Alex Marshall

In a telephone interview, Littmann said he wanted people who saw the forest to think about humanity’s impact on the environment in places like the Amazon. One day, he added, seeing trees could be a rare spectacle, like going to a soccer match or looking at animals in a zoo.

He said he had thought a few environmentalists might be annoyed that the trees had been trucked in from Belgium, Italy and northern Germany: They might claim it undermined the green message.

“But I didn’t think this would happen,” Littman said about what came next. “People are using it for political warfare.”

Littmann’s project, “For Forest,” opened in Klagenfurt, a small city in the southern state of Carinthia, on Sept. 8, as Austria was gearing up for national elections, scheduled for this Sunday. Now, the forest in a stadium has become the surprising focus for a political flap in an area that was once a stronghold of the far-right Freedom Party.

Opponents say “For Forest” wastes taxpayers’ money. (Littmann said it has been privately financed, but the regional government said state-funded institutions had spent part of their budgets on related events.) It’s also been attacked for using foreign trees, instead of local ones from Carinthia, and for preventing the local soccer team from using the stadium for important matches.

Littmann said he had been sworn at in public meetings, and was once pushed in the street and told to go home to Switzerland, where he lives.

A small group of protesters from the far-right Alliance for the Future of Austria party also turned up outside the stadium and waved chain saws in what it said was a “satirical protest” against the project.

But the main public opposition to the project has come from the larger Freedom Party, which has a strong base in Carinthia, and whose former leader Jörg Haider was once the state’s governor. Haider, who died in a car crash in 2008, was a flamboyant and media-savvy leader who brought anti-immigrant and anti-European Union views into the mainstream in Austria.

The stakes are high for the Freedom Party in Sunday’s election. Support in Carinthia, its former bastion, has slumped; in regional elections in 2018, it secured less than a quarter of the vote. Austria’s last coalition government was brought down in May after a video emerged showing Heinz-Christian Strache, the party’s current leader and the country’s vice chancellor at the time, promising government contracts in exchange for financial support from a woman he thought was a wealthy Russian.

Peter Kaiser, Carinthia’s current governor and a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party, said in a telephone interview that he did not think the attacks on the project had been successful. “Day by day, we’ve seen between 3,000 and 7,000 spectators,” at the stadium, he said.

The protesters, he added, were “just attacking it and hoping people who have an opposition to the climate situation, have an opposition to green policy, have an opposition to art, vote for them.”

Gernot Darmann, the Freedom Party’s chairman in Carinthia, denied the party opposed the installation because of its environmental message. In fact, he said in an email, “The project leaves a devastating ecological footprint,” because the trees were imported.

“Such a project would have more meaning in large industrial cities with bad air, and in countries where the forest is being over-exploited or destroyed,” he said. More than 60% of land in Carinthia is covered by woods, according to Austria’s Federal Office for Forests.

Littmann said transporting the trees had released up to 55 tonnes of carbon dioxide. That is roughly equivalent to the emissions a passenger would create by taking 25 return flights from New York to Vienna.

The idea for the project went back about 30 years, Littmann said, to when he saw a drawing by Max Peintner, an Austrian artist, called “The Unending Attraction of Nature.” It shows a dense forest in the middle of a sports stadium, with spectators gawping at it from bleachers. “I was completely fascinated by the image,” Littmann said.

The curator tried to turn the drawing into reality first in Switzerland, France and Germany, he said, but none of the soccer teams he approached would let their stadiums be used. He succeeded in Klagenfurt because the soccer team there was “so bad” at the time that it could not fill the stadium’s 30,000 seats, he added, so local authorities were happy to let him use it.

The furor around “For Forest” is likely to die away as soon as the election is held, Littmann said. But views on its success as an artwork will likely linger longer. Almuth Spiegler, the art critic for the Austrian daily Die Presse, said in a telephone interview that she loved Peintner’s original drawing: The trees in it had a threatening air to them, she said, and reminded her of a wild animal, caged.

But, she said, the installation did not have the same impact.

“It’s quite a banal metaphor for climate change,” she said, though she added that she kept thinking about it for hours after she saw it, and that it made her look afresh at other trees.

Darmann of the Freedom Party said he did not think the debate would have much impact on the election. He had not actually visited “For Forest,” he said, and would not let his son visit either. Instead, he had an alternative idea for an outing, he added: “In the near future I will take my son for a walk in a beautiful broad-leafed forest in Carinthia.”

This article originally appeared in

Forest in a Soccer Stadium Outrages Austria's Far Right

Curator Klaus Littmann expected complaints when he installed 299 trees — some up to 50 feet tall — in a soccer stadium in Austria.

Last Friday, Litvinenko went to London’s Old Vic Theater to watch “A Very Expensive Poison,” a new play by Lucy Prebble, running through Oct. 5. She knew she would have to watch her husband die again.

In a telephone interview the morning after the performance, Litvinenko recalled how, as she sat in the theater beforehand, a woman walked up to her, shook her hand and said, “I think you’re very brave.”

“I didn’t know for which reason,” Litvinenko said — “for coming and watching the play, or fighting for Sasha.”

Litvinenko said she had felt nervous going to the theater, partly because she didn’t know what to expect. There had been several documentaries about her husband’s murder, but never a play. The only previous dramatization was screened on Russian state television, she said. In it, Litvinenko was poisoned by another critic of the Kremlin.

Litvinenko said she had been nervous for another reason, too. “I want these people, this play, to succeed,” she said. “I want people to understand its message.”

Two weeks before Litvinenko went to see the play, Prebble, the playwright, sat in an office at the Old Vic Theater and pulled a bemused face at two glasses of water that had been left for her on a table. “It’s difficult to not be a little bit paranoid now,” she said. “I feel a little bit like I shouldn’t drink something that’s already been poured for me.”

It has been a decade since Prebble became the talk of British theater with “Enron,” a play that told the story of the U.S. energy company’s implosion, and that featured song and dance numbers and even, at one point, dinosaurs. “Enron” was a hit in the West End, but closed on Broadway after just one week.

The idea for “A Very Expensive Poison” came to her by surprise in 2017, Prebble said. Lately, she has been writing mostly for television (notably the HBO family drama “Succession”), and she felt she might be through with theater, she said. But then the Old Vic sent her a copy of a book about the Litvinenko case.

Prebble said she was only a short way through it when she felt she had to write a play about it. And she knew instantly how to do it.

She decided to tell the complex story of Litvinenko’s life and murder by having the character investigate his own death, with Putin trying to direct the action, or at least divert the audience’s attention from the truth, from the sidelines.

Prebble said she was also drawn to the love story behind the news event.

“I was touched by the immense loss to Marina,” she said. “She was not just dealing with a bereavement, which is terrible enough already, she was dealing with it being a murder, and then she’s dealing with the political machinations of it.”

After the murder, Litvinenko fought for years for an inquest, then a public inquiry, into her husband’s death, despite successive British governments blocking her efforts. She was as driven in her fight to expose Russian wrongdoing as her husband had been, Prebble said. “I thought what Marina did was tremendously moving,” she said. “She sort of carried on his fight.”

The writer met Litvinenko several times while researching the play, she said. The first was in a basement cafe of the London bookshop where Litvinenko used to meet his handler from the British secret service. Prebble worried that she might lose her sense of professional distance, she said, but that doesn’t seem to have happened: In the play, Litvinenko is sometimes portrayed as overly proud, or dangerously obsessed.

The play, Prebble said, has several messages: about Russian politics, about how governments in the West overlook murders like Litvinenko’s for economic or political reasons, and about male pride. But the main one, she said, is that a family suffered, and that no matter how absurd these events seem, they’re personal.

“After I met Marina a number of times, I did feel a personal connection to her,” Prebble said. “I wanted to do justice to how she spoke about Sasha.”

Last Friday at the Old Vic, Litvinenko eventually sat down to watch her life with Alexander onstage — both the happy times and the tragic ones.

Litvinenko said she was amazed by actor MyAnna Buring’s portrayal of her. “MyAnna took everything from me: how she moved, how she talked, how she looked,” she said.

She was equally impressed by Reece Shearsmith’s portrayal of Putin, she said. His interjections during the play should make people realize how Russia’s president really works, she added: by holding up a pretense of a democracy, although information and the courts are controlled and opposition is stifled.

“I saw people’s reactions, and I think they were understanding what’s happening in Russia now,” Litvinenko said.

She cried several times, but said there was one moment that had a bigger effect on her than any other. It was a short scene — just a few seconds long, and toward the end — in which Buring and Tom Brooke, the actor playing Litvinenko, dance tentatively.

“It was the breaking point for me,” said Litvinenko, a former dance teacher. “Of course, Sasha couldn’t dance,” she added. “We did try some movements, but it was only like this: just three simple steps, nothing difficult.”

Her voice broke as she spoke, as if she were about to cry again.

“It’s kind of a justice for me,” she said of the play. “People who come will understand who committed this crime. You can’t just do what Putin tries, to turn a page and forget it.”

“He decides it’s all forgotten,” Litvinenko added. “But not for me. Not for my friends. And now not for many people who watch this play.”

‘A Very Expensive Poison’

Through Oct. 5 at the Old Vic, London; oldvictheater.com.

A Murdered Spy's Widow Relives Her Loss Onstage

LONDON — In November 2006, Marina Litvinenko watched her husband, Alexander, die in a London hospital. The Russian spy-turned-whistle-blower — whom she called Sasha — had drunk green tea laced with the radioactive element polonium. President Vladimir Putin probably approved the murder, a public inquiry in Britain later said.

But after a few too many cellphone arguments, wild bachelorette parties and patrons getting drunk on smuggled-in gin, some theater owners have decided it’s time to use a high-tech tool for crowd control: body cameras.

Last month, The Stage, a British theater newspaper, revealed that several London venues had bought the devices to combat an increase in aggressive, alcohol-fueled theatergoers.

“When you mix in alcohol with the theater environment, that can exacerbate situations,” Phil Brown, head of risk and safety at the Society of London Theater, told the paper. Some staff members had refused to work Friday and Saturday nights because of the public’s bad behavior, Brown said.

The small cameras are clipped to belts or shirts and have a front-facing screen that shows the image being recorded, he said. People calm down when they see themselves being unreasonable, he added.

But because body cameras are more commonly associated with policing, theater officials have been reluctant to draw any attention to them.

On a tour of London’s theaters last month, staff members refused to speak about whether ushers were using body cameras, although employees at the doors who check bags on the way in appeared to be wearing the devices at “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” “Mamma Mia!,” and “Thriller Live.”

“I can’t say anything, sorry,” said Michael La Borde of Pace Prestige Services, a company that provides security to at least one London theater, in a telephone interview. “That’s above my pay grade,” he added. (La Borde is the company’s managing director.)

Julian Bird, chief executive of the Society of London Theater, said in a telephone interview that there had been “a lot of misreporting” about the issue. Some British newspapers, picking up The Stage’s article, had portrayed the West End as a war zone, Bird said. “That’s so ridiculously over the top,” he said.

Seven London theaters were using the technology, Bird said, although he declined to name them. He said his understanding was that normal ushers — such as those who sell ice cream at intermission — were not using body cameras in any West End theaters. They were used only by security workers or theater managers, who dealt with incidents that ushers could not resolve, he added.

In March, the Society of London Theater, and UK Theater, another trade body, asked their members to report bad audience behavior. Forty-four incidents had been logged, Bird said, out of more than 14 million trips to theaters. “It’s tiny,” he added.

Not everyone was so quick to dismiss reports of unruly patrons. Adam Charteris, 28, an actor who works as an usher between jobs, said in a telephone interview that audience members had sworn at him and that he had seen fights. He blamed high ticket prices for the worsening conduct. “It puts so much pressure on a night out,” he said, “and the second something goes wrong it becomes a big emotional issue.”

Incidents could erupt from something as minor as someone kicking the back of your chair, he said.

Behavior was worse around emotional holidays like Christmas, Charteris added. A few years ago, on Valentine’s Day, “two couples started swinging at each other in the middle of Row J,” he said. “It was just extraordinary.”

Charteris said the general feeling among ushers was that the audiences for so-called jukebox musicals were the worst behaved. These shows, which string together well-known pop songs, usually end with the audience singing and dancing in a finale that’s more like a rock concert than a play. But London’s more upmarket productions are not immune from rowdy behavior.

In December 2017, a theater producer said he was punched at a performance of “A Christmas Carol” at the Old Vic theater after asking a man’s girlfriend to stop using her cellphone. In May 2018 the English National Opera banned open water bottles after “someone got drunk by smuggling in gin and threw a loaf of bread across the auditorium,” Stuart Murphy, the opera’s chief executive, told The Daily Telegraph. (A spokeswoman for the opera company declined to comment for this article.)

The following month, two men at the National Theater got into fisticuffs at the end of a performance of “Julie,” a play inspired by the work of August Strindberg. At a performance of Wagner’s “Siegfried” at the Royal Opera House in March, a fight landed opera fans in court.

Kirsty Sedgman, a lecturer in theater at the University of Bristol who has written a book on audience behavior, said that fights in the arena were as old as theater itself: Plato complained about “catcalls and uncouth yelling” during performances in ancient Greece.

What is new, she said, is a culture clash between older audiences, who want silence, and newer ones, who attend the theater for a fun night.

Jukebox musicals are exactly the kind of shows that pull in the second. On a recent Friday night, body cameras were visible on the security guards at the Aldwych Theater for “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.” A preshow announcement asked people to “please refrain” from dancing or singing during the performance, and, in the first half, ushers had to tell at least three audience members in the orchestra level to put their phones away and stop filming.

But there was nothing bad enough to warrant a body camera’s glare. No one was sick in the aisle, and no one belted out “Let’s Stay Together” from their seat. At one point in the second half, a minor flap broke out when a woman spilled a glass of rosé and lemonade. But any noise was just the woman, in a very British fashion, repeatedly apologizing for the upset.

After the performance, members of a bachelorette party stood outside the theater taking photos. Emma Simpson, 46, wearing a veil and “Bride to Be” sash, said her friends, who were wearing novelty headgear for the night, had been well behaved. “We only had two gin and tonics before the show,” she said.

Body cameras sounded like a brilliant idea, Simpson added. “I’m all for people having a little bit of a laugh, but it’s a thin line when you’re spoiling it for others,” she said. Her group had gone out of its way not to be a pain, she said: “We even took our bunny ears off.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/theater/body-cameras-london-west-end.html" id="fbf327d5-03a0-3877-a6e3-af4fc94feb43">The New York Times</a>.

Bachelorettes, Brawls and Body Cameras: A Night at the Theater in London

LONDON — The West End is traditionally seen as a genteel place where crowds flock to sit amid Victorian opulence, watching the world’s great actors and musical stars in quiet reverie.

Polanski, the Polish-born filmmaker who won the Oscar for best director in 2003 for “The Pianist,” has been a fugitive from the United States since 1978, after he fled the country while awaiting sentencing for the statutory rape of an underage girl.

Last year, he was expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, not long after it changed its rules to say there was “no place in the academy for people who abuse their status, power or influence in a manner that violates recognized standards of decency.”

But there is still a place for Polanski at Venice, where he has a long history. In 2011, he did not attend the premiere of his film “Carnage” there because of attempts to extradite him to the United States.

“J’accuse” is about one of history’s most famous miscarriages of justice: the Dreyfus affair, in which Albert Dreyfus, a Jewish French military officer, was wrongly convicted of treason in the 1890s. The film takes its title from an open letter by Émile Zola, the novelist, that accused France’s government of mishandling the case and of anti-Semitism.

“J’accuse” will compete for the Golden Lion, the festival’s top prize, against 20 other films. Those include “The Laundromat,” Steven Soderbergh’s comedy based on the Panama Papers scandal, which showed some of the world’s most powerful people may have used offshore bank accounts to hide their wealth.

“The Laundromat” stars Meryl Streep, whose character uncovers a scandal involving a law firm in Panama City run by two men played by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas.

Other films in competition include “Ad Astra,” starring Brad Pitt as an astronaut who travels into space in search of his father, played by Tommy Lee Jones; and Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story,” about a husband and wife dealing with the demise of their relationship, which stars Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson.

“Marriage Story” will also play at the Toronto International Film Festival, whose lineup was announced on Tuesday.

The festival will open with “The Truth,” by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda. His film “Shoplifters,” about a group of petty thieves who rescue a girl from abusive parents, won the Palme d’Or, the top award at the Cannes Film Festival, in 2018.

“The Truth” is in French and English and features Catherine Deneuve as a French actress who has a complex relationship with her daughter, played by Juliette Binoche.

Venice has recently been criticized for its lack of films by female directors. Last year, Jennifer Kent’s “The Nightingale” was the only film in competition directed by a woman. This year there are two: Shannon Murphy’s “Babyteeth,” a comedy about a seriously ill teenager who falls in love with a drug dealer; and “The Perfect Candidate,” by Haifaa al-Mansour, the pioneering Saudi Arabian director, about a female doctor who runs for office in the country.

The Venice Film Festival will run from Aug. 28 through Sept. 7.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/arts/venice-film-festival-roman-polanski.html" id="8641019f-0b3d-3ad3-afd0-b435a17e928e">The New York Times</a>.

Roman Polanski’s “J’accuse” will compete at this year’s Venice Film Festival, organizers said in a statement Thursday.

Roman Polanski's New Film Will Compete at Venice Film Festival

The prosecution will proceed “despite claims of self-defense and provocation,” the public prosecutor for Stockholm, Daniel Suneson, said in an email.

The rapper will remain in custody until a trial begins Tuesday, the Swedish Prosecution Authority said in a statement.

The punishment for Rocky could include a fine based on his daily earnings or a maximum two years in prison, a spokeswoman for the Swedish Prosecution Authority said.

The development will sharpen the focus on a case that started as a street brawl, but has ballooned into a diplomatic incident, with Sweden facing accusations of racism and human rights abuses for its treatment of the rapper.

Rocky, 30, whose real name is Rakim Mayers, is accused of assaulting Mustafa Jafari in Stockholm on June 30 after an altercation in the street that was captured on video. The rapper and two other men were detained on July 5 as prosecutors investigated the matter.

Slobodan Jovicic, Rocky’s lawyer, said in a telephone interview Thursday that the rapper acted in self-defense. On July 2, Rocky posted two videos on Instagram that Jovicic said show Jafari and another man following and harassing the rapper, despite being repeatedly asked to stop.

But Suneson, the prosecutor, said Jafari had been punched, kicked and struck with a glass bottle in an attack that lasted several minutes.

Rocky’s case was initially treated as a minor incident, but rapidly escalated after the rapper was detained and tour dates were canceled. Pop stars including Justin Bieber shared a Change.org petition created by Rocky’s team that demanded his release.

As the clamor to free Rocky grew, the case went all the way to the White House: On Saturday, President Donald Trump called Prime Minister Stefan Lofven of Sweden to discuss the rapper’s detention.

Trump said on Twitter that he had told the prime minister he would “personally vouch” for Rocky’s bail if the rapper were to be released. Sweden has no system of bail.

Lofven’s office said in a statement Saturday that the prime minister would not intervene.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/arts/music/asap-rocky-charged-sweden.html" id="b084cb1a-d16a-3de1-a158-ebb4ac1fce29">The New York Times</a>.

The rapper ASAP Rocky was charged Thursday with having committed an assault causing actual bodily harm June 30 in Stockholm, Swedish prosecutors said in a statement.

ASAP Rocky to Stand Trial in Sweden on Assault Charge

The punishment for Rocky could include a fine based on his daily earnings or a maximum two years in prison, a spokeswoman for the Swedish Prosecution Authority, Annika Collin, said in a telephone interview.

Two members of Rocky’s entourage also face a trial.

Suneson said he had more evidence than the video clips that were published to Rocky’s Instagram and on websites including TMZ. That included footage from CCTV cameras and witness statements, he added.

Rocky’s case was initially treated as a minor incident, but rapidly escalated after the rapper was detained and tour dates were canceled. Pop stars including Justin Bieber shared a Change.org petition created by Rocky’s team that demanded his release. More than 600,000 people have signed.

Trump said on Twitter that he had told the prime minister he would “personally vouch” for Rocky’s bail if the rapper were to be released. Sweden has no system of bail and usually keeps foreigners accused of crimes in detention because of the flight risk.

Lofven’s office said in a statement Saturday that the 20-minute phone call had been cordial but that the prime minister insisted he would not intervene, and “underlined that in Sweden everyone is equal before the law.”

The storm did not settle despite Trump’s intervention. “I don’t want to call the race card,” Renee Black, Rocky’s mother, told the gossip site TMZ on Monday, “but that’s what it’s looking like.”

“If it walk like a duck and it quack like a duck, then it’s a duck,” she added.

Lovette Jallow, a human-rights activist in Sweden and commentator on race issues, said in a telephone interview Tuesday that “racism in Sweden is very problematic.” “But it is not a case of racism in the ASAP Rocky case,” she added.

On Thursday, Expressen, a Swedish newspaper, reported that Jafari is 19 and comes from Afghanistan.

Magnus Stromberg, Jafari’s lawyer, would not confirm his client’s nationality in a telephone interview Thursday, but said he was an immigrant. “He has only stayed in Sweden for a few years,” Stromberg said in an earlier phone call.

His client “had no previous knowledge of ASAP Rocky before this incident,” Stromberg said.

“He is under a lot of pressure, and he doesn’t feel secure,” Stromberg said. “This is not a racist prosecution,” he added. “The prosecutor has analyzed the case thoroughly and handled it impartially.”

Prosecutors investigated Jafari on accusations of “abuse and assault,” after Rocky’s bodyguard said the man had hit him during the altercation, but that case was dropped Monday, the Swedish Prosecution Service said in a statement.

The man did hit the bodyguard, the statement added, but in self-defense.

Jovicic, Rocky’s lawyer, said the rapper was “under a dark cloud,” but added that he and his legal team had “good hope that we will get a result, and get him home soon.”

He refused to consider the possibility that Rocky might be jailed. “Let’s not talk about that now,” he said. “We are preparing for a trial.”

The rapper ASAP Rocky was charged Thursday with having committed an assault causing actual bodily harm June 30 in central Stockholm, Swedish prosecutors said in a statement.

An extended search ended Wednesday, when the company announced that Alexander Neef, general director of the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, would take on the position, starting in 2021.

“It’s a pretty emotional day, obviously,” Neef, who was born in Germany, said in a telephone interview from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he is also the artistic director of Santa Fe Opera. “It’s a big honor and a big responsibility.”

Widely admired for his work in Toronto, Neef, 45, is no stranger to the Paris Opera, where he was casting director from 2004 to 2008, working under his mentor, Gerard Mortier. He also held positions alongside Mortier at the Salzburg Festival and the Ruhrtriennale, and during Mortier’s brief time leading the New York City Opera.

“What I really look forward to,” Neef said, “is reconnecting with the people” in Paris, where he will oversee both the opera and ballet sides of the company.

The appointment was welcomed by many in France. “It is a very good choice,” Christian Merlin, a critic for the newspaper Le Figaro, said in an email.

“For the first time, it won’t be a position for a man at the end of his career,” Merlin added, saying that Neef’s relative youth could allow for a long tenure and the implementation of needed changes.

“The other advantage is that he knows both the European and American systems,” Merlin said, “so both government subsidies and private finance, which is very useful today in our vulnerable economic context.”

Neef helped make Toronto an operatic destination, attracting top singers like Sondra Radvanosvky and staging ambitious productions. Last year, he presented the premiere of Rufus Wainwright’s “Hadrian,” which tells the story of the Roman emperor’s love affair with Antinous, a young Greek man, and included a gay sex scene, an unusual occurrence on the opera stage.

“It’s 2018, and it’s our job to tell these stories,” Neef said at the time in an interview with The New York Times.

Neef said Wednesday that President Emmanuel Macron of France interviewed him for 45 minutes a few weeks ago for the directorship, which is officially a presidential appointment.

“For someone who is running a country, I found it incredible he took so much time,” Neef said.

He added that it was too early to provide definite plans for his tenure but that he wanted to expand the company’s work on 21st-century operas and new commissions, and also to explore French operas.

“It's about identity, to really look at the French repertoire,” he said. “Not in an encyclopedic way, but showing the right pieces and the forgotten pieces, to keep that part of the heritage alive.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/arts/music/alexander-neef-paris-opera.html" id="4cdde6eb-45d3-3d8e-a807-7ea4be6b3176">The New York Times</a>.

Founded in 1669 by Louis XIV, and with a modern-day budget of over 200 million euros ($222 million), the Paris Opera is one of the oldest and most powerful music-theater companies in the world. But it has struggled to find a successor to Stéphane Lissner, its director since 2014.

After a Long Search, Paris Opera Names a Director

“A ferocious nondisclosure agreement” prevented the prize’s judges revealing any of the book’s plot, they said in a joint statement announcing the list of 13 competitors. But the novel is “terrifying and exhilarating,” they added.

Atwood, whose novel “The Blind Assassin” won the Booker Prize in 2000, faces strong competition for the award. Other nominated books include Salman Rushdie’s forthcoming “Quichotte,” about a traveling salesman who drives across the United States, and “10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World” by Elif Shafak, about a prostitute in Istanbul.

Little is known about “The Testaments,” except that it is set 15 years after “The Handmaid’s Tale” and is narrated by three female characters. Last year, Atwood said that she wanted “The Testaments” to explore parallels between her imaginary dystopia and the current political climate.

The list of nominees is dominated by novels inspired by political crises, such as John Lanchester’s “The Wall,” set on an island surrounded by a concrete barrier to keep rising seas and immigrants out. Mexican author Valeria Luiselli’s “Lost Children Archive,” about child migrants, has also made the cut.

The nominated books “imagine our world, familiar from news cycle disaster and grievance, with wild humor, deep insight and a keen humanity,” said Peter Florence, the chair of the judges, in a statement.

Other books on the list are less political, such as Oyinkan Braithwaite’s comic thriller, “My Sister, The Serial Killer.”

The nominees will be narrowed down to a shortlist of six that will be revealed Sept. 3, and the winner will be announced Oct. 14.

Margaret Atwood, “The Testaments”

Kevin Barry, “Night Boat to Tangier”

Oyinkan Braithwaite, “My Sister, The Serial Killer”

Lucy Ellmann, “Ducks, Newburyport”

Bernardine Evaristo, “Girl, Woman, Other”

Deborah Levy, “The Man Who Saw Everything”

Valeria Luiselli, “Lost Children Archive”

Chigozie Obioma, “An Orchestra of Minorities”

Elif Shafak, “10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World”

Jeanette Winterson, “Frankissstein”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/books/booker-longlist-margaret-atwood.html" id="2043ecb7-8157-3abf-ae50-7c4a4924dfb7">The New York Times</a>.

LONDON — Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Testaments,” the highly anticipated sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” was announced here on Wednesday as one of the books in the running for the Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award.

Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie in Running for Booker Prize

Little is known about “The Testaments,” except that it is set 15 years after “The Handmaid’s Tale” and is narrated by three female characters. Last year, Atwood said in a statement that she wanted “The Testaments” to explore parallels between her imaginary dystopia — in which women are treated as reproductive serfs — and the current political climate.

The list of nominees is dominated by novels inspired by political crises, such as John Lanchester’s “The Wall,” set on an island surrounded by a concrete barrier to keep rising seas and immigrants out. Mexican author Valeria Luiselli’s “Lost Children Archive,” about child migrants, has also made the cut. “The brilliance of the writing stirs rage and pity,” wrote Gaiutra Bahadur, in a review of the book for The New York Times.

The nominated books “imagine our world, familiar from news cycle disaster and grievance, with wild humor, deep insight and a keen humanity,” said Peter Florence, the chair of the judges, in a statement. “These writers offer joy and hope.”

Other books on the list are less political, such as Oyinkan Braithwaite’s comic thriller, “My Sister, The Serial Killer,” about two siblings in Lagos, Nigeria, one of whom has a habit of murdering her boyfriends. It is “a bombshell of a book — sharp, explosive, hilarious,” wrote Fiammetta Rocco in The New York Times. “Only after you turn the last page do you realize that, as with many brilliant comic writers before her, laughter for Braithwaite is as good for covering up pain as bleach is for masking the smell of blood.”

From its inception in 1969 until 2014, the Booker prize was limited to books by writers from Britain, Ireland and Commonwealth countries (plus South Africa and, later, Zimbabwe), but that changed in 2014, when it was opened to works by anyone writing in English. That led to fears it would be dominated by Americans.

In 2016, Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout” took the prize, and, the following year, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” by George Saunders, won. Both writers are American. After that, criticism of the rule change grew, and non-American authors complained they were being crowded out. In 2018, a literary society that counts Atwood, Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith among its members demanded the rule be reversed.

The closest this year’s longlist comes to a book by an American writer is “Ducks, Newburyport,” by Lucy Ellmann, who was born in Illinois, but moved to Britain when she was 13 and now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The nominees will be narrowed down to a shortlist of six that will be revealed on Sept. 3, and the winner, who receives around $62,000, will be announced at a ceremony in London on Oct. 14.

The suggestion, first made on Instagram, did not go down very well — some even called it blasphemous, Lehanneur said.

The idea was meant as a simple provocation: to show the absurdity of rebuilding the spire as it was in the 19th century, he said. But, he added, he had since become serious about the plan.

“A few days after I put it online, I thought, ‘Why not?’ ” Lehanneur said. “The flame is actually a very strong symbol in the Bible,” he noted. “It’s powerful.”

Lehanneur’s plan is among dozens that have been made public since the fire, most of them produced by small architectural and design firms. They range from the madcap (an architectural folly that looks like a spaceship has landed on the cathedral) to the modern (a project that would turn the roof into a greenhouse).

Many of the designs are glass towers. But one, from Vizum Atelier, a design firm based in Slovakia, would see a beam of light shoot up from a new spire into the sky. It would be a “lighthouse for lost souls,” Michal Kovac, an architect at the firm, said via email. It would fulfill the aim of the architects of Gothic cathedrals around Europe who wanted to touch heaven with their spires, he added.

Another proposal with religious overtones came from Alexandre Fantozzi, a Brazilian architect, who envisaged the cathedral’s roof and spire being rebuilt entirely using stained glass.

A further design, by Alex Nerovnya, a lecturer at the Moscow Architectural Institute, suggested a roof resembling a diamond around a rebuilt Gothic spire.

Several designers said that their designs were merely artistic responses to the shock of the fire. But some also hope that their plans will be chosen. Two days after the fire, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe of France said that there would be an international competition for a spire to replace the one designed by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc that was destroyed. “This is obviously a huge challenge, a historic responsibility,” Philippe said.

No details of the proposed contest have yet been released.

President Emmanuel Macron of France said last month that he was not opposed to a “a contemporary architectural gesture” that could make Notre Dame “even more beautiful.” But many in France have called for Viollet-le-Duc’s spire to be restored as it had been built. On Thursday, the daily newspaper Le Figaro published a survey suggesting that 55 percent of French people wanted the spire restored to its original form, and several politicians have pushed for an identical replacement.

A proposed law on how the restoration would be financed was to be put before the French Parliament on Friday. The law would also allow exemptions from environmental and heritage rules for the project, seen as measures intended to make it possible to comply with Macron’s stated desire to rebuild the cathedral within five years.

In response, more than 1,100 architecture professionals and art historians published a letter in Le Figaro on April 29 calling on the government to “take time to find the right way” to restore the structure and ensure that heritage laws were respected.

Franck Riester, the French culture minister, told Parliament on Friday that the restoration would “not be hasty” and that the government would listen to critics of the proposed law.

No major architect has yet issued a proposal for how they would rebuild Notre Dame, but several said they would consider entering a competition when details were announced.

“We’d certainly think about it,” Stephen Barrett, a partner at the London-based practice of architect Richard Rogers, said. Rogers was one of the architects who designed the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Barrett said the five-year deadline was unrealistic, unless a new spire was constructed elsewhere, using modern lightweight materials, and then dropped into place. But that was “not in the spirit of a medieval cathedral, which took decades and involved a lot of craft,” he added.

Barrett said “the most interesting” designs he had seen so far were those that involved opening up the roof and creating a new public space. Those included turning the structure into some kind of garden with trees, echoing the lattice of ancient timber beams that used to make up the cathedral’s attic and that were known as “the Forest.”

“That process of democratizing space is something we like and have done before,” Barrett said, though he speculated that the weight of trees could be too much for the cathedral.

Several designs have appeared online that look to create gardens. The greenhouse design was created by Paris-based Studio NAB and would include beehives in the glass spire. Those plans are a nod to the beehives that have long been kept on Notre Dame’s roof — the honey produced has traditionally been given to the poor. (The hives survived the fire.)

Clément Willemin, a director at a French landscape architecture firm, posted on LinkedIn his idea to turn the cathedral’s roof into a garden with views across Paris “dedicated to all the species of animals and plants that we have been erasing off the planet.”

Willemin said that a love of nature and a desire to protect the environment were concerns that united people across the world. “In that way, it is our one and only universal religion,” he said.

Like most of the plans, Willemin’s idea has received a mixed response. But he predicted that whatever idea was chosen would cause upset. “There is no way we’ll get to a consensus and an idea that everyone is happy with. Definitely not in France,” he said.

Lehanneur, who designed the flame spire, noted that most of the landmark buildings in Paris had been contentious when they were constructed, including the Eiffel Tower, the glass pyramid at the Louvre and the Pompidou.

The objections never last long, Lehanneur said. “After one or two decades, the most conservative people not only accept them, they want to defend them,” he added.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/arts/design/notre-dame-spire-designs.html" id="83b6e901-7174-3a7f-a4f8-a4ecd2a42e20">The New York Times</a>.

On April 23, about a week after the fire at Notre Dame in Paris, designer Mathieu Lehanneur unveiled his plan for a new spire for the cathedral: a gleaming, 300-foot flame, made of carbon fiber and covered in gold leaf, that would be a permanent reminder of the tragedy.

Glass, Golden Flames or a Beam of Light: What Should Replace Notre Dame's Spire?

On Wednesday, the shortlist of four artists for this year’s prize was announced at Tate Britain in London, including Colombian artist Oscar Murillo and sound artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan. But the announcement was overshadowed by news that a bus company owned by the Stagecoach Group was to sponsor an exhibition of the shortlisted artists at Turner Contemporary, a gallery in Margate, a seaside town about 70 miles east of London.

Brian Souter, Stagecoach’s chairman, campaigned in 2000 against teaching about homosexuality in schools, and has spoken against same-sex marriage.

At the news conference announcing the shortlist, Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain and chairman of the Turner Prize’s judges, declined to comment on whether Stagecoach was an appropriate choice. It had been Turner Contemporary’s responsibility to find local sponsors, he said.

But just over 24 hours later, Turner Contemporary, Tate and Stagecoach canceled the deal by mutual agreement, an emailed statement said.

“We are absolutely committed to diversity in our company,” Stagecoach South East said in the statement. “However, we do not want anything to distract from celebrating the Turner Prize artists and their work.”

LONDON — The Turner Prize, Britain’s most high-profile art award, has canceled a sponsorship deal after gay rights campaigners criticized it for accepting money from Stagecoach, a transportation company.

Alex Marshall

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