Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

God is getting the cold shoulder in Britain, not because of doubt but indifference. We’re just not that into Him any more and John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, respectively editor and Washington bureau chief of The Economist, give us the figures to prove it.

The 63rd Edinburgh International Film Festival – as the organisers (understandably) never tire of pointing out, the world’s longest-running event of its type – has barely been finished for a month and already a handful of its most high-profile titles can be found in art-houses.

Dispatches: Bankrolling Mugabe
Channel 4

The Scandalous Adventures of Lord Byron
Channel 4

It’s a mystery how some people get away with it. How does Robert Mugabe, for example, cling to power in impoverished Zimbabwe, given that a third of the population is starving? How does he pay the wages of that oddly loyal army and police force protecting him, despite having lost the general election? Well, dig down into the slagheap of this political crisis – as in so many others, past and present – and you may find something British at the bottom of it.

4.48 Psychosis
Young Vic, London

Playwright Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis is not so much a play as a legend. When it was first staged in 2000, some 18 months after her suicide at the age of 28, it split critical opinion. Some dismissed it as self-indulgent twaddle, some called it a thinly disguised suicide note and some praised its perfect marriage of form and content. Now, more than 10 years after Kane’s death, how does her final play shape up?

Tchaikovsky – Orchestral Suites 1-4/Romeo and Juliet/Francesca da Rimini: Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra/Academy of St Martin’s in the Fields/Neville Marriner
Capriccio

Shostakovich – Symphony No 4 in C Minor: Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra/Mark Wigglesworth
BIS

In the 10 years 1877-1887 and between his Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, Tchaikovsky wrote his violin concerto, the orchestral version of the ever-popular 1812 Overture (originally for military band), the second piano concerto, Italian Caprice, serenade for strings and these four orchestral suites. These suites are full of charming melodies, beautifully developed and sensitively orchestrated. The musical invention never flags and the moods and emotions evoked are wholly free of the fatalistic torments and passions found in abundance in the later symphonies.

Classified
Tate Britain, London

Stuck in the centre of a large wall in Classified is what looks like a perfectly ordinary receipt from Morrisons supermarket. It is one of the art works recently bought by the Tate for its permanent collection and, as such, represents the concerns of artists working today. From the accompanying label you learn more about this absurd-looking artwork – discovering, for example, that the perfectly ordinary goods listed on the receipt were passed through the checkout in a carefully orchestrated order and that the label, mundane as it is, represents a mythical sort of still life in which the buyer selected the objects while leaving the viewer to imagine the image. The work, by super-conceptualist Martin Creed, as usual, expects the visitors to do most of the work, to ponder the possibilities of a trip to buy groceries being part of a voyage of discovery.

Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back
by Douglas Rushkoff
Bodley Head, £12.99

The Damascene moment came, for Douglas Rushkoff, one Christmas Eve. He opens this book by relating how he was mugged in front of his Brooklyn apartment. His understandable response was to post a note on his community website warning neighbours of the incident. The reaction stunned him. Far from being grateful, the locals snarled that he should keep quiet. Didn’t he realize he was publicizing something which might adversely affect property prices? “Had it really come to this?” he mused. “Did people care more about the market value of their neighbourhood than what was actually taking place within it?”

Tell Me Lies: Poems 2005-2008 by Adrian Mitchell
Bloodaxe Books, £10.95

Adrian Mitchell, who died last December at the age of 76, was one of Britain’s most exciting, prolific and politically-committed performance poets. A lifelong socialist and pacifist – he was arrested at Faslane for protesting against Trident – who revelled in the English language and the work of William Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll and, especially, William Blake, he famously wrote in a preface to his first volume of verse in 1964: “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.” He spent the rest of his life writing poems, songs and plays which would engage and inspire rather than push people away.

This is a fascinating book – on two levels. It’s a great political adventure story laced with sex, politics and death but it is also a profound book about journalism that raises crucial questions about objectivity and commitment. Paul Preston has meticulously researched the work (and play) of an extraordinary group of committed journalists who reported the Spanish Civil War, mainly from the Republican side. This group reads like a roll call of the 20th century’s greatest journalists and writers: George Orwell (of course), Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Koestler, Claud Cockburn, Martha Gellhorn and many, many others.