"All the world's a stage"

“And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”

Ah yes the Bard’s words indeed. So rushing through childhood into middle age, if “life begins at 40” what happens a decade later?

Well if you’re a play it would seem, not only do you have some sort of cultural backbone, but it also means perhaps you can go on a world party.

And such is the case with the 50th anniversary production of West Side Story, currently in mid run at London’s Sadler’s Wells.

It’s a pretty weird feeling watching something that was first performed over half a century ago with the creeping realisation that in a very real sense it’s still bang up-to-date.

But that’s a sensation hard to get away from at the 50th anniversary production of West Side Story, currently in mid run at London’s Sadler’s Wells.

It has all the potential on paper at least, to be spectacularly dated. After all it’s a modernised version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set in the 1950s in New York’s Lower East Side. Hardly the stuff of the 21st century.

But in a very real sense that’s exactly what it is.

Yes it’s American – very much so. Yes it’s a musical, from which some more “discerning” theatregoers might conclude it’s not really highbrow enough. And yes it’s full of songs to which probably many of us could in our finest Karaoke moments do a pretty fair caterwauling injustice.

But all that said, it also tells a universal story that of course still resonates today and is as frighteningly bang up to date in the saddest of ways.

Violence, street gangs, recent immigrants fighting territorial battles, and deprived inner city suburbs are after all not confined to New York in the 1950s. And the same old problems still exist in cities around the world.

But one thing couldn’t have escaped the attention of the London audience, and that was how much the plot revolves around two tragic incidents; a shooting at the end of the second act, and more poignantly perhaps for a British audience, a knifing in a gang battle between the Jets and the Sharks in the first.

That will surely have struck a nerve among a public, which has become all too used to reading or hearing reports of a spate of senseless stabbings in the capital and around the country over the past year.

Romance of course is as integral a part of the plot as violence, and just as in Shakespeare’s “original” there’s no happy ending.

Much has been written over the years about Leonard Bernstein’s wonderful score and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics. They are and remain simply a joy.

What perhaps sets this musical aside from others though is the choreography, which is simultaneously classical and modern, pushing bodies to perform over two-and-a-half hours a series of moves that shouldn’t be humanely possible – but clearly, somehow are.

West Side Story is well into the European leg of its world tour and after stops in Vienna, Paris, Zurich, Leipzig, and Baden Baden, it’s now playing to packed houses at London’s Sadler’s Wells until the end of this month. Extra matinee performances have recently been added, but the chances are all the tickets have already been gobbled up. Still, if you’re visiting London and have the right contacts, you might be lucky.

If not, fear not as it’s then scheduled to go on tour around Britain, playing in half a dozen or so towns and cities, ending up in the northeast of England in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in February 2009.

Sarkozy spin or a cave in to Chinese pressure?

It’s hard enough for any of us to stick to our principles at the best of times. Imagine how much harder it must be then for a politician, regardless of his or her political hue.

Of course it can help assuage guilt and shed a completely different light on your own decision when your partner holds opposing views and is able to exercise “independent’ actions over which you apparently have no control.

And as he beamed from the stands of the Olympic stadium in Beijing on Friday at the opening ceremony of the Games, similar thoughts could well have been passing through the mind of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

You’ll perhaps remember that the poor man had problems deciding whether he should pitch up at all. Back in March he said he was “shocked” by China's security clampdown in Tibet and urged Beijing to re-open discussions with the exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

He then ummed and aahed for a couple of months, all the while not making it clear what he would do. Finally he ignored the decision of Germany’s Angela Merkel, who took the moral high road by refusing to attend, and said he would indeed show up. Which he did.

Sarkozy could have been forgiven for brimming with Gallic indignation a couple of days later though, when the Chinese ambassador to Paris, Kong Quan, told the French media that there would be "serious consequences" for Sino-Franco relations if he decided to meet the Dalai Lama personally during the exiled spiritual leader’s visit to France in August.

Instead Sarkozy remained quiet – seemingly a recently-discovered tactic in his diplomatic armoury, although it could also be interpreted as simply being “vague.”

Quiet that is just before his “appearance” at the opening ceremony, when his office at the Elysée palace released an official statement that showed once again he is a master of wheedling himself out of a conundrum

The solution to the dilemma? Twofold. First a carefully worded announcement from the Elysée palace that Sarkozy wouldn’t be meeting the Dalai Lama, while making it look as though it was the latter’s decision but cleverly not expounding on the reason.

And then phase two and the real answer to his dreams: Enter stage Left, politically and socially in the form of none other than France’s first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.

For it is she and not he, who will be present as the Dalai Lama opens a Buddhist temple in southern France on August 22.

A cave in from Sarkozy, a jiggling of the first lady’s calendar or some deft diplomatic footwork that appears to keep all sides happy and prevents any loss of face?

Whatever the case may be, it sure hasn’t done Sarkozy any harm having Carla at the Elysée palace.

France is already working

Forget all those stories you’ve read that the French are apparently a nation of the work shy, spending as little time as possible on the job and instead enjoying more days off than their counterparts in other European countries.

A new study out this week puts paid to that myth and actually reveals what many who live and work in this country probably already knew.

There are a fair number of people who work longer than the official 35-hour week.

So many in fact according to l’Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (the national statistics office, l’Insee) that the average working week of Monsieur le Français et Madame la Française is more in the order of 41 hours a week.

The survey was carried out among more than 72,000 people and, described as a so-called snapshot of the job market here in France, reveals some perhaps surprising and significant trends.

While the average working week of the French turned out to be 41 hours, there were of course a number of employment sectors rating far higher.

Farmers top the list, working on average almost 60 hours a week, the self-employed around 55 hours, management (all levels combined) 44 hours and even blue collar workers almost 39 hours.

Of course it rather raises the question as to who, if anyone, is actually benefiting from that 35 hours a week.

The simple answer would appear to be the five million or so “fonctionnaires”, or civil servants, employed in the public services or former state-owned companies that have been partially or fully privatised, but where the same employment protection laws are still very much part of the “way things are done.”

The survey also reveals that unemployment is at 2.2 million, or eight percent of the working population of 27.8 million.

That’s still pretty much well short of the target the government has of five per cent by 2012, but figures can be massaged of course and there are other tendencies revealed by l’Insee, which might help the official level “drop” by then.

For example if the current trend continues, the number of those working on a short-term contract (contrat durée determinée, CDD) is likely to increase and that could have a significant impact on future figures.

Those on CDDs now account for 12 per cent of the working population (up from 11.1 in 2004) and there has also a rise in part-time work.

Those trends also present a somewhat double-edged sword for future unemployment figures. Yes they’ll allow more people to come off the official register, but they also reflect that the French job market is becoming more precarious and that even without government intervention, it’s moving away from the long-established model enjoyed for decades of “jobs for life” in the shape of the contrat durée indeterminée.

So where does this latest report leave the 35-hour working week and the promise of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy promise to shake up the French job market?

After all he’s known to be less than enthusiastic about a policy introduced by a Socialist government just over 10 years ago, which he claims has cost the country billions of euros, created few job opportunities, made French companies less competitive internationally and on whom he blames a fair share of the country’s economic woes

Well first up of course, it won’t have escaped anyone’s notice here how fortuitous the timing of the study is for the government. It comes less than a fortnight after changes in the employment laws were hustled through parliament; changes which will in effect signal the beginning of the end of the 35-hour working week.

In law the 35-hour working week will continue to exist. It needs to so employees can choose between being paid for overtime or taking days off they’ve accumulated.

But Sarkozy’s oft repeated mantra that the French be given the opportunity to “work more to earn more” will also have more credence now that “proof” exists that for the past decade, during which the current legislation has been in operation, many people have in fact been prepared to work much longer hours than the law allows.

It’ll also undoubtedly help in his stated goal of reducing the number of fonctionnaires and weaken the opposition’s claims that there’s no popular sentiment for his proposals.

Perhaps most importantly what the study reveals is that there is already a degree of flexibility in the job market – at least among a high proportion of those in employment, and that the French are more willing to adapt than previously thought.

In other words, France is already working.