizens whose homeland is denied them… pro-Israeli) negotiations in 1975, the Syrian president said then that “for our part we look upon peace in its true sense… Even though he knows that Mr Barak is offering little more than Mr Netanyahu, he doesn’t want Syria to be blamed for the collapse of the “peace process”.
Be sure that if the world – for which read the White House, CNN and the European Union (newly grateful for America’s participation in the Yugoslav war) – regards Barak as the man who can make peace, Assad does not want to be the man blamed for its failure Frustrated by Henry Kissinger’s highly partial (i.e. Hence the Syrian press (government controlled, let us not forget) praises Washington’s peace-making Hence President Assad’s enthusiasm to restart negotiations. He wants the return of Golan – all of Syrian Golan – in return for peace.
And when Barak is being feted in Washington as the man who will fulfill the promises of peace, the Syrian leader is not going to be left out. Having watched the Palestinians writhe under their 1993 Oslo agreement – which let the Israelis renegotiate 242, deciding which bits of occupied Palestinian land they would give back and which they would not – Assad has understood the need to keep to the original text. Baker promised that if Syria took part in the Madrid Middle East peace conference, “peace” would be founded on UN Security Council Resolution 242, which demands, specifically, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Arab land in return for the security of all states (including Israel) in the region.

In 1991, Assad – though he has not yet chosen to reveal the document in public – received a letter from then US Secretary of State, James Baker. As if “peace” was to be found on a supermarket shelf, to be put “back on track” when all the Israeli signals were green. Woe betide anyone – any Arab – who suggested that the toy train should not be put back on the railway line.
And given the royal treatment of Barak in Washington – not a single critical voice asking why he would need 50 more F-16 fighter bombers if he was so keen on peace – it’s not difficult to see why the Arabs are fearful of being left out. BBC World Service was trumpeting the cliche in its headlines yesterday. A man with real power, a man with whom the Arabs could – in words made immortal by the Americans when they were dealing with dictators like Saddam Hussein (before 1991) and Slobodan Milosevic (before 1999) – “do business”.

And no sooner does Ehud Barak sit down with Bill Clinton in Washington than the satellite television boys tell us that this is the moment when “peace” – and let’s keep the quotation marks around the word – is “back on track” It’s odd how the networks use this tired old phrase. The moment Ehud Barak was elected prime minister of Israel, we heard President Hafez el- Assad of Syria announce that Barak was an honest and strong man Note the word “strong”.

And anxious not to be blamed for its failure, the Arabs and Israelis leap to express their support. Every few months in the Middle East, the Chamberlain bell is rung: “Peace in Our Time”, it tolls. A man with real power, a man with whom the Arabs could – in words made immortal by the Americans when they were dealing with dictators like Saddam Hussein (before 1991) and Slobodan Milosevic (before 1999) – “do business”. The moment Ehud Barak was elected prime minister of Israel, we heard President Hafez el- Assad of Syria announce that Barak was an honest and strong man Note the word “strong”. And anxious not to be blamed for its failure, the Arabs and Israelis leap to express their support. One Golan area wine producer has already started planting vineyards in Galilee to stay in business after an Israeli withdrawal..

Luxury handbag maker Mulberry jumped 12.5p to 51p after a marketing tie-up with US rival Kravet, while textile tiddler Hicking Pentecost surged 20p to 227.5p after US bidder Ruddick trumped an offer from Coats Viyella, down 0.25p at 44.25p, with a 226p-per-share bid. Disappointing sales from Debenhams, down 11.5p to 391.5p, hit rival clothes chain New Look, 10p lower at 232.5p. Electrocomponents surged 20p better to 540p on vague bid talk, while old chestnut Rank rose 7.75p to 270p on a Deutsche Bank push and continuing break-up whispers.Electronics Boutique firmed 1.75p to 97.25p on rumours of stakebuilding by a large investor. Unilever melted 16.5p lower at 596p after the watchdog raised the prospect of a spin-off of its Wall’s ice-cream unit.Alliance & Leicester ignored the feared Government investigation into the mortgage market and moved up 8.5p to 839.5p on talk that Friday’s results will be good.Rail maintenance group Jarvis shed another 8.5p to 280p. The market is worried that a contractual dispute with Railtrack – down 1p at 1181p – is harming trading.A buy order by a leading European fund manager combined with a stock shortage to push Photo-Me to the top of the midcap-risers chart The picture booth group clicked 65p higher to 1100p.

Talk of big disposals is still there.A raft of competition inquiries unsettled several blue-chips. Engineer Invensys firmed 7.25p to 334.5p as HSBC said it might upgrade after Friday’s annual meeting. An intriguing rumour suggested that Misys could be the mystery predator stalking smaller rival JBA, up 16.5p to 197.5p. Poor old Aegis lost 6p to 140p.The rising big hitters were few and far between. Caterer Compass served a 21p rise to 652p on revived whispers of an offer from Rentokil, up 1p to 244p. Allied Domecq frothed 17p better to 592p after the pubs saga ended with the sale to Punch Taverns and Bass, down 4.5p to 934p.Software designer Misys bucked the techies’ malaise and rose 7.5p to 617.5p on a WestLB Panmure push ahead of tomorrow’s results. The market was ecstatic at the news that it has poached the chief executive of media agency Aegis after a year-long search.

The FTSE 250 did better, finishing 17.4 lower at 6,072.5, while the Small Cap lost only 1.6 to 2743.7.Marks & Spencer’s fell 15p to 373.75p amid suggestions that some of its staff were selling stock received in the latest profit-sharing handout. The struggling retail giant was hit by a wave of small deals, with some orders totalling as few as nine shares.Another fallen giant, the magazine publisher Reed International roared back with a 37p rise to 492.25p. Sharp falls in US techies’ stocks also contributed to the malaise. Under the deal, New Jersey-based GPU bought Cinergy’s 50 per cent stake in Midlands. Cinergy had been opposed to the acquisition of a water company and its disappearance from Midlands’ share register left its management free to pursue its diversification dreams.If a foreign rival pips Midlands to the Yorkshire post, the power group could turn to Severn Trent, down 3p to 978p. Sector peer Anglian Water was also buoyed by vague bid talk, rising 15p to 748p.The rest of the market took another sharp tumble as sellers gained the upper hand for the second consecutive day.The FTSE 100 shed 91.7 points to 6,392.0 as bearish US economic data and fears over equities’ valuations depressed sentiment.

If the takeover floodgates open, Yorkshire, soon to be renamed Kelda, could be one the first company to be swallowed up.Supporters of a bid from US-owned Midlands pointed out that the electricity group has made no mystery of its desire to expand in water. This strategy was given a boost a few weeks ago when Midlands’ feuding parents, the US groups GPU and Cinergy, made peace. Most experts predict that water companies will be hammered by the regulator’s proposals for tough price cuts.However, the arrival of the long-awaited Ofwat review will remove the cloud of uncertainty which has been hanging over the sector and could start a round of corporate action. The UK group Midlands Electricity is the market’s favourite, although some less insular dealers muttered that a European or US group could strike.
The trigger for any corporate action will be next week’s price review by watchdog Ofwat. The utility bucked the trend of a sharply falling market and gushed 16p higher to 497.5p. According to City leaks, rivals are sniffing around Yorkshire. THE MARKET was excited by bid rumours from “up North” yesterday as predators were said to be circling Yorkshire Water.