Matron saint of Victorian greats

Julia Margaret Cameron National Portrait Gallery

PHOTOGRAPHY was still young when Mrs Julia Margaret Cameron first operated a camera, but the lady herself was (by the standards of her day) quite old. She first resorted to the genteel novelty at the age of 48, drawn to it partly as a way to fill the lonely hours while her husband and son were away on the business of Empire. Within barely a year, by 1865, she was producing photographs as fine as any that vast Empire had so far seen.

Within another two years, by 1866-7, she was producing photographs as fine as any that have ever been taken. She ought to be recognised as the matron saint of every mature housewife returning to the job market, and of all late starters in any art or science.

Almost every book on early photography treats her with due respect and some of her portraits - the so-called Dirty Monk study of her neighbour on the Isle of Wight, and good friend, Alfred Lord Tennyson, for example - will be familiar to almost every literate Briton.

And yet, despite her canonical status, it has usually been hard to see more than a handful of her original prints at any one time, which is why the National Portrait Gallery's superb new show is instructive as well as delightful.

Authoritatively curated by the pioneering scholar of Mrs Cameron's work, Colin Ford, the exhibition examines every phase of her short but intensely productive career.

At the beginning, the tentative family portraits of her novice months; at the end, the enigmatic (and, until now, little-known) portraits and semi-ethnological studies she made in Ceylon, where she spent the last four years of her life, from 1875 to 1879, supporting her husband's painful efforts to rescue their coffee plantation from financial ruin.

In between these extremes lies a rich and varied body of work, some of it a little out of line with 21st century tastes, some of it simply glorious, all of it the product of scrupulous preparation and rapidly developing skill - no matter how much the Victorian gentleman critics may have tutted about the softness of her focus. Ford has arranged this work thematically: portraits of women, portraits of children, religious allegories derived from painters of the Italian Renaissance, illustrations for Tennyson's Idylls of the King and other books.

One of Ford's intentions is to solicit renewed sympathy for the religious and literary pictures, generally written off in recent years as a lamentable lapse into kitsch.

In at least one case, he succeeds: the image of a frankfaced little girl with angel wings now looks less like sickly piety than a weird, half-comic anticipation of surrealism.

Towering above all, there are her portraits of men: the more or less unknown, such as Iago, whose preposterously handsome face, all razor blade cheekbones and unrazored jaw, would not look out of place in a Scorsese movie; and, of course, the greats.

Mrs Cameron shared her era's robust belief in, and admiration for, Great Men and thanks to her camera, we can still see them through uncynical eyes that could always detect the blazing spirit inside the creased and sagging flesh of, among others, Darwin, Carlyle and the scientist Sir John Herschell.

(Her wonderful picture entitled The Astronomer is at once noble and scary.

It would make a suitable cover for a novel by Samuel Beckett.) In capturing the unsmiling face of Victorian greatness, this previously obscure lady staked a major claim to greatness in her own right. Like the earliest practitioners of jazz, she went straight to the heart of a youthful medium and did things with it that have never been bettered. Cameras have improved; eyes have not.

. Until 18 May. Information: 020 7306 0055.

Multitalented Sami steals the show

No. 2 King's Head, N1

YOU could almost conclude that New Zealander Madeleine Sami is possessed by each of the characters she plays in this drama, so total is her transformation from one role to another. Disbelief, incredulity, and admiration fly through the brain as the 22-year-old actress morphs effortlessly from savvy Fijian matriarch to mono- brain-celled rugbyplayer, or from precocious little boy to an English girl dizzy with diffidence.

Her not inconsiderable brief is to create a picture of a dying world: a Fijian community based in Auckland, New Zealand, where - as playwright Toa Fraser puts it - people "used to sit down at the dining room table at breakfast time and be finished with their second bottle of Johnny Walker by lunch". In No 2, Fijian matriarch Nana Maria is one of the few relics of that world - and the action is set on the day when she wakes up at 3am and cracks the whip for a feast to be held where she can name her family successor.

It is one of those plays where the appeal could not begin to be gleaned from a listings description. For its humour, subtle social observation, pathos and wit are all intrinsically bound up in Sami's mercurial performance. Fraser wrote the play for her, and she has made it hers to the exclusion of all other contenders.

Indeed, you suspect that it becomes a far better play through her ability - for instance - to mimic the yelping laugh and jerky speech patterns of an immature young man, or to re-enact the laboured eccentricities of an elderly Fijian woman, since she compellingly brings the rhythms of her native New Zealand alive in a way that goes deeply beyond the words she speaks.

Tim Simpson's minimalist stage design provides nothing apart from a yellow-washed backdrop and an armchair, where Nana Maria sits as she issues orders to her family and encourages a visiting young English girl to down gins and smoke cigars. Yet whether she is mimicking roasting a pig on a spit, or staging a flirtatious dance contest, Sami acquits herself with a style that should have casting directors beating a path to Upper Street.

. Until 16 March. Box office: 020 7226 1916.

Hairy bunch inspired by rock legends

My Morning Jacket The Garage, N1

IN 1970, Neil Young's redneck-taunting Southern Man perpetuated a lengthy feud with southern men Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Had they combined forces though, the result would have been Kentucky quintet My Morning Jacket.

Their records are contemplative affairs, propelled by Jim James's plaintive vocals. On stage, those otherworldly, reverbsoaked vocals remain intact and his solo acoustic encore, At Dawn and Bermuda Highway, was as doleful as anything on Young's Harvest.

Yet, bassist Two-Tone Tommy, drummer Patrick Hallahan and the bearded James were a blur of hair as they rocked in Skynyrd fashion.

Evelyn is not Real veered wildly between country, metal and barroom boogie without losing its pop heart, but they peaked at the close of their 90 minutes. Phone Went West's finale consisted of a thrilling, fiveminute instrumental squall. Hallahan stood hammering his drums, Two-Tone Tommy and guitarist Johnny Quaid duelled back- toback, keyboardist Danny Cash had an Emerson, Lake and Palmer moment, and James sang the sweetest childlike melody. It appeared ad hoc; it must have taken months to perfect.

For all their eulogies to the past, their absence of fear and willingness to experiment - Phone Went West began in reggae fashion - their sound is distinctly 2003. Men with beards and shaggy hair who subtly construct musical behemoths (Badly Drawn Boy if his live shows emulated his records; the spiritually hirsute Flaming Lips) are suddenly high fashion and My Morning Jacket recently signed a major deal. All things being equal, they'll delight us for decades to come.

Copyright 2003
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