Still Moving, Putney Library, initiative Siobhan Davies
Pari Naderi, unusual angles, Elemental Water showing Counterpoint by choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh; Grace, Dancing Stage at the Royal Festival Hall with East London Dance, the expressions on the faces here are wonderful; I love the way it looks as though she has stamped her foot and that’s what has catapulted him into the air; Contact by Emma Higham from This Way! The white company; Jump, where shadows steal the show from Youth Dance Day with London Youth Dance….. Dance whether in rehearsal or performance provides rich pickings for an eye hungry for a beautiful image; this sums it up beautifully. This exhibition is compact, mobile and on its way around the country. Perfect for a lunch-time or after work dip.....
Rare. Tour of the new build, pink dormitories for years 7,8 and 9, a royal hunting lodge, the cull of a cedar tree in the recent bad weather, the steps which mask the entrance through which Queen Mary rode her horse, a clutch of studios dedicated to Pavlova, Galene Stock and Darcey Bussell, bronzes of Fonteyn, Merle Park, Antony Dowall, the death-mask of Pavlova, and the stunning Robert Macdonald bronze at the top of the steps which looks down on the avenue of trees, the museum with its time-line of dance and the lodge itself, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Renaissance man, the archetype for all ballet moves, interaction, projection, the Margot Fonteyn Theatre in which a year eight class were going through their classical class, discipline, mark, present, amend, mark, present, a lesson in showing not telling, an ordinary class showing an ordinary routine, in an ordinary life on an ordinary day who would doubt otherwise…
Blitz, dir Aiden Gillen, Paddy Considine, Mark Rylance, Ken Bruen, dir Elliott Lester
Messy. There are many backstories to this movie. There is the good cop bad cop; there is the good cop bad cop acting outside of the law; there is the good cop bad cop just out of rehab; there is the good cop bad cop burying incriminating evidence; and there is the good cop bad dispensing moral law. The awkwardness is that they are not the same cops throughout. Throw in a psycho-cop-killer, a few snitches of the switchy, youth and killer-dog owning variety, a maverick local reporter and the confusion is complete. Blitz is part domestic police drama, everything seems to happens in and around Paddington Green; part James Bond in the character of the chisel-jawed, hard action-man Brandt; yet filtered through the urban-Brit lens of a Guy Ritchie. Ken Bruen writer, producer, and would-be actor cannot resist a cameo as an Irish vicar, either. At least when Hitchcock did this he was aware of what could and could not be stretched: namely, audience credulity…..
The Brontes, Richmond Theatre, Polly Teale, dir, Design Ruth Sutcliffe
Vintage. As you would expect this revival shows all the shared experience theatrical hallmarks: expressionistic style, presentational text and vivid internal and external characterisation. Polly Teale’s text interweaves the real lives and disappointments of the Bronte siblings, counterpointed with fictional episodes from Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Their authorial success is brief as each is consumed by the very landscape and conditions that is the rich source for their stories. The production as a whole rises to this brutal, yet tragic story, in its stark gothic backdrop, designed by Ruth Sutcliffe and pacey direction by Nancy Meckler. Yet too many blackout changes, particularly in the second half, cut into the rise and fall of the action, which at times comes up short. But it is great to see this company in action, particularly in the light of its recent fortunes at the hands of the arts council, go and see them……
Kingdom of the Earth, The Print Room, Dir Lucy Bailey, Design Ruth Sutcliffe
Terrific. It’s got everything: complicated love, sibling rivalry, beauty in the bleak, fragility and three strong characters that interleave and lock horns in a bid for status and ultimate survival. Lot has come home to die but intends to thwart his half-brother’s due inheritance by producing a wife. The levee is rising and the three are isolated from help or hope. This production is biblical in its proportions: the mud mountain set, like a modern-day Sinai, is ingeniously used throughout. The kingdom of the earth is fought over by a dark complected guy, a show biz variety girl and Lot who sits at its top, Norman-Bates style in an armchair, dressed all in white, TB-ridden, who like his biblical counterpart, turns his back towards his dead mother. The performances are uniformly excellent, the direction taut, intelligent, theatrical with a soundscape of the Mississippi created by drips, rain and an eerie percussive score worthy of Hitchcock’s Bernard Herrmann…..Fantastic!
Entertaining. A natural raconteur and entertainer, Gyles Brandreth, has an innate sense of his own physicality. He has beautiful, graceful hands which he can soften and harden like gossamer wings or hatchets, evoking Donald Woolfit, Michael Redgrave, Lord Curzon, a brace of British Prime Ministers or members of the royal family. And this was very much the measure of the evening: a feast of anecdotes, some directly related to his experience as a student, an MP, Countdown or his Oscar Wilde crime series. Others graced the stage of apocryphal but were no less entertaining for all that: Prince Charles with tulips and hamster jam being one of the funniest. The king of the gab, Brandreth has a mellifluous voice, like honeyed syrup, which goes down well whatever the subject or muscular turn of phrase: a rake on his progress.....
Chekhov in Hell by Dan Rebellato, Soho Theatre, dir Simon Stokes
Chaotic. Chekhov wakes from a hundred-year coma to find himself in twenty-first century Britain. There is a kind of plot of sorts: Linda, a descendant of Chekov’s, reports him as a missing person; and Aleksandr, a sex trafficker, passes himself off as Chekhov, whilst pursued by police as he looks for a girl named Irina. Throw in a couple of scenes in Russian and German for authenticity, projected lines from scenes as motifs on the wall, such as You’re having a fucking laugh or Yo Soy un Fashionista; the lack of props, unless essential to Chekov, no change in costume and a range of accents, reminiscent of an agents’ showcase, and you begin to have a measure of this hotchpotch, chaotic evening. What was the point? No help in the programme which suggests this bitterly comic new play asks where we came from, how we got here and what do we do now? This could be said about the play itself. It feels like an early draft with too many ideas and directions, and never digs deep enough as its bitter-comic tag suggests.
Beautiful. Pina is imbued with a real sense of loss. The dancers talk direct to camera as if having staggered away from a car crash. They talk in truncated sentences as a child might mourn a parent about inspiration, yearning now that Pina Bausch is dead. The structure of the film is the 3D presentation of Pina Baush’s signature work, including Rite of Spring, Café Muller, Kontakthof interspersed with site-specific filmed dance sequences and the dancers’ thoughts. There is a strong elemental quality that runs throughout Bausch’s work which the film captures beautifully. Glimpses of a natural life sometimes cut off by the backdrop of a high-rise monorail, open-glassed housing, barren, desert terrain or subterranean mining tunnels as dancers criss-cross concrete, sand, flooring or wood. The most impressive, Vollmond, shows a rock-spattered terrain doused first by trickles of water which build into a deluge. The female dancers have a look: shoulder-length hair, maxi dresses which hide their legs. The impression is that movement explodes from the centre, filling the immediate space and beyond. Wim Wenders’ direction respects this dynamic and with sharp lighting, colours and angles gives the film a fresh, crisp aesthetic. See it on the big screen before it’s consigned to DVD.
Richard III, Propeller Theatre Company, Dir Edward Hall, Design Michael Pavelka
Inventive. As always with Propeller this production of Richard III is a gargantuan visual feast. The set, Michael Pavelka, is a mass of scaffolding, black & decker artifacts, hospital screens, and plastic curtains which resemble hammer horror dungeons and torture chambers. It constantly changes adding to the fast pace and imaginative direction of Edward Hall. The pitch throughout is grand guinol in style. Often grotesque, fitting the mounting body count as Richard, last of the Plantagenets, cuts down anyone who stands between him and the English throne, it is fluid and flexible.
Yet a difficulty in this full-on approach is that sometimes this B movie execution threatens to over-tip the play towards a vaudevillian farce. It’s left to the moving scenes between the three widowed queens to re-focus the play, and underline the personal, as well as political tragedy. What does work with sharp clarity is the foregrounding of Queen Margaret’s curse dispensed in a ritualised blood-letting. Each victim refers to this before they are brutally done to death by the ever-present assassins and murderers in surgical, sinister masks.
The soundscape, a Propeller trademark, is witty, satiric and at times moving as it combines and re-sets Down Among the Dead Men, charting Richard’s descent into madness, Dies Irae, madrigals, hymns and other folk tunes. The addition of an electric guitar gives a punchy, contemporary edge; and the revs of drills and chain saws, sets the teeth on edge......
Catch it. Tell TaleHeart and Dog shows off Steven Berkoff’s consummate skill. He offers a window on vaudeville, clowning, music-hall as well as casting light on some uncomfortable human characteristics which can make you squirm.
The first, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, is a madman’s tale of murder, obsession. The recreation of the old man’s room and his subsequent dismemberment is wonderfully grotesque, brought off with a few choice movement sequences. Berkoff’s graceful hands have the precision of a surgeon as he delineates his settings, with the swift execution of a Venus fly-trap. As the butler he teases out the text, beats, as he plays the audience as willing, and sometimes, uncomfortable accomplices in his tale.
The second creation Dog is equally grotesque but here Berkoff steps up a gear, if this is at all possible, by characterising both the hooligan dog owner and his pooch, Roy. Much of the humour is derived from Berkoff’s facial expressions which cross and re-cross from one to the other and in his rapid change in physicality. Dog is ‘a day in the life of’ as opposed to Poe’s rounded, macabre tale. In both pieces you know you are in the presence of a master-craftsman: vibrant, highly theatrical, often chilling in its grotesquerie, as Berkoff climbs and re-climbs stairs, or in a moment of fierce bonding, gives the dog a kiss.
Both pieces are accompanied by his own percussive man-made sounds: footsteps, the lopping of limbs or driving his transit van and swilling back pints of lager. Yet the introduction to Dog by the Sex Pistols is a forceful reminder that the bad boy of the theatre is still around to kick ass. Go and see him and learn what theatre is really about.
Wastwater, Royal Court, Dir Katie Mitchell, Design Lizzie Clachan
Intense. Within the Heathrow environs, three scenes are played out with chance references to people, situations or events, making a theatrical triptych. Everyone wants something and the scenes show degrees of humanity, callousness, cruelty in order to get it. It’s a dystopian view made all the more chillingly for its close, geographical proximity, and superb characterisations. The direction is meticulous and the actors have responded to this despite the often elliptical dialogue. The fractured lighting and soundscape of overhead planes make for an eerie backdrop. And the three settings: a farmhouse garden, site of a proposed runway; an up-market hotel bedroom; and whitened, distempered warehouse, is cunningly conceived by Lizzie Clachan. Yet the Wastwater in the title refers to one of the Cumbrian Lakes, a couple of hundred miles north of Heathrow, under which many bodies lie hidden. And this ultimately seems to be its point: still waters run deep. Yet only in the first pairing of Freida and Harry, a foster mother whose son is about to depart for Canada is there any real sense of one human being reaching out to another.
Dir Duncan Jones, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan; Screenplay Ben Ripley; Music Chris Bacon
Cracking. Source Code entertains on all fronts: pacey sci-fi thriller, with tense, taut music score and fast, confident direction. Colter Stevens is a helicopter pilot shot down in Afghanistan. He is part of a secret, controversial government programme, the source code, which allows him to re-live the last eight minutes of his life in another’s body. A train is blown apart and it’s Colter’s mission to uncover the bomber’s identity. Groundhog Day meets Hitchcock as Stevens returns each time for eight minutes and uncovers further clues. This narrative structure is neat as it ratchets up the tension whilst allowing Colter to fall for Christina. Yet we are never quite sure how much is real or not. With daring, overhead shots of compartmentalised Chicago, the doomed fast-moving train and the recurrent montage of split coffee, punched tickets and snatched dialogue, Source Code is intelligent, entertaining and stylish
Dir Neil Burger; Bradley Cooper, Robert de Niro; Screenplay Leslie Dixon; Cinematography Jo Willems
Stylish thriller based on the novel TheDark Fields written by Alan Glynn. Eddie Murra has writer’s block until he is introduced to NZT. He writes his book in four days learns French, Italian and Mandarin; and deals the stock exchange. But the highs come with a price: memory loss and the implication in a women’s murder. At base level the film’s real hook is that Eddie Murra uses the knowledge and experience that he already has in order to access all intellectual and sensory experience; this is a very seductive premise. We inhabit Eddie’s world as he experiences it, making us complicit in everything he does. Throw in some Russian thugs, De Niro as foil, New York’s Soho and Xray-shots of those neon streets and you have a thriller as efficacious as the best quick fix
Wow! If you can’t get tickets for Kneehigh’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg because of prohibitive prices then go and see their The Red Shoes at The Battersea Arts Centre. A drag queen perched above the compact stage steers the narrative through the tale of a girl, a pair of red shoes, a shoe-maker, an old women, a soldier and a butcher in this Hans Christian Andersen tale of obsession. It’s fast, edgy and wonderfully chilling. Simplicity has never been more inventive: cases for headstones, stairways that connect heaven to earth, an illuminated cross; escapology, levitation and the ubiquitous red shoes. The performers’ skills are breath-taking: they clown, dance, play musical instruments and propel the story on in a beguiling mix of tension and languidity. Kneehigh re-define theatrical story-telling every time: The Red Shoes is an absolute treat full of invention and wit......
The Most Incredible Thing: Sadler's Wells; Pet Shop Boys and Javier de Frutos
Wild. In order to create the most incredible thing, you need to create an incredible thing and this production does just that. Inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen story of the same name the choreography is inventive, with some balletic trace prints of Balanchine’s Apollo and Nijinska's, Les Noces. The ensemble sequences in the kingdom with mirrors, see-through gauzes, cut-out pieces and profiles is particularly fine and expressive; showing a cohesion between choreography and design. The second act acid-trip is less successful as the dancers appear diminutive against the filmed sequences in Leo's incredible clock invention. But there's wit and chill aplenty as in all good fairy-tales. A visual feast: bold, extravagant driven by an hypnotic, pulsing Pet Shop Boys score.....
