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.

Why do I have to introduce John Cage? His name should be a salver-balanced card of introduction into the high esteem of any lover of the arts, the equivalent of Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp and Mark Rothko. And yet music never made it quite as far in the 20th century, at least in classical terms, and the world should sit back and ask itself why. In his book, Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen, David Stubbs notes that the jarring polyphony of Béla Bartók and György Ligeti was used by Stanley Kubrick to illustrate the high horror of his closing scenes in The Shining; how the atonal school of Japanese music gagaku was used by the ad men to soundtrack migrane in headache commercials. His point is that unlike modern art, modern classical music can be highly distressing through its all-absorbing, immersive presence. We can shut our eyes, but we can’t close our ears.

Cage was a polymath who outside modern classical also embraced the fields of music criticism, printmaking and painting. His most identifiable technique was to incorporate the use of chance, or aleatoric devices in the composition of his music. He composed Concerto For Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra in late 1950 using for the first time, dice to determine the outcome of his work. Later he would programme early computers to throw dice for him. The New Yorker critic Alex Ross, in his book The Rest is Noise paints Cage as a skilled publicist who “browsed through the literature of Zen Buddhism which supplied him with an all-accepting, ‘whatever happens will happen’ approach…”        

His supposed “whatever happens will happen” approach is contradicted by his visual work, that I saw flanked by his east London followers in the Waterloo recently. One particularly delineated bow of thread, neat against a mottled page, brought to mind Ted Hughes’ description of Marianne Moore’s conversation: “…a needle / Unresting – darning incessantly / Chain-mail with crewel-work flowers / Birds and fish of the reef / In phosphor-bronze wire”. It is this tension, between the flesh of creation and Cage’s meanness of execution, that can lead us to re-examine Cage’s ‘unassailable’ (as the catalogue boldly refers to him) reputation, through the prism of his drawings.

Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912, but by the 1940s moved to New York and throughout his life there associated with and drew inspiration from visual artists like Pollock, Rothko and Robert Rauschenberg. He would often cross the street to avoid a drunken Pollock on his way through Lower East Side, but would draw a more fruitful association with Rauschenberg. The artist’s plain white canvasses so impressed Cage in 1951 that he decided to create a musical equivalent: 4’33”. This was four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, performed first by pianist David Tudor, who would walk to a piano, open the lid, and sit immobile except for to open and close the lid at the start and end of each movement. There is a work similar to Rauschenberg’s in Cage’s current exhibition: On The Surface [number 22].

The floor was teeming with visitors, all visibly Cage fans – eager for a taste of the legend’s work. The difference, highlighted in Stubbs’ book, between 20^th century art and 20^th classical music is the former’s ability to subsist as ‘an Original’ – ie ‘a Hockney Original’. John Cage died in 1992, and since then no ad originem performance of his music is of course possible. So we are left with the drawings. His colours are much more successful than his thin mean lines – one piece, New River Watercolors, Series I has the taste of washed-out earth sediment in its chicory background and algae trails, to be then revived with a rich marine swoop, and sealed with a light red ring.

The overall feeling of the exhibition is spare and minimalist, with muddled black lines making us think of the hundreds of layers in his Williams Mix, his pioneering experiment with spliced acoustic tape that combined ‘city’, ‘country’ and ‘small’ sounds among many others. He uses pastels in square collages, but even these soft colours have an edge of metal to them, and splinter of the theory that underpinned his every move. 

Interviewed by the American art historian Irving Sandler, Cage said how he felt about the intensity and excitement of Jackson Pollock: “Oh, none of those aspects interested me. I wanted to change my way of seeing, not my way of feeling. I’m perfectly happy about my feelings…I don’t want to disturb my feelings, and above all, I don’t want someone else to disturb my feelings.” It is this thought, this stickler’s adherence to “chaotic” theory, the dice, the Zen, that led Cage to leave undisturbed the biggest chaos of all: his emotional subconscious. This would have been the biggest madness of all, one he wanted to leave undisturbed, while the computer threw dice up above.

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

Long before this Read had shared a flat with Tom Stoppard and Derek Marlowe in Pimlico, and Stoppard once wrote to Read in praise of one of his books: “[It is] written in a a way that I envy; it seems so cool and in control and unflashy, and yet, mysteriously, much more compulsive than more ostentatious and overt skills.”

Speaking to him one is aware that this style is not conscious. Unlike Hemingway’s deliberate economy of prose, Read’s writing merely reflects his personality. Despite his abrupt side parting and roughly-hewn features, Read at first appears a poised figure, speaking in fine, languid tones from his armchair in his shaded study. Slowly his personality reveals itself, honest, warm and rather old school: “Updike is pornography” he says, before revealing that the novel he is working on has “some obscene passages” [shifts awkwardly in armchair], and that he is apprehensive as to how Catholic devotees of his just-out church thriller will take to his next, more saucy offering.   

In his biography of Alec Guinness Read’s lightness of touch is evident; he deals with Guinness’s homosexuality very well, deftly handling a topic that has proved the subject of morbid speculation for previous biographiers. “When Alec’s son was first presented with the idea that Alec was probably a homosexual, he said ‘No it can’t be true’ – but then when I presented him with the evidence he agreed.”  

Guinness’s is Read’s only biography, but his thorough, perceptive style has lent intself to other works of non-fiction – he has written a series of documentaries: Ablaze: The Story of Chernobyl, The Train Robbers [on the Great Train Robbery] and, of course, Alive. “My US publisher called me and said he’d heard about the plane crash story and that he’d pay for a first class return to Montevideo. I thought – this is great – a free ticket – I had no intention of writing the book. All I had read about it was the bit about cannibalism so I thought it was disgusting.

“But then I got chosen over more famous writers, because I was nearer their age, because I was Catholic. I had the advantage that they wanted to unburden themselves about it. They didn’t want to talk to their parents, a priest or an analyst. You had to be a good listener, and not express any disgust or horror when they were telling you what were pretty gruesome details about their ordeal.”

One uniting force during the ordeal was the group’s strong faith – they believed that the consumption of their comrades’ bodies was a form of Holy Communion. Read adds: “They were all from the same class which kept them together I think. If they had come from different classes it would have made things uglier. When they first saw the book they were horrified. They kept saying – you’ve put in all the details – we’ll be stoned in the street! I personally don’t think I would have survived the experience. The weedy intellectuals didn’t do as well as the tough guys, and I was always a weedy intellectual, not a tough guy.”

A list of Read’s correspondents over the years reads like a literati Debrett’s, and he’s not shy about how he used to view society: “You can’t be immune to the values of those around you – those around me were very snobbish. I was very keen to establish myself as an English gentleman. I would imagine myself as Georges Duroy in Bel-Ami by Maupassant, or Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir [both young men set on conquering society]. 

Read’s father was the deeply influential art critic Sir Herbert Read, known as “the apostle of modern art”. He was friends with Henry Moore and Stravinsky ["He is a darling - tiny like the ghost of a flea" wrote Read's mother of the composer] and would give his son frightening advice like: “You may “se débrouiller” so long as you are alone, & don’t get entangled in marriage & children…but it is equivalent to becoming a monk, and there is no compromise.”    

Before duly ignoring his father’s advice by getting himself a wife and four children, Read would hang out with writers and artists of the time – outside Derek Marlowe and Tom Stoppard ["We would never creatively inspire each other" he tells me] was political hack Alexander Cockburn, who he met working at the TLS, John Updike ["A shit" he wrote in a letter - maybe that's where the pornography comment comes from] and Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee ["I’ve been “promising” all my life.  When will I start to achieve?  Perhaps never..." she moans to Read]

It was when researching the Alec Guinness biography that Read began to value how privileged his early life had been. “Writing it I thought how lucky I was to have had such a life, with a father who adored me, a very secure family life, a privileged upbringing. Then there was poor Alec, with his ghastly drunken mother – he was a starving waif when he started out.” Read and Guinness struck up a strong friendship after Read interviewed Guinness for a newspaper: “I was going to have lunch with him but was told very firmly that he would take me out to lunch, and before I could tell him that I admired his acting, he said he’d read my novels and admired them – so he was always in control. He would come and stay at the Connaught in London and had a list of friends and when his other friends were busy he’d call up and invite us to dinner. We’d go to very, very expensive restaurants and have a wonderful evening, sitting and listening to Alec.”

Read is well known as a Catholic author, and has written a history of the Knights Templar as well as various other Catholic-themed novels. His latest book, The Death of a Pope, has been billed the high-brow answer to Dan Brown – the book is all Vatican intrigue and terrorist plots, whilst including some of the major Catholic debates of recent times.

An hour has passed, and Piers Paul Read has stopped speaking into the microphone. Walking back into the impressionist afternoon, an image emerged of a man who in his spare, abstracted way, achieved what baroque flourishes could not – letting the subject speak for itself.

Ushered into a sitting room to wait by her son Tom, who is preparing a “birthday surprise”, I find further clues. Faded Eastern throws, a reminder of her years living in Pakistan, cover sofas, above which hangs a distinctive Dutch painting.

It was this very picture that proved a key reference for Tulip Fever, Moggach’s bestselling novel, inspired by the desire to “walk into a Vermeer painting”. Framed in the sunshine as she walks through the door, I am first struck by how tall Moggach is, before she settles herself on a sofa opposite me, her spring of blonde curls spilling over handsome, serious features.

“I said it off the top of my head,” says Moggach, referring to the Tulip Fever inspiration, tucking her bare feet up under her. “I was sitting on a panel at the cinema in the Empire Leicester Square.” Incredibly, this was the same place where her long-term partner, cartoonist Mel Calman, had died of a heart attack mid-showing four years previously.

“It felt a bit weird. However, a film producer was in the audience and contacted me saying he liked my idea. I walked on the Heath and thought up a plot and ended up writing it as a novel. It was this that caught Spielberg’s eye. He called me from his car, and said that he’s never been so excited by a film. It was going to be this $48million dollar film, to be directed by Shakespeare In Love’s John Madden, starring Jude Law and Keira Knightley.”

And then, as if Gordon Brown didn’t have enough excuses to be unpopular, he closed a film funding tax loophole that effectively axed any chance of the film being made. “We still had 12,000 tulips all ready to flower for one of the film scenes. I had so many spare tulips that I ended up giving away bulbs. Now in people’s gardens all over Hampstead tulips are flowering which are from my film!”

Moggach was nominated for a Bafta for her adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley. “I remember one heady moment with Donald Sutherland on set when he took me by the hand and led me through a ball scene, pointing out all the amazing faces of the extras,” she says.

Moggach turns her hand to both novels and scriptwriting, and has a keen sense for the visual, as well as for intense characterisation. Although she claims to have stopped drawing her inspiration from her life at an early stage, many of her novels seem to have their root in some home truth, such as her latest book In the Dark, a novel charting the war-time romance of a Southwark hostel keeper seduced by the wares of a profiteering butcher. The doomed affair mirrors that of her grandmother, who was born in Keats’ house.

“My grandmother had lost her husband, her brother and 11 cousins to the First World War. Then she was wooed and married by a doctor, and ended up being a very unhappy,” she remembers. “She still remembered horses slithering down Haverstock Hill in the snow and when you would hire a horse and cab for a day to go to the Army & Navy stores.”

It is often said that once rockstars make their millions they lose the inspiration that has made them famous, no longer provoked by the gilded sterility that surrounds them. Moggach, who for decades lived and wrote in the grittier Camden Town, recognizes the shortcomings of writing in Hampstead.

“I like portraying people who are marginalised, lost and washed up in life. In somewhere like Hampstead you are protected like that. The real world isn’t Hampstead. It’s a charmed existence.”

One of her depictions of marginalization came with the toecurling Porky, a tale of incest set, for true grit value, on a pig farm near Heathrow. “My father was really uncomfortable about it,” she laughs. “He said ‘I think it’s really good, but don’t write anything like it again’”.

Moggach seems quite closed when discussing her personal life - and much more game when discussing her novels. She claims not to be affected by the ‘novelist-syndrome’ – of being an interior, thoughtful character, being more comfortable with a simple, analysis-free approach.

Whilst disappointed at not being afforded a deeper delve into her creative process, her passion for all things Hampstead is contagious: “I get all my ideas from swimming in the ponds on the Heath. When you’re submerged the ideas come. The Heath is the distillation of the countryside” she says. “I’m all for development in north London as long as it’s sensitive. However, you can’t keep Hampstead in aspic!”

And with that, Deborah Moggach is gone, off to enjoy her birthday surprise.

César Chávez is the most iconic Mexican figure in American history, a “Ghandi without an India” who created the fist recognised union for Californian farm workers during the second half of the 20th century. In these pages we see Chávez, the “Chicano Moses” at the head of a people people starving in the “golden state” of California. Thanks to his Catholicism, Chávez does not get lost in this irony – he turns his journey of emancipation into an exploration of the beauty of humility and the force of faith.

This book is a spiritual ride through Chávez’s quotes ranging on subjects from poverty and non-violence to fasting and self-sacrifice – all themes that greatly informed his struggle against the Californian labour contractors. The introduction describes the poignant situation of Mexicans in California: an unseated ruling caste who have seen their towns and pride reduced to rubble; untouchables working for “Mexican wages” in a land they used to preside over.

The roots of Chávez’s war-cry Sí Se Puede (famously copied by Barack Obama as his ‘Yes We Can’) are explored in the potted account of his life. We see the makings of the rebel, mirroring the actions of Rosa Parks by refusing to sit on the segregated side aisles of his local theatre. His faith is clear throughout his book: the ideology is as far away from Che Guevara and Sartre as it could be; his Catholic belief in the sanctity of human life made the use of violence intolerable to him, unlike the “ends justifies the means” idea that fired the violent glamour of 60s revolutionaries. “Time accomplishes for the poor what money does for the rich,” he once said.

One thing that Chávez’s words convey is the momentous rhythm of God’s justice. The mechanism of God is seen to work much slower than man’s, is rendered visible by Chávez’s belief that the downtrodden will get their due. We also get a sense of Chávez’s muscular spirituality, an ability to passively exert his will on situations. This is exemplified by his frequent fasting; his first 25-day fast was broken by Bobby Kennedy administering communion to him (pictured above).

However, the problem with this anthology of quotes on selected spiritual subjects is that too often the abstract terms used and their repetitious nature can seem like a monotonous barrage. His most beautiful passages are in the “On the Poor” chapter. At one stage he describes the torture of lettuce picking: “It’s just like being nailed to a cross. You have to walk twisted or stooped over.”

You sense that much of the wisdom of this man, who never went to high school, is a catharsis of his suffering. In this book we see the stubborn beauty of his accomplishment: of effecting a strange reversal of the Fall, giving dignity to those who lived by the sweat of their brow.

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.