My London Your London

A cultural guide

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Exhibition Review: Darwin at the Natural History Museum

February 1, 2009 / / 0 Comments

by Natalie Bennett

The Natural History Museum’s Darwin exhibition begins with reminder of the cost that the science once involved: two starkly displayed mocking bird specimens, laid pathetically on their backs. “Two of the most important specimens in the history of science” – but not much consolation, on suspects, for the birds whose lives were cut short.

Explicitly, the exhibition states, this aims to trace not a chronological journey, but an internal one in the way, following changes in the way Darwin saw the world, and that’s an aim that is largely achieved.

The first stage, as the exhibition sees it, is “wide-eyed wonder”, something anyone who’s seen a rainforest could probably sympathise with, although there’s an early reminder that Darwin lived in a very different world with that note that Darwin as a student at Cambridge had formed a club dedicated to eating animals “unknown to the human palate”.

The iguana that he later found so illustrative he also found tasty, “liked by those whose stomach soar above all prejudices”. Looking over this scene in the exhibition is a live green iguana perched on the top of a log gazing lugubriously at the passing throng, leg trailing down casually behind him and illustrative tail artfully displayed down its length. He might be saying: “Well at least you humans have evolved, a little.” And it was certainly something to keep the children amused, of which there’s not a great deal in this exhibition.

The exhibition remarks on the role of Josiah Wedgewood in persuading Darwin’s father to let him go, providing a grand invitation to alternative history. How would it all have worked out if Wallace had been first?
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Book Review: St Pancras Station by Simon Bradley

January 4, 2009 / / 0 Comments

by Natalie Bennett

You might describe my reading interests as catholic (very definitely with a small “C”): I read history, science, politics, philosophy, and bits of fiction: but I would have given you good money that railway station architecture was not particularly likely to feature on my reading list. But I’d have lost that money.

When I saw a little paperback entitled St Pancras’s Station in the lovely, small but select branch of Foyles that’s opened since the London international terminus’s refurbishment, I couldn’t resist. After all, I only live five minutes away and walk through the station several times a week. Although had I known how much there was about those roofing struts I might not have done – and that would have been a pity.

For although this is an odd little book — mostly an architectural history, something that isn’t terribly evident from the book’s furniture — there’s a huge number of fascinating snippets in this – and even those supporting struts are interesting.

The largest section, and the least involving, focuses on George Gilbert Scott, the architect of the great neo-Gothic frontage on the Euston Road that was built as the Midland Grand Hotel. He also built the Albert Memorial and was responsible for huge numbers of church and cathedral restorations. He was, on this account, hyperactive, arrogant, greedy, bewhiskered – the perfect Victorian male. (And his architecture to my mind doesn’t have a lot to recommend it – although St Pancras is far from the worst of it.)

Things warm up when you get to the train shed chapter, which begins by roaming across the history of this entirely new form of architecture and social space (before this the only vaguely comparable place was a coaching inn, a very different beast) – with many of the examples being within a stone’s throw of St Pancras, for easy comparison. Euston’s “ridge-and-furrow” shed was, Bradley tells us “essentially a lightweight translation of a timber-framed system developed for greenhouses”, the prevailing type in the 1840s. “Thought readily extendable, their numerous uprights hindered flexible use of space, and their limited height coped poorly with smoke and steam generated by increasingly frequent and powerful trains.”
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Theatre Review: The Cordelia Dream by the RSC at Wilton’s Music Hall

December 18, 2008 / / 0 Comments

By Natalie Bennett

It isn't at all uncommon for parents and children not to like each other, to be consumed by rivalry and competition – yet you'd think, watching Marina Carr's new The Cordelia Dream as performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Wilton's Music Hall, that this was a new, dramatic idea taut with possibility.

At least you would, if you weren't feeling as though you were stuck in a cheap motel room with plywood-thin walls, hearing a two-hour full-on domestic in the early hours of the morning.

This was quite the worst time I've had at the theatre in a very long while. About the only virtue of this production is that it makes the previous effort in the RSC's new play series, The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes, look good in comparison — at least that was an interesting failure. This is just endless, histrionic melodrama, two characters who spend most of the time screaming at each other — when the violins aren't doing the screaming for them.

An aged composer (David Hargreaves) has retired to a bedsit — well he hasn't got a bed, but sleeps on his piano — to attempt to realise his failed potential. His daughter (Michelle Gomez) comes to visit after a long absence, distressed and angry that the relationship has broken down because she's been more successful in the same career.

As the title suggests, reference is continually made to him as Lear and her as Cordelia — increasingly clunking references, at increasingly regular intervals. It's not so much allusion as thumping jackhammer have-you-noticed-yet-audience? repetition.
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Exhibition Review: Byzantium at the Royal Academy of Arts

December 13, 2008 / / 0 Comments

by Natalie Bennett

You’re visiting the exotic and foreign Eastern Empire at the Royal Academy, but you begin on more familiar ground: in Classical territory – a spectacular full-room mosaic. While the subject of a modestly sized white marble sculpture is Jonah, the style is entirely Classical, as is that of a head of Constantine nearby.

But by the time you get to a sarcophagus front from Constantinople in the last third of the 5th century you’re heading into a recognisably Christian aesthetic; the saint’s hand is turned in benediction at a wholly impossible angle and his proportions greatly exaggerated for effect – symbol is becoming more important than harmony and naturalism.

But there’s also a reminder of just how kitsch the late empire could be — a trait we tend far more to associate with the Eastern Empire — in three elaborate gilded chair ornaments from Rome, and a multicoloured cameo from the same source. And one case of ivory demonstrates clearly the disappearance of perspective that becomes so characteristic of icons; some have it, if roughly; the makers (and presumably consumers) seem not so much to have lost the knowledge as lost interest. (Loss of perspective is what cubism did, of course, and we think that’s brilliant.) With a diptych leaf with a Byzantine empress in ivory from the 6th century, you couldn’t get a finer piece of craft work.
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Theatre Review: The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes by the RSC at the Wilton Music Hall

December 5, 2008 / / 0 Comments

by Natalie Bennett

When you call a play "the Tragedy of [name of famous philosopher here]", and get the Royal Shakespeare Company to stage it, the origins on which you're drawing can hardly be mistaken. And in the waning days of the repressive Protectorate, the hysterical gaiety of the Restoration, and the overlaying memories of Civil War, you've certainly get a tale that its possible to imagine Shakespeare would have seized with glee.

But there was wise warning from the Bard that the playwright here, Adriano Shaplin, forgot: "the play's the thing". In telling the story of the struggle between the "traditional" philosopher Thomas Hobbes and his rival "natural philosophers" of the Royal Society, particularly of the brilliant but erratic Robert Hooke (and this play might better have been called Hooke's tragedy), against the detailed background of the political and practical history of the time, Shalpin apparently forgot that this wasn't a school lesson.

You could use it as such – although you might come away with some pretty odd notions, such as that Cromwell died and the King was restored in 30 seconds, that the Great Fire of London was started by an old philosopher trying to avoid the secret police, and (for the younger and more gullible side of the audience), that Elvis was resurrected as Charles II.
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Theatre Review: The Ides of March at the White Bear Theatre, Kennington

November 29, 2008 / / 0 Comments

by Natalie Bennett

Imagine if 9/11 had been really big. Not the c. 2,700 people who are now believed to have died (about the same as die on US roads every month), but larger by a factor of 100 — and in a country with a population a fraction of that of the United States.

That’s the scenario of the new political thriller The Ides of March, which premiered last night at the White Bear Theatre in South London. It begins on the one-year anniversary of the day fundamentalist Islamic terrorists exploded a Russian atomic bomb in the Australian city of Melbourne, the date that gives the play its title.

This is a society shaken totally to its foundations, with a bureaucracy struggling to cope, a new secret police force desperate to ensure that nothing like this could happen again — both enjoying almost rabid public support. Set against this direction is a small core of human rights activists and a Muslim community struggling not to be stereotyped as scapegoats. Much like the United States after 9/11 and Britain after 7/7 in fact.
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