Saturday Review - 08/08/2009

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by writers Louise Doughty and Bidisha and literary critic John Carey to discuss the cultural highlights of the week, featuring a shipwrecked king, two imposters and a singing building. Euripides's play Helen begins with the premise that the face that launched a thousand ships was that of a mischievous doppelganger and that Helen herself was spirited away to Egypt by the gods. In Frank McGuinness's version of the play at Shakespeare's Globe, Paul McGann's Menelaus gets a shock when he is shipwrecked on the coast of Egypt and bumps into his wife Helen, played by Penny Downie, who he thought he had just rescued from Troy. Can they escape before Theoclymenes, King of Egypt and hater of Greeks, kills Menelaus and marries Helen? Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno had their first outing as The Yes Men in 2003's eponymous film. Now they return in The Yes Men Fix The World with the same modus operandi: passing themselves off as representatives of global corporations and powerful agencies while pulling off stunts to expose the misdeeds of the powerful. The most notorious hoax in this film involved Andy posing as a spokesman for Dow and announcing to the media that they were going to provide full compensation for the victims of the Bhopal chemical disaster. Lawrence Weschler is a writer who likes collecting what he calls convergences, correspondences he notices between images and structures in art and nature. He has collected a selection of these in his book Everthing That Rises: A Book of Convergences, in which, for instance, a photograph of a Venezuelan landscape reminds him of Velasquez's Venus and Cupid and also of Man Ray's A l'Heure de l'Observatoire: les Amoureux, which combine to bring him on to Chagall's Nu au-dessus de Vitebsk. David Byrne has turned the Roundhouse in London into an unlikely musical instrument with his installation Playing The Building. A small 19th-century organ at the centre of a web of cables and tubes coaxes a range of sounds from the surrounding structure by hitting, rubbing and blowing air over parts of it. All visitors are encouraged to see what happens when they strike the keys. Absolutely no musical experience required. When the death of John Updike was announced at the beginning of 2009, his status as a major voice in post-war American literature seemed assured. However, in our occasional series of counterblasts against cultural landmarks, guest reviewer Louise Doughty puts forward the case that Updike is, in fact, massively overrated as a writer.