Painters three

Mike Curtis and his merry men are with us this week, painting the outside of our windows etc. We find them a pleasure to have working for us, as witnessed by it being 12 years since they first started coming.

This evening, I have been part of a large audience listening to Nick Hytner at the Literature Festival. The tent was too dark for me to take notes, and anyway he spoke too fast for me to get much down. As before, I enjoyed hearing him talk about working at the National Theatre, but perhaps rather less so than when he was just embarking on his highly successful reign there. My mind swims when I think of the man's capacity for work!

"Timon of Athens"

In recent months, we've missed a couple of National Theatre Live relays, but tonight's "Timon of Athens" made up for that: Simon Russell Beale's performance was, as we have come to expect, a tour de force. And excellent Shakespearean verse-speaking, in the main throughout.

Not that I have anything to compare the production with, as it's the first time I've seen this play. It's a strange one, possibly because it's not all Shakespeare. A lot happens in the first half - not much in the dour second.

Nicholas Hytner's modern-dress production (with Alcibiades the leader of the Occupy Movement) recognises that the play has a contemporary feel to it: we can perhaps think of people who have been generous to a fault, then repulsed by those who failed to return the favour. "Neither a borrower nor a lender be," urges a more circumspect Shakespearean character.

There's a touch of Job about Timon, not to mention the echo of Jesus driving the traders out of the Temple - the parallel being rammed home by El Greco's celebrated painting adorning The Timon Room, the clever setting for Act 1.

By way of contrast, this week's Something Understood - always one of the highlights of my radio week - saw Mark Tully looking at misers. I particularly liked his anecdote about the Delhi Press Club member mocked as "pencil shy" because he never stood his round: when it's your shout at the bar there, no money changes hands, but instead you just sign the book - or not, if you are mean.

"Travelling Light"

We were attracted to the latest National Theatre cinema relay by the presence in the cast of Anthony Sher. Nicholas Wright's play title reflects the imagined passage of a Lumière camera from deep in Eastern Europe to the West coast of America, transported by our hero, the orphaned son of a forgotten Jewish cinema pioneer. Sonny and Sher both, however, disappointed last night: Damien Molony looks good, but his wooden acting in the final scenes was exposed by the close ups. Sher's magnetism, so attractive when first we went to see him at Stratford, has now it seems worn off. But worst of all Travelling Light, for all its large cast and Hytner's elaborate production, has none of that true lightness The Artist has, a film echoing a similar era but with more finesse and magical delight.

Nor would Travelling Light work as a film: indeed, the best parts of the evening were the alienation effect of seeing a film of a play about a film, and the discussion at the end - in which (as Emma Freud pointed out) the author was the only gentile.

The stained glass - photographed in 2008 (in Oxford's Christ Church Cathedral) - looks like Kempe: another young Jewish boy on the run.

BBC4 x 2

Today's Guardian has a "Spanish Spirit" supplement, which says the best known Churriguera retablo mayor is in the church of San Esteban in Salamanca. The article's accompanying photograph isn't as detailed as the one I took in San Esteban - and even that doesn't really do it justice.

Our visit to this (and sundry other equally magnificent Catholic churches and cathedrals in Spain) last Autumn came back to me last night as I watched Don Carlo on BBC4. I'm not a great fan of opera on the small screen, or even at the cinema - Cineworld have of course stopped their relays from the Met., which I regret. The Covent Garden production of Verdi's grandest opera came across superbly on TV, however, and I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

Marina Poplavskaya's Elisabetta stole the show for me - even with the great Rolando Villazón singing the title role. Her acting was terrific, and what a joy to hear a young, still lyric soprano, with no vibrato, in that great dramatic part! Only 29, Marina lives over a pub in Soho, the daughter of a Moscow chemist with five specialist diplomas, but working as a taxi driver because she can earn more.

The Poplavskaya family held to their Russian Orthodox faith throughout the Soviet years, keeping an icon hidden in a wardrobe. Nicholas Hytner's Don Carlo has plenty of icons of one sort or another to evoke the atmosphere of 16th Century Spain. Orthodoxy and the Reformation are the themes for last week's and next's instalments in Diarmaid MacCulloch's History of Christianity, also on BBC4. I really don't watch that much TV normally - just football (as I've said before): this week seems to have been an exception. But I'm not sure I am going to stick with MacCulloch. I envy him the opportunity of skipping around Europe and Asia Minor, seeing the sights, and he is distinctly likeable. Further, his substance is interesting enough: he makes it all sound fresh. The accompanying pictures are, however, repetitive and ultimately distracting. Radio 3 would be a much preferable forum.

Odd, that the previous week in MacCulloch's exploration of "the extraordinary rise of the Roman Catholic Church," there wasn't a single mention of St Benedict.