My London Your London

A cultural guide

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Theatre Review: The Curse of the Werewolf at the Union Theatre, Southwark

September 8, 2007 / / 0 Comments

by Natalie Bennett

If you look down the range of credits of the cast of The Curse of the Werewolf they make a curious mix. Sarah Whitlock has appeared in The Mousetrap and multiple pantomimes. Hugh Futcher has been in “seven of the Carry On films”, James Horne in Me and My Girl. So what on earth are they doing in a werewolf drama underneath the arches in Southwark, deep in the London fringe?

Well what they are doing is using the skills they’ve already displayed in the earlier shows – a fine soft-shoe shuffle, a trilling verse, comic delivery of a very old line – in an affectionate parody of the traditional British stage, blended with a dose of Hammer horror. It could be dreadful – but it’s actually great fun. The key to successful parody, if its not scathing satire, is that it has to be well done – and this is remarkably well done: the ice-skating scene is quite the neatest bit of low-budget stagecraft I’ve seen in a good while.

The story is established in the opening scene: we’re a graveyard at midnight in 1890 and the baroness is being buried under dubious circumstances, complete with gusts of dry ice. That sets the scene into which arrive the entire stereotypical English family – jolly well-meaning hen-pecked Dr Bancroft (Futcher), the stout, domineering, resolutely unimaginative Mrs Bancroft (Whitlock) and their flirty, empty-headed daughter Kitty (Alexi Caley) – who’s after a husband with the highest title that she can snare. What she doesn’t know is that the “butler”, D’Arcy (Gareth ap Watkins) is more than he seems.

We’re set for the classic English farce on this side, while the locals provide the Hammer darkness – the dark and mysterious Baron von Heilman (Daniel Brocklebank), the mad professor, Steiner (James Horne) obsessed with the idea of lycanthropy (werewolfism), attended by the strange nurse/attendant Frau Gessler (Kirstie Senior). She’s stereotypically, German in irritating ways – the least effectively written and staged part of the production.
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Exhibition Review – Faith, Narrative and Desire: Masterpieces of Indian painting in the British Museum

August 25, 2007 / / 0 Comments

By Natalie Bennett

The tradition of European painting started out small and intimate. Paintings were kept in cabinets, little more than book-sized, and brought out for intimates to share and admire. But around the 16th century that changed – they became larger, more items of general display to impress anyone who entered the room.

It was a change that didn’t happen in Indian painting, which remained small scale and usually on paper, maintaining a delicacy and intimacy lost in the larger European works. A new exhibition at the British Museum suggests what might have happened had European art stayed small, while also offering an insight into a tradition immediately, viscerally, foreign to our own.

The key difference is in realism, or the lack thereof. In Indian paintings psychological insight was regarded as more interesting than photographic reality – the aim is to convey information and elicit an emotional response, rather than accurately depict a single scene.

Having said all of that, the exhibition opens with its single large-scale work, an almost life-size image on paper of Maharana Karan Singh of Mewar (died 1628) painted a half-century after his death. Here we’re not far from the traditional European ruler portrait – all the symbols are there: imperial jewelry, weapons and sash, and he holds a flower just as Mughal emperors did in their portraits.

But after that the visitor familiar chiefly with European traditions is on unfamiliar ground, and will quickly learn new terms, and new ways of looking at paintings.
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Exhibition Review: Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan at the British Museum

August 7, 2007 / / 0 Comments

by Natalie Bennett

There’s a question feminists have been asking for a long time: do professions lose status because women join them, or are women allowed into professions only when they are losing status? (Doctors in Russia – who through the 20th century had relatively low status compared to their compatriots in Western Europe – are the classic example.)

As I passed around the Crafting Beauty exhibition, presented by the British Museum in association with the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, that old question was at the front of my mind. In the West, by and large, women’s “craft” has had poor status, low expectations as opposed to men’s “art”. It has been left, by and large, to “the ladies”. It’s not that way in Japan, and it seems that, at least in most of the celebrated national crafts, the women have never, and still are not, getting a look-in, not being given that peculiarly Japanese status of “Living National Treaure”.

I’m through the pottery section and well into metalwork before I find the first woman, Osumi Yukie (born 1945) with ‘Sea Breeze’, a vase in hammered silver decoated with inlay. Ripples on the surface of the vase are laid on ripples of darker inlay, which overlay the rhythmic base pattern of hammering. You are looking into the depths of the universe.

Finally, in textiles, there are more women – which you might, perhaps Eurocentrically, expected. The spectacular kiminos, made by patient wood-block printing or sometimes through fancy weaving techniques were traditionally designed and made by men but now women artists are increasingly influential says the exhibition; a claim that the presentation of the work of four women and nine men almost supports.

With lacquer however we are back to an all-male cast, although this part of the exhibition generates the positive though that if you can do all these things with lacquer and bamboo — pretty environmentally friendly materials — you really don’t need plastics. A rich red orange “Tray with Handle” by Masumura Kiichora has the shape but a glorious depth of volour and an organic shape no petrochemical could quite match.
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Theatre Review: The Great Theatre of the World by Pedro Calderon de la Barca

July 15, 2007 / / 0 Comments

by Natalie Bennett

For Shakespeare, all the world was a stage, and the men and women merely players. But he took that only to the level of observation. It took a Spaniard, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, to take that to the fullest possible lengths, in The Great Theatre of the World, written in 1635. It is a short, action-packed play in which entire lifespans of a society – from king to beggar, rich merchant to peasant, are explored.

God here is the omnipotent director, who appoints his stage manager, “The World”, and selects his players and their roles (not individuals, but archetypes). Then, in line with the doctrine of free will, he pushes them on stage. From the cradle to the grave, they’re free to chart their own choices; only then will the Supreme Being intervene again to decide their ultimate fates.

The similarities to medieval mystery plays are obvious, and played up here in set and staging, but what does this say to a 21st-century secular Britain? The adaptor of the production that opened last night at the Arcola Theatre in east London, Adrian Mitchell, says that although he’s an atheist, he felt that there was a truth in the play that transcended religion, and a wit that translated to the modern age.

Of wit there’s certainly plenty, particularly in such Falstaffian scenes as that in which the actor appointed to play the peasant, Kristian Dawson, tries to get out of the role with a string of excuses, including that he’s “scared of cows”. The verse is turned, effectively, to rhyming slapstick at such moments – to ask God “to leave me out would be thought rude,/ by a director of your magnitude”.
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Theatre Review: Bloody Mess at the Queen Elizabeth Hall

June 21, 2007 / / 1 Comment

By Jonathan Grant

A pair of clowns, forlorn and silent, wander across the stage. Slowly, and then suddenly, to and fro, chairs in hand, they scuttle back and forth in agitated aggression – desperate to have these quadrupeds for themselves and deprive their jester foe. Strobe lights flicker, wood clatters and heavy metal blares. This is a Bloody Mess.

Finally our comic chums, make-up smeared all over their faces, order these seats and an audience take their places to watch us. Or are we watching them? Atypical for this type of performance theatre, our audience / our cast introduce themselves. In confusing, contrasting couplets, we become familiar with Richard, our “Romantic Hero”, and Robin who claims to be the same – only better, more virile and more suave. We have our clowns, obviously, and our sex sirens, some roadies and more buzz words float around the stage in deadpan fashion as all ten cast members compete to be the “real stars of the show”. Symbolic, enigmatic, indefatigable, dynamic….

Flick to next skit, and the next and the next, a Bloody Mess is just that; high-energy, pokerfaced, farcical and whimsical. Delinquent cheerleaders, crazed gorillas, naked men holding stars, women running, screaming, pouring water over themselves and the stage. Each cast member plays their own role, seemingly not interacting with one another. None of these stories are connected. Why should they be? This is life. This is a bloody mess. And yet this is the point.
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Exhibition Review: Surreal Things at the V&A

June 16, 2007 / / 0 Comments

by Natalie Bennett

When Andre Breton and Louis Aragon led the disruption of the 1926 Paris premiere of the Romeo and Juliet for which the sets had been designed by Max Ernst and Joan Miro, they were complaining about selling out. “It is inadmissable that ideas should be at the behest of money,” their leaflet read: they wanted to keep the ideal that surrealism was essentially subversive.

It is another surrealist set, Giorgio de Chirico’s for the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo’s Le Bal of 1929, that opens the Surreal Things exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and it seems, in this room, that art and commerce can live together, can both flourish. In this production the dancers were styled as walls, columns, architraves, statues, that came alive for one night, and the imaginative leap is exciting, enrapturing, helped by the display of this static set in three dimensions, so that the visitor can look in from the wings, and from back stage.

Yet as the exhibition progresses it is clear that the surrealists did lose something, perhaps everything, in their eagerness to be co-opted by the seductions of wealth. A Man Ray photo of a model in a design-name evening gown reclining in Oscar Dominguez’s “Brouette” (a wheelbarrow lined with plush red satin) doesn’t so much scream “sell-out” as ooze it from every tiny, manicured pore.
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