Tony Blair as you probably haven't seen him before
Tony Blair is one of our least painted prime ministers – and if he were to visit a new exhibition by former war artist John Keane, he would probably be quite glad about that. Keane's portraits of Blair, though striking, are far from flattering. "I just couldn't bring myself to address him in any sort of literal way," the artist tells me. His paintings, on show at Flowers gallery in London, capture Blair answering – or not properly answering, in Keane's eyes – questions at the Chilcot inquiry almost a year ago.
"I spent the whole day watching it," says Keane, who came to prominence 20 years ago when the Imperial War Museum asked him to be their artist for the Gulf war. "I was fascinated and appalled. It was a kind of sanctimonious self-denial. In the face of obvious facts, there was this sense of self-righteousness, which somehow seemed to trump everything else."
As he watched online, Keane took screengrabs that he has now rendered in paint, with Blair in the foreground looking heavily distorted. Before the invasion of Iraq, Keane had actually been sounded out by the National Portrait Gallery to paint Blair, but the plan never came to fruition. Keane thinks Lord Derry Irvine blocked it. "I would have been honoured," says Keane who, back then, was a Blair supporter, thrilled by his 1997 election victory. "But in many respects, I'm glad things turned out how they did."
Need a fix of controversial US theatre? Make for Bath
Bath, I'm told, is less conservative than people give it credit for. This could explain why the Ustinov Studio is staging a handful of controversial US plays that others have steered well clear of. Laurence Boswell, artistic director, has commissioned what will be the UK premieres of three plays this spring – and you should think long and hard before taking your gran along to two of them.
There will be Adam Rapp's Red Light Winter, which Variety enticingly describes as "an edgy, nudity-heavy drama". Then there's Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), which charts the invention of this strange device that successfully treated female hysteria in the late 19th century. As one reviewer put it: "There's real emotional turmoil mixed in with the simulated orgasms." The third, which needs less parental guidance, is Howard Korder's In a Garden, about an ambitious US architect commissioned for a job in a fictional Middle Eastern country.
Quick – sign up against library closures
One of the most hotly anticipated parliamentary inquiries of 2012 is the one into library closures. It's an issue that arouses strong feelings, with many angry at the stance taken by arts minister Ed Vaizey. Or lack of stance, given how vocal he was about defending libraries while in opposition. "Your silence has been deafening," said a recent open letter that counted Joanna Trollope and Yann Martel among its signatories.
The committee has invited written submissions but you haven't got long: the deadline is tomorrow. Email cmsev@parliament.uk with "library closures" in the subject field.
