Neil MacGregor, the British Museum’s ever-inquiring, ever-thoughtful director, hopes his new exhibition on the Hajj will be the closest a non-Muslim can get to understanding the pilgrimage to Mecca.

And it probably is.

The ground-breaking show has been created thanks in part to the highest-level backing from Saudi Arabia secured when Mr MacGregor and curator Venetia Porter visited the Saudi royal family three years ago.

That led to collaboration with the King Abdulaziz Library in Riyadh and a series of loans which together convey something of the intensity of the spiritual journey that only Muslims can take part in.

Plans were dealt a bit of a blow by the Arab Spring which prevented some works from leaving the Middle East, principally Egypt. But other astonishing rarities are in.

They include a 15th century certificate showing Hajj has been accomplished, an 8th century Koran which is one of the earliest in existence, and the dramatic red ceremonial “mahmal,” a tent carried on a camel, which was the centrepiece of the pilgrim caravan. There are also modern souvenirs such as hats and holy water jars, called zamzam, collected in 2010.

Ten million Muslims a year now take part in the Hajj but the exhibition shows how early explorers ignored religious sensitivities to join them. The explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton disguised himself as an Afghan doctor to gain access in 1853.

The show highlights key travel routes and the compasses and maps required to make the journey which was often difficult and dangerous. Outbreaks of cholera led the government of India to appoint the travel agents Thomas Cook to organise visits for seven years from 1886.

Dr Porter said: “If you really want to understand Islam you have to understand what the Hajj is and why people keep going to Mecca. We tell the story through lots of quirky ordinary objects as well as beautiful ones.”

Faisal bin Muammar, of the King Abdulaziz Public Library, said they hoped the exhibition would be “a source of inspiration and enlightenment for all who visit it”.

I suspect the show will horrify those who disapprove of what they see as "politically-correct" multi-culturalism in British museums and galleries, though why eludes me. Better understanding all round? Why knock it?

The music of Radiohead is inspiring a new work by pioneering
avant-garde composer Steve Reich that is to be premiered in London.
The 75-year-old some regard as America’s greatest living composer is
transforming tracks including Everything In Its Right Place and Jigsaw
Falling Into Place into a new commission for the London Sinfonietta.
It is set to be a highlight of a blockbuster 2012/2013 season at the
Southbank Centre announced today.
The 15 to 20-minute piece, Radio Rewrite, joins a programme alongside
Bryn Terfel in a concert performance of Wagner’s opera The Flying
Dutchman, Sir Simon Rattle conducting the final three Mozart
symphonies and an entire programme dedicated to bringing The Rest is
Noise, Alex Ross’s award-winning history of 20th century music, to
life.
Speaking from his home in the States, Reich revealed his first
connection with Radiohead was in an email exchange with its guitarist
and keyboard player Jonny Greenwood whom he then met at a music
festival in Krakow, Poland, last autumn.
“Meeting him encouraged me to look further into their music,” he said.
Greenwood, Thom Yorke and bandmates have supplied Reich with samples
of tracks and sanctioned his use of their music for the commission
which is “not making musical variations in the classical sense but
dealing with the harmony and with the melody”.
Reich said: “I really like them, they’re really different. If you look
at the themes I’m working with, I think they’re brilliantly
constructed. Their instincts are intelligent.”
He is still writing the work, which will be premiered on March 5 next
year, and said he believes there is at least one “obvious
quote” for the band’s fans to spot but added: “It may strike you or
you may go – where’s the Radiohead?”
It is a turnabout for the composer, an arch proponent of minimalism
alongside Philip Glass, who has himself influenced rock acts including
Sonic Youth, King Crimson, the Orb and Brian Eno.
The Rest of Noise season of events will see the London Philharmonic
Orchestra performing important classical works whose stories are told
in the book with guest soloists including the baritone Thomas Hampson.
Under the Southbank’s Shell Classic International series, the
Philharmonic will also collaborate with the Russian National
Orchestra, Russia’s pre-eminent orchestra, to perform major Russian
and British orchestral works under the heading War and Peace.
The season will also celebrate the centenary of Stravinsky’s Rite of
Spring, the work that sparked a riot when premiered, and include
performers such as trumpeter Alison Balsom, the pianists Angela Hewitt
and the teenage Benjamin Grosvenor and baritone Sir Thomas Allen.
www.southbankcentre.co.uk

London audiences could get to see Love Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s troubled sequel to the famous Phantom of the Opera, on the big screen.
The musical was dubbed Paint Never Dries when it premiered two years ago. But a revamped version with completely new staging has wowed fans in Australia where it has just opened in Sydney.
The live show has been captured for film using the technology and skills developed for the increasingly popular cinema relays of performances from the National Theatre and New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
And its composer is so pleased with the dramatic results he is now considering a limited cinema release – which could be the only hope for British Phantom fans to catch it as he told me he would not be bringing the show back to the West End any time soon.
He said it was “completely thrilling” and initial reaction very encouraging. “It has made the think that maybe it could have a small theatrical release. I’m very proud of what the Australians have done,” he said at a private screening yesterday.
Michael Ball, the musicals star who was among the guests, told me he was so impressed he wants his forthcoming appearance in Sweeney Todd in the West End to be recorded in the same way.
“I like the changes they have made to it. And in some ways it’s better than making a movie because it has the edginess you get from a live performance. Technically, Andrew’s reinventing the wheel.”
Arlene Phillips sobbed at the Phantom’s reunion with his love, the singer Christine. “I just cannot believe how moving it is and how exciting it is. I was transfixed.”
Lord Lloyd-Webber is set to screen it in New York next week and will then decide whether to delay DVD release for a cinema run. There's no doubt there would be an audience.

The actress Emma Thompson has endorsed the pioneering political plays of the Tricycle Theatre as vital in explaining pressing social issues in a way no straightforward journalism can achieve.

Plays such as The Colour of Justice, its drama about the inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence murder, had made sure the issue had not gone away, she told me, and “illuminated and explored” what had gone so “horribly and tragically wrong” in Eltham.

“You can’t emphasise enough the importance of that particular kind of communication. When I was growing up, agit-prop [theatre] could be a bit clunky. But the Tricycle has blazed a trail in making pieces of work that are truly engaging and artistically thrilling.”

I caught up with her at the launch of a second phase of fundraising for the Tricycle - her local venue - after its cut in Arts Council funding. The Pym’s Gallery in Mayfair is showing paintings by the Victorian Hercules Brabazon Brabazon that have been donated by a theatre supporter, Al Weil, 89, for auction.

The rather nice twist is that Brabazon was an artist championed by the critic John Ruskin who just happens to be the subject of Ms Thompson’s new film where he is played by her husband Greg Wise.

She has written the film, Effie, about Ruskin, his wife Effie and her lover, the artist John Everett Millais, which has just finished shooting, in London, Scotland and Venice.

It was beset by claims of plagiarism but these were being resolved, she said. She compared the process to writing a story about Hitler “and everyone says, So have I?”

You can see what she means. It might not be as well-known as the Princess Di-Camilla-Charles love triangle, but the Ruskin-Millais scandal is famous in art history. Very exciting.

I finally caught the thought-provoking new play by Rachel De-lahay at the Royal Court at the weekend.

Westbridge explores the tensions that emerge between a couple who come from different racial backgrounds after a black man is accused of rape, an allegation that sparks trouble in the community.

In a case of fiction pre-dating fact, her story of riots in south London was written two years ago, long before this summer’s outbreak of violence.

But De-lahay, 27, told me she could understand the despair of the young people who were involved in this August’s troubles.

The reasons behind the real riots and her fictional ones may have been different and the troubles could not be condoned, she said.

But the tensions revealed this summer suggested there were people whose voices were not being heard.

 “I wouldn’t be involved in something like that because I feel I have something to lose. But I think they were there because they have nothing to lose.”

De-lahay, who comes from a multi-racial background in Handsworth, Birmingham, and now lives at London Bridge, won scholarships to drama college so all her fees were paid before winning a place on the Royal Court young writers programme.

“But if you’re not going to get the education you want or a job you want or the house you want, then nothing will stop you.”

London film-maker Joanna Hogg has launched a collective to screen forgotten gems and overlooked masterpieces of contemporary cinema.
The debut event last night was a screening of a 1983 French film, A Nos Amours by Maurice Pialat, which she described as “film-making on the edge”. It's about a French teenage girl who embarks on a sexual rampage.
It is being followed tonight by Edvard Munch, a biopic of the Norwegian painter by Peter Watkins, a radical pioneer of docudramas such as Culloden.
Both are being screened in Nomad,  the current pop-up cinema in a former Books etc store in Whiteleys Shopping Centre.
Hogg, 51, an Evening Standard British Film Awards most promising newcomer for her debut film Unrelated, said the idea stemmed from a conversation with experimental film-maker Adam Roberts.
They both agreed they were depressed at the “limited diet” of films on offer in London cinemas and the decline in the number of repertory cinemas in the capital.
But watching movies on DVDs was not enough. “On a television screen, you can’t appreciate the film completely,” she said.
Hogg and Roberts, who hope others will join them in the collective, have had to learn how to trace distributors to hire the movies they want to show.
But they have discovered the cost is normally around a few hundred pounds although securing films from abroad might prove more expensive. “It is totally viable,” she said.
“If these first two screenings are successful, we’ll start to programme more and maybe other cinemas will like our collective and want to show the kind of things we want to see,” she said.
“I do think there’s an appetite and I just hope it works out. It’s not just about the screenings. We want it to be a meeting place for like-minded people.”
Anyone interested in the work of the collective, itself called A Nos Amours, can sign up to a newsletter at anosamours2011@gmail.com
Hogg, whose second film was Archipelago, is now working on a third, about a married couple, set in London. Tom Hiddleston, who appeared in both her first two films and is now starring in The Deep Blue Sea and War Horse, is talking to her about the new work.

Neither business philanthropy nor private donors can save the arts as both have collapsed since the market crash of 2008, the actor Samuel West has warned.

The star of the play Enron and films including Howards End issued the alert in his role as a trustee of the National Campaign for the Arts as it launched a new state-of-the-nation audit of British arts at the House of Commons last night.

The new “UK Arts Index,” which brings together figures on everything from audiences to lottery grants for the first time, shows business support has dropped by 17 per cent and private giving by 13 per cent in the last three years.

And the pressure on finances comes as the arts are becoming increasingly dependent on volunteers, who are up 14 per cent, at the same time as employment across arts bodies has dropped by 9 per cent.

The index shows that although London was miles ahead of other regions in terms of funding, audiences and quality in 2008, the gap is narrowing as the financial crisis tightens.

And West warned the situation could only get worse as local authority cuts of 28 per cent and the full impact of the Arts Council’s 15 per cent to theatres, dance companies and orchestras hit home next year.

Yet the triumphant success of free admission to national museums and galleries where attendances have doubled in a decade showed both the appetite for culture and the impact of charging.

“The NCA believes that the most important thing about culture is to keep it cheap. People will come,” the actor said.

The UK Arts Index is based on a similar study undertaken in America. The NCA intends to repeat it annually. Culture minister Ed Vaizey said it would be “a useful tool for the sector”.

A dance company whose Arts Council funding is being axed gives its final performances this week after a quarter of a century of performances.
The all-male Featherstonehaughs - and sister company, the all-female Cholmondeleys - will cease operation after a final run at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith that starts tonight.
Artistic director Lea Anderson, 52, of Peckham, south London, who founded both companies, told me it was “incredibly sad”.
“I think we were very particular and totally unlike anything else we know of. It’s a very English kind of style.”
They had relieved “heavily” on the Arts Council, which gave them £337,230 this year, as sponsorship was difficult to attract for their kind of experimental dance.
The companies had three full-time managers and might use up to 12 dancers, four musicians and three technicians for a tour.
But with funding ending entirely in April, she said she had “absolutely no plans whatsoever to do anything”.
“You lose your mojo a bit when something like this happens and your company disappears. I have no other way of working. But I’m delighted to have been able to have done it at all and 27 years of funding isn’t bad going for anyone.”
Although the current tour was of work by the Featherstonehaughs inspired by the artist Egon Schiele, the Cholmondeleys will join them for the final performance on Saturday.
It may be a sign of things to come. As Nicholas Hytner confessed to me this week, without  War Horse the National Theatre would be really feeling the effects of the spending cuts.
So heaven help the little guys.

My top discovery of the week was that the great abstract artist Piet Mondrian was an Evening Standard reader!
It emerged when I was talking to Barnaby Wright, the curator of a new exhibition that is to tell the untold story of the creative friendship of the Dutchman and British star Ben Nicholson.
The two men met in Paris in 1934 and the older Mondrian moved to London in 1938 at Nicholson’s invitation to join the circle of artists including Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth then living in Hampstead.
Mondrian fell in love with the large scale of the city and became a regular Londoner who read the Evening Standard and even modelled his own writings on art on the concise style of British newspapers.
The exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in the spring will explore their parallel careers developing abstract painting, working just yards apart.
Nicholson’s studio was in the garden of the house where Mondrian lived and worked in Parkhill Road during his two-year London stay.
Mondrian quit Britain when a bomb hit the next-door house, finally prompting him to move to New York to find peace for work.
Dr Wright said: “Nicholson was the younger figure and the rising star of British art. Mondrian was the father figure. But what is interesting is Nicholson learns the language that Mondrian is speaking artistically but takes it on in a very original way in his work. It’s not the tedious story of an artist following another in a rather slavish way.”
He added: “Mondrian loved it in London - the community of artists and friends he had around him in Hampstead. And after Paris, it felt enormous and had a really liberating effect on his art. He really enjoyed reading the Evening Standard and becoming a Londoner.”
Mondrian Nicholson: In Parallel will run from February 16 to May 20.
It will be followed by an exhibition of master drawings from the gallery’s collection including works by Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Goya, Manet, Van Gogh, Cezanne and Matisse. A highlight of the show, Mantegna to Matisse, which runs from June 14 to September, 9, will be a detailed scene of drunken peasants by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

There is no better advocate for opera than Placido Domingo - and not just because he was one of the Three Tenors who made Puccini such a hit at Italia ’90.

Of course, there is the voice which is still special even if he is some years past collecting a bus pass. But everyone who meets him adores him, too. Staff relish telling you how he knows the doorkeepers, remembers everyone’s names, looks at family photos and has his make-up done with everyone else and not alone in his own dressing room.

And he has a knack of making something sound like a compliment when it is questionable whether it really is – but with no sense of being snide.

“I think the public in London is amazing,” he told me amidst the adoring crush on stage after he had brought the Royal Opera House to its feet last night at a special gala marking the 40th anniversary of his Covent Garden debut.

“In some theatres maybe you have anything between half an hour or 40 minutes of curtain calls but in London I think they kind of respect the artists and say, ‘The artists has been doing a lot, they have to go home.’ Ten minutes in London is equivalent to half an hour or 40
minutes elsewhere.”

He certainly got that last night, sharing the stage with no fewer than four younger singers who were making their Covent Garden debut.

“It’s really the future when you see these people,” he said, making clear he had no doubts about the future of his artform – unless we become robots or machines.

“I believe opera is forever, as long as there is sensibility in people. We are all a little bit out of our minds because of opera. Normally the artists [are] but there are a lot of people and they are a little bit out of their mind and many of them completely out of
their mind because they love opera.”

Domingo looked around the Royal Opera House stage and reminisced with John Tooley who was the general administrator when he sang there for the first time 40 years ago, long before the improvements made by the Nineties re-development.

“This stage was little but this house has always been enormous - the warmth of the public the company like a family. I always miss being at Covent Garden. It’s unbeatable,” he told me.  He genuinely seems to love it – and for everyone there last night, the feeling was
definitely mutual.

You can catch the broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Saturday 5 November at 6pm.