Merrily We Roll Along - Menier Chocolate Factory, Friday 25th January 2013

 

http://ww.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/9708850/Merrily-We-Roll-Along-Menier-Chocolate-Factory-London-review.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2240739/The-Seagull-theatre-review-Merrily-We-Roll-Along.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/dec/02/merrily-roll-along-boris-godunov-review
http://www.theartsdesk.com/theatre/merrily-we-roll-along-menier-chocolate-factory

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Cast:
Franklin Shepard: Mark Umbers
Charley Kringas: Damien Humbley
Mary Flynn: at this performance, Amy Ellen Richardson
Gussie Carnegie: Josefina Gabrielle
Meg Kincaid: Zizi Strallen (holy smoke, another Strallen)
Company: Ashley Robinson
Martin Callaghan
Amanda Minihan
Samantha Mercer
Matthew Barrow

Creative Team:
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by George Furth
Director: Maria Friedman
Design: Soutra Gilmour
Lighting: David Hersey

Synopsis:

In Frank's swanky Los Angeles pad in 1976, after the premiere of his latest film, a party is in full swing. Frank's Hollywood peers are there, and bestow lavish praise on him. His long-term friend and a theatre critic, Mary Flynn, who is now an alcoholic, is also at the party. She is disgusted by the people Frank has chosen to associate with and by his abandonment of music - the one thing he was truly good at - for the world of commercial film producing. Frank admits that his new film is just a formula picture, but he promises: just wait for the next film! But Mary has given up waiting, and becomes progressively more inebriated. She is ordered to leave after insulting everyone.

Frank is stung by Mary's rants, because he knows they are true. He has concentrated so completely on being a "success" that everything (and everyone) he most valued at the beginning of his career has gone. The evening ends traumatically with the breakup of Frank's marriage to his wife Gussie, a former leading actress in one of his early musicals, when she viciously attacks Meg, whom he has been seeing on the side.

Back to 1973 Frank and his long-time friend and lyricist, Charley Kringas, are about to be interviewed in a New York TV studio. Mary greets Charley backstage and Charley tells her that Frank never has time to write shows anymore with him. Mary wonders plaintively why can't their collective friendship be "Like it Was". When Frank finally arrives and the TV interview begins, a nervous Charley launches into a rampage on the way his composer has transformed himself into "Franklin Shepard Inc." Frank disowns Charley and walks out - their friendship is over.

It's 1968, and Mary, Charley and Frank are in Frank's apartment on Central Park West. The two men fight over Frank's decision to do a movie version of one of their shows, Musical Husbands. Frank wants to do it for the money, but Charley says that it will get in the way of writing any new musicals for some time. Mary reminds them that they are all still old friends. But nothing is that simple anymore. The Broadway producer Joe Josephson and his wife Gussie arrive. She and Frank have been having an affair. When everyone leaves, Gussie shocks Frank by announcing that she intends to live with him and divorce Joe in the process.

1966, Frank is being divorced by Beth, and they fight over the custody of their young son in a courthouse. Beth confesses to him that she can't live with him knowing he is cheating on her with Gussie. Frank is then consoled by Mary, Charley and his other remaining friends. His pals convince him to start anew, stating that this was the "best thing that ever could have happened"

At the opening night of Musical Husbands, Gussie, having just discovered that Frank fancies her, is pondering what could come between the two of them. The scene transforms, and we see that Gussie is performing the song onstage, as the star of Musical Husbands. Meanwhile, the curtain comes down on the show. As the audience applauds, Charley and Frank, who are backstage with Joe, Mary and Beth, realize they have a hit.

In 1962 at a party in Gussie and Joe's elegant Sutton Place apartment. Gussie has thrown a soirée so that Frank and Charley, who are going to write a musical for Joe to produce, can meet most influential people in town. Pulling Frank away from the party-goers, Gussie convinces him to make his new musical, Musical Husbands, into a "big show". Returning to her guests, Gussie invites the songwriters to perform their latest song, "Good Thing Going". The guests love it. Gussie implores them to do an encore. Charley urges Frank not to, but Frank does so anyways. They play the song again, but the guests quickly lose interest and resume their noisy cocktail chatter. Charley storms out.

Time turns back to 1960, Charley, Frank and Beth are young and beginning their careers, playing a small nightclub in Greenwich Village. Trying to appear bright and sophisticated, they perform a song celebrating America's new First Family. Joe is in the tiny audience and he's quite impressed, as is his wife Gussie, who is strongly attracted to Frank at this first meeting. After the show, Frank explains to them that he's marrying Beth, and the happy couple exchanges vows. At an adjoining table, Mary is distraught; she'll always feel something for Frank.

In 1959 ("Merrily We Roll Along- Sixth Transition") Frank, Charley and Mary are busy in New York, working their way up the career ladder ("Opening Doors"). The men audition for Joe, but he wants more "hummable" tunes. So they decide to do their own show and in an ensuing musical montage, end up auditioning and hiring Beth and forming their small cabaret show together.

Finally, it is October 1957 . Early in the morning, Frank, Charley and Mary are on the roof of an old apartment house on New York City's 110th Street, waiting for the first-ever earth-orbiting satellite. Suddenly, Sputnik is there in the sky, and now, for the young friends, anything is possible.

Exhibition review - "Hollywood Costume" - V&A, Monday 21st January 2013

Off through the snow to South Kensington for the final days of the Hollywood Costume exhibition at the V and A – as most certainly “NO PHOTOGRAPHY ALLOWED” I will be interspersing the text with photo stills from the relevant films to show you some of the iconic costumes on display. There will be a bit of ranting going on, so bear with me!

Firstly I have to have a rant about how badly we cope with snow in this country. I checked online before leaving home to see if the trains to Victoria were running OK – and apparently they were, with “minor delays”. So, off to the station to find that there was a Victoria train due in 8 minutes. Lovely. 2 minutes after it was due to arrive, the train just vanished from the departures board. No announcement – it just disappeared into thin air. The station announcer then told us to “Stand back from the platform edge as the next train is not in customer service”. That train then pulled in slowly to the platform and stopped. Despite it not being mentioned in any way on the departures board, it was apparently heading for Charing Cross. And this after four days of snow that had been forecast for at least a week. Still I suppose I should count myself lucky that I wasn’t expecting to fly out from Heathrow. I’ve always felt that, should the Germans ever decide to invade again, they wouldn’t have to bother with guns and bombs and stuff; they would just have to wait until 1/8th of an inch of snow fell on the UK and they would be able to simply walk in and find us all completely stranded with all transport links at a total standstill.

Never mind, even with delayed trains we still managed to get to the museum earlier than our scheduled time slot, so we had a bit of a wander round. I do find the V&A phenomenally dreary for some reason. Its better than it used to be - but it still reminds me of an enormous attic with lots of dusty old bits and pieces lying around. I suppose the best way to appreciate it is to go with something definite in mind that you really want to see, see it and then come away again, rather than just wandering round aimlessly and poking about among the piles of stuff. The standards of display seem to be improving considerably – but see below. One particular gallery that I’d never seen before and the name of which escapes me is an enormous semicircle set up as a kind of late-Renaissance street, with windows and doors and shopfronts, statues and street furniture all set in the context that you would have seen them in the original street. We wandered around the costume gallery but found it somewhat gloomy – apart from one section in which the late regency costumes had been displayed in an enormous niche, the surround of which had been intricately painted to make it look like a bamboo trellis with climbing plants against a skyscape; this made the costumed dummies appear like real people taking tea in the garden, and really made the costumes come alive. No other part of this gallery had been given this treatment and I wondered why.

The queue for the Hollywood Costumes exhibition was enormous – its been sold out for months and I was lucky to get tickets a while back. Its quite a big exhibition and there is lots to see – but the layout really lets it down. For what is the national museum of design and aesthetics, I always find the V&A exhibitions are badly, badly let down by their layout. Its all about how it looks, and there is never any consideration given to how people behave at an exhibition, how they move about (or in this case don’t move about) or any kind of thought given to how to accommodate large numbers of people effectively, allow them to see the exhibits but prevent logjams. Particularly frustrating at this exhibition (and many others that I’ve been to) is that the explanatory cards are always put on the floor. This means that in order to see it you have to shuffle around and crane your neck and bob about behind the inconsiderate person who plonks themselves in front of something and then just stands there. The V&A curators could really learn a lot from going to a big Disney theme park and seeing how to move people in a particular direction, giving them plenty to look at should the queue come to a halt.

The first room is particularly badly laid out. Its square, and the podiums (podia?) with the costumes standing on them run the width of the square. There are four of five of these and the dummies, all facing front, are ranged in two back-to-back rows on each podium. This means that the costumes can only really be seen from one side (never a back view), and because of the lack of directional flow, people are just milling about getting in each others’ way, clumping in front of something particularly interesting or viewing costumes in a completely random, scatter gun fashion depending on where the crowds are thinnest. Its frustrating in the extreme. Solution: make the podiums thinner (one costume deep). Alternate costumes to face front so they can be seen from the back as well.  Design a directional, non-negotiable flow system which moves everyone in the same direction, sending them in a series of S-shaped movements along the front of one podium, around the end, along the back of it in the opposite direction and repeat with the next podium (think of the directional post and tape arrangement you go through to get to the ticket desk at the cinema, or to a window at the post office). At the end of the last podium, allow people to move either forwards into the next display room or back to the beginning of the first room if desired. Place information cards on stands at waist level, not on the floor.

On the first podium, costumes are lit individually and in rotation, which is fine if you can walk along the row at the correct speed to keep up, but most people are standing in front of a costume, getting a quick glimpse of it and then waiting in front of it until it gets lit up again. As the very first costume in the exhibition is Vivien Leigh’s green “curtain” dress from Gone With The Wind, there are a lot of people waiting in front of it.(thankfully, none of the other podiums have been given this ridiculous lighting treatment) The more I look at it, the more I am convinced that the green and yellow tie-backs used as a belt are not the same ones as Leigh is wearing in the poor resolution still from the film mounted behind it Its crammed in next to a couple of beautiful costumes from The Last Emperor which I would love to inspect from all angles but I can only see them from the front. The final podium in this room is spectacular – there are period costumes from Shakespeare in Love, Mary, Queen of Scots, Marie Antoinette and Dangerous Liaisons - and because wigs and millinery are completely separate disciplines of costume design and therefore not, for the most part, displayed with the costumes, some considerable time and effort has been spent in recreating hairstyles and headgear with strips of elaborately curled and styled black paper. I like it.

The second, much larger room feels as if it has been curated by a completely different team of individuals. There are a series of large, waist high tables like the cutting benches you would find in a costume studio. They are lit from above to make it look as if there are things lying around on the top, there are props, one seated or standing dummy wearing a costume and interviews with their designers projected onto the solid backs of chairs arranged around the table. The attention to detail of the lighting is incredible – the first table showcases Tippi Hedren’s green skirt suit from The Birds  and on it stands an empty birdcage, but its “shadow” contains the moving shadows of the two caged lovebirds Hedren takes across the bay in the motor boat. So the birds are there, but not there. On another table is a white ceramic ashtray –

empty in reality but projected into it is an image of a couple of cigarette stubs. One of them is still lit and the “smoke” curls out of the ashtray and flows across the table. The trouble is that all the tables are quite close together and the resulting hubbub caused by all the interviews playing at once is horribly distracting. Each chair is “occupied” by a different interviewee, and they play alternately on each side of each table – so you are constantly dashing round each table to catch the next bit of the interview and so, unfortunately, is everyone else. On the opposite side of this room are three large centralised podiums with a number of costumes (all facing outwards again). This would be fine, but interspersed between the costumes are large waist height projection screens, showing clips of the films from which the costumes around them come. And of course, people are clumping in front of each screen, standing there until they have seen the clip selection all the way through. This means that progress around each podium is practically glacial. Slap bang next to costumes from two different renditions of Cleopatra is a display about computer generated “motion capture” filming and

how costumes are applied to animated figures. It’s a bit of a perspective shift to be looking at a costume worn by Claudette Colbert in the 1930s and at the same time have a narrator practically shouting at you about the latest technology on display three feet away. I finally realise that this is because the costumes on this podium are clumped according to (more or less) when the film is set and how new film technologies have changed the art of costume design over time. So a costume from the black and white 1930s film 42nd Street stands next to a costume from the 2010 film The Artist The two Cleopatra costumes are the “start point” on this podium and the motion capture “costumes” are the end point – but of course they are adjacent to each other because it’s a rectangular podium and you’ve walked all the way round it.

The last podium in this room is another gear shift. Instead of the mannequins being headless, each has a small square screen attached to it in the position where the wearer’s head would be. On these are projected moving images of the actor’s head as it appears in the film itself. It’s a clever idea, but I’m not sure it entirely works, nor is indeed necessary. On some, half the screen is obscured by a hat or other headdress and some of the screens are blank because the relevant projector isn’t working. I care not that there is only a week left for the show to run – get the bloody things going!

The third room again feels like a different team has curated it. Its in a completely different format from the first two and so feels like another clunky change of gear. It’s a more-or-less traditional “catwalk” approach with mannequins displayed facing front at different angles, sometimes two or three deep. The face-screens are there, the floor-bound information cards are there, the video clips are not there. I begin to notice that the V&A is playing jiggery-pokery with some of the costumes; the accessories are not the original ones but modern substitutes. And the attention to detail as regards these accessories is pretty damned poor. Kate Winslet’s beautiful “Embarkation” costume from Titanic is topped off with a hat far smaller than the one she wears in the film and with a brown patterned ribbon rather than the blue one from the film. Natalie Portman’s “Black Swan” costume from the film of the same name is accessorised with PINK pointe shoes when they should be black. Daniel Radcliffe’s Hogwarts costume is wearing a completely non-Gryffyndor tie. At the end turn of the catwalk is a semicircular podium that is almost completely bare, meaning that on the “home stretch”

towards the exit door, many of the mannequins are crammed together in too small a space to be properly appreciated. The most heinous consequence of this is that the two most arguably famous costumes in the entire show – Marilyn Monroe’s “subway grating” frock and Judy Garland’s iconic dress from The Wizard of Oz are shoved up against each other in a total “dogleg” where the podium turns at a right angle towards the exit. Monroe’s frock is the only one in the entire show presented in a glass case and the curators really missed a trick in not installing a fan in the floor to make the dress billow upwards in the way that most of us think of it and (poor) modern copies of the Ruby Slippers (not the real ones, as I notice the blurb is trumpeting)  are tucked away on the floor and easily missed as a result. If ever there were a pair of shoes that should be on their own waist height column covered in yellow brick-patterned paper, its these. Garland wore pale blue ankle socks in the film, but here the feet of the mannequin are wearing what look like strident royal blue football socks. Surely, surely these two costumes should have stood on their own on the semicircle at the end of the catwalk, where the desire of people to linger and look is not going to cause a jam right by the exit door?

There are some lovely – and iconic – examples of the costume designer’s art on show here. But the overall layout of the exhibition is messy, badly thought out and frustrating. And for the national museum dedicated to the history of design, that’s an absolute scandal.

The Magistrate - National Theatre, Tuesday 1st January 2013

Synopsis:

Some years before the play begins, Mr. Posket, a London magistrate, married a widow, Agatha Farringdon. At the time she had pretended to be 31 rather than her true age, which was 36. Accordingly, she found that she needed also to knock five years off the supposed age of her son by her first marriage, Cis Farringdon. When the play opens, the Poskets are preparing to entertain to dinner the following day an old friend of Posket, Colonel Lukyn. The Colonel knew Mrs. Posket in her earlier days, and is Cis's godfather. He is well aware of Mrs. Posket's true age. Fearful that the Colonel may be indiscreet about dates, she slips out that evening to see him privately. She takes with her her sister Charlotte who is staying with the Poskets for a few days, getting over a broken engagement.

Agatha's son Cis takes advantage of his mother's absence. Although he is supposed to be 14, he is in fact 19 without knowing it, and his precocity is far in advance of his supposed age. He smokes, he flirts, he gambles, and now, as soon as his mother has left, he coolly proposes to his staid stepfather that they should go to the Hôtel des Princes, where he keeps a room for the use of his friends. Posket allows himself to be persuaded.

Greatly to his surprise Posket finds himself "making a night of it". Colonel Lukyn has also arranged to dine at the Hôtel des Princes, with his friend Captain Horace Vale, the man who has broken Charlotte's heart.. When Agatha and Charlotte arrive to see the Colonel, there is a lengthy reconciliation scene between Vale and Charlotte. Equally lengthy are the carousings of Posket and Cis in the adjoining room – so much so that a breach of the licensing laws is committed and the police arrive to search the house

The landlord, having put out the lights, brings all his law-breaking guests into one room and bids them conceal themselves as best they can. Posket and his wife hide under the same table, each unaware of the other's identity. When the police burst in, Posket and Cis make a dash to the balcony, which collapses under their weight, depositing them in the street below. The others are all taken into custody.

Posket and Cis are chased by the police. Posket staggers back just in time to perform his magisterial duties at Mulberry Street court. He is tattered, bruised and dirty. He pretends to be much shocked when the chief clerk tells him that the first case he has to hear involves his friend Lukyn. Despite Lukyn's appeal, Posket permits no favours, and insists that the case must be tried in the normal way. On going into court, Posket is so shocked to find his wife in the dock that he finds himself, in a trance-like state, sentencing her to seven days' imprisonment without the option of a fine.

Posket's excessive sentence of his wife and the other guests at the hotel is overruled on a technicality by Posket's fellow magistrate, Bullamy. Back at home, Posket feels the force of his wife's indignation, but she cannot avoid explaining her presence at the hotel, and the truth about her deception about her age comes out.

Posket, a Magistrate - John Lithgow

Agatha, his wife, formerly Mrs. Farringdon - Nancy Carroll

Charlotte, her sister, formerly engaged to Captain Vale - Christina Cole

Cis Farringdon, her son by her first marriage - Joshua McGuire

Achille Blond, a hotelier - Don Gallagher

Beatie Tomlinson, a music teacher, in love with Cis Farringdon - Sarah Ovens

Colonel Lukyn, a former acquaintance of Agatha - Jonathan Coy

Captain Horace Vale - Nicholas Burns

Mr. Bullamy, Posket’s colleague - Nicholas Blane

Mr. Wormington, Posket’s Clerk - Roger Sloman

Popham, the Posket’s cook - Beverly Rudd

Sergeant Lugg- Sean McKenzie

Inspector Messiter - Peter Polycarpou

Director - Timothy Sheade

Designer - Katrina Lindsay

Lighting Designer- James Farncomb

Lyrics- Richard Stilgoe

Music - Richard Sisson

Movement Director- Liam Steel

Sound Designer- Paul Arditti

Vocal Arranger - David Shrubsole

Yes, its been over a week since I saw this, but I had to go into hospital shortly after New Year to have a small op and I’m only just now up and around (I don’t do inactivity very well, in fact I don’t do inactivity AT ALL). I can’t sit comfortably for very long, can’t lie down unless I’m completely flat on my back, can’t really lift anything heavy, certainly can’t do anything remotely useful and as for picking something up that I’ve dropped – have you ever seen a giraffe trying to take a drink??

Also, I was hampered slightly by this being on 1st January – out a little too late the night before, and as the auditorium was warm and dim, I caught myself nodding occasionally in that slightly drooly way you do sometimes when you are desperately fighting to stay awake. Not that the show was sending me to sleep, you understand. But my impression was a little hazy sometimes.

We should have been seeing The Count of Monte Cristo, which was scheduled to be the National’s Christmas show. But apparently there were problems with the script, the writer got the heebie jeebies and the whole thing had to be shelved. Consequently The Magistrate had to be moved up the pecking order to take its place, and as a result I felt that the festive element of the show felt a little bit crowbarred in and the jollity fell a little flat. You know that feeling when all the presents have been opened and you’ve sat and looked at them and played with them for an hour or so, and then someone starts to scoop up all the shreds of wrapping paper and begins muttering about having to get the dinner on?

For one terrible moment I thought that the entire production had been designed by Gerald Scarfe. Certainly he drew the picture on the programme cover, and to the untrained eye both the sets and the costumes looked as if he had designed them – lots of ink blots on the wallpaper, Mr. Whippy hairstyles and so on. But apparently not – Katrina Lindsay has done a good job of “sub-Scarfe”, slightly rounded-down and easier on the eye. The first set opens towards the audience like a huge Christmas card – clever in itself and deserving the round of applause it got. All the furniture has to be stuck down, of course, and apparently there was a slight amount of chaos at an earlier performance when some of it came adrift (which I would like to have seen). As a consequence, the other sets are a bit of a let down by comparison, and bear more than a trace of Dr. Seuss.

Everyone on stage did a good job, although I have to admit that John Lithgow left me a little cold. Apparently he was in something on TV called Third Rock from the Sun, which I never saw. Apparently it made him a big star. Meh. I did wonder why he had been cast in this most English of plays – a lot of the time his accent slipped precariously but he did some inspired clowning. I think Nancy Carroll rather walked off with the honours though, and I got terribly, terribly confused between the actors playing Captain Vale and Colonel Lukyn to the detriment of my understanding of the plot. Maybe I was just tired and not paying enough attention. Him Indoors thought that the direction was too broad, but then he’s never satisfied. It certainly didn’t bother me that much. And, in fact, now I look back at it, that really rather sums up my feelings towards the entire production. It didn’t bother me that much. It was inoffensive, nicely played, but a bit weak around the edges and not something I would put myself out to go and see again. In fact, the bit I enjoyed most was the clever sung interpolations – allegedly in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan but not noticeably so until the very last song at the end, when I picked up distinct allusions musically and verbally to the “Paradox trio” from The Pirates of Penzance, a patter song very much in the manner of “I am the very model of a modern major-general” and the clever mixing of two choruses, each sung at a different speed (a musical form which Sullivan is alleged to have invented – probably the best known example is “When the Foeman bears his steel”).  Sharp-eared G&S afficionados will probably pick up on a bit of dialogue which I swear Pinero stole from Iolanthe, in which a legal professional has to apply to himself in order to apply some legislation.

But the whole thing seems to fall between two stools. It’s of a style which is very much an acquired taste – rather wordy, elements of a comedy in the manner of J. B. Priestly (the “taking five years off your age with hilarious consequences” is very Priestly) overlaid with bits of farce, but not enough farce to make it a complete farce, if you follow. People laughed, I spotted that a couple of the audience didn’t come back after the interval, there was some decent applause at the end but it didn’t really set my world alight.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/9694401/John-Lithgow-in-The-Magistrate-National-Theatre-review.htm

http://londonist.com/2012/11/theatre-review-the-magistrate-the-national-theatre.php

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/nov/22/the-magistrate-review-michael-billington

http://calitreview.com/34031

Exhibition review: PreRaphaelites: Victorian AvantGarde - Tate Britain 21st December 2012

Driven from the house because I could no longer bear the upheaval created by the builders who are putting in a new bathroom (tentacles of chaos extended from the room itself through the hall, the kitchen and the spare room, leaving me trying to maintain some semblance of normality in either the living room or the bedroom) and feeling somewhat emotionally labile after a bad tussle with Mr. Novovirus and therefore unwilling to subject myself to the delights of the pre-Christmas scrum in the High Street, I decided to seek an oasis of light and calm at the Tate Gallery.  Because of the current chaos caused by the building works at Victoria, I couldn't find the right bus stop and ended up having to walk to Pimlico; not a great experience when you have to stop every couple of hundred yards to catch your breath.  Maybe I should have got a taxi because, Dear Reader, it turned out that I was going to need every last bit of energy to get round this huge exhibtion, the scale of which I completely underestimated. 

I have no objection to paying good money to see an exhibition; what I object to is museums' constant squawks of "please donate".  Yes, I will happily drop a couple of coins in a collecting box if it is parked discreetly to one side but its the in-your-face "PLEASE DONATE £4!" signs that rub me up the wrong way.  I think I had to pass eight or nine of them between the entrance and the actual exhibition.  Even the cloakroom counter was liberally festooned with "PLEASE DONATE £2!" signs.  I asked the staff member behind the counter whether a percentage of those donations made their way into his wallet each month and he shook his head regretfully, so I said cheerfully "Then the Tate can go hang" (no art gallery pun intended).  The financial assault wasn't over yet; within the space of 50 feet outside the exhibition itself I was practically wrestled to the floor by three staff members trying to foist the audioguide on me, one of whom was deeply engaged in a private conversation on his mobile phone at the time.  I generally like audioguides, but not for another tenner, thank you very much. 

The first room of the exhibition is quite small, but even this contains a couple of "biggies".  This would ultimately cause me enormous problems with the "Art Gallery Game", the rules of which I outlined in my review of Bronze.  Because familiar images scream at you from every wall, you can run the risk of making your choices simply because you happen to be familiar with an image rather than for more aesthetic reasons. Anyway, even in this first room, there are a couple of very famous paintings - Rosetti's Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Holman Hunt's Lorenzo and Isabella.  I stood in front of the latter for quite some time deliberating whether it would be my "shortlist item" simply because of the beauty of the fold's of Isabella's dress, but decided to reject it because there was something about it, not previously noticed, that annoyed me.  The plants on the windowsill are cotton and passion flower, both of which are New World plants and therefore wouldnt have been in cultivation in Europe in the 14th Century when Bocaccio wrote The Decameron in which this story appears.  I did wonder whether the audioguide mentioned the incredibly phallic shadow which appears on the tablecloth behind the male figure in the white hose.  In the end, I settled on Ford Madox Brown's The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry for my Room 1 Shortlist Item; unfortunately none of the reproductions on the internet I could find do justice to its luminous quality, but its a lovely, glossy thing and I wondered why the Tate don't do a Christmas card of it. 

Room 2 has the nominal theme of "History" and there are some interesting pictures here - lots of Rosetti's rather over-pouty maidens, and quite a lot of Shakespeare-inspired Millais - although I struggle to see how The Two Gentlemen of Verona or The Tempest could be construed as "history". What I enjoyed about this room was that there was absolutely nothing to stop you getting as close to a picture as you wanted and peering intently at it - so often you are held back by a little wire barrier which is easy to forget about and catch your foot in as you turn around - do you hear the voice of experience here? After a brief flirtation with Rosetti's Wedding of St. George as my shortlisted picture (mainly because I think the dragon's head looks just like some daft mummer has been prancing around in a dragon costume and then bundled the head back into the dressing up box before sneaking off to quaff some mead, or whatever it is that mummers do for kicks), I picked his enigmatic Tune of Seven Towers because it was just so damned crackpot for a while before realising that I couldn't justify not picking Millais' superb Mariana (link to a very interesting YouTube documentary if you have five minutes to spare) simply because you can practically feel the velvet pile of the dress she is wearing (and I like the mouse which has obviously been hidng under her chair and which has just had to make a run for it after being disturbed).  In fact, tiny details would become an almost over-riding criterion for shortlist selection during this visit).

Absoultely no contest about the star item in Room 3 - my personal selection for the award of Greatest Picture of All Time.  The almost photographic rendering of the hands just blows me away every time I see it.  No dicussion needed, go straight to the head of the shortlist, do not pass GO.   Millais again.  Two out of three so far; not bad going given the competition on offer.  In fact, there has to be something pretty spectacular ahead for this not to be coming home with me as I leave the exhibition. 

Its a bit difficult to stand and gaze meditatively at Ophelia about to sink beneath the surface, as Room 3 is filling up and there is a bit of a crush.  Room 4 is roped off at the moment because someone has collapsed and is being tended to by anxious-looking staff members, although this does not stop some people refusing categorically to leave the room and  have their picture-viewing interrupted; in fact, a couple of feelingless idiots actually step OVER the poor prostrate figure on the floor in order to get a closer look at the canvasses she fell over in front of.  Room 4 starts to get a bit claustrophobic as no message seems to have been given to the idiots on the main doors  to stop more people coming in. Finally, with an almost audible sigh of relief, the ropes are removed and we can finally get into Room 4.  Almost as soon as I enter, someone shouts from Room 5 that someone has collapsed in there as well.  They are obviously falling like flies, although whether overcome with aesthetic transfiguration or Norovirus is hard to ascertain. 

Room 4  - "Salvation" -  is full of "big ticket paintings" - images whose fame stretches far and wide.  Holman Hunt's  The Scapegoat,, The Light of the World, and The Shadow of Death (a picture ruined for me because of Christ's resemblance to Russell Brand), Millais' controversial Christ in the House of His Parents and, strangely, Ford Madox Brown's Work (odd inclusion; is "work" the new salvation?)  which is so full of details that it makes me feel queasy looking at it.  It always looks to me like one of those paintings used in competitions - find 7 hats, 3 dogs, a baby, a picnic lunch and a blue spotted handkerchief.  The number of famous images screaming for attention from every wall starts to get bit overpowering, and I am just about to settle on Convent Thoughts for my shortlist and stagger from the room, when a quiet, almost rustic image that I have never seen before brings me to both a halt and my senses.  Its another Ford Madox Brown - Jesus washing Peter's Feet - and although I have no religious leanings whatsoever, it makes something inside me chime loudly.  It immediately becomes my shortlist item for Room 4.  I like the man on the left fiddling with his shoestrings.  Perhaps he is next.  At various points so far I have encountered a elderly lady using a portable stool sitting gazing up at paintings with a look of wonder on her face, and here she is again, explaining the significance of the act of washing someone's feet to her teenaged grand-daughter, who is hanging on her every word; they are clearly having a great time together and grandma is enjoying passing on her enthusiasm and knowledge.  I stand and listen quietly and wish that I had had someone to do that for me. 

I'm fading a bit by now as tiredness starts to set in but, in room 5,  I am briefly intrigued by the almost Art Deco feel of Rosetti's Lady Lillith.  I am held captivated once again by a detail - the shine on the watering can in the bottom right corner of Isabella and the Pot of Basil, and its reflection in the highly polished wood of the prie-dieu it is parked up against.  Again, it is a tiny detail that has won the larger image a place on the shortlist.  In fact, I wonder at this point whether I can bend the rules slightly and just have the watering can instead of the entire painting; having such a number of large canvasses under my arm is beginning to wear me out. 

Room 6 is full of odds and ends of slightly dinky furnishings, a spectacular carpet featuring some rather scary peacocks and four acrimonious parrots having a go at them, some of those odd William Morris wallhangings featuring effeminate knights searching for the Holy Grail and, tucked away in a corner, my shortlist item for this room - a Morris design for wallpaper.  I think an entire room decorated with this might be rather overpowering,(a criticism I have to level at most of Morris's wallpapers) but here its lightened considerably by only being coloured in the middle and surrounded by a deep border of unpainted pencil design (not entirely shown in the image below), as if in a frame.  So I take it off the wall and add it to my collection. 

Its called "Tulip and Willow" - and it crosses my mind that Morris must have been a bit tripped out that day, because they sure as heck don't look much like any tulips I know. 

The end is in sight with only the final room - "Mythologies" left.  My feet are starting to complain quite a lot and I feel slightly light-headed in that way you get when you have been staring at paintings for a couple of hours.  There's only one painting here that takes my interest: Burne-Jones' enigmatic Golden Stairs.  I can finally have a sit down and contemplate which of the paintings I have carried with me will be coming home on the train.  I sit on a seat in the middle of the room and suddenly I see IT.  THE ONE.  Because its hanging in a slightly out-of-the-way position relative to how you come into this room I haven't noticed it before. It is completely out of place in this particular room among all the distressed damozels and simpering heroes. I've never seen it before.  Its a simple landscape and I WANT IT and I WANT IT NOW.

Practically the last painting I see has carried all before it.  Its a Millais - Chill October.  Ophelia can return to her wall, vanquished by a simple, stunning landscape, that has little to do with PreRaphaelitism in the sense that most of us would describe it.  You can practically feel the stiff breeze blowing out of the frame towards you and making those dry grasses rattle, and those birds are calling to each other as they fly towards their roost for the night.  Just off canvas, perhaps a solitary heron wheels slowly towards its nest.   I could sit and look at it for hours. 

There's only one problem - it belongs to Andrew Lloyd Webber.  And I find in the gift shop that he has refused the Tate permission to reproduce it as a postcard.  Still, I can carry it home with me anyway. Its been an exhausting afternoon, and its time for a hot chocolate in the cafeteria before finding my way back to the station. . 

PreRaphaelites - Victorian Avant Garde ends in mid-January.  Still time to catch it - perhaps in the long, slow days between Christmas and New Year when there is little else to do but eat leftovers and slump in front of the TV.  Its well worth the effort.  Its a little overwhelming at times - there are so many famous paintings that it can feel disorientating, a bit like seeing a crowd of old friends at a party - but at this particular party, the crowds have suddenly parted and, from the other side of the room, a beautiful stranger has just smiled at me.







Aladdin - Richmond Theatre - Monday 10th December 2012

Cast:

Slave of the Ring/Genie of the Lamp: Suzanne Shaw

Wishee Washee – Tim Vine

Princess Jasmine – Helena Dowling

Widow Twankey – Graham Hoadley

Aladdin – Gareth Leighton

Abanazar – Jonathan Ellis

Emperor of China – John Pennington

PC Pong – Yo Santhaveesuk

 Creative Team:

Director: Christopher Dunham

Script: Eric Potts

Choreographer: David Lee

 

Its that time of year again, folks – when Him Indoors starts reading the panto listings and digging out the batteries to put in the glow-in-the-dark wand to wave.  Plus we had to be out the house because the builders are in, destroying the bathroom.  So its off to sunny Richmond, boys and girls, mums and dads, for an exciting trip to Pantoland!  Mind you, sunny Richmond looks increasingly bleak – there  are more empty shops than last year and even the charity shops have put their prices up.  We’ve had to come out again today and are ensconced in the library, where I am tapping away at the laptop and Him Indoors is sitting opposite me writing Christmas cards and getting glitter all over the table.  He just said to me “I wonder if this is what it was like for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert?” and I glared at him and said “I doubt very much that Prince Albert kept interrupting Queen Victoria by throwing Christmas cards across the table for her to sign while she was trying to write a panto review”.  But you never know, I suppose, it could have happened. “Did India send us a card last year, Darling?”

 

Aanyway, my heart dropped through the floor when I realised that we were practically the only adults in the entire auditorium – there were three primary school parties there and the programme sellers were pale and quaking in their boots.  However, we needn’t have worried – this is Richmond after all, and the little darlings were all incredibly quiet (and probably incredibly cold – who would send little boys to school in weather like this in shorts?) and impeccably well behaved and, perhaps, just kept that little bit too much in check by teachers because there was NO waving about of glow in the dark novelties, NO screaming and shouting and demanding to be taken home to watch CBeebees, NO throwing of sweet packets (although biodegradable cartons of healthy, vitamin-rich juice were handed out in the interval) and practically NO laughing or shouting out whatsoever, which in essence put a real damper on the performance.  The script may not really have taken into account of the local demographic – I doubt very much that primary school children from Richmond have ever even heard of B&Q, Woolworths or EasyJet; afterwards I heard a snatch of conversation between one of the little darlings and their grandparents as they passed what to the uninitiated appeared to be a hairdressers; “Look Grannie!”, said little Tarquin, “that’s where Mummy gets her eyebrows plucked!”.    Him Indoors pontificated afterwards that it was the lack of adults in the audience that made it so quiet – there was nobody there to snort at the double entendres.  I did my best, but it was hard work.  There was no “It’s behiiiiiiiind yooooooou!” sequence and only a very brief burst of  “Oh yes it is/Oh no it isn’t” – maybe children in Richmond wouldn’t have understood that shouting out is actually ALLOWED at the panto.  “Don’t shout, Jocasta, only common people do that”.    We moved to a box very near the stage for the second half (very exciting for me - the first time I've been in a box.  I've been in a cardboard box, but its not quite the same.....) rather reinforcing the Queen Victoria and Prince Albert image – although perhaps Waldorf and Stadtler might be a more appropriate one.  By this time the laughs were coming thin and slow rather than thick and fast and there was more than a slight air of desperation about the entire performance – as we were so close I began to see a slightly haunted look appear in the eyes of a couple of the cast.  Mind you, only a couple of the cast were really trying anyway – I have never seen panto performers work so hard to get an audience reaction as Tim Vine and Graham Hoadley.  There was an awful lot of “phoning in” of performances by the younger members of the cast.   Gareth Leighton’s Aladdin wasn’t wearing any makeup whatsoever and looked physically as pale as his performance.  Jonathan Ellis’s Abanazer wasn’t nearly evil enough to register beyond the first couple of rows.  I grant you that the role of the Chinese Policeman isn’t exactly on a par with Hamlet as regards possibilities for character development or motivation but I am sure that Yo Santhaveesuk could have given it a little more wellie than he did at yesterday’s performance.  Rearrange the following words into a well know phrase or expression: The Going Motions Through.  And he can’t sing either. 

 

I don’t know whether to feel sorry for Suzanne Shaw or not.  Although a complete micro-celebrity (ex member of Hear Say, Dancing on Ice and a bit of Emmerdale and that’s it), she is headlining in this panto and therefore probably getting paid more than anyone else in the entire cast.  Mind you, she’s earning it – she has to double both the Slave of the Ring and the Genie of the Lamp, which I think is really, really cheap of the producers.  There are even jokes about why the two Genies never appear on stage at the same time and why they look the same – which is just being arrogant about your stinginess. By the end of the performance she was letting the lack of audience reaction get to her big -time; you could see on her face that she really wasn't happy.  Perhaps children from Richmond have never watched commercial TV and don't know who she is/was.    Tim Vine works his socks off as WisheeWashee and I felt really sorry for him yesterday that he wasn’t getting anything like the reaction he deserved from a theatre full of slightly unnaturally well-behaved children.  It was a bit like watching The Stepford Panto – he even threw in a couple of ad libs for the cast about how difficult it was getting any kind of reaction out of them.  God help him he even had to have four of them up on the stage – this being Richmond they were called Mollie, Edwin, Archie and Benjamin – and I bet they were thrilled to go home afterwards with a plastic carrier bag stamped with the logo of the production company with a few cheap odds and ends in.  “Its called a plastic bag, Archie darling.  Poor people use them.  We can give it to the au pair as a Christmas present”.  Graham Hoadley was a fine Widow Twankey and I would have loved to have seen him spark off a more appreciative and interactive audience.

 

Costumes were great and had obviously had money spent on them, and there were lots of suitably sparkly backcloths (although I did wonder why The Cave of Wonders had a backdrop which had those pointy Siamese temple towers on and which looked more like “The King and I – Act one” than anything else).  The Palace Garden set was particularly nice – pale blues and pinks and greys; you could do a lovely Mikado on that. 

 

It all felt slightly sterile because of the lack of audience response.  I hope they get less well-behaved audiences for the rest of the run.   

Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty - Sadler's Wells, Tuesday 4th December 2012

Synopsis:

Prologue:

Not having been blessed with children, the King and Queen turn to the evil fairy Carabosse for help. She grants them a child, the Princess Aurora, but considers that they have been insufficiently grateful and decides to take her revenge. Unbeknown to them, Carabosse has a son of her own, Caradoc.

1890:

The Princess Aurora is beloved by all, although she leads her Nanny and the palace staff a merry dance. The night before her Christening, Aurora is visited by Count Lilac and his retinue of fairies. Each of the fairies present the infant with a gift. Count Lilac is about to bestow his gift when there is a clap of thunder and the evil fairy Carabosse appears, vowing that on the child’s 21st birthday, she will prick her finger on the thorn of a rose and die. The King and Queen are inconsolable, but Count Lilac then gives his gift; Aurora will not die, but fall into an enchanted sleep for 100 years until woken by love’s first kiss. Carabosse is arrested and banished from the kingdom to die in exile.

1911:

The entire court celebrates Aurora’s 21st birthday with a lavish picnic. Aurora is presented with a single red rose, a gift from Leo, the gardener’s boy, who loves her from afar. A mysterious suitor, wearing a black rose in his lapel, arrives and pays court to the Princess, who rejects his advances. He offers Aurora the black rose; fascinated, she takes it but pricks her finger on one of its thorns. The curse begins to take its hold, and Aurora faints in Leo’s arms. Caradoc (who is the mysterious suitor) points to the red rose which Leo has given her and lays the blame on him. Leo is chased from the scene. Aurora is carried to her bedchamber. Count Lilac appears and offers his protection but realises that Leo will be long dead before Aurora is due to wake. Biting the boy’s neck, Count Lilac confers immortality on Leo. A forest begins to grow up around the palace.

2011:

Leo has been camped outside the palace gates for 100 years, awaiting the opportunity to break the spell. Count Lilac appears, magically unlocks the gates and shows him a vision of Aurora who exists only in the Kingdom of the Sleeping. Leo battles his way through the forest, armed only with his red rose. In Aurora’s bedchamber, Caradoc has been keeping guard over the sleeping princess. Leo climbs in through the window, fights him and kisses Aurora. Held back by Caradoc’s minions, Leo is kept away from her; Caradoc claims her as his bride and leads her away. Count Lilac watches them leave and promises to help Leo reclaim her.

Yesterday:

There is a party to celebrate Aurora and Caradoc’s wedding; after the ceremony, Caradoc will conduct a ritual sacrifice of virgin blood. The party is infiltrated by Leo and Count Lilac in disguise. At the last moment, Leo manages to stab Caradoc with the knife and the spell is finally broken.

Tomorrow:

Aurora and Leo present their firstborn child to the court. Like her father (and presumably by now her mother), she is a vampire – and thus they will live for all eternity – or as fairy tales would put it, happily ever after

.

Cast:

Unfortunately, I cannot provide a list of who was dancing which role at this performance, due to the strange decision not to include a flyer in the programme detailing this. Its usual of ballet companies when several people may be covering a role during a run, to give a daily printed list in the programme of which performer is playing which role – but the only way this is communicated to the audience in this instance is a noticeboard in the main foyer. Whether this is due to the fact that the company may not know until the day who is playing what, this does prevent the audience from knowing who they are seeing at any given performance unless they traipse down to the foyer and take extensive notes. Which is a BAD THING.

Creative Team:

Again, unfortunately, I cannot give these details at the moment because Him Indoors has the programme in North London. If you are one of the people who like my reviews because I am the only blogger to give a nod to those backstage, my apologies. I will rectify as soon as I can.

Off on the tube to Sadler’s Wells for the first London performance of Matthew Bourne’s new ballet. Surprisingly, this seemed to be a very quiet opening, save all the hubbub from excited punters and a few token props and lighting effects in the dress circle bar for the rich nobs. In fact, audience reaction (until the very end) was strangely muted – possibly because people were watching in rapt attention to keep up with the re-jigged plot. This didn’t stop the usual Sadler’s Wells rustlers; one charming individual, obviously bored out of her tiny mind from the word “go” decided to open the biggest packet of crisps I have ever seen about three minutes before the curtain went up and proceeded to ram them into her gob in fistfuls (well, at least she used her hands; she was going at it so hard I was surprised she didn’t just force her head into the packet and suck). As the lights dimmed and the music started she showed no signs of giving up or even slowing down, so I nipped over the aisle and hissed “WILL you put those crisps DOWN!”. Temporarily chastened, there was silence for a while, although I did notice that the need for calories overwhelmed her after about half an hour and she was at it again, trying to do it surreptitiously which of course merely made it worse. My apologies to the gaggle of teenage girls across the aisle and a couple of rows behind whom I thought were going to be a source of constant irritation; I was all ready to let rip at you the second you made any kind of noise but you behaved perfectly the entire evening.

Aaaaaanyways, this is a brilliant retelling of what can be a fairly anodyne story. Bourne has cleverly overcome a couple of major problems with the ballet; usually, the heroine doesn’t appear until the second act, leaving you with a bit of an emotional void. In this production, Aurora is present from the word “go” – in baby form. She’s a puppet baby – looking a little like the slightly scary babies that you saw occasionally on The Muppets. And she’s obviously a handful, crawling away from Nanny (you get the distinct impression that this is the not the first time she has “made a break for it”) and making a spirited attempt to evade recapture by the harassed footmen by shinning up the curtains – cue the first big laugh of the evening and putting the audience firmly on Aurora’s side. Masterful. Bourne then takes a nod from the Disney film by having her fall in love before the curse comes into effect – in this way, we are not left having to believe in love at first sight after the spell-breaking kiss, which is clever, although there seems to be some confusion as to Leo’s exact status in life – at first he carries a shotgun and a couple of dead rabbits so is clearly the gamekeeper (bit of Lady Chatterley going on here, perhaps) but then ditches these and trundles on a wheelbarrow containing garden clippings and a pair of shears.

There is also a clever idea used to get over the problem that, having met her prince/gamekeeper/gardener, he will be long dead by the time Aurora wakes from her century-long kip. It did occur to me that perhaps the vampire motif is, these days, more than just a little bit over-used and that Bourne might well be accused of jumping on a particular bandwagon just as it rolls out of town. The masterstroke, however, is how the vampire theme nicely wraps up the very end of the story – being immortal, no wonder Aurora and Leo live “happily ever after”. Even more masterful, however, is turning what is usually quite a bland ending (there is a grand, formal march/fanfare during which Aurora and her prince basically walk to the edge of the stage for the final picture before the curtain falls) into something with a major emotional pull – in this version, the scene is a simple one of happy domesticity, with the couple holding between them a cute toddling baby; even more pertinent given that it was announced yesterday that there will soon be a real, cute, toddling royal baby. How Mr. Bourne must have rubbed his hands with glee!

The story does get a little muddled along the way – Carabosse is banished from court and apparently dies in exile (can a fairy die?), leaving her son, Caradoc, to take revenge. The tiny scene during the prologue in which this bit of the story is set up is awfully underlit and terribly brief – take your eyes from the stage for a second and its gone, even if you could see it through the gloom in the first place. Him Indoors missed it, even through his racing binoculars. The “birthday” act is dominated by a huge statue of a weeping angel draped over a sarcophagus, which is pretty but seemingly completely redundant – I thought it was going to open and Aurora be taken down into a crypt or something. And then its not exactly clear what Caradoc is going to do with Aurora after the wedding (or indeed why) until you sit and think about it afterwards. A synopsis of the story in the programme would have helped, I think, if only to fill in the bits that you miss along the way. Purists may shudder about this, but it does eliminate all the “Why did….?” and “”Who was…..?” questions that buzz annoyingly round your brain on the way home.

One thing I nearly always find missing from Bourne’s choreography is those moments of gobsmackingly breathtaking choreography that you get in classical ballet – the real show pieces. Yes, there is choreography in spades – the Rose Adagio, usually a showstopper, is here turned into a pas de deux full of the joys of first love, with lots of running about, flinging yourself into each other’s arms etc – but its all so dancey dancey; Bourne never seems to call a halt and say “OK, enough of the hopping about, stop and take a breath because now I am going to give you something REALLY special to watch”. Sometimes a dancer needs a grandstand, and invariably Bourne seems to deny them the opportunity. There is always, always too much busy-ness on stage, meaning you miss a lot of detail – sometimes important detail – by having your eye try to take in too much at once.

Another tiny criticism I have is that Bourne does not yet seem to have fully worked out where the some of the laughs are going to come from his audience for this show. There are a couple of occasions – notably right at the end of the “birthday” act where what was obviously planned as a dramatic moment gets a laugh and descends into bathos as a result. Things like this need to be watched carefully and shifted so that the laughs come in the “right place”, I think.

Costumes are stunning, scenery is lovely to look at in the main (although the night-club scene doesn’t wash somehow – it looks little like a louche early 21st century party venue but more than some hideously kitsch 80’s throwback with coloured fluorescent lighting strips and overstuffed banquettes) and some of it seems superfluous (the enormous angel statue referred to above being a case in point; it dominates the scene but adds nothing to the setting or indeed the story itself). Its all danced with incredible commitment, verve and energy and the first night audience lapped it up and rightly so. However, Bourne should ditch his egalitarian company bowing and allow his principals their individual moment of glory at the final curtain – and incidentally should have the entire company on stage; last night there seemed to be far fewer people on stage than the cast list would have you expect.

The rewrite of the story is very clever – teenagers saturated on Twilight and Buffy and so on will love it. Others may well mutter under their breath “Bloody vampires again” – pun intended by me, possibly unrecognised by the person muttering it.

9th December update: Reviews starting to come in. More will be posted as and when

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/ios-dance-review-matthew-bournes-sleeping-beauty-sadlers-wells-london-8395803.html

(note: this has to be the most idiotic review I have read. It complains that people will feel "short changed" because the show is danced to recorded music. Does the reviewer not realise how much it costs to hire a reasonably sized orchestra and then pay all their touring costs? Bourne will have paid for someone to make changes to the score and reorchestrate, then would have paid a substantial amount of money to "session musicians" to record the music. More than likely, the Musician's Union will be getting repeat fees for their members for each performance. And touring an orchestra would mean that only those venues with an orchestra pit would have been able to host the production. Honestly, some professional reviewers really don't have a clue!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/dec/08/matthew-bourne-sleeping-beauty-review

http://www.theartsdesk.com/dance/matthew-bournes-sleeping-beauty-sadlers-wells-theatre

Exhibition review - "Bronze" - Royal Academy, Friday 30th November 2012

Bit of a departure from the norm today, fair readers. Its not often that I get to see an exhibition – Him Indoors doesn’t care for them (in fact, Him Indoors doesn’t really care for anything unless it is running at Chepstow or has curtains and footlights. In fact, I couldn’t even tempt him with the prospect of an exhibition about horses at the British Museum a while back; I thought I was onto a potential “something for everyone” winner there but no dice, apparently). So it was splendid to hear from an old friend that he would be in town to see this and would I like to go. As Him Indoors would be in full on Diva mode that day because of a concert in the evening in which he was singing, I decided that here was my opportunity to get out of the house and out of what is left of his hair.

Part of the pleasure I get out of exhibitions is people watching – each museum or gallery seems to have a definite “type” and the RA delivers this in spades. In fact, had it not been so bloody cold I think I could have happily just sat in the courtyard watching people in brightly coloured corduroy trousers and Puffa jackets going back and forth – if only to catch my breath; thanks to Southeastern Trains’ somewhat lax interpretation of the notion of timekeeping I was late and, because of the traffic along Piccadilly, I had run (for which read “clumped along in a pair of shoes that seemed to weigh more with every step”) more or less the entire length of the road trying to dodge clueless tourists all the way.

Strangely, for an exhibition that is finishing at the end of next week, the place seemed to be heaving with people and this would, in one sense, have a serious knock-on effect on my enjoyment, about which more shortly. Before that, I have to explain about my “exhibition game”, the rules of which were explained to me by a kindly teacher back in my distant past. The set up is this: as a reward for being such a wonderful person, the curators have decreed that you are allowed to take home one – and only one – item from the exhibition. This item has to be chosen from a shortlist of candidates; one item from each room in the exhibition. Regardless of the number of items in the room, as you leave the room you have to nominate one item for your shortlist, giving a short but coherent reason why. Whether or not your home would actually be able to accommodate the item is superfluous (I’ve “taken home” everything from items of domestic china to 80-feet frescoes in the past). As you leave the exhibition, you have to make the final choice from your shortlist. You are allowed to take home the same item as your companion/s if necessary. Hopefully your choice is rewarded by being able to buy a postcard of your item in the gift shop afterwards – again, about which more anon.

The first room of the exhibition is the easiest – because there is only one thing in it; the ancient Greek sculpture Dancing Satyr; a stunning piece which was apparently hauled up in a fishing net off the coast of Sicily in 1989. Its stunning because it has such a sense of movement; an instant of time caught in bronze. Is he dancing? Running away from someone? Running towards someone? Drunkenly reeling? We’ll never know for sure, so we can make up our own story around it. Its one of the few exhibits that you can walk all the way around and examine from all angles – but in order to read the explanatory notes about it, you have to plonk yourself directly in front of it (obscuring the piece for those coming through the entrance door behind you), bend down and peer myopically at the tiny piece of card printed in a relatively small font. As the piece stands in the centre of an enormous square plinth, you would have thought that the curators would have seen fit to have put a card at each corner, but there’s just one card, inconveniently and inconsiderately placed. This lack of thought and consideration is carried through practically every other exhibit – time and time again I had to go without any background information on something purely because the notes on it were poorly and inconveniently placed. On the few occasions when I did manage to struggle through the crowd looking at a particular exhibit to read the card, the information was generally sparse, terse and uninformative. Often the card itself was so inconveniently placed that I didn’t feel up to the struggle of getting to a position from where I could read it. I suppose this is so that you are forced to go and by the exhibition catalogue in order to understand what you have seen.

The second room (and in fact all the subsequent rooms) comes across as a bit of a mish mash. There is no chronology, so you don’t get to trace the development of ideas, techniques or cultures. After a while, it all becomes like rummaging through a vast attic – you never know quite what you are going to unearth next. This becomes tiring, as you are constantly having to reappraise, rethink, shift your focus – and in fact by the later rooms I was getting seriously “arted out” because of the mental effort required in sorting out the jumble of ideas, styles and themes into something vaguely coherent. There are some seriously wonderful things in this room, some of which surprised me by finding their way onto my shortlist. For a while, I dithered over a Giacometti called “La Cage” and which I wouldn’t normally have given more than a passing glance to but for some unfathomable reason I found it strangely beautiful. Lorenzo Ghiberti’s St. Stephen was momentarily arresting, until you turn through 180 degrees and find yourself looking at a Roman bronze from the Archaeological Museum in Naples which predates it by around 1500 years and which is a far superior work of art, both aesthetically and artistically. By contrast (and its obviously a deliberate juxtaposition by the curators), St. Stephen looks formulaic and dead, whereas the Roman senator seems vibrant and alive.

There is another interesting juxtaposition if you know where to look. In a small, cramped case stands Cellini’s “Modello for a statue of Perseus holding the head of Medusa” – an exquisite piece, less than 2 feet tall but full of movement and life. The body of the dead Medusa lies on its back, arched over a deep cushion, while gore spills from the neck. Above, Perseus stands triumphant, one foot seemingly poised to kick the body away, the other planted firmly on the ground. It’s a lovely, lively thing. And yet above it towers a 19th century copy, at least three times life-size; and its crass and lumpy, with none of the freshness or vitality of the work that inspired it. The composition is different; Medusa now lies flat on the ground, Perseus holds her head at a completely different angle. His body seems awkward, out of proportion. Its horrible. Two “horsey-types” agree with me; I love nattering to strangers at exhibitions. There are some exhibits in this room that simply fail to register for some reason – Rustici’s “St John the Baptist preaching to a Levite and a Pharisee” in particular. The medieval “Weeper” figures don’t elicit much emotional response other than prompting a short discussion on how unflattering 15th century dress styles were to the fuller figure.

The third and fourth rooms– Animals – are full of exciting things – a wonderful horse’s head, a stylistically fascinating chimera, a wonderfully animated tiger attacking an alligator. “That’s Picasso” says one woman loudly, pointing to a hideous figure of an ape. “Picasso was fucking ugly then” I nearly respond out loud. Next to it is a wonderfully serene figure of the cat goddess Bastet from ancient Egypt and a turkey so lifelike that I cannot see why everyone isn’t raving about it. The horse’s head and the turkey go straight on my list, although it’s a tough decision between the horse’s head and the chimera.

The following rooms are a challenge – the exhibits are smaller, more stylistically diverse and rather less interesting (the comparison with an attic starts to fade and is replaced by a junk shop) and my interest starts to wane sharply at this point. The room of religious icons leaves both me and DBA completely cold, and though the final room contains some busts and masks which both of us would have found stimulating had they been placed in an earlier room, I think we’ve both had enough by this point. Anyway, my feet are getting tired and I need some coffee, so we wander in search of a seat and caffeine – and hopefully a postcard. Coming home with me is the tiny model of Perseus, after an intense mental struggle between that, the horse’s head and the chimera. The Dancing Satyr is going home on the train with DBA to St. Albans. But we are both stymied – neither of these wonderful pieces have been thought worthy by the RA to be the subject of a postcard. My choice is, I suppose, justifiable; it’s a small, relatively unimportant piece, and I could always settle for the horse’s head. But no Dancing Satyr postcard? Its arguably the most exciting piece in the entire exhibition. The postcard offering is, frankly, piss poor and ill advised. Some of them depict exhibits so lacklustre and insignificant that I can’t even remember having seen them. I often find this happens with exhibition postcards; I know that they are relatively expensive to produce in terms of what they actually are, and copyrights are difficult to obtain from museums anxious to preserve the exclusivity and integrity of their artefacts. But for an exhibition of some 700 pieces, I am sure that the RA could come up with more than 9 decent postcards – particularly of the major works, and the most exciting ones. As I turn to leave the shop, having been baulked of my Perseus, I mutter loudly “The world would be a much better place if I was in charge of it”. DBA, denied his satyr, agrees with me and we go in search of coffee and a sit down; these things are in our control even if the satyr wouldn’t have fitted in the luggage rack and Perseus would probably have been a terrible dust magnet.

http://www.standard.co.uk/arts/visual-arts/brian-sewell-on-bronze-at-the-royal-academy-8159298.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/9571941/Bronze-at-Royal-Academy-Seven-magazine-review.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/sep/09/bronze-royal-academy-london-review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/sep/09/bronze-royal-academy-london-review