Bookshops are piled high with copies of The Essex Serpent, a novel by Sarah Perry. I read it at the end of last year and have some reservations.
It is a riff on the great Victorian novel – with more than a nod to Charles Dickens. I won’t elaborate except to say that I found it rather pretentious and very irritating. The critics fell for it. The Essex Serpent of the title refers to a pamphlet published in 1669, Strange News Out of Essex, describing a flying serpent that was killing farm animals and scaring the wits out of the citizenry.
Further north a similar story was doing the rounds: The Lambton Worm. The worm was a marauding dragon in Durham.
Now we are at our destination. Please alight at the Lambton Estate in Chester-le-Street. For about a month in 2015, Durham graduate, William Oldroyd, shot his first feature film here. The cinematographer is Ari Wegner and she has done a brilliant job; maybe a bit too much Farrow & Ball but the film is a beauty.
In 2006 I saw Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at Covent Garden. It was a gripping production but the only things I can remember are the garishly wallpapered sets and a mushroom omelette being cooked on stage. The opera is based on an 1865 novella, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov. Oldroyd’s film is based on the same tale. He has created a highly-charged drama that will keep you awake for ninety minutes: “a hit, a very palpable hit”.