Why should an inspirational singer such as the counter-tenor Andreas Scholl be doomed to a smaller specialised following for his lute song CD A

Why should an inspirational singer such as the counter-tenor Andreas Scholl be doomed to a smaller, specialised following for his lute song CD A Musicall Banquet than Sting in similar repertoire? What price hard-won scholarly fidelity to early music performance practice when Sting sweeps the board for singing Dowland with pop inflections and an American accent? Why should there be more of a fuss over Ecce Cor Meum as a new British choral work than, say, James MacMillan’s brand-new Sun-Dogs, or Roxanna Panufnik’s Westminster Mass of 1997?Sour grapes aside, I’m willing to stick out my neck and say that whether or not you like the results, and whether or not it’s fair, both Sting and McCartney have done something worthwhile. Then there’s Gustl, who marries the non-Jewish K?sberger, much given to malapropisms that quickly pass into family legend. The anecdotes are memorable: her grandmother’s single-minded dedication to playing cards means that she refuses to leave a game even when giving birth to her son. What counts are the larger-than-life characters who commandeer the narrative.Essentially, the structure of the book consists of a series of shaggy-dog stories about the outrageous behaviour of the narrator’s family, notably a father who becomes a famous footballer in the 1950s.

For a writer born in Vienna in 1970, this rambling, hilarious, moving debut novel is a remarkable achievement. Eva Menasse could hardly have first-hand experience of the epochal events she describes: one family’s experiences in the Austrian capital from the 1930s to the present. Yet her acumen for diverting (if discursive) Jewish storytelling seems to have arrived fully formed. The shades of other authors do hover behind Vienna: Proust, certainly, with the wry observation of the foibles of a family and a society, and (in the interstices) the broad-canvas depiction of an era. But perhaps a more pertinent echo for English readers would be Anthony Powell’s narrator, Nick Jenkins, in that writer’s sequence of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time.
The young Jewish girl who enthrals us here with the history of her vulnerable father, gambling grandfather and imperious grandmother, could not be more different from Powell’s Oxbridge Englishman, but there is the same refusal to tell us anything significant about the character through whose eyes we observe the sprawling human comedy. Alas, a gremlin had got in the surtitles causing some bad errors. To adopt and adapt a gag by Gertrude Stein, what was flashed up wasn’t literature; nor was it writing Indeed, it was scarcely typing..

And during this bout of tortured lust, the women cry out “Father! Father!”Starting in modern attire, with a detour into icily monumental Elizabethan dress to indicate the way the daughters try to barricade themselves sartorially from their interfering papa, the production finally lays bare the “unaccommodated man” with a kind of reckless delicacy It makes most other Lears look a bit uptight. Suffice it to say that most of the changes are made in the interests of emphasising the warped familial relations caused by neglectful or vicious fatherhood. There is a weird dream-like sequence of episodes in which Dodin alternates between pitch-black darkness for the journey of the blinded Gloucester (Sergei Kuryshev) and coke-snorting Edgar (Danila Kozlovsky), and light that rears on the bastard Edmund rogering Regan and Goneril (separately and two-timingly, of course). I found that the difficult opening scene was too dragged out, though there are fascinating fresh touches The daughters are not smoothly divided into good and evil.

It’s clear that Lear has taken abusive liberties with all three and here Goneril and Regan hug Cordelia supportively when she is banished.Dodin has cut and rearranged certain scenes and it would be wrong to divulge some of his more startling innovations. There’s even a variant of the old gag whereby a free-standing bowler hat manages to cover (look, no hands) the privates of the Fool (Alexei Devotchenko). The mood of the piece is established by the way this zany half-mast-trousered character offers a subversive musical accompaniment on an upright piano whose innards are exposed. And in a magical, uncanny touch the character continues to make his presence felt after he disappears from the text because the piano jerks into autonomous, self-playing music as though his attitude was still registering telekinetically.Petr Semak’s Lear is younger than most and at the start looks and sounds too weary and beyond-it-all to be bothered to rant or put any rhetorical punch into the lines. Then, when he thought about the jumpers from the Golden Gate Bridge, he saw an odd parallel.

“In their own minds, these people must have felt they had a choice either to throw themselves off the bridge or keep living lives that must have felt similar to them to the inferno at the World Trade Centre,” he said “One is a physical thing, the other a psychological one. But the parallel seemed clear to me.”Steel has had his own share of trauma, which has brought him closer than many to difficult questions of life and death. His brother died of cancer at the age of 17, and a year later his sister was killed by a drunk driver. “I didn’t feel suicidal,” he said, “but I never felt it was all that far away. I knew there were people for whom the idea entered their heads and was there all the time. These were not people who felt foreign to me.”That said, something about the Golden Gate Bridge is distinctly unusual.