Month / December 2017

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The Unteleported Artist

So I didn’t need to be at the theatre until 7.15 for a 7.45 start, so I thought a HS1 to Saint P would put me on the Victoria to the Royal Academy of Arts, a coffee and expotition booking, the Victoria down to Pimlico and t’Tate t’Britain, Victoria/Northern to Borough and The Royal Oak for an annual half of Harvey’s Christmas Ale, with time for a walk to a Caffè Nerd near London Bridge to sober up for the theatre.

I saw and enjoyed a preview of the Dalì/Duchamp exhibition and will write that up, but I took a second look and my sense that Dalì is the better artist but Duchamp the more interesting one stays. And I got to admire the Christ of Saint John of the Cross again, having not seen it (obviously) Glasgow.

Meanwhile, the From Life show is a group show based on the idea of art taken from life that begins with a horse’s arse (literarily) and is dominated by art student images of Iggy Pop curated by Jeremy Deller, a selection of Gillian Wearing portraits and two instantly identifiable sculptures by Yinka Shonibare MBE, based on laser scans of two statues (or casts?) in The Academy collection

But what drew my attention were three portraits by Jonathan Yeo, the central one being a Paolozzi style sculpture. I didn’t have a predisposition to like Yeo, in a case perhaps of guilt by association, having seen portraits of luminaries such as Andrew Lloyd Webber, Rupert Murdoch, the Duchess of Cornwall and Tony Blair at the Laing Art Gallery. But these two paintings were based on scans of his face and body and were called The Unteleported Man and The Simulacra.

Clearly a Philip K. Dick fan. And quite striking.

A couple of hours later I made it to the Tate and finally did the Rachel Whiteread exhibition. The first woman to win the Turner Prize, she is probably best known for Ghost, the interior of a demolished house, and her Fourth Plinth commission, a cast of the plinth.

A room full of her stuff is a little overwhelming, or perhaps underwhelming. And it is one room —the Tate having removed the walls that usually guide you through the galleries. It is the same idea repeated: lots of casts of doors or mattresses, a cast of Room 101, a cast of bookshelves, a cast of a staircase… you get the idea. I’m glad I didn’t pay, for I clearly wasn’t in the mood and I had to go in search of colour in paintings to detox. I’ve liked works individually, but a retrospective made me recall the sublime Roger Hiorns copper sulphate cast of a council flat, Seizure.

In fact, a proper Whiteread retrospective would be a cast of Tate Britain.

Your kilometerage may vary.

And then in the shop I noticed a copy of Dick’s Confessions of a Crap Artist.
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Yes, obviously, I know “crap” isn’t acting as the emphasised adjective — Jack Isidore is not an artist who is crap and I’m not saying that Whiteread is an artist who is… But I couldn’t immediately see why the book was there.

In a sense she creates alternate realities, making the space solid… but why that book? What did I miss?

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Marx for Beginners

Richard Bean and Clive Coleman, Young Marx (Director: Nicholas Hytner, Br/dge Theatre)

ED162A8D-A237-4CCF-B0BF-2FB68E32609CWhen a big developer wants to land a huge estate in a city, they often offer an incentive to planners, such as affordable housing or cultural facilities. Near me someone has offered to build a hospital shell in return for turning the existing site into a housing estate. I don’t know, maybe there were no cynical reasons behind The Bridge, poised between London City Hall and Tower Bridge. Apparently this is the first new commercial theatre to be built in London in eighty years —although I don’t know where that leaves The Globe. Nicholas Hytner is the first artistic director, semi fresh from the NT, and who I think directed the version of The Tempest I saw at the RSC in about 1987.

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The Antepenultimate Jedi

Have you seen it? Read on. If not, and spoilers bother you, stop.

The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson, 2017)

There’s a moment in Reign of Fire where a story is being acted out for a group of rapt children — and we in the audience should recognise the story, since it’s a version of the original Star Wars trilogy. Those first three films — episodes IV to VI — have the quality of the fairy tale, the orphan who battles monsters, who reaches the happily ever after moment and then is heard from no more, until he has to give half his kingdom and his daughter to whomever will slay the dragon. There is always another child — and it should have been more interesting than it was that Anakin was that child and grew up to be evil Darth Vader. Think reading The Magician’s Nephew after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. And then there was Rey, in The Force Awakens, of mysterious birth, a wild untutored phoenix in the ways of the Force who this time was a girl (and there was a great perturbance in the Force….)

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Hard Stares

Paddington 2 (Paul King, 2017)

And inevitably — for reasons that need not detain us — I was looking back to all those long drives to holiday destinations and family in the north east, and the five tapes that passed the time: two Winnie the Pooh, two Paddingtons and a Beatrix Potter. The first two (four) were the loved ones, sharing Bernard Cribbins as a reader. And I’m pretty sure that the first theatre I saw, aside from panto, were adaptations. I’m not sure why I missed the first movie — feeling some trepidation — but I could see Ben Wishaw would be perfect for the voice.

As far as I can recall, with the exception of Paddington Abroad, the books were all short stories: Paddington would attempt to do something (sell Mr Curry a vacuum cleaner) and it would go wrong (Mr Curry had no mains electricity), but everything would turn out ok. There would be a visit to Mr Gruber and sticky buns and there’d be a hard stare. I think I have about ten books, Armada Lions, battered and fading orange.

But here we need a feature length narrative: Paddington saving up money to buy a rare pop up book of London for his Aunt Lucy’s hundredth birthday. Only someone else is after the book and will stop at nothing to get it.

In a prologue, we learn that Paddington’s Aunt Lucy was about to go on holiday to London when she found Paddington — revealing in the process that Paddington was adopted before the Browns took him on. I am shocked that Aunt Lucy is not a blood relative — is this canon? Mind you, it took me a long time to realise that Pike’s Uncle Arthur wasn’t a blood relative.

And so we are in Notting Hill, which presumably has come up in the world since the original stories, but here at least is infinitely more multiracial than the last time co-star Hugh Grant appeared in a film set there. There is a neighbourhood of lovable eccentrics, almost all charmed by Britain’s favourite illegal immigrant, and each played by the gentry of television comedy. Occasionally, this can be distracting. Mr Curry, who I’d always assumed to be Scottish, is played by Peter Capaldi, better known for Local Hero and the Oscar-winning Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Gruber, meanwhile, is Jim Broadbent, slightly confusingly as Hugh Bonneville (Mr Brown, Paddington’s reluctant adopter) has played a younger version of Broadbent in Iris.

The build is slow, as Paddington begins cleaning windows, in a borrow from the books (surely) and from a Hoffnung monologue where it was a barrel of bricks. But as the birthday approaches, Paddington finds himself behind bars with a choky full of dodgy characters. Paddington weaves his magic, setting the scene for a geographically dodgy train chase.

I assume writer-director King is a Wallace and Gromit fan, as it borrows from Nick Parks’s heterotopia and his style of piling up sight gags. I think this is a film to rewatch on DVD, pause button to hand, to unpick the notices and headlines. It’s a long film, but it doesn’t feel long. Paddington is utterly convincing, although perhaps at times he’s not sufficiently in the landscape, and I could have done without quite so many fantasy sequences. The pop up book perhaps allows homage to the Ivor Wood animated series, that never quite sold me. Meanwhile, even though I’d avoid Hugh Grant movies like the plague, he steals this film gloriously and effortlessly.

And, spoilers, it’s pretty obviously worth watching the closing credits, for one more set piece.

Perhaps it’s an air of exhaustion, but this might be my film of the year, watched through teared up eyes, eucatastrophically or for those endless drives on the A1 or the M1 all those years ago.