Spring in London is an astonishing thing: blossom among the grey buildings and pavements; green and blue and pink and white making us look up at it and then at each other and smile, us Londoners who spend most of our time walking around looking at the pavement (or the now-ubiquitous technology in our hands), making us open our mouths and say something to a stranger about the beauty all around us. The postman said, this morning, ‘It’s lovely isn’t it, all this sun? All this flowery stuff?’ Outside a city it would sound ridiculous. Outside a city the seasons still govern life’s rhythms. But inside a city we’re insulated, interior, isolated from the natural. Spring makes us look up and out and reminds us that: 
The Earth is like a child that knows many poems.
Rainer Maria Rilke in his Sonnets to Orpheus
And the thing I would love to have made in a world where everything is possible and time is infinite is Simon McBurney’s The Kid Stays in the Picture. It’s technically brilliant and breathtaking as Michael Billington’s review says here, and I who, unlike Billington, knew nothing about Robert Evans (the subject of the play and head of production at Paramount Pictures which gave us, among many, The Godfather, Love Story and Chinatown) thought it had everything to add to the story of Robert Evans’ life. It’s a play that’s, in the words of one of the folk I went to see it with, ‘Eight-dimensional’. And the actors take on several roles each, all brilliantly. The run has just finished but if you spot it on anywhere go and see it and be amazed at what theatre about film can do.
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