Afternoon:
14°c
Burnt By the Sun at the National is a play I venture to with trepidation. Nikita Mikhailov's film (made under Yeltsin) is a classic reckoning with the past: a mixture of revenge tragedy, bleak comedy and Chekhovian saga of a fateful day in a countryside dacha on the eve of Stalin's great purge.
Peter Flannery could have gone awry here: but he gets the hum of fear that pulses through societies characterised by repression. That and the absolute terror that lurks behind the jokes, relationships and absurdities of everyday life.
The critics are impressed: including Tim Walker in The Sunday Telegraph, who added that there are lessons for all of us fighting an overbearing state here in Blighty. Hmm. It is similarly fashionable to compare civil liberties infringements in Britain with the Stasi: another comparison that gets the wrong end of a very important stick.
Dictatorships do not contain the possibility of change, unless it is at the whim of the person in charge. The characters in Burnt by the Sun are trapped like flies under glass, because the only real power in the land is dependent on Stalin's untrammelled whim. He would not have been defeated on a 42-day anti-detention vote, nor been prodded — as David Miliband rightly is — to clarify Britain's complicity on the treatment of terror suspects. Civil libertarians are absolutely right to keep a stern eye on what our powers-that-be are up to. But don't stoop to stretched comparisons with police states: it muddies memories we need to preserve and cheapens the argument all round.
* So Enid Blyton — who never really goes away — is back again, this time in the luscious form of Helena Bonham Carter. Closet Blytonophiles are leaping out of the wardrobe to celebrate. We know we shouldn't: what with those class prejudices about rough boys, boarding-school stories and some very dodgy views on golliwogs. But an illicit hour or two back in Malory Towers never did anyone much harm.
As for the Island of Adventure story, it's perfectly obvious that mysterious secret-service Jack would these days have been embroiled in scandal about rendition. Times change: Enid never does. That's why it works.
* Marianne Faithfull, below, has made snippy comments about the “vampirical” Kate Moss. How dare she, when adulation of Ms Moss is a great given of the age? Once immune from Faithfull worship, I have succumbed on seeing an imperfectly preserved 63-year-old take on a style icon three decades younger than herself without body armour. “She is very clever but she isn't at all educated,” adds Ms Faithfull. Precision insults are a joy to behold: if not to receive.
