Clemency Burtonhill

Thursday

28 May 2009
Clemency Burtonhill

The public arts

At a press conference at the Hay Festival this week, broadcaster-comedienne Sandi Toksvig began with a wistful reminiscence of what arts broadcasting used to be like when she started out. ‘You could have an idea, go and see your editor, and they’d say okay, let’s do it’ she explained. ‘Now, you go to, ahem, certain broadcasters, and they say, okay Sandi, good news, we can have your idea up and running in three years.’ Three years? The alternative to this is – well, what, exactly? The BBC may be dutifully putting out quality arts programmes on their hinterland digital channels (you can pretty much forget going to BBC2 for the arts anymore) but ITV, as their axing of the South Bank Show show proves, have decisively relinquished any commitment to providing a mainstream British television audience with the arts; they’re also slashing drama budgets and will presumably be stuffing schedules with yet more cheap-as-chips reality TV and ‘talent’ shows in their stead.

The public arts

Tuesday

26 May 2009
Clemency Burtonhill

The view from Hay

As sun breaks through last night’s cloud and the beautiful Wye valley is once again bathed in dazzling sunshine, Tuesday morning seems a good moment to take stock of what was a triumphant, record-breaking bank holiday at the Hay Festival. As ever, the opening-weekend programme contained a plethora of luminaries from the worlds of books, politics, economics, history, music, science, film and art, but this year there was also a particularly rare visitor to the Brecon Beacons: the sun! In stark contrast to the storms and mud of recent years, giddy festival-goers (of whom there were more here this weekend alone than at the entire festival last year) swapped wellies for flip-flops and hot chocolate for ice-creams as they got sunburnt on the grass discussing events that ranged from Jane Birkin on her love affair with Serge Gainsbourg to astronomer royal Martin Rees on what’s going to happen to the human race.

The view from Hay

Wednesday

10 Sep 2008
Clemency Burtonhill

The laureate of intractable conflicts

Looking every inch the Brit that he isn’t, American playwright Christopher Shinn takes a bite of a sandwich in a Shepherd’s Bush rehearsal room on a rainy summer afternoon and confesses that, although grateful, he still finds it ‘a mystery’ that it should have been London’s theatrical community, rather than New York’s, that made his career. For his latest play, Now or Later, recently opened at the Royal Court, will be his fifth to premiere in London before going anywhere near his own continent, about which he relentlessly writes. It’s not that Shinn, 32, is not successful in his native country. Quite the contrary: the author of nine critically acclaimed plays, he is the winner of an Off Broadway Theater Award for playwriting and the recipient of numerous grants including the esteemed Guggenheim Fellowship.

Wednesday

20 Aug 2008
Clemency Burtonhill

Behind closed doors with the maestro

‘It has to do with the condition of being human,’ Daniel Barenboim smiles, looking remarkably relaxed for someone who’s just battled through rush-hour traffic from Stansted. The conductor, along with his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, is in London on the latest stop of a European tour, but instead of resting before the next day’s epic Proms programme of Haydn, Schoenberg and Brahms, the 65-year-old maestro is now in a hotel near the Royal Albert Hall, deep in animated discussion about one of his favourite topics: the power of music and, yes, the human condition. Not that we should be surprised: Barenboim’s energy is as legendary as his intellectual curiosity. As one of the world’s great conductors, pianists and recording artists, his output remains formidable, and he has recently published a new book: Everything Is Connected.

Saturday

9 Aug 2008
Clemency Burtonhill

Diary - 9 August 2008

One of the great adventures of being an actor is filming abroad, when suddenly you have the opportunity not only to visit, but actually to work somewhere else; to feel temporarily part of another city’s fabric rather than floating along its surface. This, then, comes to you from glorious, sweltering Rome, or more precisely from the Cavalieri Hilton, whose view over this ancient, unreal city, is quite breathtaking. I’m here doing costume fittings for The Red Priest, a movie shooting later this summer. Luca, my tailor at Farani, the historical costumiers, is clearly a genius but has perhaps something of the demonic about him. As he laces my 18th-century corset, my waist seems miraculously to have shrunk to the size of Keira Knightley’s, but at some point my eyeballs must be popping out of my skull and my face turning purple because the director Liana shrieks, ‘Luca! Loosen it!’ Luca looks dismayed.

Saturday

12 Jul 2008
Clemency Burtonhill

Clemency suggests | 12 July 2008

Festivals In only its third year, the laid-back Latitude (17-20 July) has gained a reputation for being one of Britain’s finest festivals, and it certainly has one of the most enticing and interesting line-ups of any event this summer. More than a merely musical extravaganza, the beautiful site on Henham Park Estate in Suffolk will also host comics, poets, writers, theatre companies, film directors, actors, cabaret artists and musicians, alongside headlining acts such as Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, Blondie and Sigur Ros. I’ve packed the pop-up tent and the Hunters and am now crossing my fingers and praying for sunshine… Rain or shine, this year will mark the 25th anniversary of the Edinburgh Books Festival (9-25 August), and as usual the line-up is magnificent: Sean Connery, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood alongside a plethora of other luminaries from the arts, sciences and politics.

Saturday

26 Jan 2008
Clemency Burtonhill

Clemency suggests | 26 January 2008

FILMOne of the most remarkable things about Africa is how rare it is to see Africans cry. You meet so many human beings there who are forced to endure the most unthinkable, unconscionable poverty, disease and neglect; and yet invariably they do so with a smile so big and true it breaks your heart. How, you wonder, do people literally grin and bear such horror? Among the many things that makes Paul Taylor’s documentary We Are Together so moving, therefore, is its observation of African grief. Don’t get me wrong, there are laughs galore and plenty to smile about in this uplifting tale of a group of AIDS orphans who live at a school called Agape in a village in KwaZulu Natal, and who are hoping to come to England for a singing tour – the music itself is enough to make the soul soar.

Clemency suggests | 26 January 2008

Tuesday

15 Jan 2008
Clemency Burtonhill

Arts Council seems distinctly un-excellent…

In Piccadilly Circus this lunchtime, under an apocalyptic grey sky and wearing plain white face masks to evoke the classical symbol of the dramatic trade, a ‘flashmob’ of hundreds of actors, directors and stage professionals gathered on the steps of Eros to silently express their continued grievance with the Arts Council of England (ACE). Today marks the last day of possible appeal for those unlucky arts organizations who were slapped with the shock news just before Christmas that, despite a recent fifty-million pound boost from the DCMS to ACE coffers, they would be losing some or all of their subsidies. These unfortunate organizations, who include in their number London’s much-loved Bush and Orange Tree theatres, were given just over a month to appeal – much of which was taken up with the non-weeks of Christmas and New Year – despite ACE giving them no indication of why they had lost their funding, or what criteria had been employed in the decision-making process.

Arts Council seems distinctly un-excellent…

Saturday

12 Jan 2008
Clemency Burtonhill

Clemency suggests

January may traditionally be the year’s grimmest month, characterised as it is by broken resolutions, misery-inducing detox diets and frightening reminders from the Inland Revenue, but at least there are some artistic treats around the corner to beat the blues (until the Arts Council get their way, that is...) The Royal Ballet is in the best shape it has been in for years, not least because of the presence of the young Australian Steven McRae. Hailing from the suburbs of Australia, this effervescent 21-year old fell into dancing quite by accident, but having nabbed the prestigious Prix de Lausanne aged 16, followed by a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School, he has been tearing up the stage at Covent Garden for the past two seasons.

Saturday

5 Jan 2008
Clemency Burtonhill

Is a TV drama about the royal family sacrilege?

Filming on The Palace was only a few weeks in when the rumours started flying. ‘A tawdry and offensive affair’ trumpeted the Sunday Telegraph; ‘dreadful and offensive and very near to the bone’, added Lord St John of Fawsley; ‘a real danger [it will] undermine support for the [royal] family’, weighed in a media watchdog. To the cast and crew, such reports were flabbergasting, not least because those talking so authoritatively about the television series in question were yet to see an episode. We wondered if this hatchet job might be some sort of publicity stunt (it bore similarities to some of our storylines, after all) — before it became obvious that no, it was simply that we had dared to stray into sacrosanct territory.

Is a TV drama about the royal family sacrilege?

Saturday

15 Dec 2007
Clemency Burtonhill

Clemency Suggests | 15 December 2007

It seems bizarre to me that book shopping at this time of year should be about negotiating your way through mountainous piles of ‘Things You Never Knew About…’ or ‘The Book of Absolutely Useless…’ -type miscellanies. Surely Christmas, with its long, lazy afternoons and that strange week of limbo between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve, is the perfect opportunity to get stuck into those weighty tomes you’d normally only have time to read on a long summer holiday? By the time you’ve shelled out a tenner for some flimsy collation of trivia to go in your beloved’s stocking (absolutely useless, indeed), you may as well have spent the extra few quid and bought one of the many genuine titles gasping for attention underneath the Truss and Schott ziggurats out there.

Saturday

10 Nov 2007
Clemency Burtonhill

Clemency Suggests

Books Letters of Ted Hughes – ed. Christopher Reid/Faber Finally! Moving, passionate, angry, funny, striking, brilliant and beautiful beyond belief, the collected letters of one of our greatest poets have now taken pride of place on my bedside table, and may, I suspect, be a permanent addition to the pile. They are extraordinary. For too long Hughes – who is also revealed here as an impassioned pioneer of the environmentalist movement – has suffered under the prying, accusatory eyes of those who would blame him for the successive suicides of Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill; a prime example of what happens when biographical speculation gets in the way of objective appreciation of artistic genius. Not that this collection, magnificently edited by Christopher Reid, shies away from that tragic period of Hughes’ life.

Thursday

8 Nov 2007
Clemency Burtonhill

Politics regained?

Joe Klein, the legendary American journalist and author of Primary Colors was in town last night to talk about the US election. TimeWarner threw a champagne-soaked gathering with the great and the good at Soho Hotel, and a very lively panel discussion – with Jim Naughtie, Bronwen Maddox and Trevor Phillips – ensued. Unsurprisingly, the consensus was that, with twelve months to go, the presidential race is still wide open. While the Republicans are practising ‘Cinderella’ politics, quipped Klein, squeezing right-wing religious policies into glass slippers, the Democrats are more like ‘Goldilocks’: ‘too much heat’ on John Edwards, the ‘coolest’ candidate he’s ever written about in Barack Obama, and Hillary, of course, somewhere in the middle.

Politics regained?

Thursday

27 Sep 2007
Clemency Burtonhill

One of the best places in London to hear music

I spent last night in one of my favourite places in the whole of London: Wilton's Music Hall. Anyone who hasn't yet been to the magical, near-derelict building which is hidden down Graces Alley near the Tower of London: go. A treat is in store for you. The place where the Can-Can was premiered—and promptly banned—it is the oldest surviving music hall in the world and is also included, sadly, in the world's 100 most endangered buildings. Stepping from the blustery September wind into its warm, crumbling interior last night I was reminded of the wonderful sense of history that envelops you there: the faded gilt and mahogany holding the secrets of thousands of decadent performances, when the grand stars from the Royal Opera would rush over from Covent Garden fully costumed to sing bawdy music hall operettas and rub shoulders with the likes of George Leybourne, who created the ditty 'Champagne Charlie' on this very stage.

One of the best places in London to hear music

Saturday

28 Jul 2007
Clemency Burtonhill

I am proud to have been on Dave’s Rwanda trip

He was damned because he did, but he would have been equally damned if he hadn’t. David Cameron’s decision to come to Rwanda this week — which honours commitments he had made both to the country and members of his own party who are out here working on a two-week volunteering scheme called Project Umubano — appeared controversial because it was taken in the wake of terrible flooding in Britain and two thumping by-election defeats.KigaliHe was damned because he did, but he would have been equally damned if he hadn’t. David Cameron’s decision to come to Rwanda this week — which honours commitments he had made both to the country and members of his own party who are out here working on a two-week volunteering scheme called Project Umubano — appeared controversial because it was taken in the wake of terrible flooding in Britain and two thumping by-election defeats.

Saturday

30 Jun 2007
Clemency Burtonhill

‘All because of The Spectator’

Chinua Achebe is chuckling as he attempts to describe how much it means to him to have won the Man Booker International Prize. ‘How do I answer that?’ he wonders, in his soft, sing-song voice. ‘It means I am appreciated in certain quarters, that my work means something to people. When I started writing all those years ago, I wasn’t even aware there were such rewards. All I had in mind was to write a true story, in the way that fiction can be true. I had to be honest. I was not going to be pushed around. And so, to have appreciation of any kind is wonderful.’Many would argue that such appreciation is long overdue. It is half a century since Achebe, who was born in 1930 in Ogidi, Nigeria, started writing Things Fall Apart, the book for which he is still most admired.

Saturday

5 May 2007
Clemency Burtonhill

Cameron is taking on Brown

Nothing much is certain in British politics these days, but assuming that the next general election will pit Gordon Brown against David Cameron, we can be sure of one thing: its result will be a referendum on rebranding. Can the slick young pretender convince the cynics out there that the Conservatives are no longer a party of posh toffs with nasty views on immigration and labour markets? Can the dour old Scot loosen up a bit and stop making the electorate feel so very uncomfortable? Even with a couple of years to go (Brown being increasingly less likely to call a snap election with Labour as much in the doldrums as it is), they’re already at it furiously: Gordon with his intimate interviews and glitterati dinner parties; Dave (whose efforts to rebrand are necessarily more about his party as a whole) with his solar panels and natty webcam, his hoodie love and public support of the NHS.

Saturday

27 Jan 2007
Clemency Burtonhill

Blood Diamond should help

Diamonds are a guerrilla’s best friend. You may have heard that it’s ‘girls’ who share a special relationship with the little sparklers, but don’t be fooled; females have simply had a rather more sophisticated advertising campaign working for them over the years. Drug-addled soldiers, morally lobotomised mercenaries and bloodthirsty terrorists are more appreciative of the potential contained in those chalky-white carbon stones than any dewy-eyed fiancée could ever hope to be. Since the late 1990s, thanks to relentless lobbying by organisations such as Global Witness and Amnesty International, Western fiancées have become more conscious that these expensive symbols of eternal love may not have had the most loving of journeys to their left hand.

Saturday

13 Jan 2007
Clemency Burtonhill

Diary - 13 January 2007

The new year is little more than a week old and while everybody else is no doubt still righteously munching lettuce leaves, joining gyms and going teetotal, I’ve already broken Personal Resolution Number One: to reduce my carbon footprint. Barely off a Ryanair flight from Provence (where we’d spent New Year in freakishly hot sunshine, proof if ever it were needed of climate change), my boyfriend and I promptly boarded an easyJet plane to Morocco. OK, so I know the likes of Al Gore would have my guts for garters, but it’s a while since I’ve had a holiday and, given that it’s considerably cheaper to fly to Marrakech than get a train to Manchester, I’m afraid I succumbed. The sooner aviation is part of the EU emissions trading scheme the better, because as long as budget airlines operate thus, it’ll remain even easier to break this resolution than it is the gym-going one.

Saturday

28 Aug 2004
Clemency Burtonhill

Three welcome new voices

Liars and Saintsby Maile MeloyJohn Murray, £14.99, pp. 260, ISBN 0719566444 Darien Dogsby Henry ShukmanJonathan Cape, £12.99, pp. 279, ISBN 022407282 ‘Short’ as Peter Dimock’s potent novel about the Vietnam war may be, it packs a not insignificant punch. The curious title is to be taken literally: this really is a ‘rhetoric’, in the classical sense, and the point on which it wishes to persuade is indeed ‘leaving the family’. For, on the eve of the first Gulf war, Jarleth Lanham writes a letter to his two adoptive ‘sons’, intended to be read when they come of age in 11 years’ time (which takes us unwittingly to September 2001, just to hot up the political spice). Pledging them nearly a million dollars, Jarleth’s ‘purpose’, as he writes, ‘is solely to provide you with the means of leaving the family entirely, should you desire to do so — to provide you, in other words, with some speech for another history’.

Saturday

10 Apr 2004
Clemency Burtonhill

A man of many names and faces

If you’ll excuse the pun, Paul Delany’s biography of the man commonly dubbed ‘the greatest British photographer’ brings one thing sharply into focus. For Bill Brandt was not, as it happens, British at all, but was born in 1904 to German parents of Russian extraction — a fact he denied vehemently all his adult life. This rather fundamental inconvenience raises all manner of questions about psychological identity and the ethics and artifice of self-image-making. It also forces us to re-open the century-old can of worms as to whether an artist’s work can be more profitably understood by having some knowledge of their private life. The definitive word on this issue came in 1919 from Brandt’s contemporary T. S. Eliot, who announced that ‘the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’.

Saturday

6 Mar 2004
Clemency Burtonhill

Fame was the spur

Larry Wyler is a man in conflict. He knows what makes him happy — the St Matthew Passion, sex, a beef sirloin ‘slightly charred on the outside and reddish pink in the middle, nicely peppered, with mustard aioli’. But he has all these things in his little Minnesotan life: he met his wife singing Bach; they have great sex; they eat good steak. It is not enough. Aspiring writer Larry wants more. He wants New York. His dream, in fact, is ‘to work at the New Yorker and go to lunch at the Algonquin with Mr Shawn’. Well Larry gets his ‘dream’, or something like it, and Love Me is a hilariously moving account of it. Larry is possibly the funniest literary creation of recent years, but locked as he is in a struggle between two selves, his plight also verges on the tragic.

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