Review: Yank!

I was fortunate enough to be given tickets to Yank! by Time Out, so I got the chance to see a production I was unfamiliar with in a theatre I'd never been to before.

The Charing Cross Theatre say:

“Some stories didn’t make it into the history books”
Based on the Off-Broadway hit production, and transferring to London following a highly acclaimed run at the Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester earlier this year, YANK! is a poignant love story based on the true, hidden history of gay soldiers during World War Two.
In 1943, young Mid-Westerner Stu is called up to serve in the forces and becomes a reporter for Yank Magazine, the journal ‘for and by the servicemen’. Following the men in Charlie Company, this acclaimed musical explores what it means to be a man and fall in love…

This is a really difficult production to attach a star rating to. There were moments in Yank! that were four or five stars, without question, however the 'modern' framing of the piece at the beginning and end - where it is revealed that the events portrayed are from a diary - is much weaker than the rest of the show and, in fact, a bit cringey.

If we ignore these moments of the play as a misstep, then there are plenty of positives to discuss. For a start, the song and dance numbers deserve a bigger stage and a bigger audience - they are up-lifting and fabulous. The music is excellent and the choreography, mostly a blend of tap and swing, is a real delight.
Furthermore, there is some excellent multi-roling from a phenomenally strong cast - again I couldn't believe this was staged in such a small venue - and the whole cast charmed and camped and raged in a series of beautifully sympathetic performances.

All things considered, I have to recommend Yank!. The closing moments - the modern framing - annoyed me hugely, but the rest of the piece is well worth your time. The general message, 'it's not doing it that's the crime... it's wanting it', is still shockingly relevant, and the manner of the story-telling is very easily bought-into. It's a good night out.

4/5: A slick and stylish musical number
Charing Cross Theatre
Until 19th August

Review: Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave

Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave has been a massive success for the British Museum: it is virtually sold out, and it is consistently rammed. So, what's the fuss about?
The British Museum say:

Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) is widely regarded as one of Japan’s most famous and influential artists. He produced works of astonishing quality right up until his death at the age of 90. This new exhibition will lead you on an artistic journey through the last 30 years of Hokusai’s life – a time when he produced some of his most memorable masterpieces.
Throughout the exhibition, outstanding examples of Hokusai’s work will show the artist’s creative breadth and depth. A selection of superb landscapes is introduced with the iconic Great Wave – itself part of a print series of views of Mt Fuji. Intimate domestic scenes capture fleeting moments in private lives. Exquisite depictions of flora and fauna display an innate skill in representing the natural world. The artist’s imagination is given full rein in the portrayal of supernatural creatures such as ghosts and deities. Through all of these works, explore Hokusai’s personal beliefs and gain a fascinating insight into the artist’s spiritual and artistic quest in his later years.
The exhibition will include prints, paintings and illustrated books, many of which are on loan from Japan, Europe and the USA. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these extraordinary works together.

I found that the exhibition was a really interesting insight into one man developing his artistic practice. It also does a lot to demonstrate why we should look beyond that one image an artist is famous for.

Hokusai was driven by the desire to become better and better at his art, and you can see, as the exhibition progresses, the 'Great Wave' of the title only falls about halfway through the journey of his latter years. His style is beautiful, and his talent is indisputable, so I was really excited to learn more about the breadth of Hokusai's work, as he is not an artist with which I am particularly familiar. The show opened up a whole new artistic and symbolic culture to me, and I enjoyed it a lot, despite the busyness. The 'Great Wave,' interestingly, is only a small print, compared to some of his massive paintings, but it was fascinating to see how intricate it is, up close.

If you can get tickets - which may prove impossible at this stage - you should definitely get down to the British Museum and check it out, although be prepared to get jostled around, and have a wait to see key pieces: it is a very busy exhibition in quite a narrow space, which some are finding very frustrating.

4/5: A rolling success
British Museum
Until 13th August

Review: Dreamers Awake

Ah, the summer holidays. Time to catch up on all of the shows I've been dying to see, but haven't had chance to yet...

First off, Dreamers Awake, the current exhibition at the White Cube, Bermondsey. The gallery say (in some detail):

White Cube is pleased to present ‘Dreamers Awake’, a group show at White Cube Bermondsey which explores the enduring influence of Surrealism through the work of more than fifty women artists. The exhibition brings together sculpture, painting, collage, photography and drawing from the 1930s to the present day and includes work by well-known Surrealist figures as well as contemporary and emerging artists. Woman has a powerful presence in Surrealism. She is the object of masculine desire and fantasy; a harpy, goddess or sphinx; a mystery or threat. Often, she appears decapitated, distorted, trussed up. Fearsome or fetishized, she is always the ‘other’. From today’s perspective, gender politics can seem the unlikely blind spot of a movement that declared war on patriarchal society, convention and conformity.
Nonetheless, from its earliest days female artists have been drawn to Surrealism’s emphasis on personal and artistic freedoms and to the creative potential that the exploration of the unconscious offered. By focusing on the work of women artists, ‘Dreamers Awake’ hopes to show how, through art foregrounding bodily experience, the symbolic woman of Surrealism is refigured as a creative, sentient, thinking being.
Repossessed by its owner, the fragmented, headless body of Surrealism becomes a vehicle for irony, resistance, humour and self-expression. Ranging beyond those who might identify themselves as Surrealists, the show traces the influence of the movement where artists delve into the unconscious; create alternative realities; invent fetishistic objects, such as Mona Hatoum’s Jardin Public (1993), that subvert the objectification of the female form, or, in the spirit of Claude Cahun’s iconic black and white self-portraits from the 1930s, play with gender identity as a fluid construct.

My first impression was that Dreamers Awake represented a particularly strong showing of work by women. Exploring the ideas of surrealism, it's a bold reclamation of a genre that has historically objectified the female form, so the work on show feels very powerful.

If you think about the images you connect with the idea of 'surrealism,' once you get beyond melting clocks, you probably call to mind close-cropped images of the body, or even oddly-disembodied limbs: for the Surrealists, the bodies of women were part of their language of expression. What Dreamers Awake does is return a sense of agency to women so they can make the symbolism of surrealism their own mode of expression.
The diversity of the ways in which this expression achieved is stunning; a painting by Dorothea Tanning, photography by Claude Cahun, and sculpture by Louise Bourgeois draw the mind in different directions, whilst circling back round to the concerns of identity and gender. The body of work on show is divergent, but the overall point of the exhibition holds it together with a clear sense of narrative.

I really enjoyed this show, and not just for the quality of the art. The fact that this major exhibitions is female-focused offered an exciting insight into an area of art that everyone thinks they know. As far as I'm concerned, it is well worth seeing.


4/5: A glorious wakeup call from the women of Surrealism
White Cube,
Bermondsey.
Until 17th September

Review: Selfie to Self Expression

The current major show at the Saatchi Gallery, From Selfie to Self-Expression, is an interesting one: it explores the selfie, and self-portraiture, from art history to today. In other words, the Gallery have hit upon a topic that virtually everyone will have a strong opinion on, which, by contrast, makes it quite difficult to review thoughtfully.

The Gallery say:

Saatchi Gallery and Huawei have teamed up to present From Selfie to Self-Expression. This is the world’s first exhibition exploring the history of the selfie from the old masters to the present day, and celebrates the truly creative potential of a form of expression often derided for its inanity.

The show also highlights the emerging role of the mobile phone as an artistic medium for self-expression by commissioning ten exciting young British photographers to create new works using Huawei’s newest breakthrough dual lens smartphones co-engineered with Leica. 

When I left this exhibition, I wasn't sure whether I'd witnessed a playful, clever review of the state of modern image production, or whether I was witnessing a manifestation of the end of days. I'm still not sure.
It is clear that a lot of thought has gone into the installations, and that everything included is there to spark some serious debate. Whatever your opinion of selfie culture, however, the curator has done a very good job of drawing parallels with portraiture from art history, so the exhibition isn't a study in isolated tackiness.
There's a mix of photography from established artists, large scale installation work, and, of course, both researched and crowd-sourced selfies. As a whole show it has a good balance to it, and explores the idea of self-expression in a surprising amount of intellectual depth for a show with 'selfie' in the title.
Overall, I think that Selfie to Self-Expression is worth seeing so you can wrap your own opinions around it. The issues it deals with are too contentious for any one reviewer to offer a definitive statement on, so I'm not going to try to. I still don't know if I loved or hated it, but I definitely engaged with it. It is worth your time, if only to give you something to argue over.

4/5: Irresistible debate-fodder
Saatchi Gallery
Until 6th September

Reviewing: The Ferryman

Jez Butterworth's most recent work, The Ferryman, became the fastest selling play in the Royal Court's history. His past success, and the renown of director Sam Mendes, meant that expectations were always going to be sky-high: the question is, does it live up to the hype?
The Royal Court tells us,

"Vanishing. It’s a powerful word, that. A powerful word.”
Northern Ireland, 1981. The Carney farmhouse is a hive of activity with preparations for the annual harvest.  A day of hard work on the land and a traditional night of feasting and celebrations lie ahead. But this year they will be interrupted by a visitor.

Now, in terms of plot, The Ferryman covers so much ground it's a miracle that it isn't a complete mess: instead, it's a stunning meeting of a stellar cast, a talented writer and a brilliant director, resulting in an incredible play.

All of the big themes are dealt with: love, loss, family, conflict, but they are woven together in a way that doesn't make the show seem overcrowded; Butterworth seems to have worked magic with his storytelling. The Carney family, headed by Paddy Considine's Quinn, are a vibrant, complex group of characters, each sympathetic in his or her own way, and watching them is a joy.

The naturalism of the Carney's kitchen at harvest offers insight into a world that is very similar to our own, but far enough away in time to seem dream-like. The brutal reality of the Troubles cuts through the rural idyll of the farm, and if you have any knowledge of the period, you know that the story could have no simple resolution. Others have pointed out how quickly the 3.5 hours flies by, and that is down to how compelling this story is, and how well it's performed.

Sam Mendes' direction is marvellous, and Nick Powell's music and sound design are subtle and create a sense of longing for a simpler time. Simply put, everything in this show works.

If you can get tickets for it, you really should. The Ferryman is unquestionably one of the best shows of the year.

5/5: Theatrical magic
Gielgud Theatre
Until January 2018

Review: Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour

Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour began life at the National Theatre, and is currently enjoying a West End transfer. Its life as a production has been very successful, but not entirely without controversy.
The NT describe it thusly:

From the creator of Billy Elliot (Lee Hall) comes the uplifting and moving story of six Catholic choir girls from Oban, let loose in Edinburgh for one day only.
Funny, heartbreaking and raucously rude, Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour is adapted from Alan Warner’s brilliant novel about six young friends on the cusp of change and is directed by Royal Court Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone.
Featuring the songs of ELO, Our Ladies is a glorious anthem to friendship, youth and growing up disgracefully.
Prepare thyself for… really rude language, flashing lights, pyrotechnics, lots of sexual references, excessive drinking, and extensive use of the smoke machine.

A lot of people seem to have struggled getting beyond the lewdness on Our Ladies, but if all you do is get hung up about the swearing you have really missed the point.

The stories of the six schoolgirls, on their trip to Edinburgh, are poignant, and even though the characters are lairy, the way their story develops is really touching. If you walk out before the end, then you don't reach the points of resolution and the 'morning after' clarity of the play. And that would be your loss.

Of course, you can't review Our Ladies without discussing the music. The performances of both the actors and the band are phenomenal. Really, the singing is just incredible. I left the theatre uplifted: it it a thing of joy. I've never encountered a show that blends traditional choral pieces with ELO before... and probably never will again. The juxtaposition of the two means that when the choral music cuts through the rock, it is simply stunning.

I absolutely recommend Our Ladies, but if you're prudish about swearing, sex, or wild drunkenness, it's probably not the play for you.

4/5: Proud, loud, funny, but touching
Duke of York's Theatre
Until September

Review: Hir

Hir hadn't even been on my radar when a friend asked if I wanted to go and see it, so I agreed and it became one of the three productions I scheduled for this week.
So what is it?
The Bush Theatre say:

Isaac (Arthur Darvill) gets home from serving in the marines to find war has broken out back home. In a nondescript town somewhere in Central Valley – America, Isaac’s mom Paige (Ashley McGuire) is blowing up entrenched routines.
Fed up with domestic patriarchy, Paige has stopped washing, cleaning and caring for their ailing father, who recently suffered a stroke. She reigns supreme.
Ally to their mother’s new regime is Isaac’s sibling Max (Griffyn Gilligan). Only last time Isaac checked, Max was Maxine. Once the breadwinner, Isaac’s dad (Andy Williams) has toppled from the head of the household to the bottom of the pile – a make-upped puppet emasculated by Paige once and for all.
In a cheap house made of plywood and glue, notions of masculinity and femininity become weapons with which to defeat the old order. But in Taylor Mac’s sly, subversive comedy, annihilating the past doesn’t always free you from it.

Now, it's taken me about 24 hours to process exactly what I thought of Hir, and the conclusion I reached is that, whilst there are positives, the show as a whole is a bit of a mess.

The acting itself solid. No complaints there. All four members of the cast turn in decent performances. And the staging works well: the clear messy/anarchic and clean/ordered split between the two halves does what it needs to.

However, the script tries to cram in way too much. There are Important Themes flying about all over the place, meaning that none of them are properly dealt with. The trauma of a soldier returning from a war zone, a young person establishing hir gender identity, living with serious illness, and domestic abuse are all major issues that suffer for being rammed into a short play. Nothing is fully explored. Another huge detraction is the fact that the mental/physical health of the characters is often treated, at best, lightly or, at worst, as a joke: that did not sit well.

Hir could have been an amazing bit of theatre. Instead, a waspish script is held together by some sound acting. It isn't a write-off, but your time could be better spent elsewhere.

3/5: Solid performances despite a plotting mess
Bush Theatre
Until July 22