After the first free-standing sculpture of early Renaissance, discussed in this space three weeks ago, our journey through monumental art continues. We’re skipping a few centuries and ending up in the epoch of the Baroque, the Seventeenth Century, with one of the most celebrated artists of the period, Caravaggio, and his Seven Works of Mercy.

The painting is very large (nearly four metres high), but no detail is neglected. The composition is dynamic, and the figures are doing all sorts of things: lying, standing, pulling feet, drinking, stretching, twisting, clasping. All these actions are highlighted by plays of lights and shadows, possibly Caravaggio’s most distinctive trait. Bodies and textures are illuminated by different light sources, and chiaroscuro effects (strong contrasts between light and dark) dominate the surfaces of the picture. This painting therefore embodies the Baroque style well, which, if one had to capture it in just one word, that word would be ‘movement’. Indeed, looking at this painting, one’s eyes shift continually from one figure to the other, enraptured by the hectic activity in the picture.

But what is this hustle and bustle all about? The painting, as much as it may appear to be simply a scene set in a rough Neapolitan street, is in fact packed with allegorical meanings. As the title suggests, it depicts the seven acts of mercy which, according to Matthew’s Gospel, the good Christian should perform towards his neighbours. The theme ties in with the commission and the location of the painting: it is housed in the Church of the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples, a charitable organisation founded in 1601 by seven young noblemen with the aim to intervene actively in society in order to alleviate the poverty of poorer classes. The painting is the altarpiece of the high altar of the church, and constitutes a sort of ‘visual creed’ for the institution. In just one canvas, Caravaggio manages to encapsulate all seven works of mercy, with 15 characters in total. Clockwise, we have two men carrying a dead man to bury him, a woman visiting a prisoner and feeding him, a naked and crippled man (in the foreground) being comforted by a gentleman, an innkeeper welcoming a pilgrim, and a bearded man slaking his thirst. In the upper half of the painting, Mary is portrayed as Our Lady of Mercy, with the Child and two angels. The one on the left is stretching his arm towards the men below, as if wanting to jump down and see what was going on down there.

As we can see, the seven works of mercy are not performed by members of the aristocracy, which was the aim of the Monte della Misericordia, but rather by common people, which Caravaggio depicts in a scene that is everything but bombastic and self-congratulatory. It is as if Caravaggio was giving his own twist to the commission, excluding the world of the wealthy by choosing to portray the kind of people the charity wanted to help, rather than those who carried out the charitable actions themselves. Simply put, in this painting we see the clamour and the complexity of the Baroque coupled with the humblest representation of Seventeenth Century society. 

It was in The Times Literary Supplement in January 1977, in a feature remarkably similar to this one – ‘The Most Underrated Books and Authors’ – that Philip Larkin called for a greater recognition of Barbara Pym’s works, writing of the author, “She has a unique eye and ear for the small poignancies and comedies of everyday life.” So in a sense, this article is sort of redundant – or at least, is about 38 years too late to the party. Larkin’s efforts have probably already somewhat eclipsed anything I could achieve in a meagre Cherwell column; his comments in the TLS led to Pym’s previously marginalised works being re-issued by her publishers, and indeed incited the author herself to compose three new novels before her death in 1980. Pym has now become almost a byword for ‘rediscovered author’, so I won’t pretend to be uncovering anything ‘new’ here; instead, I’ll sing the delightful praises of her bestknown work, the politely amusing Excellent Women.

It helps that my copy of the novel is a beautiful Orla Kiely-covered hardback version; if aesthetically pleasing books are your thing, then this one’s for you. The novel itself is almost as picture-perfect as its cover, with a plot as neatly puttogether as its protagonist, Mildred. The story follows Mildred (an unmarried woman in her 30s – though from the way she presents herself, you’d think she was 50) as she navigates the faintly exciting world of 1950s London, met with such insurmountable crises as – gasp – her next-door neighbours maybe or maybe not getting a divorce, or – shock – the vicar’s new fiancée being a bit mean to the vicar’s sister. OK, so the action doesn’t exactly come thick and fast, but that’s patently not the point of the novel; this perfectly-etched comedy of manners presents us with a world in which what happens is infinitely less interesting than the people to whom things happen.

Jane Austen’s influence on the novel hardly needs emphasising; the characters’ magnification of their little lives to a status of all-encompassing importance echoes Mrs Bennet at her best, while the unfailingly polite narration conceals, in true Austenesque style, a gently mocking smile at the trivialities people mistake for events of utmost seriousness.

Excellent Women won’t blow your mind, it won’t change your life, and it certainly won’t spur you on to go out and perform any acts of earth-shattering importance. However, this also does not mean that I’m not recommending you to read it as soon as possible. I’m heartily of the opinion that we all need a little more non-malicious fun-poking in our lives, and Pym is truly one of the masters of the craft. And, if you need more convincing: Philip Larkin said she was the most underrated novelist of the Twentieth Century – what more invitation do you need?

Arthur Miller, the writer who delved into the beautiful and ineffably sad recesses of post-1929 Depression America like no other, followed Willy Loman into the dark ten years ago this month. 2015 also marks the centenary of his birth. If you’re reading this article, then it’s likely that you were touched by something in his work – and, given Miller’s success as winner of the Pulitzer Prize, seven Tony Awards, two Drama Critics Circle Awards, an Obie, an Olivier, and the John F Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award, you would be one of an extensive number of admirers. Despite so many accolades, Miller had his critics, and entertained a lively relationship with the press for much of his life. Two months after his death, the actor Peter O’Toole called him a “bore”, and critic Roger Kimball was particularly derisive of his artistic achievements. As a conservative figure in the world of Twentieth Century literature – his style and form were hardly ever radical – his work was often faced with accusations of tameness, and it is true that Miller was one of those playwrights whose reputation was founded on only a handful of his many plays. The ironically titled The Man Who Had All The Luck is one particularly memorable example of the atrocious reviews many of his plays received.

It is, however, worth noting that if the critics were derisive, Miller was equally so. “Critics and commentators, like most of us, are lazy people,” and “I have often rescued a sense of reality by recalling Chekhov’s remark, ‘If I had listened to the critics, I’d have died drunk in the gutter’,” are two characteristically pertinacious remarks which indicate the writer’s disdain for those who presumed to judge him.

Yet, it isn’t just through his comments that one gets the feeling that Miller was uncompromising. In a 1966 Paris Review interview, the author famously stated, “The director of a play is nailed to words.” And what words. Death of a Salesman and The Crucible are remarkable for their unflinching style and strong vernaculars, which rise and fall with rugged poignancy. They feel cogent, charged, masculine, and John Procter-like in their sparse, unyielding diction. Miller once stated that carpentry was his oldest hobby, and it’s hard to imagine that this ‘scholar-farmer’ characteristic didn’t influence Miller’s work. Something polished came from a natural, robust core.

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Miller himself was explicit about the relationship that his work had with his life, saying, “The plays are my autobiography. I can’t write plays that don’t sum up where I am. I’m in all of them. I don’t know how else to go about writing.” Married four times, his life was so dramatic, it often seemed to overshadow his work: he was first married to Mary Slattery; then to Marilyn Monroe for five years; then to the photographer Inge Morath, with another two children, and lastly to a 34 year old minimalist painter Agnes Barley (by which time Miller was 89). Particularly with Monroe, the bombshell-geek union was irresistible for a salivating press. Some critics even dubbed a series of plays ‘The Marilyn works’. Still, the relationship between his private life and his work wasn’t always damaging. For anyone who has ever spent an evening absorbed in Death of a Salesman, it would be hard not to draw comparisons with the playwright’s personal life.

Miller was born into a very wealthy Jewish family in Harlem, which was an elegant and mixed neighborhood of New York, partly German, partly Italian, Jewish and black in social make-up. Everything changed for the Millers after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, with the family plunged suddenly into the depths of poverty alongside many other American citizens. They moved to Brooklyn, to a smaller house in a more underprivileged area. At 13, Miller wanted to be a soldier. At 16, he wanted “anything that was going”. The effect on him was sweeping, undoubtedly leading to a critical opinion of corporate life and the subsequent accusations of Communist sympathies during the period of McCarthyism, out of which arose the modern classic The Crucible. 

The first time I came across that particular play, I was an impressionable 14 year old in an all-girls school filled with girls who could rival Regina George for bitchiness. A particularly brave young teacher decided it might be an interesting thing for us to study. I distinctly remember my 14 year old self noting the eerie echoes of girls going too far, caught up in the hysteria of group identity and retribution in my own environment. The themes of his play were palpable even ostensibly unrecognisable setting.

And that’s just it with Arthur Miller. Although very much rooted in a particular period and culture, whether an allegory for McCarthyism, a portrayal of the Great Depression, or an acute examination of corporate mendacity, each of his plays is infused with the time from which it arose. His work is imbued with something vitally human, a kind of transcendent examination of sex, betrayal, fundamentalism, and despair. We are Salem, just as Salem was McCarthy’s America. And it is for that reason that he should be – and will be – remembered. 

When one whittles down the plot of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, it certainly does seem to resemble a modern day soap opera. When uptown widow the Duchess, finds love again in downtown boy Antonio and marries him in secret, her two power-hungry brothers – one weirdly incestuous – exact their blood-thirsty revenge when she suddenly gets pregnant, destroying the lives of everyone around them, including themselves.

Director Cara Kenny certainly revelled in drawing out the modern relevance of Webster’s Seventeenth Century tale, peppering the stage with ever-evolving newspaper articles from the Malfi Mail – the first headline reading ‘Widow Woes’ – and incorporating magazines as contextually appropriate props where necessary.

But though the play ultimately succeeds in reminding us of the modern day relevance of this Renaissance tragedy, for such a supposedly “bold reimagining”, we might have expected a little more inventiveness. In “an age of non-stop information”, it seems odd that the Duchess’ will wasn’t written on an iPad, just as the urgent letter which Bosola sends to Rome wasn’t updated to an e-mail, or even a Facebook message.

Even the Duchess’ monologues could have been reimagined as a series of anonymous blog posts, to illustrate further how “the boundaries between the public and the private are increasingly blurred”. But alas, the tale’s modernisation became more and more diluted as it went on, though the idea itself still holds great merit and validity.

In particular, the sex-reversed casting of Bex Watson in the originally male role of Bosola, a malcontented and murderous social critic, is an insightful and yielding interpretation. When juxtaposed with the Duchess herself, Bosola is able to offer an alternative to the gender-constrained role enforced by the media, in demonstrating how a woman may defy such stereotypes by being as deceitful and opportunistic as a man. Hamish Forbes as the tender-hearted Antonio provides an effective contrast to Watson’s grittiness.

Even Niall Docherty’s Ferdinand – who somehow manages to make incestuous lust humorous – seems somewhat emasculated by his lack of control over his sister the Duchess. Higgins, too, performs admirably in her role as the poised and steely Duchess, and is arguably the most compelling actor on the stage, hitting both the comedic and tragic targets set out for her character in the script with great artfulness and precision.

Despite some occasional amateurish errors, their performances were entertaining and the standard was generally high. Higgins in particular was admirably polished. Though they could have pushed their modernisation agenda further, the cast and crew have provided a thought-provoking show which is certainly worth seeing.

The Duchess of Malfi runs until Saturday at the BT Studio.

Shakespeare’s epic tail charts the rise and fall of two daughters who, having inherited their father’s kingdom, proceed to brutally usurp him. Their subsequent machinations and eventual downfall implicate an ambitious bastard son who betrays his own father in aiding the sisters’ coup. Like the best tragedy, it casts us into the most horrifying and disturbing extremities of the human experience. Like the best tragedy, it is the artifice of the form that confronts the brutality of the truths revealed. 

We are constantly reminded of this relation between artifice and reality in Hyde’s production. Soliloquies are often accompanied by a live filming to which are privy via a huge wall projection. The characters seem to be both aware and unaware of their image on the wall. We as the audience are thus at once complicit in the character’s view of themselves yet at once detached from this identification. In a brilliant touch, it is the fool who wields the camera, the character who is at once the outsider and the inner most core of the play. Playing with the artifice behind our identification and yet maintaining the horrific fascination induced by such identification is perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the production.

This achievement owes no small measure to the cast. There were some absolutely stand out performances due to a masterful naturalism across the board. There was no lazy characterization by way of grandiose proclamation and hammy melodrama. Rather a nuance and sensitivity in the delivery made for some really captivating moments. In particular, James Hyde’s rendition of a ridiculous yet commanding, childish yet perverted, despicable and humorous Lear was very convincing. His counterpart, the fool, was so well played that under Alex Wicken’s interpretation, one wishes Shakespeare had written him more lines. The sisters were as sinister and generally unpleasant as one would expect. Unexpectedly they were played with a flagrant sexuality, which while intriguing still remains unclear to me. In a torture scene, one of the sisters practically orgasms over strapping the poor Gloucester to a chair and then proceeds to menacingly gyrate over him. It was an excruciatingly visceral scene, yet I’m not sure if it was in spite or because of this odd sexualisation.

The elements of a great production were all certainly in abundance and in the end it managed to be more than the sum of these parts. But only just. Hyde directed this as if he were directing a film. The music (original and brilliant) was used like in a film, the use of shadow and light was very film noir and indeed use of the live filming almost made a film of it. On stage, this cinematic aesthetic sometimes sat too heavily particular at the start. In the end I think as an audience we bought it, but purists beware.