SOME SHOWS

Like the previous entry, this is new stuff, not extracted from the book Common Sense, which you can download for nothing by clicking on the link in the right hand margin ...

I was in London last week, catching up with old friends, new shows and some Christmas shopping (though I much prefer to do the latter in Bath these days). Choosing what to see in town on a short visit is fraught with the danger of disappointment. You have to follow your nose and hope for the best. And what you see is inevitably dictated by the critical consensus as well as by the shape of the time you have. I specifically chose to visit last week so that I could be sure to get to the musical Caroline, or Change at the Lyttelton, picking up day seats at the box office first thing on the day of the performance. Being in the National Theatre's repertoire, the show isn't always available. Everything else I saw in town fell into place around that centrepiece.

Now, I greatly admire Tony Kushner's work and my interest in his first musical (as lyricist and book writer) was inevitably sharpened by the plaudits it has received and by its winning an Evening Standard award the other day. And Kushner's wish "to explore the civil rights movement, race relations, African-Americans and southern Jews in the early 1960s" (programme note) appealed to me strongly.

But how was it? Well, there's a helluva lot to like in the show. It's very nicely staged and it has a terrific cast, led by a really wonderful performance by Tonya Pinkins as the eponym. On the night I and my friend were there, the three young boys (the roles have alternate players) were particularly accomplished, much more convincing as Americans than English child actors usually manage. It seems perverse, however, to cast in a (grown-up) role that requires a minimum of acting but a great deal of clarinet-playing an actor who has to mime the instrument.

The downside is uppermost, though. The score is not strong. It's through-composed and it rarely resolves into a discrete number. Towards the end, Anna Francolini's somewhat one-noted stepmother had a sequence that actually rhymed and began to shape into something like a song, at which point the show came closest to being Sondheimesque and musically interesting. Elsewhere, the discursive score made the plot appear to meander. That flavour was compounded by the show's worst flaw: everything – every scene, every sequence, every aria and piece of recitative – was just too long. You wanted to call out "ok, we get it already, move on". As a result, the show feels thin. With a more demanding director or producer, the whole story it tells could easily have made for a first act, leaving a second to take up the implications and run a lot further with them.

A highly-praised movie that left me a great deal colder than Caroline was Borat. The Guardian's film critic, usually the hardest to please of the current crop of reviewers (unless the movie in question is at least 25 years old), named Borat as one of his top five films of the year – as the list wasn't alphabetical and he put it first, it may well have been his topmost film of the year. I suspect he will come to revise that opinion. Just in terms of simple film-making, Borat is far from notable. A film of the year ought to display a bit of craft, let alone a bit of art. (The same critic cited as one of his movie moments of the year "Penelope Cruz singing her heart out in Volver" and, as Cruz is patently dubbed, you fall to wondering if Mr Bradshaw has given very much thought to his list).

It seemed to me that, for a knockdown comedy, Borat was fatally unfunny. Humour is a matter of taste ... up to a point. What is deemed funny can be analysed without the comic essence of it being washed away. The relentless misogyny and anti-Semitism of Borat's character is supposed to be forgivable because a) it's so hilarious and b) Borat's creator Sacha Baron Cohen is Jewish (though not female). Intriguingly enough, there is also a good deal of homo-erotically orientated humour that is rather less broad and (mock-)offensive. It seems clear enough to me that Cohen's natural audience is one made up of male adolescents who relish being "grossed out". A friend who loved it – male, gay, Jewish, 59 – and who, unlike me, saw it with a full evening audience (I reserve my London evenings for the theatre) reports that his loudly appreciative fellows were of all ages and both sexes. I think that just goes to show that we are all lads now.

One of the aspects of the movie that most repulsed me was that I believed hardly any of it. Documentary has always been a dissembling form, artifice masquerading as unmediated actuality. I sensed that almost everything here was a put-up job. It is quite funny (and poetic) that the ghastly, mouthy frat boys who are suing Twentieth Century Fox for the way they are portrayed are the ones who evidently least needed to be provoked into expressing their stupid views by Borat. In their sequence he is unusually withdrawn, letting them hang themselves. Clearly some of the other participants were conned into appearing in a different vehicle from the one they were led to expect and I find myself sympathising with them. Did they sign a release before or after filming? Never mind that most of them are dumb-ass rednecks and absurd evangelists. (Indeed, the attitudes of some of Borat's victims are capable of more than one reading. In Sight & Sound, Ali Jaafar's review describes "a dinner party of white Southern respectables who leave the moment Borat's guest is revealed to be black" but I would submit that it is rather her patent function as a prostitute that precipitates the exodus).

Generally the people whose advice Borat seeks treat him with a lot more grace and decency than he treats them. A woman to whom Borat goes for guidance in etiquette maintains her dignity with exquisite poise, despite everything Cohen throws at her, not least photographs of his "son" brandishing his cock. If you laugh at this sequence, what is it that you are laughing at? That Borat does something "shocking"? Well, it doesn't work. The woman is too dignified to give him the satisfaction of outrage; rather, she plays a completely straight bat. Is that funny? At whose expense?

From Jonathan Routh to Noel Edmonds to Dennis Pennis, there is something deeply repellent about hoax television, the whipping up of an audience's scorn against some innocent stooge. Only Chris Morris, a truly radical and subversive broadcaster, manages to turn hoaxing into a usefully political weapon and he uses it against those who richly deserve to be publicly pilloried (eg Gary Lineker). All the others, not least Cohen, are simply exercising gratuitous cruelty. I hope somebody is collecting the off-cuts of those moments where it goes grotesquely wrong and backfires. Borat just about gets through it at television length. As a feature, his material is stretched pitifully thin – the naked wrestling with his obese manager is the work of a man with no jokes left to tell – and its lack of structure (how much of it has anything remotely of the television report about it?) makes it look lame and indisciplined. And yes, it's a big box office hit. Well, so was Chuck Norris once. I don't think that means it's any good.

I saw a play and a movie, both by the same suddenly emerging writer and featuring the same increasingly dazzling actor. Both do something profoundly resonant and riveting with an event from recent British history, managing to crystallize in a most engaging and persuasive way a sense of irrevocable change in the socio-political landscape. I saw the movie back to back with Borat: odd that both were documentary-dramas about a British institution whose origins lie in other lands (well, I suppose Borat is as likely to be a British institution as Dame Edna Everage). Have you guessed the other movie yet? Well, it was The Queen. And what a deftly paced, delicately handled work it is, both by writer Peter Morgan and by director Stephen Frears. I know it wins its spurs as a feast of acting – Dame Helen Mirren is certainly unmatchable as Her Majesty – but you don't get acting this good unless it is underpinned by a richly textured script and controlled by an acute and watchful director. The miracle is that everyone emerges really very sympathetically, with the exception (no surprise, though) of the Duke of Edinburgh. I've never before felt quite so clearly the real potential (unrealised so far in the real world) of "New Labour", nor the importance of maintaining the traditions that hang about the House of Windsor. The careful, carefully inexplicit confrontation of these two forces and their never-stated accommodation is touched in with triumphant skill. There's not a false note or a wasted line in the whole film. It's the most enthralling broad-brush portrait of the English class balance since Gosford Park. And you only have to begin to ponder the bear-traps that such a project has confidently avoided to see how really remarkable it is.

Frost Nixon is no less an achievement. After his Tony Blair in The Queen (already familiar from Peter Morgan's television script The Deal), Michael Sheen transforms himself into a plausible, never guyed David Frost. Morgan's stage play is about far more than just the television interview with former President Richard Nixon. As Queen Elizabeth II had to bend to public expectation of an expression of her family's loss of the Princess of Wales, so Nixon had to be drawn into an acknowledgment of wrong-doing in the Watergate Scandal. In both cases, accessibility and accountability are seen becoming watchwords of the age. With an almost scientific skill, Morgan teases out the process of nudging Nixon into a place from which he cannot retreat. His director Michael Grandage realizes his blueprint impeccably. This is a major work. And what a time Peter Morgan is having. Along with his Longford script for Channel 4, he has conquered all three non-musical dramatic mediums this year.

Beside it, Caryl Churchill's Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? seems a little anemic. I adore a lot of Churchill – Top Girls, Cloud Nine and Serious Money of course – but she drives me nuts at other times. I loved the Marx Brothers madness of Heart's Desire but couldn't stand the remorseless logic of its companion piece Blue Kettle. Drunk Enough shares an irritating tic with another of her brief works, A Number, in that the characters continually interrupt each other but she doesn't write through the interruption, leaving it impossible to play without appearing stutteringly artificial. The new piece is very schematic – two men who are having an affair are rather explicitly The American and The British positions on foreign policy – and it felt too naked for me, so that there wasn't any human interest in what passed between them, only a kind of cerebral admiration for an exercise. I wish Churchill would renew her interest in and feel for character. Writing out of anger is all very fine but righteousness is not necessarily very compelling. Serious Money had rage to burn but it had a vivid theatricality too.

And then there was my dose of sex. Attitude magazine hails Shortbus as "alongside Brokeback Mountain the most important gay film of the year", though in truth it is pan-sexual, certainly not limited to gay voyeurism. And Time Out swoons: "how not to love a film that features an 'orgasmic superhero' called Shabbas Goy, a guy having 'The Star-Spangled Banner' sung up his ass and a drag queen with a megaphone?" Shortbus is a lot more engaging than John Cameron Mitchell's previous cinematic essay in the leisure hours of (sexually) driven New Yorkers, the mad and relentless Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but if it's what passes these days as a "sweetly romantic" movie (Attitude again), then give me Michael Powell's I Know Where I'm Going! any day. What it is – let's not mince words here – is porn. I have seen plenty of the recent movies, many of them of French origin, that feature unsimulated sex – Virginie Despertes Coralie's Baise-moi, Gaspar Noë's Seul contre tous and Irreversible, Patrice Chereau's Intimacy, though not Michael Winterbottom's Nine Songs (you can have too much of a good thing) – and I don't think any of them can claim to be other than porn. Porn with a degree of story and character and even occasional humour certainly, but no less porn for all that. People will get the DVD of Shortbus for jacking off purposes. Only the truly unhinged do that with sweetly romantic movies.

The mâitresse d' of the back room that gives Shortbus its title is Justin Bond, aka Kiki of Kiki & Herb who have also been in London lately. I didn't catch their show, Christmas Happens ("show business has destroyed them but they cannot live without it" says a flyer), but the gay friend I mentioned before told me that he has seen them in New York and that they're the sort of indulgent act that gives stoners a bad name. After Bond's performance in Shortbus, I certainly wouldn't have rushed to see Kiki & Herb. In the grand tradition of drag gagsters, he's not even worth mentioning.

Finally (though first in my actual chronology of viewings) was Paul Andrew Williams' London to Brighton, which makes Brighton Rock look like Mary Poppins. It's a low-life melodrama that is unremittingly horrible from beginning to end but it's a superb piece of no-budget movie-making by a real film-maker who will surely go on to make a string of masterpieces. In purely cinematic terms of old-fashioned craft – cutting, framing, structure, pace, placing of the camera, character-through-dialogue, directing of performances – it leaves Borat and Shortbus looking shoddy and unimaginative, which is largely what they are. In twenty years' time, all being well, it is Paul Andrew Williams whose career will mean something.