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Katherine Kelly & Steve Pemberton in 'She Stoops to Conquer'

There’s an important fact that you don’t really get told in English lessons: plays aren’t actually meant to be read. Go to school or university and you could come away imagining that plays are strangely bare, odd-shaped novels, with no description and scene changes instead of chapter titles. The truth is, of course, that plays (being plays) are meant to be acted, and reading them only lets you understand half of what’s really going on. It’s like trying to watch a film from the next room while you’re busy with something else.

Plays, after all, are about communication, and communication is made up of a lot more than just speech. It’s about the nuances you put into words, the movements you make, the tone of your voice. You can say the words “He’s very handsome,” and show by the way you say them that you really do think so, or that you think that he thinks so, or that you secretly think he’s a hideous toad in a suit.

This is something that living in London has really brought home to me. I keep going to see plays that I think I know well, and every time I come away astonished at how much better they are in action than I even imagined they could be when I was reading them. She Stoops to Conquer is a case in point. Written in the eighteenth century by Oliver Goldsmith, it’s the story of upper class twit Marlowe, a man who’s spent all his life being educated and has consequently never learnt how to deal with women of his own class. A saucy rake around bar maids and the like, he becomes a dribbling idiot when put near any girl who’s fully dressed and able to write her own name. Eventually, his father loses patience and sends him off to be married to upper class lady (and extremely clever girl) Kate Hardcastle. Of course, Marlowe can’t even look at her, but Kate likes the look of him so much that she decides to seduce him by dressing up as a maid. Events, of course, proceed amusingly from there, and end up with lots of marriage and general revelry.

Even on the page, She Stoops to Conquer is completely delightful. It’s difficult not to be won over by a heroine who exclaims, when told of a prospective lover’s good looks and fortune, “He’s mine! I’ll have him!” Gleefully anti-authority and with a deliciously hard-headed attitude towards romance – when another character exclaims, “Perish the baubles! Your person is all I desire!” he’s told off by his fiancée for being too impractical – She Stoops to Conquer champions desire founded on what’s in someone’s head as much as what’s in their heart. Love in this play is about compatibility, mental as well as physical, an attitude that chimes so well with what we believe today that I’m forced to conclude that either people in the eighteenth century were much more advanced than we give them credit for or that we’ve hardly moved on at all.

But that’s just the text. The play is what you do with that text, and the ever-brilliant National Theatre have used Goldsmith’s words to create a new production that’s charmingly naughty, visually spectacular and so uproariously jolly that I left the theatre in a haze of goodwill towards mankind.

As I’ve said, I studied the play at university, and so I thought I understood the irony of lines like Marlowe’s “As for Miss Hardcastle, she’s too grave and sentimental for me.” But when I finally saw him saying it, blissfully ignorant, while the Miss Hardcastle in question came sidling up behind him lifting up her skirt and aiming her cleavage at his head, I realised that I’d been missing how incredibly, dirtily funny the situation really was. This production definitely makes the most of She Stoops to Conquer’s physical humour. Marlowe, when he finally notices Kate in her peasant dress, leaps up and neighs like a horse; characters slap and pinch each other and drag each other in and out of rooms; and Kate’s country bumpkin mother has an awe-inspiring accent that travels up and down the register from Glasgow to Torquay.

Sophie Thompson (who plays Mrs Hardcastle) really does have a show-stealingly great turn. From her curtseys (which always end up as undignified crouches) to her hair-piece (which is constantly falling out) she’s outrageously pitch-perfect. Not that the cast she overshadows aren’t excellent as well. Kate (Katherine Kelly) is beautifully pert, Marlowe and his friend Hastings (Harry Haddon-Paton and John Hefferman respectively) are beautifully foolish, and Mr Hardcastle (Steve Pemberton) has a beautiful time shouting at everybody.

It’s all backed up by gorgeous costumes and a stunning set (the Olivier Theatre’s rotating stage is put to good use, and we even get tree trunks lowered down onto the stage in the garden scene), and an incredibly enthusiastic ensemble who gallop around banging on pots and pans and singing.

She Stoops to Conquer is a wonderful text that’s had wonderful things done to it, and the result is a play that’s genuinely funny and warm-hearted. And most importantly, it’s a pleasure to watch.

Robin Stevens

'The Art of Fielding' by Chad Harbach

In the last few weeks, there have been a lot of column inches in the review sections of the weekend papers regarding the new US bestseller The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. I haven’t read it yet but I know it’s been mentioned as the next “Great American Novel” and has received generally excellent reviews from the press. I’m sure it’ll be a multi-faceted book with the usual helpings of love and life-changing experiences but what I find interesting is that the background to the novel is baseball. Now, I’ve nothing really against baseball – I certainly don’t understand the finer points of what looks like an upmarket rounders, even though it’s always on screen in almost every American bar. My point is more general. Given how much sport seems to dominate our lives these days, it strikes me that there are relatively few novels in which sport features to any great extent.

I’m not saying that there aren’t any. In fact, in recent years, one or two novels with sport as the background have been very successful.  Netherland by Joseph O’Neill was a novel mainly about the strangeness of New York but showed cricket in possibly the last city in the world where you’d expect to find it. The Damned Utd by David Peace featured a fictionalised Brian Clough struggling to maintain his high standards of football management when thrown the challenge of looking after Leeds United. I know this book divided opinion, written only two years after Clough’s death, but I thoroughly enjoyed both the book and the subsequent film, starring Michael Sheen.

Looking further back, there have been novels or stories about rugby league (This Sporting Life by David Storey), golf (The Clicking of Cuthbert by PG Wodehouse) and pool (The Hustler by Walter Tevis). If you like your crime novel with a horse-racing setting (and you’ve read every Dick Francis book), you can’t beat the Saratoga series (Saratoga Longshot, Saratoga Swimmer etc.) by the American writer Stephen Dobyns, featuring the private detective Charlie Bradshaw. Moreover, if The Art of Fielding has given you the urge to read even more about baseball, you could try Ring around the Bases by Ring Lardner or any collection of his short stories, such as Round Up or Selected Stories. Lardner was a sports journalist in the American mid-west and wrote his stories between 1915 and his early death in 1933, at the age of 48. Although not so easy to find today, his books capture the prohibition-era and the American obsession with sports that not many other countries play. So, I’m certainly not saying the shelf of sporting novels is empty or of a low standard, just that compared to the number of novels featuring love and romance, for example, we see very few with sport at the centre.

Some of the best books about sport are, of course, the straightforward biographies or autobiographies, once you cut your way through the large number of ghost-written “why I’m so great” books. Try It’s Not about the Bike by Lance Armstrong on cycling (and his battle with cancer) or the excellent King of the World by David Remnick about the rise of Muhammad Ali. Both books shed light on two sports that don’t always get as much exposure as others. As for football, where lack of exposure certainly isn’t a problem, I’ve found the most enjoyable books have taken a more offbeat view of the sport. Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby is a good example of this, focussing on a die-hard fan’s obsession with Arsenal, though to be honest, compared to those of us who support a League One team, he can consider himself lucky. Another book in this vein is A Season with Verona by Tim Parks, a gripping story, part-travelogue, part-social history, where the author journeys around Italy with the often terrifying fans of Hellas Verona during one of their rare forays in the top division of Italian football. I couldn’t put the book down, desperate to discover the outcome of their battles, sometimes in every sense for the fans, with the might of Milan and Juventus.

It’s possible, then, that the relative dearth of sport-based novels is because of the difficulty of capturing the sheer thrill and excitement of actual sporting events, whether in watching or participating. So, with that in mind, I suppose it’s about time for my daily jog around the local park.

Briony Wickes

Last week, I wrote about Culture, something that has an almost unique ability to make most of the population very nervous, as though it were a test they were bound to fail. It’s an understandable position but a very unfortunate one – people should be able to read, or look at, whatever they want, regardless of who they are. But if there’s a mistaken belief that there are certain kinds of art that can only really belong to people who speak like the Queen and have souls shaped like David Cameron, there’s an equally silly and almost as prevalent idea out there that there are certain sorts of book that are not for ‘real readers’.

This, as a position, drives me completely crazy. It’s also something that I come up against repeatedly on my university literature course. Although academia is beginning to wake up to the fact that books are still being written today, and that some of them are even quite good, there’s still an enormous amount of infuriating snobbery about genre fiction.

Genre fiction, of course, literally means books about romance, crime, horror, science fiction and fantasy. If I was feeling prickly (as I am when I’m repeatedly told that many of the books I enjoy are somehow invalid as fiction) I’d define it as any book in which the characters do more interesting things than just stand in a room and cry.

The key word here is interesting. I’ve noticed that often, when a book is accused of being ‘genre’, what its accuser really means (but doesn’t want to come out and say) is that it seems suspiciously like it might be fun to read. Many critics – and academics – suspect fun. There’s an invisible rule in their heads that all good books have to be difficult, and so all books that don’t tie your brain in knots of uncomprehending agony must therefore be bad.

'Snuff', the latest novel by Terry Pratchett

In one of my seminars last week, another student brought up Terry Pratchett. It was a valid reference and a relevant comment, and he could have left it at that, but the moment the words were out of his mouth he got a look on his face as though he’d just come to his senses to find himself desecrating his mother’s grave. He backtracked frantically – he’d read one book! Once! When he was a child! It meant nothing! It was just one time! – and then he started talking about Derrida, to prove that he was a serious academic who knew large texts and had important, grown-up, un-fun thoughts about them.

Personally, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Why can’t you bring up Terry Pratchett in an academic setting? He’s a writer, isn’t he? He puts down words on a page in exactly the same way as Alan Hollinghurst or A. S. Byatt, and those words get published and read just the same as theirs do. And after all, there isn’t an approved list of topics about which you can intelligently write. A passage about an elf, or a pair of shoes, or a bloodstained corpse, has just as much chance of being good as does a passage about sex, or loss, or the unbearable trauma of being. It all depends on the person who’s written it.

In fact, if we take Terry Pratchett as an example, a lot of what he’s doing when he writes about trolls and swords and magic carpets is using them to make extremely subtle and embarrassingly spot-on comments about the society we live in – which also happens to be exactly what Jonathan Swift, who now appears on almost every English literature course anywhere, was doing three hundred years ago. But of course he’s not genre, because he’s from history, and therefore all the funny parts of his books are probably just mistakes.

Actually, as soon as you do look at older texts, the genre-as-worth argument begins to totally break down. Many books that we now think of as classics would probably, if they had been published today, have been shoved on the Genre Shelves of Shame, where only nerds and children can get at them. Dickens and Hardy, for example, wrote specifically for the mass-market and most of their novels were first published in instalments, in popular magazines. Their analogues in terms of sales today would probably be writers like Stephen King or Alexander McCall Smith. Frankenstein? Well, that’s a science fiction horror novel. Dracula? The same. The Odyssey? Fantasy. The Three Musketeers? Historical fantasy. The more you think about it like that, the less literary snobbery makes any sense at all.

As you might be able to tell by now, I think the boxing-in concept of genre is incredibly stupid. It prevents a lot of people from feeling able to try authors they’d probably love, and it prevents a lot of really great authors from getting the recognition they deserve. China Mieville is one of the most creative and intelligent writers working today, but he would probably have to crawl on his knees to the country he’s named after to stand any chance of getting mainstream prizes for his work. It’s a sad state of affairs, because what should matter is the quality of someone’s writing, not what that writing is about. Against all those idiotic people who think that fun is a dirty word, I defend my right to read Zola and Diana Wynne Jones, Nabokov and Meg Cabot, and enjoy them all in very different, but equally valid, ways. And so should you.

Robin Stevens

Now it’s Chinese New Year, it is time to ditch the Chow Mein Pot Noodle. In the year of the Dragon, cuisine from the far east is being rediscovered as more than just fast food. It comes from a tradition more than 1,000 years old, and each dish is intended to tell a story with poetry and panache. Alexander James, picked up the chop sticks.

There are few cuisines, or even cultures, that are as misrepresented as the Chinese. You don’t have to look further for evidence than its food scene. Take Japanese cuisine; it’s perceived as being up there with the finest, the undisputed darling of the Asian food boom. It’s said that because it can take up to 15 years to make a sushi master, the end result is perfection on a plate.

But it can take even longer to master the art of making Chinese Dim Sum, up to 20 years, by which time most City Bonus-Boys have already retired. Still, most people’s idea of Chinese food is slurping limp and lank soggy noodles after a night on the sauce. It seems only now, food from the grand continent is winning the respect it deserves.

“What we typically think of as Chinese food isn’t really the same thing at all, more a version of what might have been popular in Hong Kong, and exported to the UK,” says Geoffrey Leong, director at London’s Asian food empire, Dumplings’ Legend, one of London’s Chinese restaurants to specialise in Dim Sum. Leong’s family are an Anglo-Chinese Dynasty, who played a part in shaping Chinatown in many gestations, exporting opium and tea in its hay day, along with the odd cow. “As a present from the Chinese to the British, because they liked milk in their tea,” he retorts.

Leong says real Chinese food and culture is largely unknown in the West, and put down to cultural stereotypes. “Think about the size of Europe, and the difference in, say, Scottish food to Greek food – the spectrum in China is the same,” he says.

However, one thing is uniform wherever Chinese food is served. “When the Chinese serve food to their guests, it is as a sign of their generosity,” Leong points out. “It’s about sharing and a Chinese dinner is more about the food more than anything. It’s not important to have flashy or seductive surroundings, as you’ll see from many restaurants, all focus goes into the food not the interior.”

That doesn’t stop many iconic Chinese food places stop trying to bring an element of swish minimalism or Asian bling to their table. Ping Pong restaurants have invested millions into bringing dim sum into a new market, that’s fresh, dynamic and keen to explore new tastes, in the same way Litro brings a fresh eye to literature.

Royal China, Queensway

One classic Dim Dum experience is Royal China in another of the UK’s dim sum eating outposts, in Queensway, London. It’s dining halls had a recent huge refurbishment to bring touches of the former-Emperor’s country to the tables of the UK.

“Dim Dum is intricate, it created by royalty more than 1,000 years ago when an Emperor wasn’t able to eat any of his lavish meals, so his cooks set about creating an alternative,” says Mr Lok manager of The Royal China Group.

“Dim Sum is an essential part of Chinese culture as families will gather over these delicacies for Chinese New Year to the Moon Festival, to celebrate or catch-up,” adds Lok

There’s more behind the dish than just taste, each parcel is symbolic, to fit with the Chinese element of superstition and bringing good fortune. The jiaozi dumpling symbolises prosperity to those who sit down for a family feast on Chinese New Year’s Eve. When the dumpling is crescent shaped it symbolises wealth, like the gold ingot once used in ancient China as money. It’s a tradition more than milliennia old, coming from superstitions about feeding the spiritual world, legends and history.

“In this way Chinese food tells a story, it’s not just about eating,” says Lok . “It’s about an explosion of flavours, all simply cooked, and the best way to learn is to take a lesson from the head chef at your favourite restaurant.”

There are many technical elements to creating a perfectly balanced dish. It is believed food should have a balanced yin yang. Remember that, next time you order that late night Special Chow Mein.

Alexander James