Draw a shadow, hammer a nail - and weep

Lessons from the masters - and Yoko Ono

One of the joys of being back in London full time is the access to art. Or perhaps I should say the theoretical access to art.

I have certainly handled a lot of paint brushes in the past few months. I have flipped, squeezed and rinsed a lot of rollers. I have sloshed matt emulsion on walls. I have slapped layer after layer of Satinwood on faux-mahogany doors. I have knocked over cans of paint. (Don’t ask. Anthony dropped a lasagne on our incredibly expensive new hall carpet, so let’s just say we’re quits.)

I wish I could say I have, like Michelangelo, been chipping away to release the angel from the marble. Nothing so grand, I’m afraid. We have just been trying to turn a rather shabby Victorian house into something that doesn’t feel quite so 1984. We are, in fits and bursts and with quite a lot of bickering, getting there. We are creating a home that will, I hope, also be a place to welcome the people closest to our hearts. There will be slapdash cooking, there will be wine, there will be conversation and there will be love. It’s a big creative project, but I’m not sure you could call it art.

And so last week it was a joy to get out of the house and see – and hear - some actual art.

It started with Bach. Steven Isserlis, one of the world’s greatest cellists, had very kindly invited me to hear him talk about, and perform extracts from, the Bach cello suites. Steven and I have been in email touch since my column-writing days at The Independent. He was a guest on my podcast. (It was a fascinating conversation, which you can listen to here.) He knows how much I love the cello suites. He also knew that I would be extremely excited by his fellow guest, Dame Janet Suzman.

Janet Suzman is one of the great Shakespearean actors of our time. In 1971, she played the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna in Franklin J Schaffner’s film Nicholas and Alexandra. I don’t know if it was this film that ignited my sister Caroline’s love of, and near obsession with, the Russian royal family or if Caroline watched it because that love had already been ignited. I do know that she watched it many, many times. I have her VHS video of it and many of her books about the Romanovs. I also have the book she herself wrote and had printed about the Russian royal family.

Sadly, I don’t have the signed photo of Janet Suzman she used to have in a frame on her bookshelf. But somewhere, in a box of photos culled from the albums I threw out, there’s a photo of her and Janet Suzman at the stage door of the Yvonne Arnaud theatre in Guildford. She had been in a production of The Three Sisters. She was wearing a pink dressing gown. Caroline was wearing a red jacket. Her smile is like the sun coming out.

Steven Isserlis knew about Caroline’s love of Janet Suzman (and of the Russian royal family) because he has read my family memoir, Outside, the Sky is Blue. He knew that we buried my sister to Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze”. He knew that I buried my brother to Bach’s “Sleep Well and Stay in God’s Safe Keeping”, from the St John Passion. He didn’t know that I had played (as in tapped Spotify not as in suddenly training as a world-class cellist) the Bach cello suites at my book launch, which was two years ago on Saturday. And no, I will never forget the date because it was the day that the man who thinks he is a Tsar invaded Ukraine.

The event was at the JW3 centre in Finchley Road. I was searched as I went in because Jews don’t feel safe anywhere since the massacre in Israel on 7^th October last year and neither do many Muslims after the Israeli response. Who ever thought, after Glasnost, that we would live through a time when there was war in Europe and in the Middle East? Tsars, of course, built their empires through wars. The borders of many countries have been created by wars. Perhaps those of us who thought the world had learnt from the wars of the twentieth century were just naïve.

When I heard Steven play extracts from Bach’s cello suites, and heard Janet Suzman read from Steven’s book about them, I had to fight not to cry. I thought of my sister, and of how she would have felt to be sitting in the same room as her heroine. I thought of my father and of how Bach, for him, was number one. I thought of my brother who would, at the end of a hard day mowing lawns or clearing weeds, pour himself a glass of red wine, light one of the four cigarettes he allowed himself a day, lie down on the sofa and listen to Aretha Franklin or Schubert. I thought of my mother, and the Open University degree in “The Enlightenment” she had done while also teaching full time, running a household and cooking meals for five.

And I thought of Bach, whose first wife, Maria, died suddenly at the age of 36, and who lost 12 of his twenty children before the age of three. Bach lived through the Great Northern War, led by Putin’s role model Peter “the Great” against the Swedish Empire.

When you’re in a room with one of the world’s best cellists playing the work of one the greatest composers who has ever lived, and with one of the world’s best actors who has played characters created by the greatest playwright, you feel something that’s quite hard to describe. I think you could perhaps call it repose. It’s the feeling you get when you know that you are not alone. Someone has been here before, someone who could dive as deep as it's possible to go, and captured the anguish, the despair, the hope and the joy.

Five days later, I went to Tate Modern to see “Music of the Mind”, the new exhibition by Yoko Ono. There she was, on film, having her clothes cut off. There she was, in a photograph, selling fragments of glass from a broken bottle on the roof of her West Village apartment and labelling them as mornings of the future and past. The show was mainly made up of instructions: to draw a shadow, hammer a nail, writhe around in a bag etc. Some of these instructions were fun to follow. The Japanese woman who asked me to draw her shadow looked thrilled when I did. I passed on the nail-banging since there’s so much of it at home.

There was a film of bottoms – fat bottoms, skinny bottoms, hairy bottoms and smooth bottoms – which was also apparently a “petition for peace”. Oko is often described as a “peace activist” as well as a multimedia artist, singer and songwriter. She and her husband staged “bed-ins” and urged the world to “Give Peace a Chance”. It would be lovely if films of hairy bottoms and lying in bed yelling for peace stopped people like Putin, Hamas and Netanyahu from slaughtering innocent people, but the evidence base, unfortunately, isn’t strong.

I quite liked the show. It looked as if the process of creating this art, if it is art, was fun. I was in awe of Ono’s confidence and admired her playful brain. She’s brazen. She’s witty. She clearly wanted to reach for the stars - and married one. But what seemed strangely absent from the whole thing was the human heart.

Bach was a genius. Shakespeare was a genius. Most of us don’t aspire to be either. But Steven Isserlis and Janet Suzman are among the best at what they do because they understand their art and they have put in the graft. This kind of work comes out of a desire to go deeper and deeper in the attempt to understand. It’s not about gimmicks or the desire for fame.

You can have the quick, slick and fine or the slow, hard and often painful, with the potential to be great. I really, really wish you could have the quick and great, but you can’t.

After the event at the JW3 centre, Steven kindly invited me to join him, Dame Janet and the organisers for a Chinese meal. Afterwards, I was desperate to tell Caroline that I’d had a Chinese meal with Janet Suzman. We had noodles, I’d say, and I told her all about you!

I can’t tell Caroline, of course, so I’m telling you instead.

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Soul Music

Continuing the theme, I’ll be joining award-winning violinist Fenella Humphreys at Lauderdale House in Highgate on Thursday 21^st March at 7pm for an evening of words and music exploring endings and beginnings. The aim is to “explore great works of the violin repertoire and the human spirit to create hope and resilience out of adversity”. I will not be whipping out a violin, but I will certainly supply some words.

The event has been organised by classical music supremo Nicky Thomas, who, among other things, is on the board of the music charity Polyphony based in Nazareth which brings together Jewish and Arab musicians.

For more details of the event, and to book tickets, click here.