The exhibition of two such wildly differing painters as Cy Twombly and Nicolas Poussin has incited outrage and interest on the London art scene. Poussin was the 17^th Century Classical painter, Twombly was the 20^th and 21^st century painter in the Abstract Expressionist style. Both painters took heavy inspiration from Classical themes, and produced a collection of work, which, while the titles may be similar, have dramatically and at times shockingly different outcomes.

The basis for this juxtaposition, in the eyes of curator Nicholas Cullinan, is the influence Rome had on both their careers. Both painters arrived at the city aged 30, 323 years apart. The showings of the two painters contain shared antique visions of Venus, Pan, Parnassus and Apollo, and the exhibition is divided into sections covering Arcadia, Bacchanalia and the Four Seasons, which both artists attempted aged 64.

The 323 years that separate these two painters have make for some highly unusual wall-sharing. Whilst Twombly’s works are spreads of light colour on white with scrawled logos and a spare, unfinished look, Poussin’s renditions of Classical and Biblical themes became even more formalized than those of his heroes from the early Italian Renaissance.

Nicolas Poussin was born in 1594 in Normandy. In 1624 he travelled to Rome and as a young artist worked in the studio of Domenichino, the Baroque painter from the Carracci school, who influenced him with his lucid composition and cool colouring. After an early coup with a commission for an altarpiece in St Peter’s, he succumbed to a serious illness and thenceforth adhered to his Classical rejection of the Baroque style - in favour of more measured style on a smaller scale for high-brow patrons from the bourgeoisie. In Peter and Linda Murray’s Dictionary of Art and Artists Poussin’s late style is described as: “Essays in solid geometry, with facial expressions eliminated and immobile figures…they are the logical exposition of his theories: a picture must contain the maximum of moral content expressed in a composition which shall convey its intellectual content.”

Cy Twombly was born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia, a place he would proudly remember had “more columns … than in all ancient Rome and Greece”. His parents first discovered his talent for drawing when he reproduced a Picasso painting on the cover of a monograph they had given him for his twelfth birthday. He became friends with figures like Robert Rauschenberg, travelling with him to Europe and North Africa in 1952. By 1957 he went to Rome and quickly adopted Classical themes in his painting before marrying an Italian heiress who was the sister of a wealthy patron of the arts in the city. He lived out much of his life in the city in a palazzo near the Farnese where he worked at a happy seclusion from the Abstract Expressionists he had left behind in New York. His real fame would only come in 1987 when an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery opened the floodgates for widespread critical acclaim. 

The first room of the exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery does not quite convey the full dissonance of the works displayed: we are greeted with two curving octagons by Twombly which contain a sea in whipping, vivid hunter green slashes and whites, both threateningly alive when compared to the pastoral calm of the Poussin works – a mellow-coloured Roman road with reclining peasants and another low-lit piece, The Arcadian Shepherds. The shepherds in this piece are uncovering an hidden tomb bearing  the inscription: ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ . The rustic idyll of these shepherds, and the clashing spray of the Twombly octagons, are both challenged by this reminder of mortality.    

What immediately proceeds is an assault on the senses. The carefully sculptural forms of Poussin with their immediately perceptible rigidities of form are shattered by the white noise of Arcadia with its scribbling on white paper. More successful is the ‘Pan and the Bacchanalia’ section, where we see a liver-coloured smear from Twombly that seems part wine, part excreta mirror the excesses of Bacchus. On the opposite wall we see the same subject handled with a corresponding formality by Poussin. The effect is a tension release.

The final work by Twombly is his The Four Seasons, 1960-1964. This room is a pleasure after the rigours of such an exhibition, and fittingly my favourite was autumn. The mellow fruitfulness [he was a big fan of Keats] is well captured, with a hint of a deeper arterial sap also on the palette. Catch this show while you can, even if you choose to ignore the comparisons and enjoy each artist in his own right.

Dominic Jones, the 25-year old jeweller who is fascinating people like Florence Welch, Vivienne Westwood and Alice Dellal, squatted near here when he started in London – and has by accident or design the same macabre flood running through his veins.  

His perfect birthday present would be a colony of Dermestid beetles; ideal, we understand for eating the meat off bones for purposes of taxidermy. For his designs he sources giant squid jaws from Californian fishermen and recently made an enemy of a model when he made her retch at a fashion shoot after beautifying her neck with a collar of fresh cow’s intestine.

He is a regular on the London party scene, making custom jewellery for Florence [for her Dizzee You’ve Got the Dirtee Love duet at the Brits and her Drumming Song video] and Jack Peñate [“At an after party at Kai from the Mystery Jets’ house they were all sat around playing away, bouncing off each other ... I was annoyed that my talent wasn't instant...so in my fucked five in the morning state I was like ‘I hate this I'm going to make you a ring!’”].

Jones was heavily involved in the graffiti scene for years, growing up in Buckinghamshire [his local hero, a graffer called Rain Man who he painted with a few times, is apparently due back in court soon] and has hung out with Banksy at anti-war marches.

In jewellery, his most widely-known piece is his 22-karat gold-plated fang necklace, as worn by Megan Fox on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar; his black gold plated thorns studs, claw rings and knuckle dusters adorned Thierry Mugler’s 2010 A/W collection.

His latest A/W 2010 collection comes bolder than ever [it was his 2009 ‘Tooth and Nail’ collection that made him Anna Wintour’s tip], these feature solid gold versions of: vampire bat skulls, crocodile skulls and jaws, giant Humboldt Squid beaks and vulture skulls.

He studied at Sir John Cass School of Art and Design, dropping out after they made a point of asking everyone to “think outside the box”. However he created some of his most inventive work as a student; notably a broach inspired, as always, by grotesque nature – the puffer fish. He used magnets to make said innocuous broach flower into a giant red balloon at the touch of a button. 

Bit of a shame that Rhianna has jumped on the bandwagon, but then maybe Dominic could disenchant her by asking her to model for him – that recent model got treated as follows: ”When we were sawing through the large fish heads [for a necklace]it split and guts poured out on to the studio floor and while we were holding it against the girl, bits of its brain and blood were spilling all over her.” Rude boy!

http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/fashion-ones-to-watch-dominic-jones

Faced with a similar scenario in his latest project, Michael Symmons Roberts is more docile, if not just as self-assured. Symmons Roberts is taking on Mozart, writing the libretto for his unfinished opera Zaide, and feels no compunction to defer to him, or the list of lyric poets that preface him:  “If they’re all looking over your shoulder when you write you would never pen a line – it’s a frightening group – Thomas [Edward], Tennyson, John Donne, Milton. In that sense there is hubris in all writing.”

When we meet off a scruffy Whitechapel thoroughfare, Symmons Roberts the trumpeted winner of the Whitbread Poetry Prize and a range of other awards, makes no immediate impression. He is keen to find out about me, in a perfunctory teacher-like way – he is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Met – equally teacher-like with his rumpled pinstripe jacket and meagre orange beard. When asked about himself he fixes glaucous blue eyes into middle distance, and the teacher disappears to reveal the poet. 

Symmons Roberts is in many respects a literal war poet. His last two books of poetry Corpus, and The Half Healed are meticulous, sensual collections that are often placed in zones of conflict, be they trench-set shell falls on the western front or Jacob fighting the Angel in a poem called Choreography. Symmons Roberts comes from the industrial northwest, living in ‘England’s most Catholic city’ Preston as a child [he is a converted Catholic], but unlike the more quotidian grittiness of some of his fellow northerner Simon Armitage, has a more whole-hearted and spiritual angle.

He joined the hallowed group of modern poet translators of the greats [Hughes, Auden, Graves, Heaney, Armitage] two years ago, when translating the verses for Schubert’s Winterreise, and he says that for this latest project he took tips from the founder of the confessional poetry movement, Robert Lowell: “This is a huge debate – whether you can translate poetry, and how you should translate poetry. Like many of my contemporary poets I follow Lowell’s line. In a book called Imitations, he said that what he tried to do was to capture the spirit and tone and voice of these original poems, not to do a faithful academic translation. If I do that it will fall dead as a piece of English poetry. Effectively he is saying that these are versions. I’ve taken liberties where I’ve needed to take liberties.”

At the age of ten he remembers an idea coming to him for a poem as he was trying to get to sleep at his parents’ home in Preston. He ran downstairs and breathlessly told his mother about it, for her to dutifully write it down on the kitchen table. Becoming a poet was never a struggle in his youth. “I was at quite an experimental state primary school where we were allowed to wander around and pursue our interests. They spotted fairly early on that I was into poetry, so the teachers got me to write one every week and read it in assembly. From the age of about five I thought – I’m the school poet – this is what I do!” and with that a miraculously preserved primary school grin flashes out through his serious facade.

Symmons Roberts was born to the son of an industrial salesman and a housewife, neither of whom went to university, but who were, as we’ve seen, highly supportive of the idea that he could have a career in writing. The family was passively secular, but he soon developed a concerted atheism in his teens, which, when he gained a place at Oxford, led him to change his course to Theology and Philosophy, and to change his college to a Christian one, purely so he could talk believers out of their faith. And yet. “As university went on I got deeply into philosophy – and the philosophy totally undermined my atheism, by making me realize that there is no overarching objectivity, no Dawkinsian bedrock of common sense if you strip everything away.

“I realised that atheism was just as culturally conditioned as being a Catholic. The Oxford way of teaching it was the Western analytical tradition of deconstructing arguments, so for a naively dogmatic young atheist I was ripe to have the rug pulled from under me.

“I made the assumptions that you still have that atheism is exactly the same as ‘common sense’, or objectivity. I’m not saying that in psychological terms we can’t be objective, I just mean that there is no framework of thought that can be completely objective. I have exactly the same problem with unquestioning religious dogmatism.”

He is aware of the fact that, as a poet, ‘the last acceptable prejudice’ against religion can be particularly obstructive. The label ‘a religious poet in a secular age’ as fellow Whibread-winner Jeannette Winterson called him, could deter younger readers. I suggest that he’s not as accessible as a more pop culture poet like Armitage. “There’s a whole range of poetry being written and the debate about accessibility and inaccessibility is a complex one. One of the greatest living poets Geoffrey Hill, who I hope is about to be made Oxford Professor of Poetry said, when asked why his poetry was difficult: ‘my poetry is difficult because we are difficult’. We are not simple beings – we all know that from the network of our relationships with the world and each other.

“I don’t include consciously-inserted spiritual ideas in my verse: if you start a poem with an idea the poem either risks falling flat, or just becoming instrumental as a way of illustrating it through fancy language. Poems aren’t that – you discover what it is you’re trying to say through trying to say it. In that sense poetry is a volatile art.”

Whether describing ‘the scar and camber’ of soldier’s shoulder, the ‘twisted star’ pose of a dead body, the ‘vascular stamens’ of a heart of on a morgue slab, Symmons Roberts’ recent poetry is rooted in the physical. “In the book Corpus there is this whole group of poems called ‘Food for Risen Bodies’, which is about imagining what Resurrection might be like. Particularly what we’d eat and smoke and talk about on the first meal of the first night of the next life. I’ve read those countless times, and I think it’s very hard to say that it means more to someone who believes than to someone who doesn’t . You get all kinds of reactions from people to who if you said ‘do you believe in the resurrection of the body?’ wouldn’t know what you meant.”

A professor of poetry, he is aware of the culture surrounding his art, and is keen to discuss stylistic trends in poetry, like the trend for “the tersest, tightest Anglo-Saxon words, the one syllable ones. Some poets are fixated by them. However I enjoy complex Latin-rooted words. I have no objection to multi-syllabic words!”   

 As a literal war poet, he returns to the subject tirelessly, [he also names Keith Douglas and Edward Thomas as his favourites] from Iraq to the trenches, to UK civil war – perhaps it chimes with his sense of the industry of the northwest, the bleak textile decline that set the scene for his youth.    

His latest work, however deals with forgiveness. For his Zaide libretto he has had to approach vernacular dialogue, in the German Singspiel style. His dialogue has been criticized in his 2008 novel Breath, which received some poor reviews; however here he was not afraid to write the whole libretto in “natural speak”, in avoidance of heightened language. He focuses especially on the dialoguing arias, which features complex inter-stitched singing.

For all of the oblique lyrical spirituality in his work, there is the clashing technique. The millimetric adjective, the air-tight, wool-swaddled image, and that child’s forensic perception – the one he never grew out of. Corpus’s Corporeality ends with a jewel; as he slowly accumulates references to the sun’s black core, he ends: ‘Once, a girl stared it out / to spite her mother / and the spiteful sun / gave her a dark print / of its heart in every blink.’

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/features/f0000586.shtml

If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet runs at the Bush Theatre, London from October 17 to November 21 2009.

http://www.spoonfed.co.uk/spooners/miguel82-6247/if-it-is-i-havent-found-it-yet-at-bush-theatre-1685/

However, unsurprisingly for a man into his fifth decade of Shakespearean leads, Lear remains the biggest loon on Pennington’s horizon. “If I were to go into rehearsal tomorrow I would love to play it, I know. Lear lies ahead,” he says with oracular conviction. Over the years, Shakespeare’s role in Pennington’s life has become increasingly deep-seated. He remembers taking part in a production of The Tempest with convicts at Maidstone prison.

“The physical act of performing Shakespeare for these guys, who were mostly lifers, was quite extraordinary,” he recalls. “They were playing roles which were quite often about freedom –the freedom to go hunting, to wander in the woods – and they played them as if their lives depended on it. It was an extraordinary feeling.”

The two plays that the 65-yearold is performing at Hampstead Theatre deal with subjects that informed his life at various stages. Sweet William provides a tour around Shakespeare and his work, allowing him to recite passages that he never could on stage – Cleopatra for example, and Romeo.

Secondly, he is performing Anton Chekhov – a look at the playwright and short story writer’s life and work. Pennington has a lasting sympathy with Russia. He describes the juxtaposition of glitz and famine at a first-night party in his book about Chekhov. “My interpreter was shoveling canapés into her handbag, all the while wearing a fur coat, and downing champagne as if she had to live on it for the next few weeks – which, in a sense, she probably did,” he says.

“At that time the infrastructure was so wretched in Russia – but people were trying to behave as if they were doing fine.” Skeletal portrayals of Raskolnikov in Crime And Punishment were accompanied with the frisson of working with a director who was reportedly being trailed by the KGB. “The main excitement of that play was the great direction of Yuri Lyubimov, who ‘defected’ from the USSR in 1983. You’d hear all this stuff about him being trailed by the KGB and death threats, so he was a very intriguing man to work with.”

In Pennington, it’s possible to detect a considered, deep-set sensitivity that would betoken more a writer than a script-a-month board-cracker. However he dismisses this suggestion, saying that “writing would be too lonely, too boring”.

This intelligence is revealed in his singular analysis of Shakespeare’s Timon Of Athens – a part he learnt in three weeks. Instead of boasting of candle-burning nights memorising speeches, he reflects on the play’s darker themes. “It’s a play about the vanity of generosity – this compulsively generous man, a big party-thrower. But it’s about the loneliness of it all. It’s a very interesting psychological type that Shakespeare obviously spotted all those pre-Freudian years ago.”

Circumstance dictated that Pennington did not limit himself to Shakespeare. In 1982, he played an Imperial officer supervising the construction of the Death Star in the Return Of The Jedi episode of the Star Wars saga. “I still get fans coming down to Hampstead Theatre in their macs to get autographs!” he laughs. “I always get kids sending me photographs with specific instruction: ‘Sign it but don’t personalise it.’ Of course they’re going to sell the picture, so I always personalize it. And then they finish by saying ‘we think you were fantastic as Moff Jerjerrod, if you ever do any more acting please let us know’!”

Anton Chekhov sees Pennington in full-body role immersion mode. He attempts less to deal with the work of the man than he does the life and character of his subject. “He was the easiest company – so easy to get along with. However, he also had the reserve of a writer. I thought this could lend itself well to the show because you can play with the audience in a certain way by being in turns extremely good company, so they can almost feel they can talk back to you, but then become quite a remote figure.”

Pennington fondly recalls the beginning of his “marriage” with Shakespeare, which began when he was 11 watching Macbeth: “It was something in the language, in that music that I was hearing. It was like hearing rock ‘n roll for the first time. I rushed straight home and read that Macbeth out loud, and then I went for the next play and read that out loud.”

It’s a union from which he still bears the scars. He still has a bad back from an overzealous somersault performed in a fight scene as Mercutio in 1976. But half a century and 20,000 hours of performances later, his passion is not dimmed.

“You have to devote yourself to Hollywood and I’ve never had the patience to do that,” he says. “I suppose the truth is that I prefer playing live than in a studio. Audiences fascinate me.”

Pennington returns again to the subject of prisoners and their connection to Shakespeare. He remembers visiting a group of lifers in Long Lartin prison and planning to read them some modern poems about how boring England was, to make them feel better about their lot.

“They heard this and said, ‘You’re from Stratford, right? Read us some Shakespeare!’ So we thought about it and I read them ‘To be or not to be’. Everything about that speech meant something to them. It was an extraordinary feeling. Shakespeare is the liberator.”

The rave reviews and rubbishings, the divas and the nose-dives: Robert Tanitch’s Book is a Herculean trawl through every major production staged in London in the 20th century. I approached this encyclopaedia with trepidation, but discovered a greatly readable book within. In its function as an objective almanac, it is interesting in a variety of ways.

Here, the plots of many of the iconic productions that have provided the furniture of my London life are finally unravelled. These plot descriptions are full, and often contain sharp comment themselves when a quoted review is not available. It’s also a look at a vanished century from a dramatic perspective, and here it proves extremely interesting. We see an Othello performance in 1930 receive unsettled reviews after the use of a black actor: one critic left the theatre because he was seated near some black members of the audience. Titbits like these make this directory a teeming trove of theatre lore, from the prolific period of the turn of the century to the Starlight Express glam of the 1980s.

We see Noël Coward take cover from the Blitz to write Blithe Spirit, and Anthony Hopkins’s various turkeys. We also see how the medium of theatre took on the contemporary, expressive role now more reserved for films. Plays like The Death of a Salesman, that so captured the depressed mood of a post-war Britain, are brought to light here with vivid anecdotes about the play’s reception.

Highlights of the photography include a doe-eyed Judi Dench as a youthful Juliet, and a (believe it or not) chubby Maggie Smith onstage in 1964. The excerpts from the reviews are all well chosen, and although they do thin out in stages, some are spectacular: from “everything falls so flat it should have opened on Shrove Tuesday” to “the work is unmitigated tosh. But it is tosh of the highest quality.”

One interesting pattern that emerges from the reviews is the critics’ quickness to label productions ‘the best ever’. Through the predictable reappearance of this accolade, decade after decade, the reviews show us how tempting it is to believe that our current time is the most sophisticated, the most advanced. The volume contains separate indexes for name, titles and theatres, and also a yearly section featuring world premieres and deaths. There is also a detailed map of London’s Theatreland.

The volume is both a reference book, a collection of stories and, in some ways, an obituary of a falling star. For this history tells a sad story – that the proliferation of entertainment media has forced the theatre to leave society’s mainstream and become more of a tourist attraction.