Arts

Coward worked at breakneck speed, producing hundreds of songs, plays, screenplays, short stories, poems, a novel and a three-volume autobiography.

As is often the case in this country, his gift for being funny meant his genius wasn’t taken seriously. From The Vortex (1924), written when he was only 25, to Hay Fever (1924) and Private Lives (1930), his pre-war plays still seem modern and quick-witted.

The clips from his wartime films are moreish. In Which We Serve (1942) and Brief Encounter (1945) show the great variety of Coward’s work – contrary to the cliché of the witty gentleman in the dressing gown. How brave and original to write a light comedy about death – the play Blithe Spirit (1941), later a film –during the mass slaughter of the war.

As the film, written and directed by Barnaby Thompson, convincingly argues, most of his works share a common theme – of longing. Under the wit lies a strong seam of melancholy. Or, as Coward put it much better, ‘Cocktails and laughter, but what comes after?’

Coward also had to deal with his trump outsider card – being gay when, almost until the end of his life, homosexuality was illegal. Yes, he could be camp, but he couldn’t come out – not least because, as he said, ‘There are still a few old ladies in Worthing who don’t know [that I’m gay].’

Still, he played deliciously with his campness. In one golden interview, Coward declares, ‘I belonged to Battersea Park Public Lavatory – Library! Freudian slip…’

He had many affairs and ended up in a happy, long relationship with actor Graham Payn. But the difficulties of being gay in 20th-century Britain must have fed into that streak of melancholy, which runs through so many of his songs: Poor Little Rich Girl, The Party’s Over Now, London Pride, World Weary and, greatest of all, Mad About the Boy

At only 91 minutes, the documentary never palls. Rupert Everett does a good job of reading out Coward’s words without trying to impersonate him.

The real moments of pure comic joy come when we hear him sing at his Las Vegas comeback in his mid-50s, when the arrival of kitchen-sink dramas threatened to consign him to the past. The astonishing diction and dexterity with the wordplay of Mrs Worthington and Mad Dogs and Englishmen are a delight to watch.

He was the Cole Porter of Teddington. As Frank Sinatra said, ‘If you really want to hear how songs should be sung, listen to Mr Coward.’ Masterly: Coward in Las Vegas, 1955

Theatre William Cook Patriots

Noël Coward Theatre, London, until 19th August

How did Vladimir Putin, a medieval tyrant, end up in charge of a modern superpower – a country that looked as if it had thrown off the shackles of Communism and embraced democracy and the free market?

That’s the pressing question that Peter Morgan’s absorbing new play (now transferred to the West End after its première at the Almeida Theatre last year) sets out to tackle.

Morgan is one of Britain’s finest dramatists, whose credits include The Queen, The Crown and The Damned United. Instead of simply focusing on Putin, which would have made for a flat, formulaic drama, he charts the rise and fall of Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch who helped to make him.

This oblique approach is inspired. By casting Putin as Iago to Berezovsky’s Othello, Morgan reveals far more about Putin than if he’d tackled him head on.

At the start of the play, Berezovsky is flying high, cheerfully exploiting the vast opportunities for self-enrichment that Yeltsin’s chaotic regime created. Berezovsky’s justification for his avarice is that his Wild West capitalism is also enriching Russia – trickle-down economics of the crudest sort.

Berezovsky is gleefully corrupt, facilitating business deals with shameless bribes to state officials. The only man who can’t be bought is the Deputy Governor of St Petersburg, an obscure puritanical oddball called Vladimir Putin. When Putin loses his job and ends up as a taxi-driver, Berezovsky tries to turn him into a puppet who’ll do his bidding.

Initially, Berezovsky comes across as a thoroughly unattractive character. He’s a bad husband and an absent father. His only interest is making money. When Putin becomes president, and dismantles Russia’s nascent democracy, he finally finds his moral compass, but by then it’s far too late.

Played by almost any other actor, Berezovsky would be an unsympathetic figure, a man who sells his soul and then tries to buy it back at a knockdown rate. However, Tom Hollander is an actor of immense charm. His Berezovsky has such warmth and humanity that he becomes tragic – almost heroic.

Likewise, Will Keen resists the temptation to play Vladimir Putin as a pantomime villain. His Putin is awkward and insecure, full of pent-up rage – a personification of the forgotten Russian proletariat, who are furious they’ve been left behind while fat cats such as Berezovsky line their pockets.

Keen and Hollander are mesmeric, and they’re ably supported by Josef Davies as Alexander Litvinenko and Luke Thallon as Roman Abramovich. Litvinenko is an idealist who pays an awful price for his idealism. Abramovich is a realist who knows which way the wind is blowing. Yet, like Berezovsky and Litvinenko, Putin and Abramovich are both patriots –both motivated, in their own ways, by a deep, abiding love of Russia.

There’s a dearth of decent female parts, and a few too many phone conversations, but these are minor quibbles. Morgan’s play is compelling, and its malevolent ambience is enhanced by Miriam Buether’s lurid nightclub set, a striking metaphor for the amoral free-for-all of 1990s Russia.

This isn’t a play about a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing. A lot of the action happens in our own backyard. Litvinenko was poisoned here and died in a British hospital. Abramovich and Berezovsky did battle in a British court. Abramovich bought Chelsea Football Club. Berezovsky died in Berkshire, the buckle of the commuter belt.

At Berezovsky’s inquest, the British coroner recorded an open verdict. Patriots suggests he killed himself. After watching this engrossing drama, I’m not so sure.

Radio Valerie Grove

It’s been reported that 800,000 have switched off – fleeing perhaps from fearful news of cyber-crime, disinformation, strikes, transphobia, witchcraft, abuse of all kinds … or from a certain presenter’s gabbling voice.

Libby Purves says listeners have always been infuriated by Today presenters, including her. ‘Contumely goes with the job,’ as she put it.

Contumely! Hamlet’s word. Radio 4 assumes a Shakespearean hinterland: so Michael Gove could quote (re Boris shenanigans) Marc Antony’s ‘The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.’

‘I used to want a bomb to go off under Radio 4 – it felt so stale,’ wrote the Observer’s Miranda Sawyer, apologising for having dared to single out three Radio 4 items in one week.

Every new generation of radio commentators rediscovers Radio 4’s lingering USP: quirky documentaries and chance encounters. Take the Great Lives on John Gay by Ian Hislop. Or Adam Rutherford’s riveting series on eugenics. Or Errollyn Wallen, Belize-born composer, or sculptor Nicole Farhi, discovered in John Wilson’s This Cultural Life

Apparently the appearance of uninamed Rylan on The Archers helped to propel the ancient soap to the top of the BBC Sounds app, where its fan base includes the under-35s. So Rylan (Clark) gets to make a podcast on How to Be a Man. Rylan, gay model, X Factor star and comedian, assembles an ‘amazingly broad spectrum’ of guests: a boxer, another comedian, an athlete, a gay footballer, a camp TV chap etc – to ask, ‘How masculine are you feelin’ today?’ That was its level.

There was nobody outstanding, although Janet Street-Porter came closest. Or Hamza Yassin, wildlife cameraman and Strictly winner. Hamza is feeling broody. But watch out: his role model is the polygamous silverback gorilla, supervising a harem of shegorillas, and proving his manhood by multiple fathering.

I’m compiling a list of oldie-friendly podcasts and yes, Rachel Johnson, your indispensable Difficult Women is there, along with Catherine Carr’s Where Are You Going? I’m trying My Therapist Ghosted Me with Joanne McNally and Vogue Williams. On Saturday Live, Vogue said she was glad her mother never listened because they talked a lot about sex. Up spake Dame Sheila Hancock: ‘It’s all right – mothers do know about sex.’

Suddenly, without fanfare, came Wedgwood: A Very British Tragedy, briskly told by Tristram Hunt, former Labour MP for the Potteries, now director of the V&A, biographer of the visionary Josiah Wedgwood.

Readers of A N Wilson’s Confessions memoir will know this terrible story, because his father, Norman Wilson, was running Wedgwood until one Arthur Bryan persuaded Josiah the fifth to float the company. Flotation spelled doom. New bosses aimed to make only money, not pots.

‘My father was so angry, he was broken by it,’ said A N W.

We also heard from potters Edmund de Waal, David Queensberry and Emma Bridgewater. And from skilled workers, helpless in the face of takeovers (by Tony O’Reilly, then KPS Capital Partners), false promises, buy-outs, outsourcing to China for cheap labour and receivership. The present owners, Fiskars, Finnish secateur-makers, inspire confidence. This packed, well-crafted documentary was made by Anna

Horsbrugh-Porter: in 28 zippy minutes, it left you wanting more.

Times Radio is gathering listeners, despite the unmistakable voice of programme host Mariella’s being allowed to ask suddenly, ‘Fancy a Fever-Tree?’

Perhaps it’s Mariella’s avatar. Hugo Rifkind had an avatar created of himself. Last Saturday, the real Hugo made me laugh. In a Blackpool hotel, he recalled, he asked reception what time breakfast was served.

‘Seven o’clock’.

‘Till when?’ asked Rifkind.

Puzzled pause. Then a reply: ‘Till you’ve finished your meal!’

Television Frances Wilson

‘I’ll be back,’ he threatened in The Terminator, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is a man of his word.

The line was repeated in the five other Terminator films and again in Commando, The Running Man, Twins and Last Action Hero

‘You’ve been back enough,’ Bruce Willis wearily replied when Arnie said it yet again in The Expendables 2

Two weeks after Netflix released all eight episodes of the ‘kick-ass spyaction-comedy’ FUBAR – Arnie’s first television show – he’s back again in Arnold. It’s an ‘intimate’ three-part docuseries in which Arnie shares his insights and wisdom.

Arnold opens with the Austrian Oak enjoying a cigar in an outdoor hot tub. ‘My whole life,’ he explains in his AI voice, gazing at a snow-capped mountain range, ‘I had this unusual talent. That I could see things. Very clearly in front of me. If I can see it. Then it must be achievable.’

Seeing him squashed into a 14-inch screen, I was reminded of Norma

Desmond’s quip in Sunset Boulevard: ‘I am big – it’s the pictures that got small.’

Whether it’s fact or fiction, the unique selling point of an Arnie plot is implausibility. On-screen, he’s played cyborgs, a kindergarten cop, Danny DeVito’s twin, a mattress salesman (in Jingle All the Way) and, in End of Days, the single-handed defeater of Satan.

His off-screen plotlines are even harder to believe. The son of a former Nazi, he was born 75 years ago in a village called Thal. Aged 20, he became Mr Universe; he rehashed the role in his fifties when he was crowned Governor of California.

In what sounds like a plot line from Desperate Housewives, his 25-year marriage to Maria Shriver, the niece of JFK, ended in 2011 when he confessed in a family therapy session, which included their four children, that he was the father of the Guatemalan housekeeper’s 13-year-old son.

In FUBAR, Arnie plays Luke Brunner, a 65-year-old CIA operative determined to win back his ex-wife, Tally (Fabiana Udenio), who has no idea of her husband’s double identity. Nor does their daughter, Emma (Monica Barbaro), an apparently non-smoking, non-cursing, cookie-dough-loving lobbyist, whose boyfriend, Carter, a kindergarten teacher, is seen by her dad as a drip.

‘Those paintings don’t finger themselves,’ Brunner says to Carter in one of his dead-on-arrival jokes about a finger painting.

But, as Brunner discovers on his last secret mission, Emma is also Dani De Rossa, AKA Panda, a CIA agent posing as a tough American soldier in an armstrading compound in Guyana. Not only does she smoke and curse, but also she doesn’t give a damn about cookies.

Will she ever use that stand-up mixer