Arts

of Naples, Vesuvius framing the view. But, apart from a brief glimpse of Vesuvius and the catacombs, there’s none of that here or in Gomorrah

Instead, it’s all dark, rubbish-strewn back alleys in La Sanità, in the gloomy shadow of Capodimonte hill.

The streets are plagued by thugs on motorbikes, randomly spraying bullets at terrified families. Even the big don Oreste Spasiano (heroically grumpy Tommaso Ragno) takes limited pleasure in his kingdom, mutely sleeping with his prostitutes, moving from grotty safe house to grotty safe house.

The one thing that can get inside Spasiano’s granite heart is his childhood friendship with Felice Lasco – doomed by their joint murder of an old man when they were teenagers, and destroyed by Lasco’s four-decade exile in Egypt.

Their reunion in Naples after so long is touching – but will Spasiano spare the only other witness to their crime, who is

also his only friend?

That is the simple plot of this film, based on the novel of the same name by Ermanno Rea (1927-2016). Directed by Mario Martone, who also wrote the screenplay, it holds the attention at not-quite-rattling pace – at one hour 57 minutes, the film is relatively short by today’s standards.

Martin Scorsese’s next film, Killers of the Flower Moon, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, is a terrifying three hours and 20 minutes long. Some wise officials at the Cannes Film Festival are trying to trim the film before they let it be screened in May.

It’s funny how a film like Nostalgia is longer than, say, a single episode of a TV series such as Gomorrah, which varied in length from 44 to 55 minutes. And yet a single episode of a good TV series packs in more than this slightly flabby, minorly self-indulgent film.

Surely expensive, long films should feel more pressure to be gripping than cheaper, shorter TV episodes? These days, it’s the other way round.

Where Gomorrah was tightly plotted, with overlapping plots, and carefully punctuated with, I’m afraid, very pleasing bursts of megalomaniac violence, this film – like so many – is arrogant in the way it avoids techniques that might make it more interesting.

There are overlong, lingering shots of Lasco walking the streets of Naples, Lasco smoking and Lasco bathing his elderly mother.

A great TV episode – or a great film –wouldn’t allow these meandering diversions without the insertion of a plot point or a terrific bit of dialogue.

Supposedly ‘artistic’ films shouldn’t dispense with those interest-producing techniques. Not surprisingly, they then become just a little bit boring, even when they’re about wonderfully juicy subjects, such as murderous Mafia hoods.

Theatre William Cook Medea

Soho Place Theatre, until 22nd April

‘Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,’ said that splendid playwright William Congreve, ‘nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.’

Was he thinking of Medea when he coined this immortal couplet? Those two lines sum up the essence of Euripides’s timeless play.

Medea was already a familiar figure in Greek mythology when Euripides made her the heroine of this tragedy, first performed in 431 BC. That first-night audience would have known how she helped Jason win the Golden Fleece and bring it back across the Black Sea; how she married him and bore his children; how he forsook her for the King of Corinth’s daughter, and how their children were subsequently killed.

What made Euripides’s play so controversial – even at the time, apparently – was that he made his Medea a scheming murderess with malice aforethought, a calculating killer of her own offspring (in previous versions, what she did was depicted as an accident, or vengeance by the Corinthians).

Even the ancient Greeks, well accustomed to blood and gore, seem to have found this plot twist hard to stomach. Medea premièred in a dramatic contest between three rival playwrights. Euripides came third. I’m sure he’d be tickled pink to see his first-night flop being performed 2,454 years later – in barbarian Britain, of all places (a bloke called Sophocles came second – I wonder what became of him?).

It’s always fascinating to watch such an ancient play – it’s like stepping into a theatrical time machine – but that initial fascination soon wears off. To be engaged for an evening, we need to be persuaded to find this grim story enthralling rather than repelling, and the only way the drama can do this is to make us sympathise with Medea, in spite of her dreadful deed.

For actors, directors and dramaturges, it’s the ultimate challenge – somehow convincing us of mitigating circumstances for the ultimate taboo.

What prompts a woman to do such a thing? God only knows, but it seems to crop up in the news with awful regularity. Our world is very different from Euripides’s, but our demons remain the same. This is the first production I’ve seen that achieves this moral sleight of hand, turning baddies into goodies and leaving you wondering how they did it.

As a powerful woman from a foreign land who’s stripped of her power when she becomes a wife, Medea is fertile ground for discussions about feminism and immigration. I was rather afraid a new version would make a meal of these issues, rather than letting them remain implicit. Thankfully, this production sticks to Robinson Jeffers’s lyrical, lucid adaptation, written in 1946. His script still feels topical, while never seeming trite.

Director Dominic Cooke helps a lot by keeping it to a tight 90 minutes – he’s wise to realise there’s a limit to how much filicide an audience can take. It’s staged in the round, which really draws you into the action, and the chorus are scattered among the audience, in modern dress. It’s only when they stand up and start speaking that you realise they’re part of the show.

The cast are all good, but any rendition of Medea rests on the title role, and Sophie Okonedo holds your gaze throughout. Like a soloist in a great concerto, she rises to every emotional test.

Ben Daniels juggles several hats, playing Jason, Creon, Aegeus and the tutor. He’s pretty faultless in all four parts, but it’s a shame these characters couldn’t be divvied up between four different actors. I found it rather confusing, and even after I’d worked out who was who, it was hard to suspend my disbelief.

I would have found it far more interesting and entertaining to see four separate performers playing these diverse roles. There are loads of super actors out there who’d surely be grateful for the work.

That’s pretty much my only gripe about an otherwise engrossing evening, greatly enhanced by the convenience and elegance of this smart new theatre – the first brand-new theatre in London’s West End for half a century.

From the outside, it looks like a glitzy office block – an enormous slab of glass and metal – but once you’re inside, it’s surprisingly intimate and cosy. The seats are supremely comfy, and the sightlines are superb.

Radio Valerie Grove

Radio is our university of the Third Age.

I treat some programmes like undergraduate essay crises. It’s Donne next week , but first I must read Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper, before Melvyn’s In Our Time, whose subject is Stevie on Thursday at nine.

So I seize my Virago edition of Stevie Smith, guiltily unopened since 1980. I discover its introduction is by my old friend Janet Watts (we met on the Londoner’s Diary in 1968) to guide me through the idiosyncratic quirks of Smith’s prose: ‘the talking voice whose humour and warmth do not veil its merciless clarity’.

As brilliant Janet notes, ‘Smith defied suburbia and its tennis clubs; braved spinsterhood and old maidhood; foreswore marriage.’ Her novel reflects the Not Waving but Drowning poet’s voice.

On reading minor Victorian novels, Smith wrote, ‘How richly compostly loamishly sad were those Victorian days, with a sadness not nerve-irritating like we have today. How I love those damp Victorian troubles… Yes, always someone dies, someone weeps, in tune with the laurels dripping, and the tap dripping, and the spout dripping in the water-butt, and the dim gas flickeringly greenly in the damp conservatory.’

Wonderful fodder for your commonplace book.

And Melvyn’s trio of academics per episode – how does he find them? All articulate, audible, fluent and willing to respond to his request: ‘Can you just fill us in on a bit of context here?’ Everyone I met that week had heard this programme – and all sang Melvyn’s praises (except a Mumsnet blog, which accused Bragg of sounding underwhelmed).

In the same week came the 60th anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s suicide, on 11th February 1963. Archive on 4 was presented by a poet new to me, Emily Berry. Plath is a lady so honoured she defies oblivion. But Berry had a sound basis for bonding with Sylvia. Berry’s mother killed herself when Emily was seven. She fell in love with Sylvia’s The Bell Jar at about 14. She feels Sylvia’s influence on her own poetry.

She presented living testimonies from friends of Plath: Ruth Fainlight, Gillian Becker and Heather Clark, Plath’s latest biographer. Up in Heptonstall, where she is buried in Hughes country, a broadYorkshire man spoke at the graveside: ‘It’s not my thing, isn’t literature. Archaeology is.’

He said visitors divide into Plathites and House of Hughes. Whenever Hughes’s name was removed by illwishers, it was replaced – but the man who replaced it took his own life last year.

I wondered what the lovely Frieda Hughes, artist/poet daughter of Ted and Sylvia, felt about such programmes. When I rang, she was out in her Welsh garden, wearing a headlamp as darkness had fallen, and she was digging the earth for the builders who are creating the studio and gallery of her dreams. She knew nothing of the Archive on 4

But she’d admired Clark’s biography. ‘People think the children of the famous are absorbed by them,’ she said. ‘But I can’t think of my parents in that way. My mother may be what they study, but I can’t study her like that.’

The best thing was hearing Sylvia’s rich, warm, often laughing voice –especially when asking a guest at her chilly Devon house, like the hostess in the popular cartoon, ‘Would you like an extra hot-water bottle, or another cat?’

My Oldie neighbour Mr Town Mouse confides to subscribers of his magazine the Idler that his wife has switched off the Today programme (because it incited such feelings of anger and helplessness) in favour of Radio 3. Mrs Mouse’s mood has ‘soared ever since’. Their kitchen resounds to Bach and Vivaldi and they are lifted into ‘sublime worlds’.

So the Hodgkinsons, like McDonald’s outlets, sundry shopping malls and various prisons, confirm that classical music does indeed have charms to soothe the savage breast. Or beast.

Television Frances Wilson

‘Why do we still idolise this mixed-up mess of contradictions?’ the poor viewers are asked at the start of Becoming Frida Kahlo (BBC2). ‘And why can’t we take our eyes off her?’

What follows are three hour-long episodes composed of footage of the famous face: the monobrow, the faint moustache, the unsmiling mouth, the black eyes boring straight through you and the hair wound round the Medusa head like a cobra.

Unoriginal to the last, Becoming Frida Kahlo borrows its title from the films Becoming Jane (about Jane Austen) and Becoming Elizabeth (about Elizabeth I) – and the biographies Becoming Liz Taylor, Becoming Muhammad Ali, Becoming C S Lewis, Becoming Mrs C S Lewis, Becoming Queen Victoria, Becoming Johnny Vegas and Becoming by Michelle Obama.

The implication is that we will watch Kahlo evolve from chrysalis to butterfly, but no such transformation takes place. She was born fierce and she remained fierce. Photographs of her as a child, when she contracted polio, are just as terrifying as those taken in adulthood.

The narrative is told in bite-sized ‘chapters’ with titles such as ‘There’s no place like home’, ‘I get myself noticed’, and ‘There’s nothing without him, Diego Diego Diego’. It’s unclear what purpose these headings serve, unless the audience is assumed to be aged ten or under.

Born in Mexico in 1907, at the age of 18 Kahlo lost her virginity and, temporarily, her mobility when the bus home from college collided with an electric trolley car. A metal rod tore through her middle section and she spent the next few months mummified in a full-body plaster cast.

Horizontal, a mirror mounted to the canopy, she began to paint her face on an easel which her mother, using an ingenious contraption, suspended above her.

Diego Rivera, whom Kahlo married aged 22, adopted the same posture when he painted his murals on ceilings.

‘This is my first work of art,’ Kahlo wrote on one of her hospital canvases, but we are told nothing by any of the talking heads about whether these paintings were ‘art’ or not. Nor are we told about Kahlo’s folk influences, early style or evolution as an artist. Instead we learn that while she was recovering, she was abandoned by her boyfriend.

Rivera was 20 years older than Kahlo and around 20 stone heavier. He was a man-mountain and she was pint-sized; he could have carried her around in his trouser pocket. Their dimensions are so different that Kahlo’s image looks, in the photographs, as though she must be standing far away while Rivera is nose to nose with the aperture.

During the Great Depression, the