How clever of Hilary Mantel to write a 900-page novel to help us through the end times. How stupid of me to fall asleep in the bath while reading it. Maybe you’re in the same predicament. While we wait for our copies to dry in the proverbial airing cupboard, here are some other ideas to stop you becoming, during this testing period, what the Russians call ni kulturni (uncultured yahoos).
An opera epic
New York’s Metropolitan Opera is streaming, free, an opera a night until they run out of material or humanity is reduced to feasting on its own brains, whichever happens first. From Monday until Sunday 29 March, it’s Wagner week – incluing, from Tuesday to Friday, the whole Der Ring Des Nibelungen tetralogy from the Met’s 2010 to 2012 productions, starring Wendy Bryn Harmer, Deborah Voigt, Eva-Maria Westbroek, Stephanie Blythe, Jonas Kaufmann, Bryn Terfel and Hans-Peter König.
At home with Neil Young
If, like me, you yearn to know how self-isolating star Neil Young is holding up at this difficult time, you won’t have to wait too long. On his elegant website, the NYA Times-Contrarian, Young promises that soon he will be streaming from his fireside. It will be “a down-home production, a few songs, a little time together”. He will be flanked by sleeping dogs and filmed by his wife, Daryl Hannah, as he tears into Cortez the Killer.
Kusama from your sofa
Art Basel just opened its Online Viewing Rooms offering publicly accessible, timed, online exhibitions from 233 participating galleries. Works you can experience, albeit virtually, include a Yayoi Kusama infinity mirrored room, Life Shines On (2019), and Philippe Parreno’s My Room Is Another Fish Bowl (2016), an installation of 150 fish-shaped Mylar balloons that float gently through a glass-enclosed pavilion in response to human interaction and atmospheric changes.
A Game of Thrones star treads the boards
While we’re self-isolating, Hampstead theatre is very astutely streaming on Instagram its 2018 production of I and You, whose protagonist, Caroline, is housebound through illness and reliant on social media and the internet. Played by Game of Thrones’ sword-wielding star Maisie Williams, Caroline’s story speaks to me and perhaps you: she’s mad at the world and loves only her cat, ice-cream and glitter. Her solitude is rudely interrupted by classmate Anthony (Zach Wyatt) who invites himself in and, as Michael Billington put it in his review, “breaks through her defences with the aid of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass”. Which never worked for me.
Online laughs
Sophie Duker is not only host of the Wacky Racists comedy club but also a black pansexual living in post-Brexit Britain, a comic whose managers reckon she tells jokes “with the confidence of a cis straight middle-class white man”. Sadly, her live shows this spring have been nixed. So, instead, we must bask in her wonderfulness online. Try some of her best bits, such as The Funny Thing About Privilege or I Accidentally Put Chilli in My Vagina.
Crowdsourced improv
After their sell-out run of Showstoper! at the Lyric theatre in London’s West End was cancelled last week, the Olivier Award-winning improv group the Showstoppers decided to stream a show on Facebook Live. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram users suggested possible settings and plot twists. The result was – for one night only – a 45-minute Scottish musical called Haggis! (their exclamation mark) performed in an empty theatre. Watch it online now. It’s very silly and will cheer you up.
Titian does social distancing
In one of art’s earliest depictions of social distancing, Titian’s Noli Me Tangere (1514), the resurrected Jesus swerves the outstretched hands of Mary Magdalen even though, quite possibly, she has just washed them for 20 seconds. Paralleling Jesus, who did not want his followers to cling to his physical presence, the closed National Gallery in London has ascended into cyberspace by means of a Google virtual tour. Many of its masterpieces – including works by Titian, Veronese and Holbein – can now be enjoyed in perfect self-isolation.
Yungblud’s culinary concert
Yungblud, the 22-year-old Doncaster rock star (real name Dominic Richard Harrison), has been forced to cancel live gigs because of the coronavirus pandemic, but that won’t stop him getting his music to his fans. “Get on your bed, your kitchen table, your couch – and jump!,” he shouts from an eerily empty theatre during his new online gig before his band kick into another raucous ditty. Welcome to The Yungblud Show, a live-streamed gig that also features likable oddball rock’n’roll approximations of Saturday Morning Kitchen such as Yungblud swigging vodka from the bottle before testing a Flamin’ Hot Cheetos pancake. “Let me see your hands in the air! In your bedroom!,” he exhorts his virtual followers. How does he see those hands? I’ve no idea. It’s rock’n’roll, just not as we knew it.
Matthew Kelly takes on Alan Bennett
Eastbourne’s loss is the world’s gain. The Original Theatre Company’s production of Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art, starring Matthew Kelly as WH Auden and David Yelland as Benjamin Britten, was due to start a tour at the Devonshire Park theatre last week. After the theatre was closed, the cast filmed a performance that will soon be available online. The production was given fives stars by the Observer in 2017, with critic Clare Brennan arguing: “The result is a take on life, sexuality, death and everything, that is witty, moving, laugh-aloud funny and understatedly profound.” Which is more than you can say for The Grand Tour.
Celestial sounds
The superb Celeste’s British tour has been cancelled because of the pandemic. But there are compensations. She has created a live-streamed gig from what looks like her bedroom. Celeste (full name Celeste Epiphany Waite) is the BBC’s Sound of 2020 winner and the soul singer behind such quietly devastating songs as Strange, Father’s Son and Coco Blood. The impromptu gig on Instagram is part of the World Health Organisation’s Together, At Home virtual concert series that also features John Legend, One Direction’s Niall Horan and Coldplay’s Chris Martin.
Mark Thomas’s fundraising comedy
Is laughter the best medicine right now? No, medicine is the best medicine. But comedy can help. Comedian Mark Thomas is offering online access to a live virtual gig to fundraise for food banks. To see his show, called Check Up: Our NHS at 70, you make a donation to the the Trussell Trust – a charity that runs a network of 12 food banks. Once you’ve done so, you will be able to download the final performance of the show, which Thomas performed in Wakefield, along with interviews he did with NHS workers. The premise was that the approximate UK national average life expectancy is 84. So, if Thomas makes it to 84, the NHS will be 100 – but which will be in the better shape? The question prompted Thomas to go on a journey through the NHS, witnessing stomach surgery and visiting renal units and dementia care before reflecting on his own and socialised medicine’s mortality. But, you know, with laughs.
New films from your sofa
As long as you’re prepared to pay £15.99 to Amazon for the privilege for each film, you can now watch a few recent cinema releases at home. Jeff Bezos’s drones call this service their “early access” facility. Movies available include the latest big-screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, and Hilary Swank in The Hunt, which the Observer’s critic Simran Hans found to be a silly satire sending up “smug, bourgeois liberals complaining about climate change, all the while humanising their gun-toting conservative counterparts”. Most promising of these releases is The Invisible Man in which Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) is pursued by her invisible, abusive ex. As Hans pus it in her four-star review, this take on HG Wells’s story has a Hitchockian twist and reveals “the way women’s concerns are so often rendered invisible”.
The Beeb’s quarantine culture
The BBC is launching a service called Culture in Quarantine, by means of which shows including Emma Rice’s Wise Children, which was first shown at the Old Vic, and Mike Bartlett’s Albion – filmed at the Almeida – will be broadcast. The idea is that, while theatres are closed, “new theatre and dance performances will join with modern classics to create a repertory theatre of broadcast”, according to BBC arts director Jonty Claypole. The launch date for this service is yet to be disclosed.
Have the Sistine Chapel ceiling to yourself
One of the great pleasures of virtual art tours is that not only do you save on air fare, entrance fees and queuing time, but you can explore empty galleries in your own time without getting elbowed or having your backpack checked by security. One of the best such tours is the Vatican Museums’. Swivel upwards in the Sistine Chapel to see Michelangelo’s Adam and Eve being shown out of the Garden of Eden in shame. Then head over to the Raphael Rooms. Not another soul in sight. Bliss.
Coronavirus theatre club
The Coronavirus Theatre Club goes live on 29 March. It comprises Samantha Neale, Brian Lonsdale and Michael Blair, a group of actors from north-east England who are trying to create work during the epidemic by linking up actors with writers to live-stream monologues and short scenes. Fingers crossed, the results will be terrific.
Learn ballet with Tamara Rojo
Roll up the rug, kick off your shoes, push the furniture against the wall and try not to pirouette into the dog or smack your dance partner in the face with a flailing arm. The fabulous Tamara Rojo, artistic director of the English National Ballet, as well as a lead principal dancer. is offering streamed ballet classes on Facebook. The safe money says she’ll not only be getting quarantined Brits en pointe and fitter than ever, but also making her Dennis the Menace-style red-and-black-striped legwarmers must-haves this season.
Biss v Beethoven
Jonathan Biss plays Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas from the empty concert hall of the 92nd Street Y in New York on 26 March. I’m looking forward to Op 111 as a whole, but especially the boogie woogie moments that pre-dated Jools Holland by the best part of two centuries.
Phillipson’s cherry on top
Heather Phillipson has spent the past couple of years working on her sculpture for the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square, only to have this month’s unveiling postponed. Bask in her multimedia work in another way, starting with Almost Gone on BBC Sounds, billed as a “a deranged sonic landscape, addressing the Earth as an eruption, on the verge of termination”. It’s the perfect soundtrack to our times. Then try her poetry, say, Relational Epistemology and virtually tour her recent Age of Love installation at the Baltic in Gateshead. By the time you’ve got through that lot, it’ll probably be time to come out of our bunkers, wander down to Trafalgar Square and see what she has in store for us on the fourth plinth. Appropriately, it’s called The End.
