‘From Today Painting is Dead’

So said the artist Paul Delaroche, but don't panic; he was speaking in 1839 after the invention of the Daguerreotype, an early form of photograph. And he probably didn't say it anyway, but it's often attributed to him, and many at the time might have thought it a likely prediction.

Thankfully, Delaroche was wrong and for the next hundred years or so, painting just got better and better, with artists liberated from the ambition to faithfully provide a visual representation of their subject and instead were able to visually provide a faithful representation of it. In the process of forming an impression of the world in the mind of the viewer, that brief period of nanoseconds during which information is represented as a collection of photons was at last seen in its proper proportion.

More recently, over the past century or so, a similar question could have been asked regarding the potential effect of cinema on the theatre. Cinema would seem to beat theatre hands down with the ability to bring to its viewers anything that can be filmed anywhere on Earth, while the theatre's unworthy scaffold can only show what can be fitted into that small space of the stage. And with CGI and other special effects able to present on the screen not only what is, but whatever can be imagined to be, the contest might seem to be over. The benefit of being just yards away from stage populated by real people can hardly make up for the fact that that is all that they are – real people.

Happily, seeing War Horse at the National Theatre at the weekend proved to me, if I didn't already know it, that the theatre can still present us with experiences than the cinema can never achieve. The unarguable stars of War Horse are two puppet horses, Joey and Topthorn. No effort is made to hide the three puppeteers that operate each animal, and there has been little attempt to add any kind of finishing touches to the puppets – they are simple frameworks of wood and metal, resembling what a Victorian inventor might have come up with in his quest to create an equine robot. Only the creature's ears are finished with enough detail to have an appearance similar to the genuine article, but with the ears, as with every other feature of these wonderful illusions, the trick is not in how they look, but how they move.

To be honest, I haven't made any great study of how real horses move. I know (thanks to Eadweard Muybridge's ingenious application of photography) that they take all four hooves of the ground during a gallop, but this didn't actually come up during the play. The point though is not to represent the horses with indisputable accuracy; it's to make me believe I'm seeing them.

There's a certain irony in both of the film productions of Henry V that they include the Prologue, with the lines:

"Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them."

and then go on to actually show us horses, somewhat beating the point. War Horse does a little more than talk of horses, but we most certainly see them. What is more, despite the fact that the horses do nothing even faintly supernatural – they do not talk, nor lead their masters to a little boy trapped down a mine – they are as present as characters as any human on the stage. The original novel (which I haven't read, but will) is written from the horse Joey's point of view and so naturally he will be seen as a character in his own right, but since a play cannot in the same way have a point of view (and War Horse does not even try) it would be easy to lose this vital personality. (In a similar way, Bertie Wooster rarely comes across as well in dramatizations as he does in the books where he is there narrator of his own adventures.) Thus it is a glorious achievement that, without a single word, it is the horses that make the show.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to see another play, again at the National, which relied on puppetry: the two part dramatization of His Dark Materials (which I'll be seeing again in a few weeks at the Birmingham Rep). In this case it's possible to make a direct comparison with the cinematic equivalent in the form of The Golden Compass. While the film may have been able to do better in terms of the spectacle, it is the daemons which make the story, and here, as more recently in War Horse, the theatre excelled. But compared to either, what's going on in my head when I'm reading the novel wins without contest. Again, the Prologue of Henry V explains it all:

"And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginative forces work."

Whether we're talking about painting, theatre, cinema or literature, the purpose of art is to inspire our imaginations, not supplant them.

And I forgot to mention the unsung star of War Horse – a remarkably convincing farmyard goose.

War Horse has moved from the National Theatre to the New London Theatre, where it opens on March 28^th.
His Dark Materials runs at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre until April 18^th.

First as Farce, Second as Tragedy.

I can already hear your cries of outrage at my misquoting Marx, so let us move on to a slightly more influential Victorian philosopher.

'When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.'

Humpty Dumpty made this announcement, so Lewis Carroll records, in a rather scornful tone, and although I have only seen it print, rather than heard him speak, I would suspect that Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, used a similarly scornful tone when he came up with a phrase that meant just what he chose it to mean when he raised the spectre of 'passive drinking'.

It's a chilling phrase, and we all know enough about passive smoking to realize that the vaporous fumes that invade our nostrils, our lungs, our very beings are just as insidious if they are effervescing their way out of Auntie Edna's milk stout as they ever were wafting across the room from the tip of her Capstan Full Strength.

But, hang on a second – what do these terms really mean?

Passive Smoking (from Wikipedia, pending the Chief Medical Officer's anonymous edit):

'Passive smoking is the involuntary inhalation of smoke, called second-hand smoke or environmental tobacco smoke, from tobacco products. It occurs when tobacco smoke permeates any environment, causing its inhalation by people within that environment. Scientific evidence shows that exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke causes disease, disability, and death.'

Passive Drinking (from Liam Donaldson himself):

'England has a drink problem and the whole of society bears the burden. The quality of life of families and in cities and towns up and down the country is being eroded by the effects of excessive drinking.'

It may well be a problem, but it's not really quite the same as passive smoking, except in terms of the structure of the phrase, which is all that Donaldson is concerned with, being nowadays more of a politician than a doctor. On the upside, it does open a new vista of similar phrases. A pedestrian knocked down by a car becomes a victim of 'passive driving'; when you step in something nasty on the pavement, it turns out that you are actually indulging in 'passive dog-walking'. These are both genuine problems, but they don't need silly new phrases to describe them.

Now I have to declare an interest here, being a member of that sadly neglected subgroup in society, the well-heeled functional alcoholic, and as such I have some sympathy with Liam Donaldson's proposals for a minimum alcohol price of fifty pence per unit. It's unlikely to have an impact on the price of any but the rankest of clarets, and might actually do something to shorten the queue in Threshers at 10.55 of a Friday evening. While the Conservatives may argue that it is unfair for us all to bear the costs of an irresponsible few, the fact is that we do so anyway through the cost to the NHS in dealing with alcohol related diseases. While I can see some value in the Tories implicit case that the NHS should not treat self-inflicted ailments, I suspect I would one day find myself hoist on my own petard if I supported it.

But whatever the merits of the case, it does not deserve this ridiculous abasement of language, particularly from someone whose role is supposed to me as an impartial government advisor. There is no such thing as passive drinking. Standing next to me when I'm supping on a pint does not make you less able to drive, more prone to liver disease, less prone to heart disease or more attractive to women. It may mean that you have to give me a lift home, roll me out of the car and nod indulgently when I tell you I love you, but there still not one drop of alcohol in your body. The tragedy is that Liam Donaldson is so close to the government that he imbibed deeply of their propagandist style of talking – a case of passive spinning if ever there was one.

But enough of tragedy, what of farce, to return to my reversal of Karl Marx's observation.

It must be fifteen years or more since I regularly read Viz comic since it's not, as it admitted itself even back then, as funny as it used to be. And I do remember one strip called Modern Parents and one particular episode in which the eponymous parents, their newborn dangling in a pouch around the father's neck, walk past a pub where a man is sitting outside drinking a pint and smoking a cigarette.

In horror, the modern father stubs out the cigarette, complaining of effects of passive smoking on their child. The man apologizes, but then the father notices the pint, picks it up and tips it in the gutter. As the drinker complains, the father utters the phrase which somehow became lodged in Liam Donaldson's mind, to be regurgitated years later.

'Haven't you ever heard of passive drinking?'

It was funny at the time.