Review: Obsession

Tonight's theatre offering was Obsession, directed by Ivo van Hove, and staring Jude Law, at the Barbican. They say:

Jude Law plays the magnetically handsome, down-at-heel Gino in a new stage adaptation of Visconti’s penetrating social drama directed by Ivo van Hove.Drifter Gino, powerful and graceful as a puma, encounters Giuseppe and his much younger, trapped wife Hanna (played by Halina Reijn) at their roadside restaurant and petrol station. He and Hanna are so irresistibly attracted to one another they begin an affair while plotting to murder her husband. But the crime does not unite them in this chilling story where passion can lead only to destruction.
Visconti’s first feature film Obsession (1943) gave rise to Italian neorealism, a cinematic movement highlighting the struggles of ordinary people in a time of upheaval. As Van Hove’s fourth Visconti production, it features a company of Dutch and British actors led by Law, whose charismatic stage and screen performances have established him as one of the foremost actors of his generation.

When you look at the setting, you know it's Van Hove right away: a beautiful, stripped back space that will, you suspect, get more messy as the play progresses.

That is pretty much a metaphor for the whole production, really.

Obsession could have been brilliant, but the pieces don't fit together. Even Jude Law and Halina Reijn's chemistry couldn't carry the mismatched space/music/dialogue, which is a shame because they're really good. The moment of intimacy they share near the beginning is one of the most erotic things I've ever seen in a theatrical production... but then we are left to observe a series of discontinuous vignettes that don't hold together as a whole.
There's the representation of a car that is lifted up and down, spraying oil on the actors. The thing with the accordion. The bit at the end with the seascape, which is beautiful, but totally out of keeping with everything else that happens. The random nudity. The treadmill. You find yourself wondering how a director who, when on form, is so utterly brilliant could also throw these things together and call it a play.

On the whole, Obsession isn't a complete disaster, it's just frustrating. It's kind of worth seeing for Law and Reijn, but there are better things on in London right now. If you have spare time and money I can half-heartedly recommend it, but beyond Law and Reijn's performances, there are a lot of things amiss.

3/5: Moments of beauty caught up in a bit of a mess
The Barbican
Until 20th May

Review: The Treatment

The Almeida's current show is a revival of Martin Crimp's The Treatment, directed by Lyndsey Turner. In short, it goes something like:

New York. A film studio.  A young woman has an urgent story to tell.
But here, people are products, movies are money and sex sells. And the rights to your life can be a dangerous commodity to exploit.

In the viewing, what the The Treatment is, is a brilliantly dark bit of theatre. It explores ideas of stories, authenticity, and ownership, in a manner that is both morally ambiguous and uncomfortably funny. The treatment, as it were, of Anne, who is played brilliantly by Aisling Loftus, is brutally unsympathetic, and as a result it is no surprise when her reality reasserts itself over the film producers who have hitherto tried to exploit her.
The performances are great, particularly Loftus - who is absolutely beguiling as central character Anne - and disintegrating power couple Jennifer (Indira Varma) and Andrew (Julian Ovenden). There is also a great use of a large cast walking in and around the scenes, giving the action a kind of 'behind-the-scenes' feel, entirely appropriate to the subject matter.
The design is striking as well, with sparse sets and bold colours framing the action with a noir-ish vibe, though there are moments when the scene changes jar the pacing a bit, which prevents the show hitting perfection.
Overall, however, The Treatment is a great bit of theatre.
Highly Recommended!

4/5: A darkly funny downward spiral
The Almeida
Until 10th June

Review: American Dream: Pop to the Present

Yesterday, pretty much on a whim, I diverted into the British Museum and got a ticket for their The American Dream: Pop to the Present exhibition. I am really, really glad I did. Printmaking isn't really an area I know a lot about, either in terms of technique or practitioners, so American Dream offered both a steep learning curve, and an insight into a lot of really exciting work.

The exhibition is being promoted like so:

America.
Land of the free. Home of the brave…
Trace 60 years of a superpower in this major new exhibition.

The past six decades have been among the most dynamic and turbulent in US history, from JFK’s assassination, Apollo 11 and Vietnam to the AIDS crisis, racism and gender politics. Responding to the changing times, American artists have produced prints unprecedented in their scale and ambition.
...
This exhibition presents the Museum’s outstanding collection of modern and contemporary American prints for the first time. These will be shown with important works from museums and private collections around the world.

The full description, available here, is quite detailed, and makes very clear how the British Museum are framing the show. The theme of politics is threaded through the work, sometimes subtly, sometime overtly, whilst each room represents the next evolutionary stage in the history of American printmaking. In the past, I've gone to exhibitions at the British Museum where, having paid for a full price adult ticket, I've walked through about three rooms of content, reached the end, and then gone, 'Is that is?' This was definitely not the case here. American Dream is a huge, detailed exhibition, so if you're thinking about going, make sure you leave enough time to fully take things in.

There is too much work in the show for me to talk in detail about all of it, but there were a few highlights that really stood out for me. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were well represented in American Dream, and seeing their work up close was particularly exciting as you can see their artistic practice play out over time. Chuck Close's portraiture was a masterclass of technique, and the stripped back minimalism of Donald Judd and Al Taylor articulated a reaction against both abstract expressionism as a highly personal form and pop art as an ironic gesture, representing how trends in printmaking have shifted in the past few decades. As I have already noted, though, these are just a few of the amazing pieces on offer.

American Dream is a well-curated, detailed exhibition, that treats the recent history of American printmaking with an appropriate level of care and attention. I learnt about this particular area of art history, as well as enjoying the work, and I would definitely advise you to make time to do the same.

5/5: Bold, brave and beautiful
The British Museum,
London.
Until 18th June

Review: Travesties

Last night offered an absolute theatrical treat: Tom Stoppard's Travesties, currently showing at the Apollo Theatre, Soho; I enjoyed every minute of it.

Its blurb describes it thus:

Tom Stoppard’s dazzling comedy of art, love and revolution features James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin as remembered - and misremembered - by Henry Carr, a minor British diplomat in Zurich 1917.

When Gwendolen and Cecily wander in from The Importance of Being Earnest, Henry’s mind wanders too. He knows he was Algernon in a production in Zurich. But who was the other one?

Stoppard's play was written in 1974, but feels like it could have been produced in the last couple of years. Under Patrick Marber's direction, the work is pyrotechnic, with Tom Hollander and Freddie Fox leading a fantastic cast. The two hours thirty fly by as the improbable connections between a series of historical figures are remembered and misremembered by Hollander's character, Carr. The play with language and pace is a joy to witness, and, as has been my experience watching some of Stoppard's other work, when you understand the more intellectual references, you feel properly clever.

It's not all laughs though. The pathos we feel observing Carr's deterioration is real, and Lenin's journey to power holds some uncomfortable resonances for today. There are also some serious arguments made about the nature of art, which do not sound as if they were articulated in the 70s.

Travesties has been pretty much universally well received during this revival, and that must at least partly be due to its freshness and liveliness as a production. Another major draw is its charm. And then there is its well-groomed style. And, of course, the performances. I would struggle to isolate one single thing that made me enjoy this production so much: it's just so good. Everything about it.

If you can catch it before the end of the run, you definitely should.

5/5: Hysterically clever and rightfully proud of it
Apollo Theatre, Soho
Until 29th April

Review: Consent

Last night I was fortunate enough to be offered tickets to see Nina Raine's Consent, currently showing at the Dorfman Theatre at the National, so I must start this review with a thank you to the NT's wonderful Secondary and FE Education team.

Of Consent, the NT say:

Why is Justice blind? Is she impartial? Or is she blinkered?

Friends take opposing briefs in a rape case. The key witness is a woman whose life seems a world away from theirs. At home, their own lives begin to unravel as every version of the truth is challenged.

Consent, Nina Raine’s powerful, painful, funny play sifts the evidence from every side and puts justice herself in the dock.

Consent is Nina Raine's fourth play, her previous - Rabbit, Tribes, and Tiger Country - all having been well received. Her latest work, which takes a rape case as a starting point for an exploration of the relationships between a ground of friends, is no exception to her run of great writing.

The use of the rape case, and the persuasive strategies of lawyers, as a framing device takes the notion of manipulating the feelings of a jury, then replays the process through manipulating the audience into feeling sympathy and then loathing for each of the characters in turn whilst they toy with one another's' emotions. Raine's writing is excellent in this respect as she is able to contrast the reductionist guilty/not guilty dualism of the courtroom, with the complexities of real life situations: in Consent, no one is innocent, but everyone deserves sympathy.

The dialogue is phenomenally well written, and the humour is sharp, relatable, and, occasionally, very dark. The performances of the cast of seven - Priyanga Burford, Pip Carter, Ben Chaplin, Heather Craney, Daisy Haggard, Adam James, and Anna Maxwell Martin - are solid, and you really do find yourself sympathising with, then hating different characters as the scenes progress.

The set design is neat but sparse, yet does a surprisingly good job of communicating the world in which the characters live. The sound design is less successful, as some of the transitions feel a bit jarring.

My main issue with the play, however, is the fact that the pacing dips in places, and some of the scene changes are a little awkward, but these are hopefully things which will be ironed out as the run goes on.

I would definitely recommend Consent to you, even if the white, privileged, middle-class world isn't something you find you can relate to, as the play is an absolute masterclass in character development and the writing of dialogue. I found myself applauding Raine as much as the actors on the stage.

4/5: Funny but complex: laugh out loud, then go away thinking

The Dorfman Theatre @ The National Theatre

Until 17th May

Review: Eduardo Paolozzi

A retrospective of Eduardo Paolozzi's work is currently on show at East London's Whitechapel Gallery. Before visiting the exhibition, I didn't think I knew who Paolozzi was, but it turns out that I see his work on a near-weekly basis at both the British Library, and at Tottenham Court Road tube station. The Whitechapel Gallery introduce the exhibition like so:

Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) was one of the most innovative and irreverent artists of the 20th century. Considered the ‘godfather of Pop Art’, his collages, sculptures and prints challenged artistic convention, from the 1950s through to the Swinging Sixties and advent of ‘Cool Britannia’ in the 1990s.
This major Eduardo Paolozzi retrospective spans five decades and features over 250 works; from the artist’s post-War bronzes, revolutionary screen-prints and collages, to his bold textiles and fashion designs.
Alongside Paolozzi’s early brutalist concrete sculptures, highlights include material from his groundbreaking performance lecture Bunk! (1952), his large-scale Whitworth Tapestry (1967) and the iconic sculpture Diana as an Engine (1963).

I wasn't really captured by images used on the promotional material, but on entering the first room of the exhibition my heart lifted at the colour and variety of the work on show. The combination of sculpture, print, and tapestry gave the show a texture very few artists could realistically offer.

The exhibition moves chronologically through Paolozzi's work, but each of the rooms still contains a mixture of prints, textile work, and sculpture. Highlights for me include some of the later figurative sculpture, and the prints that arose from Paolozzi's friendship with the writer J.G. Ballard.
Other significant moments are offered by the huge Whitworth Tapestry, with its bold colours and presence of Mickey Mouse, and the materials from Paolozzi's 1952 'Bunk!' lecture at the ICA.

Paolozzi's magpie-like adoption of different media makes for a kaleidoscopic, and rather marvellous, experience. It is well worth your time to familiarise yourself with an artist whose work is so present in London, yet whose name is still broadly unknown.

Recommended.

4/5: A colourful, lively retrospective from one of art's polymaths.
Whitechapel Gallery
Until 14 May 2017

Review: Behind the Mask, Another Mask

Behind the Mask, Another Mask is one of the current exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery. It is being advertised with a couple of beguiling, surreal images, that don't necessarily make the nature of the show clear. So what is it?

“Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.” Claude Cahun, 1930

This exhibition brings together for the first time the work of French artist Claude Cahun and British contemporary artist Gillian Wearing. Although they were born almost seventy years apart and came from different backgrounds, remarkable parallels can be drawn between the two artists. Both of them share a fascination with the self-portrait and use the self-image, through the medium of photography, to explore themes around identity and gender, which is often played out through masquerade and performance.

My first response to the exhibition's entry point was one of a casual interest. There were photographs, they were pleasing, but they didn't really set my world aflame. Some casual links between Wearing and Cahun are suggested, but the connections are quite superficial.
Then it gets weird.
 As the exhibition progresses, we see more of Wearing's mask work, and what she has done seems to sit firmly in 'uncanny valley' territory. When you realise that you aren't looking at straight portraits, but recreations of portraits achieved by Wearing in a mask, the effect is unsettling to say the least. The same eyes stare out from faces of different ages and genders in a manner that made me feel really quite uncomfortable. The juxtaposition with Cahun's work then becomes interesting, as there is a strong dialogue between the politics of identity and the fluidity of self-representation. However, the more showy images of Wearing's are staged in a way that almost overshadows Cahun's work, which is actually the more thought-provoking of the two.
The points of intersection between the two artists could bear more development as there are clear similarities and ideological links. As things stand, though, the two artists' images sit alongside one another, talking to each other too infrequently.

Behind the Mask, Another Mask is worth a visit for thinking through the points Wearing and Cahun are making about identity, but it is a far from perfect exhibition. What makes it frustrating is that it could have been a great show. Instead, it's merely a good one.

3/5: Uncanny but undeveloped
National Portrait Gallery
Until 29th May 2017