One of the joys of where we live is that we’re very close to both open countryside and stunning coastlines.

I went for a stroll from Whitley Bay to Tynemouth—a popular walk along the promenade. It was chilly.

The trip there and back cost £4 on the Metro, thanks to their current £4 all day offer.

Wendy and I have been to see Todd Field’s Tár at the beautiful, historic Tyneside Cinema. As you may know, it stars Cate Blanchett giving the performance of a career as Lydia Tár, an impossibly famous American conductor and composer.

Tár is set in the present day: it is a film rooted in now, exploring many of the cultural issues of our time. Its theme seems to be the extent to which one can separate art from the producer(s) of the work: can we still enjoy Bach’s music even when we know that he wasn’t an especially virtuous person? In a particularly inspired comment on these questions, the film’s credits roll at the start of the film.

On another level, this is the frequently told story of the ‘great man’, the genius whose eccentricities leave personal disaster in their wake. Only this time the ‘great man’ is a ‘great woman’, and after watching the film, both Wendy and I found ourselves second-guessing whether our judgement was different as a result.

It is a film full of symbolism, but also a film acted with such authenticity as to be completely believable. There is a scene near the start in which Tár is interviewed on stage by Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker (playing himself) and I wanted the interview to keep on running to learn more about herself and her career. I was completely immersed, my disbelief entirely suspended.

I thought it was brilliant.

Tár is in cinemas now.

Although we love our milkman, there are certain disadvantages to their delivery method at snowy times of year.

This is the much-lauded 2019 memoir. It follows Al-Kadhi’s journey from being a child of a conservative Iraqi Muslim family, growing up in an enormous economic privilege in Britain, attending Eton and Cambridge, and ultimately finding solace in an identity as Glamrou, a exuberant gay drag queen.

Their story is unique and provides interesting insight into multiple facets of society. It is told with humour and warmth, though the tone is a little too informally conversational for my preference.

There were bits of the book that I didn’t really follow. This may well be due to my own ignorance of the modern understanding of personal identity. For example, I don’t really know what is meant in practice by “working tirelessly to make my identity political”—which is not to dismiss its importance.

There were more bits which made me long for a little more empathy from the author, and reflection on how their views and actions may make others feel. This particularly stood out to me when Al-Khadi described a relationship as making them “feel like I’d won a piece of the institution, by getting him to desire me”, within pages of disparaging broadly similar prejudices in the sexual preferences of others.

Maybe I’m being unfair in that expectation, but the narrative felt one-sided and Al-Khadi doesn’t seem to take responsibility for much. I suppose that’s the prerogative of an autobiographer.

I don’t mean to sound too hard on this book: I’m glad I read it and it gave me plenty of food for thought. However, I wonder if some of the rave reviews are perhaps more reflective of the remarkable bravery and force of will that Al-Khadi has shown in life than of the book itself.

Thanks to Newcastle University Library for lending me a copy.

My finger ever on the pulse, as the rest of the world raves about series two of The White Lotus, I’ve been catching up on the first series.

After the first two episodes, Wendy declared it to be “too silly”, but I thought it was marvellous. The series follows an ensemble cast of mostly cartoonish, unlikeable characters spending time at (or working in) a luxury resort in Hawaii. There were six episodes covering a period of a week. It was perfectly paced and uproariously funny, with well-chosen and very current tropes skewered. It was also outstandingly well soundtracked.

This is definitely not a series to judge from its first episode: the premiere has an arc whose pace does not really fit with the gradually increasing tension of the rest of the series. I wonder whether it was a pilot episode that would have benefitted from more reworking when the series was green-lit.

But I’m nitpicking. This was one of the best new comedies I’ve streamed in a long time, and I look forward to diving in to the second series.

A stage play inspired by a documentary film about some political television debates from 1960s America doesn’t feel intuitively like it would have much to offer. One could reasonably assume that the effect would have been dulled and flattened by the distance in time and multiple re-interpretations from the source material.

Yet, this was exhilarating. Graham’s script dramatises the US debates between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr on the ABC network, programmed around the Republican and Democratic national conventions. It explores the behind-the-scenes drive within ABC to stage these debates—it’s about ratings, as ever it is—as well as the personalities and motivations of Vidal and Buckley.

Zachary Quinto and David Harewood were excellent in this production at London’s Noël Coward theatre: both are famous for other roles, but fairly unknown to me. The staging was inspired, using live projections to make relevant scenes at once theatrical and televisual.

Graham presents this series of debates as the source of all personality and opinion-led discussion of politics on television. Clever scripting—much of it seemingly based on well-chosen verbatim quotes—draws parallels with current politics. The whole play felt immediately relevant to modern politics and media… though the time-jump at the end felt a bit like it rammed that message home harder than was necessary.

Yet, the script as a whole was definitely the biggest star here, cleverly combining direct quotations and zingy, catty one-liners with urgent questions about society’s approach to politics.

I really enjoyed this.

‘Best of Enemies’ continues at the Noël Coward theatre until 18 February.

On Christmas Day, Wendy and I caught a few minutes of Big Hero 6, a Disney film that was new to both of us. In the part we saw, the main character Hiro unveils microbots he has invented, which can cluster together to form impressive machines.

Rahal’s installation reminded me of that. The main room contains three large animalistic sculptures, which look imagined and lumpy, as though they may be made of microbots. The walls have projections of similar animals / machines which respond in unexpected ways to the ambient noise in the room, and music syncs to their movement. Weirdly shaped beanbags litter the floor, on which ‘players’ are invited to sit and fully immerse themselves in the ‘biome’. Reader, I did not.

The second space contains some printed artworks and six tabletop sized sculptures in similar forms to the large ones in the first room. Touching these produces sounds from hidden speakers.

According to the blurb, ‘Mythmachine is a site for the rehearsal of cohabitation between human and non-human systems through speech, song and rhythm.’ I didn’t get any of that from it, or really much of anything else, but then I’m obviously no good at art galleries.

’Mythmachine’ continues at the Baltic until 12 February.

I know it’s a cheap shot, but this 1993 novel brought me neither comfort nor joy nor glad tidings thereof. I found it a bit of a slog.

The main characters are a rich young doctor and less wealthy hospital administrator. They fall in love, but their relationship is strained by their own and others’ expectations. It’s unremarkably quotidian. Grimsley repeatedly telegraphs that the theme he wants to consider is why couples stay together—but his consideration seems to consist mostly of repeating the question.

I can’t help but think that, when this was published, having two male characters in a normal, everyday relationship was daring on its own terms, but it feels inconsequential thirty years on. That’s progress, and Grimsley and others probably deserve credit and respect for contributing to that progress, but this novel just seemed terribly dull to me.

I’ve long been a bit sceptical of filmed stage plays, but I’d heard so much about the power of Judie Comer’s performance in this one-woman play that I thought I’d stream it.

The plot concerns a barrister who specialises in defending sexual assault cases, but is then assaulted herself. For the first two-thirds, this felt like an virtuoso performance of a well-scripted but humdrum plot. It felt like a legal equivalent of the doctor-turned-patient cliché, with much the same by-rote conclusions about not giving enough consideration to the perspective of the victim/patient.

This impression wasn’t helped by the sound design, which is also a cliché: heartbeat-driven tension beds, which feel as though they do more to undermine the raw honesty of Comer’s performance than to support it.

But then: that final section! Emotion meets polemic meets rage meets eloquence meets honesty. Never mind the theatre, you could have heard a pin drop in my carpeted living room.

This turned out to be an astonishing performance of an excellent script.

’Prima Facie’ is available to stream via National Theatre at Home until 9 March.

I’m currently reading Heaven on Earth, a book about cathedrals by Emma J Wells. In it, she frequently makes the point that cathedrals have historical importance in secular as well as religious terms. A moment’s thought makes this obvious, most of all in this coronation year, but it’s something that’s never previously given me pause for thought.

It should have done. I feel a degree of personal connection to Durham Cathedral not because of any religious connection, but because it was where I matriculated.

It leads me to wonder: do we have enough secular oversight of these ‘religious’ buildings? Is there a clear separation of, well, ‘church’ and ‘state’ in terms of finances? Are we celebrating their secular functions sufficiently?

As religion continues its inexorable decline, I suppose these questions will steadily grow in importance if we are to protect key historical sites.