A Night at the Chinese Opera

Judith Weir's A Night at the Chinese Opera is currently on at the Royal Academy of Music. And by "currently", I mean "four performances, this week only". Apparently this is the first production in Britain since 1988, and I have no idea why it's been so long, since the work is a real crowd-pleaser. It's a contemporary opera based on a medieval Chinese tale, "The Chao Family Orphan", which has been adapted by westerners many times before. The title pretty much suggests the plot -- orphaned son avenges his parents -- but there's a play-within-a-play structure that makes the evening a bit less predictable than that would suggest.

Memorable tunes, understandable plot, sung well, with humour that is actually funny, in English you can understand without need for surtitles, and you don't need a second mortgage to buy a ticket -- what more could you want? Put another way: I may not know much about opera, but I know when I'm having fun.

Ellsworth Kelly

At the weekend, I went down to the new Ellsworth Kelly exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. I'm a sucker for big minimalist expanses of colour -- see also Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and even Dan Flavin (at the Hayward, fun for all the family) -- so you won't be surprised to hear that I enjoyed it.

There are two big groups of paintings that make up the bulk of the exhibition. One group is formed by laying two canvases on top of one another: a vertical white rectangle on top of a horizontal black rectangle, for instance. For me, the most successful of these were the two by the entrance, which are sail-shaped and appear to have a line of light running down the point where the canvases meet. Shades of Dan Flavin's fluorescent lights out of corners, here, though in fact it was just a trick of the light. I also liked the little white rectangle on a big white rectangle, in the main room; it reminded me of Jasper Johns' Flags, but without the actual flags, if that makes any sense at all.

The other big group is the Rothko-ish paintings. These are large rectangles divided into three horizontal stripes (actually each stripe is a separate canvas, when you look more closely), each of a different colour, hence the "Rothko-ish" feeling. My inner four-year-old was yelling "Oooo! Bright colours! Pretty!", but I think the rest of me prefers Rothko.

As you'd expect from a show of "recent work", it was less varied than the Tate retrospective a few years ago. But it's a relaxing way to spend half an hour, a bit like stumbling into the alternate-universe optimistic happy sparkly version of the Tate's Rothko Room.