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

Speechlessness in Three Artworks

Speechless, adjective

unable to speak, especially as the temporary result of shock or strong emotion

I am faithless, but sometimes, when confronting an artwork, I feel as if I'm in church.
On, sadly, rare occasions I enter a gallery and experience a moment of stillness so pure it feels transcendental: my heart races, my head spins, I stop breathing for a moment - speechlessness descends as a gift to someone whose life contains little quiet.

It would be nice to think that we all find moments like this in our lives: times where we connect with something greater and more beautiful than ourselves. Times of quiet. But I am not the only person who has to struggle to escape everyday noise.

At different stages in my life, the following three artworks have rendered me speechless, all for different reasons. The were quiet points, where I had the space to think.

1. Turner's Seascapes:

There are examples of Turner's works all over the place in London, but I first fell in love with his seascapes through the 'Turner and the Sea' exhibition at the National Maritime Museum a few years ago. The scale of his late seascapes, stripped of all unnecessary detail, was immense: I felt as if I could be washed away. Turner's courage to pull back details means that you end up with huge, almost abstract canvases, and being surrounded by them is very tranquil.

2. Van Gogh's 'Wheat field with Crows':

I don't remember when it was I fell for Van Gogh's work, but when I had a brief stopover in Amsterdam for a wedding, I took great delight in going to the Van Gogh museum. The highlight for me was 'Wheat field with Crows', which is a huge canvas that seems to perfectly capture a ripple of disturbance in a field, causing the birds to rise and fly off. I stood staring at the tiny brush strokes, following the movement, until my partner hurried me along. My mind stayed with the painting.

3. Rothko's Seagram Murals:

 My love for Rothko was late in developing. When I studied art at college, I was one of those foolish, pretentious teenagers who thought they had the learning to dismiss abstract expressionism out of hand. Many years, and much maturing, later, and sitting in the room containing the Seagram Murals at the Tate Modern is about as close as I am able to get to a religious experience. You sit in the darkened space and are absolutely surrounded by these massive, abstract canvases. It's well worth waiting for a quiet moment to get in there and claim bench space. It makes me feel small, yet incredibly safe.

What artworks have given you pause? Which artists?

It seems like I don't just look for a single thing in an artwork. It is more a feeling of scale. What I'm looking for, maybe, is something with the scope to put my own life in perspective. Whatever the feeling, it's beyond words.

Review: Blasted

Styx Theatre is a small North London venue, new to me, and, it turns out, a cool and quirky little space. They are currently running a 90s Season, so I finally had the opportunity to see Sarah Kane's Blasted on stage.

Blasted originally opened at the Royal Court Theatre in 1995, directed by James Macdonald. The story plays out in a room in a hotel in Leeds where Ian, a racist, misogynistic journalist, first attempts to seduce, and then later rapes, Cate, a young woman. The fairly naturalistic opening quickly gives way to a representation of a city at war, where a soldier appears in the room and describes the terrible things he has witnessed and done. The final section deals in scenes of rape, cannibalism, and other forms of savagery. All told, the play is brutal.
The version playing at Styx is stripped down, and some interesting directorial choices give rise to a lot of questions about what is stageable, what is acceptable, and what you can pare away from Kane's work without it losing its impact. The end result is a fantastic rendering of Kane's earliest play, and some of the non-naturalistic choices actually heighten the wrongness of the work, rather than shy away from it.
The stage is black, with minimal setting and use of props. For some of the earlier graphic scenes, the stage directions describing the action are projected on the wall instead of the actors performing the acts themselves. At first I wasn't sure if this was an act of cowardice, but as the play gets more graphic, and moments like Ian's rape are staged, what we actually see realised is a series of contrasts and disquieting tensions. Everything is unnatural, yet plausible in the context of war: you might be disgusted by the soldier, but his story is not necessarily surprising.
The themes of conflict and the extremities of violence have taken on a new significance in this era of war and human displacement. As a consequence, Blasted seems to act as a warning of what happens when humanity is stripped away: it is sadly a play of startling relevance for our contemporary moment.

Recommended, though not if you are easily offended.

4/5: Still shocking, still painful, still human
Styx Theatre
Until 11th March

Review: Ugly Lies the Bone

Written by Lindsey Ferrentino and directed by Indhu Rubasingham, Ugly Lies the Bone is currently running on the Lyttelton stage of the National Theatre. They say:

After three tours in Afghanistan, Jess finally returns to Florida. In a small town on the Space Coast, as the final shuttle is about to launch, Jess must confront her scars – and a home that may have changed even more than her.

Experimenting with a pioneering virtual reality therapy, she builds a breathtaking new world where she can escape her pain. There, she begins to restore her relationships, her life and, slowly, herself.

 Now, there are a lot of interesting ideas at work in the play, but overall, nothing is satisfactorily developed. The dramatic use of video projection could have been a powerful way of expressing the virtual world being trialled by Jess (Kate Fleetwood), but some of the design work incorporated by it is, frankly, a bit naff. Meanwhile, the sliding, minimalist set worked quite well, but was nothing revolutionary. 

Acting-wise, Fleetwood is good, and Ralph Little and Kris Marshall's characters are well performed and pleasingly developed, however, the introduction of Jess's mother towards the end of the play is at best trite, and at worst downright tacky.

I think, more than anything, I was frustrated with Ugly Lies the Bone. It had the potential to be exciting and original, it just doesn't quite make it. It's not dreadful, but it is too much of a near miss for me.

3/5: Interesting ideas, average execution

Lyttelton Theatre:

National Theatre.

London

Until 6th June

Review: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead last graced The Old Vic's stage 50 years ago. This time around Daniel Radcliffe (Rosencrantz) and Joshua McGuire (Guildenstern) take to the stage with David Haig and a beautiful cast of royals and misfits.

The Old Vic say:

Half a century after its premiere on The Old Vic stage, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, the play that made a young Tom Stoppard’s name overnight, returns to The Old Vic in its 50th anniversary celebratory production directed by David Leveaux.
Against the backdrop of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this mind-bending situation comedy sees two hapless minor characters, Rosencrantz (Daniel Radcliffe) and Guildenstern (Joshua McGuire), take centre stage with David Haig as The Player. Increasingly out of their depth, the young double act stumble their way in and out of the action of this iconic drama. In a literary hall of mirrors, Stoppard’s brilliantly funny, existential labyrinth sees us witness the ultimate identity crisis.

Directed by David Leveaux, and set in the wings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is a clever, witty play, and I enjoyed it a lot. It is unashamedly intellectual in its humour, at a time when so much cultural output is simply aimed at the lowest common denominator. Though I'm not such a culture snob that I would dismiss light entertainment out of hand, it feels good to be able to watch something with a bit more challenge to it.

Radcliffe and McGuire do a stellar job of portraying Stoppard's balance between humour and his exploration of human transience: there are moments of real poignancy as well as points of unapologetic postmodernism. Haig's role as resident deviant is also seedy and well played, providing a knowing commentary on the unfolding events.

The design work - part renaissance, part anachronism - is pleasing too, as is the musical direction. The aesthetics suggest a faded glory around the edges of Hamlet, whilst the meander of the characters gives a life to the incidental details that provide the framework for theatre's big stories. As well as asking 'what ifs' and 'who are wes' Rosencrantz & Guildenstern offers a window on two souls, broken free from their original scripting and trying to find a place for themselves in a wider world: it is sad and beautiful.

I would strongly recommend the Old Vic's production of Stoppard's classic, but not if you want something mindless. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead requires a bit of thinking, but you are rewarded with a narrative that stays with your for days, asking questions, making you remember, giving you space to think.

4/5: Clever and well played
The Old Vic
London
Until Sat 29 Apr 2017

Review: Richard III

Schaubühne Berlin's double bill of Richard III and Beware of Pity (with Complicite) have been taking the Barbican by storm this month. I was fortunate enough to catch Richard III in person, and will be following up with the recording of Beware of Pity.
Of Richard III, the Barbican's website informs us that:

Resplendent in evening dress, showered in glitter, the victorious Yorks celebrate. Damaged and disfigured, Richard finds no peace among this elite to whom he has never fully belonged. Murdering his way to the throne, exposing conflict and mistrust in his wake, the outsider makes us complicit, addressing us directly to reveal his manipulative plans.

Of course, as ever, the blurb does not come within a mile of describing what occurs on stage. And in Schaubühne Berlin's version of Shakespeare's historic tragedy, 'what occurs on stage' encompasses quite a number of things.

The stage and lighting design, courtesy of Jan Pappelbaum and Erich Schneider, are edgy and stripped down. With the single set virtually unchanged throughout the play, a lot of the setting is done through the lighting design, which encompasses projection and a live camera feed, to great effect.
Similarly, Nils Ostendorf's music is striking, and the presence of a live drummer creates a raucous
sound scape that reflects the events of the play spiralling out of control. All of the details add up to a scenario that gains such momentum it cannot help but end in a crash.


Directed by Thomas Ostermeier, this version of the Shakespeare classic is riotous, unapologetic, and a bit mad. Lars Eidinger as the titular anti-hero is an immense presence, and he doesn't so much as perform the role as totally own it. Eidinger is by turns carnivalesque, then sinister, then outraged that anyone would accuse him of all of the things he's actually guilty of: he is a Richard who pursues villainy, rather than creeps to it.
Some have argued that Ostermeier, in giving free reign to Eidinger's colossal personality, has made Richard III a character study, tearing away the play's inherent politics. I would disagree. We live in a world where successful politicians are colossal personalities, and we offer deference to the leaders who shout the loudest. As a result, Eidinger's grotesque rendering of the role maps onto the hinterland between celebrity and political cultures.

Schaubühne Berlin have provided us with a Richard III for our age: political power wielded for personal profit, a divided country, at war with herself. It never ceases to amaze me how well Shakespeare's stories have lasted, and how, in the re-telling, they still hold warnings for us now.

5/5: Brilliant, vital madness
The Barbican
Ended 19th February

Review: Sex with Strangers

I'll be honest with you right from the off, I didn't like Sex with Strangers. However, I am going to have a go at reviewing it as objectively as I can, because it did have some redeeming features.

The Hampstead Theatre inform us that,

Olivia, an attractive and talented but underappreciated mid-career writer, is unexpectedly trapped overnight in a secluded, snowed-in B&B with Ethan, an equally attractive and wildly successful young blogger. 
Her latest novel is an unsung masterpiece; his blog is being made into a movie. She prefers books; he prefers eBooks. She is anonymous; he has half a million Twitter followers. But opposites soon attract – passionately – as each realise they want more of what the other has. But the closer they get, the more they must confront the murky side of ambition, success and Wi-Fi…

Now, as the description points out, the attractive novelist and the attractive blogger are indeed trapped in a B&B. They become involved and, over the course of the play, become less attractive personalities with every passing second.

Peter Dubois does a reasonable job of directing Laura Eason's work, but there are moments where things seem forced and awkward, for example as the couple are about to have sex, the gauze lowers in front of them, and there's a cut to blackout, every time. Every. Time. After a while this is clunky, and the momentum is lost. It feels like Eason was writing the kind of character development that is deployed on screen rather than stage - something that can be shown through a montage of time passing. It doesn't work in a play.
The characters are also remarkably unsympathetic, as we see the pull of performative identities and the lure of money cause them both to sacrifice what they hold dear. By the end I just didn't care what happened to them. On saying this, though, there were some subtleties in the character development that were well executed from the writing, I just disliked the characters so much that I was too busy being annoyed to appreciate them.

There are other positives, however. Emilia Fox and Theo James put in strong performances; despite the fact that James seems to have been cast because he looks good with his shirt off, he is particularly convincing as one of a certain breed of social media star. Also, at some points, the dialogue between the two characters is punchy and naturalistic, but not enough to win me over. Oh, and the set design is lovely.

Some people seem to have enjoyed the play. I'm not one of them. Go and see it if you will, but you might find yourself, head in hands, laughing at the number of times Theo James' character has undressed, or irritated by the fact you are stuck watching two characters you don't really care for

3/5 (begrudgingly): Pretty but disappointing
Hampstead Theatre
Until 4th March