Most women going through menopause are not being given proper treatment, leaving millions to suffer in silence, a major review suggests.

Just 15 percent of women get effective drugs or therapies, and misinformation leads many to go down the route of unproven natural remedies, according to the review, which analyzed over 200 studies going back 70 years.

While only around a third of middle-aged women suffer noticeable menopause, the review said that many more go through silent changes in the body, such as loss of bone density that leaves them vulnerable to chronic disease down the line.

The study, conducted by researchers in the US, Italy, and Australia, found popular treatments like acupuncture and herbal supplements either just slightly improved menopause symptoms or didn’t work at all. 

And antidepressants, which are commonly prescribed for hallmark symptoms like hot flashes, may alleviate symptoms but come with a host of side effects that may add to women’s misery, including nausea, sexual dysfunction, and high blood pressure. 

‘The road to menopause is not difficult for all, but for some, symptoms may be severe or even disabling and disruptive to work and family,’ the study authors wrote. 

‘Recognition that menopause, for most women, is a natural biological event, does not exempt the use of interventions to alleviate symptoms.

‘Despite decades of research pertaining to menopause, more work is needed.’

Without effective, evidence-based treatment, the researchers cautioned menopausal women are left vulnerable to long-term ‘silent’ health consequences like bone loss, diabetes, and heart disease.

The review looked at more than 200 sources spanning 71 years to collect data on current menopause knowledge. 

They examined the effects of prescription drugs and homeopathic remedies, such as herbal treatments and acupuncture, on common side effects like hot flashes and night sweats.

They found ‘acupuncture appears no more effective than placebo,’ and herbal treatments only resulted in improvements in small, uncontrolled studies, so the evidence there is inconclusive.

However, cognitive-behavioral therapy did lead to some small improvements and boosted sleep and mood.  

Additionally, the study, published Wednesday in the journal Cell, evaluated the effects of several selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which are typically used to treat depression, on reducing hot flashes and night sweats. 

The researchers found SSRIs like citalopram, fluoxetine, and paroxetine reduced these symptoms by 25 to 70 percent.

However, patients who took these medications experienced a host of uncomfortable side effects, including nausea, insomnia, dry mouth, sexual dysfunction, headache, high blood pressure, constipation, and dizziness. 

Based on their findings, the team called for more individualized treatment approaches rather than recommending the same treatments to every woman.

‘Women with bothersome menopausal symptoms should be counseled on treatment options and offered evidence-based therapies,’ researchers wrote.

‘Therapy should be individualized depending on age and health risks, recognizing that health risks may increase with age.’

Menopause is a normal part of aging that occurs because the ovaries stop producing eggs. As a result, levels of the hormones that ovaries produce drop.

A hallmark sign of menopause is that affected women stop getting their period.  

Nearly nine in 10 women experience symptoms of menopause, including hot flashes, night sweats, changes in mood, sleep disturbances and cognitive difficulties, such as anxiety and low self-esteem, as well as memory or concentration problems.

Other signs include sexual issues, bladder problems and dryness of the vagina.

Symptoms usually arise before menopause officially begins, during a period called perimenopause. During this time, women’s periods become irregular, hot flashes start, and fertility decreases.

For some, this only lasts a few months, but it can stretch as long as four to eight years. 

The average age of onset for menopause in the US is 51. Those who undergo it between the ages of 40 and 45 have what doctors call ‘early menopause.’ 

After menopause, women enter post-menopause. This is when a woman hasn’t had a period in over a year, and symptoms like hot flashes, vaginal dryness, and changes in sex drive continue. 

This lasts for the rest of a woman’s life.  

The researchers noted doctors should focus on preventing and treating the ‘silent’ health consequences menopausal women are prone to, including osteoporosis, diabetes, and heart disease.

‘Comprehensive care of postmenopausal women involves lifestyle optimization,’ they wrote.

‘This includes optimizing nutrition, avoiding being sedentary and increasing physical activity, adding strength and resistance exercise or training, getting adequate sleep, reducing stress, decreasing alcohol consumption, and avoiding smoking.’ 

They also suggested menopause be characterized by ovarian function stopping rather than no longer having a menstrual cycle. 

This is because many women who are not menopausal stop having a menstrual cycle due to certain birth control or procedures like a hysterectomy. 

These approaches, the team argued, could help improve women’s long-term health.

Researchers added: ‘Optimizing health at menopause is the gateway to healthy aging for women.’

Supreme Court will hear Republicans’ bid to increase state authority over election laws in case with massive implications for 2024

• The case, Moore v. Harper, deals with North Carolina’s Congressional map
• Multiple state courts have struck down the Republican legislature’s redistricting proposal, which would give their party control over 11 of 14 House seats
• The GOP is arguing that striking down the map is a violation of a Constitutional provision that gives legislatures unilateral authority over state election laws 
• It’s a legal theory known as Independent State Legislature Doctrine
• The Supreme Court has struck down arguments using the theory in the past
• It has the potential to boost the power of Republican-led legislatures in battleground states like Michigan ahead of the next presidential race

By Elizabeth Elkind, Politics Reporter For Dailymail.Com

Published: 16:31 EDT, 30 June 2022 | Updated: 17:23 EDT, 30 June 2022

Growing pains that will make your heart bleed

By Georgina Brown

Published: 10:53 EDT, 10 September 2012 | Updated: 11:01 EDT, 10 September 2012

Jumpy (Duke of York’s Theatre)                                            

Rating:

Tamsin Greig’s Hilary has hit 50 and she’s feeling battered. She arrives home, weighed down by her groceries in hessian bags-for-life, but more  so by misery and weariness. She pours herself a glass of wine and empties it before removing her coat.

April De Angelis’s piercingly funny, middle-class family drama is about growing old and growing up. First seen last year at the Royal Court, Jumpy now has a hugely deserved encore at the Duke of York’s.

Not only does it dare to mention  the word menopause (Hilary’s mutinous daughter, Tilly, calls it the ‘mentalpause’) but brings the jagged relationship between a menopausal mother and her teenage daughter into sharp focus.

Beleaguered, besieged Hilary is barely off-stage throughout the play and Greig’s performance couldn’t be better, articulating as much in her non-verbal gestures – the slump of her shoulders, the clutching at her face, the spilling tears – as in her words.

Hilary’s worthy-sounding job, helping troubled adolescents to read, is threatened by cuts; her marriage to Mark is just about held together by habit (he runs a blinds company and business is sagging, which says it all). He refuses to  stand up to grunting, glowering, door-slamming 15-year-old Tilly, forcing Hilary to be the one to nag about homework and curfew times.

In a vain attempt to contain a situation that she lost control of long ago,  Hilary insists that Tilly’s boyfriend stays at their house. Alas, it doesn’t prevent Tilly getting pregnant.

Tilly, horribly well played by  a pouting, baby-faced Bel Powley,  in towering heels and a micro-mini dress, puts her fingers in her ears when her mum says the words ‘contraception’ or ‘revision’ and rarely takes her eyes off her mobile phone. She hasn’t a clue what Greenham Common or feminism mean to her mother  and couldn’t care less. As her mother says, the only thing applied with any diligence by Tilly is eyeliner.

Patient, understanding Hilary finally flips: ‘Can’t you keep your ****ing knickers on? You disgust me.’

The play is far from perfect. Some of the scenes of broader comedy feel like set pieces: in particular, Hilary’s friend Frances’s effort to kick-start her love-life and her career as a burlesque dancer, for which Doon Mackichan, in fishnets and a leather corset, does a demonstration on the deck of Hilary’s holiday house in Norfolk. It’s met by the mute, stunned embarrassment of Hilary, Mark, Tilly and boyfriend Josh – and the unrestrained hilarity of the audience.

While the female characters  are superbly observed and richly drawn, the men are outlines, though it’s impossible not to enjoy the boyfriend’s randy, philandering flake  of a dad, an actor who fancies himself rotten and imagines everyone else does too. Nina Raine’s punchy production gets away with it because you can’t take your eyes off Greig, who doesn’t merely strike a hundred nerves, but makes your heart bleed.

‘It’s never easy being a parent, especially daughters,’ says Ken in Alan Ayckbourn’s psychological thriller Haunting Julia from 1994 –  another play about parenting, though this time from the father’s perspective. It’s also about letting  go of the past. But the biggest issue  is the burden of creative genius. Is  it a blessing or a curse?

Working-class Yorkshireman Joe  (a convincingly haunted Duncan Preston) was baffled by his daughter Julia’s musical gift, not least because he’s tone deaf and Dolly, her mother, only really liked flamenco. But he is much more bewildered by Julia’s suicide at the age of 19, when, as far as he could see, she had her whole life stretching ahead of her.

He’s converted the bedroom where she lived and died into a sort of shrine and study centre for the  child prodigy the press called ‘Little Miss Mozart’ but who described herself as a ‘freak in cotton-wool’.

And it is here that he brings Julia’s ex-boyfriend, a rather reluctant and resistant Andy (Joe McFadden from Casualty), and mortuary assistant Ken (a pony-tailed, lisping, oddball Richard O’Callaghan), who claims  to have a talent for ‘tuning in to certain vibrations’.

Ken’s an unsettling guy and  possibly a charlatan, but much more disturbing is the fact  that Julia, though dead, seems spookily present.
We hear ghostly laughter and tears. A light appears under  a door. Twice, I almost jumped out of my skin.

What makes the play absorbing is the fact that all three  men, little by little, reveal  the guilt they feel in relation to Julia’s death. It’s J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls meets Susan Hill’s  The Woman In Black.

Or might be if it were cut  by half an hour – there is far too much talk and too little tension – and played without an interval, as Ayckbourn intended. Then a mildly chilling play might make your blood freeze.

Victorians let their hair down: Pre- Raphaelites released at Tate Britain

By Philip Hensher

Published: 11:01 EDT, 8 October 2012 | Updated: 11:26 EDT, 8 October 2012

Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde at the Tate Britain. Until January 13

Rating:

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were an extraordinary bunch. They took their place in a Europe-wide movement to simplify painting, to return it to plainness, moral purity and a direct appeal to the senses.

Outrageous stories circulated around  the members of the Brotherhood (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Millais and William Holman Hunt) after its foundation in 1848.

Their work, and that of the painters who followed in their footsteps, later fell sharply out of fashion. But in recent years a huge enthusiasm has sprung up for them. The Tate exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, featuring some of their most striking and impressive paintings, is a certain crowd-puller.

There was something absurd as well  as extravagant about the Brotherhood. Rossetti had his unpublished poems  buried with his wife Lizzie Siddal; later, he decided they were too good for that, and had them all dug up again.

The Brotherhood lived sensational lives in respectable Victorian Britain, marrying or not marrying the women they lived with, falling out with each other, courting blasphemy and irreverence. All that is amusing and entertaining to us now, but what ought to interest us is their paintings.

The commitment to clarity of line and colour was, I always feel, driven by the darkness of Victorian interiors. They stand out wonderfully against heavy colours and dense layers of brocade and pattern. Under modern electric lights, they can seem lurid, and it takes time to get your eye in.

Holman Hunt is probably the most challenging here: his outrageous colours, heavy outlines and uninhibited compositions are all intended to shout across dark or crowded rooms. Such well-known paintings as The Shadow Of Death, or lesser-known portraits like The Children’s Holiday, are unrestrained, detailed, saturated to a degree that might be difficult to take.

Rossetti is a dreaming myth-maker; his work is what we think of when we refer to a girl as having a Pre-Raphaelite look. Millais is a marvellous prodigy, restrained and rich in execution – the famous Ophelia or The Blind Girl are saved from sentimentality by the beautiful accuracy of observation. He went to great lengths to find the wildlife around the stream in Ophelia, and persuaded his model to lie for long periods in the bath, for the effect of floating hair.

The most documentary of the painters here is Ford Madox Brown. His magnificent Work, a tableau of mid-Victorian labour, and the beautiful The Last Of  England show Victorian painting at its most committed to observation.

There are several underrated minor painters too, including William Dyce.

His superb, thought-provoking Pegwell Bay is at once about an afternoon out, and about the huge changes of aeons, including  fossils and the arrival of a comet.

A good number of women painters are also on display, it is good to report; they have usually been reduced to supporting figures and models. The work of unrecognised artists such as Florence Claxton makes an interesting addition.

The Brotherhood’s second generation yields their most fascinating member, the  sumptuous myth-maker Edward Burne-Jones, a transfixing, haunted, magical painter. Three paintings from his Perseus cycle are the show’s tremendous climax.

This is an engaging exhibition. I will point out, though, that a good number of the best paintings are from the Tate’s own collection and often on show in any case. But there are probably enough borrowed works to make this survey of the best-loved of English painting schools worth a visit.

A teenager in love –with the Fifties: Jake Bugg’s debut album is almost too good to be true

By Tim De Lisle

Published: 11:23 EDT, 8 October 2012 | Updated: 12:20 EDT, 8 October 2012

Jake Bugg: Jake Bugg. Mercury, out October 15

Rating:

Plenty of noise has been made to mark the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ first single. And rightly so, because Love Me Do is as close as pop gets to Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon. It was both a small step and a giant leap: a modest little number and the start of the greatest recording career of all.

There’s just one problem. With The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan also  celebrating golden jubilees, there is a danger that 1962 will become engraved on the public consciousness as pop’s Year Zero. In fact, all these titans started by looking back more than they looked forward.

Dylan borrowed tunes and themes from folk songs by Woody Guthrie and others. When Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who had been contemporaries at primary school, bumped into each other again as teenagers at Dartford station, they bonded over some blues LPs.

Two of The Beatles – Paul and Ringo – had fathers who worked on the cruise ships sailing in and out of Liverpool, and both men brought records from America back for their sons. The Beatles, like the Stones, were a covers band first, and when they did start writing, Lennon and McCartney followed trails blazed in the Fifties. ‘No Shadows, no Beatles,’ was George Harrison’s tersely eloquent tribute to the best British band before his. And the Shadows’ place in that sentence could just as well have gone to the Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry or Carl Perkins.

Lest we forget how good the music of the late Fifties was, here comes a new voice who seems hellbent on reminding us. And the extraordinary thing is, he wasn’t born till 1994. Jake Bugg, an 18-year-old from Nottingham, is almost too good to be true: he could be a member of the skiffle band in the play One Man, Two Guvnors.

His look is that of a mid-Sixties pop star – dark fringe, cute face, a hint of attitude and vulnerability. But his sound comes straight from the late Fifties. Fresh, clear and uncluttered, it is mostly just a voice (nasal twang, crisp diction) and a guitar (a Telecaster, bustling, bursting with life). It’s as if Buddy Holly had grown up on a council estate in the East Midlands.

The 14 songs here are short, sharp and engaging. The fast ones are rock ’n’ roll with a touch of folk or blues, while the slow ones lean towards country. These are old, old forms, and many of today’s teenagers have given up on them, preferring hip-hop, dance music or indie. But Bugg makes them young again, and adds a  dollop of contemporary jadedness (one song is entitled Seen It All) that takes him close to the best of Noel Gallagher.

The album gets off to a scorching start with singles Lightning Bolt and Two Fingers before slowing down and becoming more middling in the second half. If Bugg had restricted himself to his strongest  ten songs, it would be a masterpiece, but  consistency is a lot to ask of a teenager.

At his best, he is superb. ‘I drink to remember,’ he announces over a rhythmic strum, ‘I smoke to forget’: a self-portrait painted in two brushstrokes. When he sings of yesterday, he doesn’t tell us he believes in it; he holds two fingers up to it. Spending time with his album makes you want to see him live. He is doing a short tour in November and a longer one in February.

Jessie Ware, a gifted backing singer, has made an album of her own, Devotion, one of the Mercury Prize Albums of the Year. In the intimate surroundings of St Luke’s church, she was likeable between songs (‘great honour to be on the shortlist for the Mercurys, I watch it every year’) and a curious mixture during them, veering from powerful to tentative.

Ware’s album has done much better in the charts than her singles, which seems the wrong way round. The singles Running, 110% and Wildest Moments are her strongest tracks: sophisticated electronic soul, skilfully played by her supple three-man band. Warming to the task, she allows herself some unfettered fervour, which makes a nice contrast to the severe  elegance of her look. It’s like watching Sade and the Banshees.

Jessie Ware
St Luke’s, London

Just leave the Ring to sparkle: The Valkyrie at the Royal Opera House

By David Mellor

Published: 11:37 EDT, 8 October 2012 | Updated: 12:23 EDT, 8 October 2012

Wagner: The Valkyrie Royal Opera House, London

Rating:

The remains of my Royal Opera House Ring turned out to be only The Valkyrie and Twilight Of The Gods. A nasty bout of flu robbed me of Siegfried. It also knocked out Alberich. They missed him more than they missed me.

After Twilight Of The Gods, an experienced friend confided: ‘Covent Garden is one of the world’s great opera houses, but this wasn’t one of the world’s great Rings.’ Just so. But why was it so?

Most of the blame must be shouldered by director Keith Warner, whose banal approach never got near to illuminating one of the greatest triumphs of Western art. Instead, like some bulky guy who stands in front of you while you’re admiring a great painting, he just got in the way, and irritated like a nasty gnat bite throughout.

In Twilight Of The Gods, he adopted almost every cliche of contemporary German Wagner directors, so the evil Hagen’s palace was set up like a Hamburg pimp’s apartment, all white leather sofas and kitsch.

When Hagen’s vassals arrived, they were clad in black leather. As the Labour politician Ernest Bevin once exclaimed, ‘clitch after clitch after clitch’.

At the end of the Ring, Brunnhilde’s Immolation is a cataclysmic moment. Warner turned it into bonfire night in Basildon, with lots of happy-clappy young people wandering about, until an actual Ring descended and a ponytailed girl in jeans and T-shirt was hoisted aloft.

The triumph of the common woman? Or bathetic rubbish? Doubtless Warner  imagined it to be moving. But, like the celebrated comment on the death of Little Nell: you needed a heart of stone not to laugh.

The late Stefanos Lazaridis’s sets didn’t help either. Especially in Valkyrie, they were clunky and ugly. The big room with the picture window in Rheingold reappeared, this time looking as if a bomb had hit it, probably trying to depict the chaos the world had been thrown into by the theft of the Ring.

It wasn’t just awful to look at, but an ’elf ’n’ safety hazard. Brunnhilde entered, and immediately got stuck on a bit of scenery: it required a stagehand to prise her off.

A few moments later, in came Fricka, and caught her costume under a heavy chair. She freed herself, but the damage was done. ‘Titter ye not,’ advised Frankie Howerd, but we all laughed like drains.

All this is sad, because somewhere amid the chaos was a rather good musical performance struggling to get out. Tony Pappano continued to conduct splendidly, and it was a nice touch to put the entire orchestra on stage for a well-deserved ovation.

This isn’t a great era for Wagner singing, but most of the cast did well. Bryn Terfel, now singing out, unlike in Rheingold, was a majestic Wotan in Valkyrie. Susan Bullock, though perhaps with a voice a shade small for this house, was a sophisticated Brunnhilde, with a detailed grasp of the role that transcended the frumpy frocks they stuck her in.

Stefan Vinke’s Siegfried was a make-do until something better comes along. Vocally he’s dry, nasal and uningratiating throughout most of his range, and it didn’t help that he looked more like a mugger out on licence than a great hero.

 A real star was Sarah Connolly as Fricka. Mainly a specialist in baroque opera, she was a revelation, and has a big future in this stuff if, among her many options, she chooses to focus upon it. Mihoko Fujimura also shone as a sonorous Waltraute.

Act 1 of Walkure, one of Wagner’s strongest inspirations, went especially well, with Eva-Maria Westbroek a radiant Sieglinde, Simon O’Neill a fine enough Siegmund to make me impatient for him to step up a weight and take on Siegfried, and Sir John Tomlinson as ever totally charismatic as Sieglinde’s gruesome  husband Hunding.

John is what football fans call a legend, and he can do no wrong for most of us. However, he doubled up as Hagen in Twilight Of The Gods, a role he first took on here more than 20 years ago, and today he’s more of a favourite uncle than the Ring’s most double-dyed villain.

I’m marking these shows purely on the musical performance. I know it’s a counsel of despair, but a semi-staged performance purged of Warnerisms would have been far more effective.

HHHHH

Twilight Of The Gods

HHHHH

Anything goes in Will Young’s sexy Cabaret

By Georgina Brown

Published: 10:34 EDT, 15 October 2012 | Updated: 11:15 EDT, 15 October 2012

CABARET Savoy Theatre, London (2hrs 30mins)                                   

Rating:

Dirty dancing, pills, liquor and persecution: hardly the stuff of your average musical but thank goodness for that. The West End has more than enough romance and tap-dancing right now. Welcome back to decadent Thirties Berlin facing the rise of Fascism in Rufus Norris’s dark revival of Cabaret.

A slightly different show from the one he staged six years ago, it now stars Will Young in leather hotpants and a corset as the sinister MC presenting the scantily clad dancers of the Kit Kat Club. And excellent he is too, hitting the high notes with an effortless sweetness while something both scared and deeply scary keeps seeping through that baby face. Anything goes round here, as long as it’s sleazy.

In a chilling new scene, Young turns puppet-master, holding overgrown children in lederhosen at the ends of strings as they sing that deceptively innocent Aryan folk song Tomorrow Belongs To Me like automatons.

In the show’s final image, the nudity (and yes, you will see Young’s bottom) is shocking as the club melts away into the yard of a concentration camp where the dancers huddle beneath the snow.

Matt Rawle is good too as the bi-sexual would-be novelist from Pennsylvania who finds himself in this hotbed of perversion and observes its final days.

However, there’s little spark between him and former EastEnder Michelle Ryan’s Sally Bowles, the sexy, gin-guzzling survivor sensationally played by Liza Minnelli in the 1972 film. Ryan’s Sally is squeaky-clean, and seemingly quite unraddled by all the sordid sex and drugs. Her performance lacks the necessary sense of irony and the emotion needed for the soulful Maybe This Time and the thrusting and bitter Cabaret. She blunts the show’s edge and makes it hard to care much about anybody.

Of course, it’s much easier turning a musical into a movie, as Cabaret was, than vice versa. Quite why anyone thought the wonderful film Finding Neverland was crying out to be made into a musical escapes me.

It’s based on Allan Knee’s play about J. M. Barrie (in the film a compelling Johnny Depp) and how his friendship with the young sons of the Llewelyn Davies family and their widowed mother Sylvia provided the inspiration for him to write Peter Pan.

This is a piece about setting the imagination alight and releasing  one’s inner child – both Barrie’s and the boys’.

Knee has written the book for this new ‘musical comedy’. Unfortunately, the show has lost its way en route to the stage, torn between drama and Disneyfication. Awkward set-pieces featuring dancing girls dressed up as roses or mermaids – and even a band of kilted lads playing bagpipes – get in the way of character development and narrative tension.

In a distinctly panto touch, the inspiration for Captain Hook has become a pompous theatre critic, Maximillian Blunt, who brandishes an umbrella with a hooked handle and runs off with Barrie’s wife.

Yet the show begins rather promisingly with Barrie (the talented Julian Ovenden) about to be made to walk the plank from a splendid ship. His crime? Boring his audiences to death. There’s also a real St Bernard dog, even if he is miserably underused.

But after that, it all runs aground. In the film, the sexless Barrie was innocently entranced by the boys and loved their mother, but not in a  conventional, romantic way. However, in the musical he is far more interested in courting Sylvia than amusing the boys. He is forever writing letters to her, which he reads out in spotlit soliloquies.

None of this would matter if the music soared, but it is bland and  forgettable. While everything about Rob Ashford’s production is lavish and proficient, it is stubbornly earthbound. Barrie’s on-stage car remains disappointingly stationary, and  my inner child was similarly left wholly unmoved.

Anne-Marie Duff is an actress blessed with extraordinary naturalness and lack of affectation. In Josie Rourke’s enthralling revival of 17th Century French playwright Racine’s tragedy-drama Berenice, she is radiant and regal but never grand in the title role of the Queen of Palestine.

Dressed in a sheath of red and gold, with a golden crown sewn into her braided hair, Berenice seems as  down-to-earth as her bare feet on the sandy floor.

She is madly in love with the Roman Emperor Titus (Stephen Campbell Moore). However, he must choose between this foreign queen that Rome would never accept and his empire, between love and duty. It’s a similar dilemma that confronted King Edward VIII in his love for Wallis Simpson.

But there’s a third person to consider. Titus’s dear friend, the slightly wet Antiochus (Dominic Rowan), is also besotted with Berenice. Should Titus decide to dump her, might he get lucky?

Duff appears to be taking her cue from Alan Hollinghurst’s elegant, restrained new version of the play. Her huge eyes are frequently filled with tears but she never breaks down. Rourke keeps things simple and calm, staging the piece strikingly in the round, in a sandpit beneath a fragile staircase.

If you don’t know this story – as I didn’t – it’s agonising edge-of-your-seat stuff  as this quietly despairing trio are torn between  following their hearts and their heads.

The nicest boys in polite rock: Alt-J, Electric Ballroom

By Tim De Lisle

Published: 07:04 EDT, 12 November 2012 | Updated: 07:15 EDT, 12 November 2012

Alt-J, Electric Ballroom, London

Rating:

Alt-J are four Leeds University graduates with one claim to fame: their debut album, An Awesome Wave, has just won the Mercury Music Prize for the Album of the Year. At their first London show since, they could have been expected to wallow in their triumph. If they were a hip-hop act, they would have talked of little else.

In the event, they didn’t mention it. The only thing being celebrated was Thom the drummer’s birthday: the others presented him with a cake, fondly brought on by their all-female support band, Stealing Sheep.

Like a once-scruffy neighbourhood, rock music is being rapidly gentrified. In the age of Mumford & Sons, we are getting used to hearing songs made by nice young people, but Alt-J take this to another level.

The first thing lead singer Joe Newman says is: ‘It’s lovely to be here – thank you so much for coming.’ The last thing he says is: ‘You’ve been amazing, we’ve had a lovely, lovely day for Thom’s birthday.’

Asked what they would do with their £20,000 Mercury cheque, Alt-J said they would buy flights to somewhere nice, and a slap-up meal in a restaurant – for their parents. Whatever happened to youthful rebellion?

But if all this makes them sound conservative, they are not. They are worthy winners of the Mercury, because they have moved music forwards. It took them five years to release their album and they used the time to develop a distinctive sound.

Newman’s vocals tend to start off pure as a choirboy before veering into an arty warble that stays just this side of irritating. Thom Green’s drums are all clicks and clacks, as if he is trying to be a machine.

Both of them, along with the bass player Gwil Sainsbury, studied fine art, and their canvases are crisp Mondrians rather than chaotic  Pollocks.

Newman’s guitar and Gus Unger-Hamilton’s synths are deployed as daubs of colour, never overdone. And almost every track has a catchy melody, a crunchy rhythm, or both. The whole package is complex, but effective.

The lyrics are studenty, but not in a bad way. In a world overstocked with love songs, it’s safe to say that nobody else has released one called Tessellate, or used the chat-up line ‘triangles are my favourite shape’.

Even the band’s name is triangular: on an Apple Mac, Alt-J is the keyboard shortcut for the Greek  letter delta. Their one concession to showmanship is to have a big neon delta sign behind them.

In rock ’n’ roll, the delta usually means the Mississippi delta, the crucible of the blues. Alt-J are in a different tradition, more English, eccentric and electronic. They were on a roll even before the Mercury, and now they are in the spotlight, their singles – none of which has gone higher than No 75 – are crying out for re-release. As well as Tessellate, Breezeblocks and Something Good come across as hits-in-waiting.

The Staves are also part of the polite-pop movement, but they lean towards the traditional. They are three sisters from Watford, Emily, Jessica and Camilla Staveley- Taylor: one better than the Pierces and the Webb Sisters, then.

They sing folk songs with a twist of Seventies singer-songwriter introspection. One reason why this generation of musicians are seldom rebellious is that they can’t argue with their parents’ record collection. Mr and Mrs Staveley-Taylor, both music-lovers, brought their girls up on The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and it shows in their ear for an elegant tune.

Their debut album, Dead & Born & Grown (Atlantic, out tomorrow) co-produced by Ethan Johns and his father Glyn, is entrancing from the opening minute of Wisely & Slow, which features no instruments at all – just the Staves’ three voices, playing off each other as only siblings can, blending, diverging and blending again.

You may struggle to work out which sister is which, but you don’t need to: just sit back and enjoy the beautiful noise.

A jailhouse Pilgrim? It really rocks

By David Mellor

Published: 11:38 EDT, 12 November 2012 | Updated: 11:40 EDT, 12 November 2012

The only previous professional staged performance of The Pilgrim’s Progress was at  Covent Garden in 1951, and it was a failure. ‘They don’t like it, they won’t like it, and perhaps they never will like it,’ was Vaughan  Williams’s pained response to the reception of a work that had preoccupied him for almost half a century.

Well, he would have enjoyed this production by English National Opera (London Coliseum) and felt vindicated. Perhaps he would have thought the contemporary prison setting a bit brutal, but what the hugely talented Japanese director Yoshi Oida and his team have done is triumphantly prove that VW had indeed written an opera and not just, as many observers thought, a static series of tableaux vivants.

Even VW himself had an each-way bet, calling the piece ‘a morality’ rather than an opera.

Oida takes some liberties with the story but only in the best interests of dramatic impact. So, towards the end the three shepherds the Pilgrim meets on his way to the Delectable Mountains become a doctor, a priest and a jailer. And journey’s end for this Pilgrim is the electric chair. Not quite what the composer intended, but VW’s morality begins in prison and it makes dramatic sense for it to end there.

VW poured a lot of wonderful music into The Pilgrim’s Progress, by turns lyrical, mystical and violent, drawing, inter alia, on some of the most beautiful passages from his Bunyan-inspired Fifth Symphony. Every nuance was captured by Martyn Brabbins and his superb orchestra, while on stage, a dedicated cast, often multitasking, and led by Roland Wood’s eloquently dour jailbird-Pilgrim, projected the drama with real impact.

A genuine success this, illuminating a hidden English masterpiece. Maybe ENO should try it more often.

Croydon’s Fairfield Halls, South London’s premier symphony concert venue, celebrated its half-century in style with an eclectic 50th Anniversary Concert  given by its resident orchestra, the London Mozart Players, under associate conductor Hilary Davan Wetton.

The hall is a bit dowdy and looks forward to its much-promised facelift.

But the acoustics of this mini Festival Hall are terrific, and the evening was for me, a regular visitor to concerts there in the Seventies, an exhilarating homecoming.

Roxanna Panufnik produced a celebratory fanfare and Malcolm Arnold’s Fair Field Overture, composed for the halls’ tenth anniversary, was joyously exhumed. Croydon’s most accomplished musical son, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, was duly celebrated in this his centenary year, and the opening concert, where Yehudi Menuhin, no less, played the Bruch Violin Concerto, was commemorated with a splendid performance of the piece from Chloe Hanslip.

Davan Wetton is one of Britain’s finest choral conductors, and the concluding works, Parry’s Blest Pair Of Sirens and Walton’s Coronation Te Deum, were terrific, with the conductor getting the best out of some very young choristers.

Now to two albums of Elgar’s wartime music, suitable for Remembrance Sunday. At the end of 1915, Elgar was persuaded to write more than 80 minutes of incidental music to a whimsical children’s play by the ghost-story writer Algernon Blackwood called The Starlight Express.

The play wasn’t successful and the music, much of it enchanting, is unfairly neglected. It’s well performed here by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, with soloists Elin Manahan Thomas and Roderick Williams, (Chandos)

The problem is the format. Davis has written a narration, declaimed by Simon Callow, to accompany the music, and you wouldn’t want to hear it more than once. Which leaves a 40-minute orchestral suite on the second CD well worth returning to. But the price, about £18, makes this an expensive option.

Elgar’s The Longed-For Light, performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by John Wilson (Somm) is better. The ballet The Sanguine Fan is interesting, the Polish potpourri Polonia is enjoyable, and the sombre little Sospiri (Sighs), composed in 1914, is premonitory of the suffering to come.

But the three settings of poetry by the Belgian exile Emile Cammaerts, again declaimed by Callow, don’t work. Wrenched from the context of British sympathy for the suffering of war-torn Belgium, the words often sound overwrought and overblown.

Bristles with tension: Ben Affleck’s 70s spy thriller

By Matthew Bond

Published: 08:15 EDT, 12 November 2012 | Updated: 22:24 EDT, 12 November 2012

Argo, Director: Ben Affleck. Certificate: 15 Time: 2hrs

Rating:

A film about the Iranian  hostage crisis of 1979-80? You might assume it would cover the disastrous attempt to recover the 52 U.S. diplomats held in the embassy in Tehran by militant Islamist students.

Eight American servicemen died in that bungled rescue and in the opinion of many it cost President Carter the election.

But instead, Argo, the new film from  the increasingly admired Ben Affleck, concentrates on another tale that is so astonishing it is difficult to believe, of six Americans who managed to slip out of the embassy unnoticed, just as the students were breaking down the doors.

They eventually found sanctuary in the home of the Canadian ambassador, but were still trapped in Tehran, at a time when traitors to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution were being hanged from construction cranes and admitting to being a US diplomat was tantamount to saying you were a spy.

Argo is a veritable masterclass in the sort of cleverly built and brilliantly maintained screen tension that leaves you feeling physically exhausted by the final credits.

From the chaotic outset, you can see how accomplished a director Affleck has become since making his debut five years ago, and why he’s increasingly compared to the great Clint Eastwood as an actor-director.

Roving camerawork and razor-sharp editing superbly contrast the ferment outside the embassy with the growing panic within. Then the order comes: ‘Burn everything!’ The rioters have broken through the gates. As terrified diplomats are seized and blindfolded, the end seems nigh.

Then the mood switches entirely: the story moves forward several weeks, to Washington.

Presidential aides, defence chiefs and CIA bigwigs are desperately trying to find a way to save the six ‘house-guests’. What has the might of the U.S. come up with? Escaping on bicycles . . . despite it being winter in Iran, with snow on the ground and the border 300 miles away.

The laughter that greets that revelation marks an important turning-point: Argo isn’t just gripping, it’s going to be funny too.

The shift in tone could easily undo all the good work of the hard, documentary-style scenes in Tehran. But laughter is almost unavoidable, as the eventual rescue involves setting up a fake film company in Hollywood, publicly announcing plans to make a sci-fi fantasy and travelling to Iran, pretending to be Canadian, to scout for locations. As someone says: ‘It’s the least bad idea we have . . . by far.’

Its architect is Tony Mendez (unshowily played by a bearded Affleck), the CIA’s top man at ‘exfiltration’ – getting people out of tight spots – which is just as well, as in Tehran the students have got hundreds of schoolchildren sifting through shredded embassy documents, and they gradually realise that some diplomats are missing.

But out in Hollywood, the comedy shows no sign of abating. Alan Arkin steals every scene as a veteran director brought in to add another layer of reality to the fake film, which has a real script, hand-drawn storyboards and the working title of Argo.

He reassures Mendez that he’ll have no trouble passing himself off as a movie  producer. ‘You want to come to Hollywood, act like a big shot but without actually doing anything? You’ll fit right in.’

That sort of in-joke could be straight out of Mel Brooks’s The Producers or Robert Altman’s The Player and is certainly helping Argo to be talked of as a picture to look out for come award time.

But it’s so much more than that: the production  wonderfully evokes the late Seventies – the facial hair is particularly good – and it’s clear that the location-scouting team has a real eye for architecture of the era.

But it’s Affleck (aided by having George Clooney and his frequent partner Grant Heslov as producers) who brings it all together, squeezing every last drop of quality out of Chris Terrio’s astonishingly smart screenplay, securing pitch-perfect performances, and keeping us on the edge of our seats up to an ending marred slightly by movie cliche. It’s one of the best-made thrillers you’ll see all year and not one to be left in a hurry . . . or you’ll miss a fascinating closing-credits postscript that comes courtesy of President Carter himself.

The Commitments, Alan Parker’s wonderful melding of young Dublin chancers with classic soul music, is one of my favourite films. It comes very readily to mind as The Sapphires gets tunefully under way. Yes, we may be in the  Australia of 1968 but it only takes the appearance of Chris O’Dowd for the resemblances to become almost uncanny.

Suddenly, our trio of Aboriginal songbirds have an Irish manager who’s obsessed with soul music, gives them the full ‘white on the outside, black on the inside’ spiel and even name-checks Wilson Pickett (an iconic figure in The Commitments) at one point.

He may not go quite as far as asking them to shout ‘I’m black and I’m proud’ but it’s a close old thing.

So while The Sapphires can’t claim much in the way of originality, the good news is that it’s a lot of undemanding musical fun, underpinned by a sharply funny script, another likable, career-enhancing turn from O’Dowd as Dave Lovelace, and winning performances from the four actresses (the trio quickly becomes a quartet) who play The Sapphires.

But for all its crowd-pleasing charm, the lack of dramatic tension is noticeable.

From the moment they first open their mouths, we know the girls can really sing, robbing us of any concerns about whether they’ll make the grade or not. One of them has cut out a newspaper ad looking for acts to tour Vietnam to entertain troops, so we know where they’re headed too.

Soon the only question is whether Dave and the group’s feisty leader, Gail (Deborah Mailman), will succumb to their obvious mutual attraction. That’s fun and nicely played but I’m not sure it’s really enough to sustain an entire feature film.

Unsurprisingly for a modestly budgeted picture, the scenes in wartime Vietnam aren’t very convincing, and a night-time hold-up looks like it might have been staged in someone’s back garden. But that scene also marks the only moment when director Wayne Blair abandons his safe, sweet, crowd-pleasing formula and opts for something stranger and more magical. A little more of that and the film might have been great, not just tuneful, lightweight fun.

People Like Us is an emotional tangle of a film, well acted by a cast including Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks and Michelle Pfeiffer but suffering from enough creative  misjudgments along the rather long way to leave it short of its intended impact.

Pine plays Sam, an angry young businessman from New York who goes to the funeral of his estranged music producer father in Los Angeles.

There he is handed a wash bag containing $150,000 and a note from his father asking him to take it to a certain address. When he gets there and finds an attractive young woman (Banks) living with her son, he assumes she is his father’s mistress, but the truth is more complicated.

Banks makes an attractively feisty presence; Pfeiffer is good if slightly wasted as Sam’s mother. But too much hangs on Sam’s reluctance to reveal his true identity (a reluctance that becomes rather creepy), and it’s hard to credit an old rocker’s tastes apparently ranging from King Crimson to, er, Kajagoogoo.

The Sapphires. Director: Wayne Blair. Certificate: PG Time: 1hr 41mins

People Like Us.Director: Alex Kurtzman. Certificate: 12A Time: 1hr 55mins 

 

ALSO SHOWING: From Devil drugs to a Titan of his trade…

New voices in British film are often regarded with scepticism by audiences and cinema owners who, with good reason in these straitened times, prefer safer ground when stumping up their cash.

So let’s get one thing sorted now: Sally El Hosaini’s directing debut My Brother The Devil (15) is unlikely to tear it up at the box office. She does, however, bring a freshness and compassion to the now-hackneyed urban genre with a drama set in, of course, Hackney.

Naive wannabe Mo (Fady Elsayed) and his handsome drug-dealer brother Rashid (James Floyd) live with their Egyptian immigrant parents in a council flat. Mo is doing well at school but is tempted into the path of drug-dealing when he sees his brother so well respected. Mo idolises Rashid but in his first attempt to really help him, he witnesses a fatal stabbing. While the death of a fellow gang member gives Rashid pause to reflect, Mo finds himself drawn in.

El Hosaini keeps her camerawork nimble, her dialogue spry and, most importantly, her characters whole. Emotionally intelligent and dramatically solid, this feels like a movie only this film-maker could have made – and sure enough, we discover that it was inspired by the death of her own brother aged 24.

Releasing the comedy Grassroots (15)in the week of the American election could offer a sweet antidote to the billions of dollars of campaign hype. It is based on the true story of a local primary in which Grant Cogswell (Joel David Moore), a maverick Seattle music journalist, runs against a well-established politician (played by Cedric The Entertainer) on the issue of improving the city’s monorail.

The film is enjoyable for a while but then founders badly, until I was baffled as to what it was really about – the end credits answered that question with a montage of the world’s finest monorails. So, if you fancy a film about nice monorails, this is just the ticket.

Mother’s Milk (15) is a gentle British comedy set in the pleasant environs of a Provence mansion during the summer holidays. Based on an award-winning novel by Edward St Aubyn, it is told from the viewpoints of members of a quarrelling family whose matriarch lies dying having bequeathed the pile to a charlatan hippy healer (Adrian Dunbar). It is not without its spiky observational humour or neat literary touches, but it does feel like a Sunday-night television drama.

The man behind stop-motion’s finest hours – Clash Of The Titans, Jason And The Argonauts, One Million Years B.C. – gets just reward in the jaunty documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan (PG) in which luminaries including Steven Spielberg praise Ray’s influence. However, the many clips of his old-school movie monsters are all that’s needed to press home  his genius for hand-crafted detail, and to show how sadly lacking such a human touch is in most of today’s computer-driven blockbusters.