critical mass

Idiot Tales. The Most Incredible Thing, Pet Shop Boys/Javier de Frutos World Premier, Sadler’s Wells 17/3/11

2011-03-18T03:56:00.000-07:00

Stages are mouths into which you can throw the world and their gaping maws will hunger for more. This truth must be haunting the ‘dream’ collaborators of the Pet Shop Boys and choreographer Javier de Frutos today after last night's world premier. They threw every device they could think at this ill-conceived reworking of the Hans Anderson tale - dancers, spoken word, dramatic lighting effects, spinning, whirling scenery yet the Sadler’s Wells stage was left chewing a pea.

Theatrical works live by creating a world, an order into which the action, dance or drama can fit. It doesn’t have to be believable, but it needs logic. Without it the audience is left with the empty spectacle of increasingly futile gestures. Three buxom muses leapt engagingly at our hero as he tried to make the most incredible thing. They were referencing Balanchine’s great ballet, Apollo in their mirrored gestures and mini Grecian togas. But it compared vintage champagne to Thunderbird, making de Frutos’s desperate dance making all the more lame by association with a work of genius.

The evening's doom was flagged up early by the show’s nervous producer asking us to indulge our patience, that this was a world premier and things just might go wrong. These must be the wisest words she’s uttered since taking up this ill-fated project.

It was as if the whole piece lacked a director for it lacked sense. Who with a full-blooded frontal cortex would have agreed to such impressive, but distracting, animation effects (courtesy of BAFTA-winning animator Tal Rosner). It made the frantic leaps of the dancers like mosquitoes beneath a blazing sun.

We left after the second act – the curtain dropped as the cartoon king was thrown spinning across the stage. Behind us two conspicuously empty seats in the centre of Row A of the Circle. It was a low-key, elegant, gesture of disapproval. If only the creators of this debacle could have engaged with these concepts rather than empty bombast they were so determined to nail.

Douglas Gordon's K.364

2011-02-17T09:03:00.000-08:00

I was lucky. When I entered the labyrinthine screening halls (there are two wall-sized angled screens showing different angles of the same scene from Douglas Gordon's latest film, K.364) the piece was in the midst of the exuberant first movement of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola (aka K.364, the codified numbering system used to catalogue Mozart's oeuvre). Two Jewish men were doing what they do best - playing their instruments with a gritty immediacy. The intimacy of the camera work with the head of the conductor slipping into view and blurred instrumentalists from the orchestra in the background while her hands danced into shot gave a strange almost slo-mo conter-point to the music's jaunty dotted rhythms.

I've heard the rest of the film dips into pretension with the prolonged train journey taking the musicians from Berlin to Warsaw for the concert I was so enjoying. Train journeys carrying Jewish passengers from West to East have obvious Holocaust-era symbolism. Our two you men talk about their forebears taking a similar route 70 years ago to their deaths, not to make music.

But there are other resonances here too. In 1943 a women-only orchestra was created at Auschwitz concentration camp. The musicians were protected from being gassed or worked to death by their luck at playing an instrument. At one point, a woman called Alma Rose was the conductor of the orchestra, Gustav Mahler's niece.

1941 was the 150 anniversary of Mozart's death. Under Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Propaganda Minister, the first music festival devoted to the Austrian composer was given, book-ended by a Nazi burial ceremony for the composer. Wreaths from Hitler, Goering and the SS were displayed outside Romanesque-Gothic St Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna at the festival's close.

Can Jews comfortably play Wagner's music because of his well-known anti-semitism as well as his appropriation by the Nazis? Wagner's music was often played at Nuremberg rallies. Mozart doesn't generate the same ambivalences no matter who is playing him. The librettist of his most important operas, Lorenzo da Ponte, was a Jew and Mozart's enthusiastic membership of the Masons was conveniently air-brushed by the Nazis.

John Stezaker, Whitechapel Gallery until March 18th

2011-02-01T05:33:00.000-08:00

The pleasure of looking at John Stezaker's work is the shiver of seeing something banal made strange. Studio shots of long-dead actors and hand tinted postcards of waterfalls and landscapes are hackneyed and banal. But when Stezaker lays one of these tired images on top of another, or just slices or folds into a photograph, a strange alchemy takes place. Jolted, we see both the material reality of the photo - look it's been chopped up! while still being seduced by the tidal pull of its image.

Like all collage - these pictures play games with our visual perception. While much collage, even going back to Picasso, overlays multiple images in an attempt to make weighty what is ultimately so light, ephemeral and playful - the chance encounter of images and their kaleidoscopic associations. Here is a more controlled simplicity - Stezaker uses only two images at most. His collage is minimalist.

Stezaker isn't only referencing those great collagists Braque and Picasso, but Magritte too (especially the shadow cutout figures at the beginning of the exhibtion), but mostly Dali. What other image comes to mind when looking at Mask XXXV from 2007 than Dali's Paranoiac Visage of 1935. Stazaker's collages aren't just made of layers, they also lay themselves at the feet of Surrealism's greatest master.

Friends indeed. The King's Speech

2011-01-30T12:35:00.000-08:00

The unlikely friendship between Lionel Logue and George VI is the real appeal of The King's Speech. The very unlikelihood of a bond between an Antipodean liberal and the stiffest of stiff upper lipped Royal is compelling. It shouldn't work and it almost doesn't. But somehow it does, and beautifully.

For what this film promises us on a deep level is that we too might find someone who will see us who we really are. It's a kind of love story played out through a chaste friendship, but is no less profound and meaningful for that. It's the yearning we have not for a return to our mother or father's embrace but for the companionship of a sibling. One who will play with us always.

Tutu much. Black Swan - on release

2011-01-25T03:10:00.000-08:00

Nina (Natalie Portman) is a good girl and good girls do ballet. She trots to class swathed in snow-frosted scarves and the sort of buttoned up pink coats worn by prim 5-year-olds. Nina is a superb ballerina (and credit to Portman for losing 9 kilos and going up on pointe - ballet's unique form of female torture). But does she have the dark passion to take on classical ballet's most demanding role? Odette/Odlie - the Swan Queen and the Black Swan? That so-tired-it-actually-died-5-centuries-ago virgin/whore claptrap.

This is the narrative thrust of this trash-gothic-campy film in which we see NIna thrust and thrash in an onanistic bed-ballet scene after her lusty svengali (Vincent Cassel) tells her to get in touch herself 'down there'. Which is really what this over blown and silly film is about. It's about Natalie Portman's body - scarred, scratched, feathered and fondled. It's also about her nemesis, a flashy dance rival (Mila Kunis) who dives between her thighs like a hungry cat.

The dance scenes are well filmed, although this viewer got giddy from too many spinning cameras. But what really fascinated me was the packed house at Notting Hill's Gate cinema last Sunday night. What were we all thinking we were about to see? A film about ballet? You're more likely to get an audience to watch a test card. We were there to see the cheap pleasures of soft porn dressed up as art-house cinema. We didn't leave disappointed.

Death Becomes Her - Giselle, Royal Ballet, ROH 19/1/11

2011-01-22T07:34:00.000-08:00

Deep are the satisfactions to be found in Giselle currently playing at the Royal Opera House until next month. Set designer John Macfarlaine’s pastoral setting for the maid’s cottage in the first act is little more than a rustic clearing on the edge of an engulfing wood. While his Second Act places Giselle’s grave in a post-apocalyptic blasted forest of tumbled trunks and mangled roots. These are the romantically sublime backdrops for ballet’s first tale of tragic love - nature rendered as a diabolical twin to our heart's own darkness.

Last night’s leads - Leanne Benjamin (Giselle) and Edward Watson (Albrecht) – were a couple we’d instantly place together. Which deepens our shock at Albrecht’s deceit – his two-timing of Giselle with another. These are young lovers who belong together making Giselle’s breakdown and death – a frenzy of tumbling hair, head-clasping bowed stillness as compelling as it is understandable.

Genius of Mozart, BBC Radio 3, 1-12 January 2011

2011-01-07T02:27:00.000-08:00

Two thoughts strike me listening to back to back Mozart playing now on Radio 3.

My radio is in my bedroom, so I hear the music from the distance of my living room/office and it sounds like there's a party going on back there. A late 18th century house party. Mozart's music is a witty raconteur endlessly keeping his audience chuckling with delight; hia nudging sauciness, mirth and joy. He's irrepressible - impossible to resist. And even when the music turns towards the shadows as it does in the slow movement of the Clarinet Quintet K 581, there is still beauty - an aching melancholy.

My other thought is about Mozart's unsurpassed invention. Take the sonata for two pianos, K448 of 1871 written when he was 25. Like so much classical music this is built on the idea of a theme and its variations. A simple melody is inverted, ornamented, stretched, shrunk and played with before returning to its original form. This is classic sonata form. It is a journey that yo-yos back to its beginning.

Yet the melody is refreshed and renewed upon its return. And this particular melody and journey improves the spatial awareness center of our brains, known as the 'Mozart Effect'. Sufferers of epilepsy had fewer seizures after listening to this sonata, according to the British Epilepsy Organization. So I'm left marveling at Mozart's joyful invention that is also - hurrah! - improving my brain.

Too far? Wayne McGregor, Random Dance

2010-11-22T12:07:00.000-08:00

Wayne McGregor - the most celebrated choreographer working in the world today - could be running out of ideas. In his new work, Far, which premiered last Wednesday at Sadler's Wells - his supremely talented Random Dance performers contorted their lithe bodies into the choreographic maestro's usual eye-watering, asymetrical shapes. Narrative-free, abstract and compelling, the man's aesthetic is to deconstruct the pleasing lines we associate with ballet to uncover what lies beneath. The answer - compelling oddity. Afterall, whatever these dancers do to their bodies as they are young, supremely talented and hot. Ugliness isn't part of their DNA.

Far is presented on a bare stage apart from a large white rectangular light installation by Lucy Carter for rAndom International.The piece's pinned lights sweep, high-light and scintillate from crazed disco effect what looked like running water. It is brilliant and mesmerizing. And it is also distracting. I found myself watching its lucid pyrotechnics more than I was the dancers in the foreground. This might be forgiveable in an art gallery where this work could be seen as an art piece rather than a dance performance. McGregor's collaborations are fascinating, he's worked with Juilan Opie, Joby Talbot and the White Stripes in past productions, especially 2006's Chroma - his most popular and greatest work to date.

With this piece, McGregor takes his inspiration from Roy Porter's posthumous book, Flesh In the Age of Reason on which the work draws it's name (an acronym) and inspiration. But who can tell?

Time Lord, Marclay's The Clock, White Cube Mason's Yard till November 13th

2010-11-10T06:40:00.001-08:00

Video artist Christian Marclay's 'The Clock' is the most original timepiece in the world because it's a film. A film that tells you the time by using every kind of movie that's ever had a shot of a clock, a character glancing at their watch or a bank robber muttering something like, 'It's now 2.29, the bomb will explode in 31 minutes!'.

The film runs for twenty-four hours - a mash up of black and white, Hollywood blockbuster, foreign language, schlock, glitz, tack (indeed, that is Jack Nicholson singing, ''It's three twenty five" to a glitter-eyed babe), art house, adventure, western, rom com, musical and drama.

The only narrative thread, is time, everything else is back story. The film's characters are telling, seeing, ignoring or responding to time as it happens. Yet these moments are fictions from source material that span over 80 years of film product. It's a dizzying concept made real via thousands of hours research on a spaghetti mountain of footage. For who can remember a great panning shot that features a clock from any film? Let alone the precise moment it happened.

It's tempting to say something clever about how 'The Clock' explores the fragmentation of time by deconstructing time's logic and rationality. I could even give it a psychoanalytic spin and see this work as a carnivalesque subversion of tyrannical super-ego 'father' time. A cocked-up clock, perhaps.

But what struck me most was the enormous pleasure this piece gives its audience. Just hear those gasps of pleasure at each audacious moment of time-revealing footage!

So remove your watch, sit back, and enjoy the ride of your life.

Two operas and a dance off - Gluck, Monteverdi and Pina Bausch 28/29th October 2010

2010-11-02T01:02:00.000-07:00

The development of opera in its first 150 years was a refinement of the melodic line and the bringing together of evermore complex vocal groups before the shuddering emotional onslaught of the Romantics at the end of the 18th Century. The same thing happened to pop when rock 'n roll first charged the solar plexus. To compare opera's first great master, Monteverdi (17th C) with Gluck (18th C) over a hundred years later is to consider two ends of a logically pleasing developmental arc.

Yet there is emotional depth in even the earliest operas. The fact that Monteverdi took the story of Nero and Poppea for his last and greatest opera showed a willingness to take on historically accurate human frailties rather than the mores of mythological gods and monsters. Although it takes a leap of the imagination still to see murderous Nero sung by a slight mezzo-soprano, Lucia Cirillo, in the Glyndebourne Festival production currently on tour.

Transplanted to a 1930s Italy, we can read the dictator as a proto Mussolini - all slicked down hair and puffed up vanity. Christiane Karg's Poppea was out sung and out performed by Louise Poole's slighted and murderous Empress Ottavia. While the chicly minimal set - little more than a series of heavy red drapes (symbolizing blood and love) created palaces and bathrooms with simple rearrangements. For a touring production this feels neat and mobile. For a more permanent production its unrelenting simplicity is underwhelming.

A note on Glyndebourne itself. This was my first time. Thankfully there weren't the penguin-suited opera toffs as this was out off season, but the rolling grounds and the round elegance of the theatre itself conjured a quieter kind of magic. I was smitten. For the theatre itself is simple and intimate and was obviously developed by those for whom the art of opera itself is paramount rather than as a crass paean to snobbery. It is a place designed for art.

Choreographer Pina Bausch once said, 'I'm not interested in how people move, but in what moves them.' What obviously moved her in 1974 was the limpid beauty of Gluck's opera Iphigenie auf Tauris against which she created a full length ballet where her signature motifs the hand clenched staggers, the tossed hair of a lead woman both troubled and seductive and the intsensity and precision of her groupings conjure the horror/comic paintings of Paula Rego. Bausch was a unique choreographic artist (she died in 2009) whose works are as much theatrical happenings, art pieces - calling them dances diminishes their absorbing power. This use of a late baroque opera requiring a full orchestra, soloists and chorus shows her pushing choreography into unlikely but rich territory. Would Mark Morris have had his love affair with the purity of the baroque (in his case, Handel) without this ground-breaking innovation from Bausch?

Or, in fact, would we even be seeing 'Poppea' with Bausch and her ilk's audacity 40 years ago.

Psychoanalysis exhibition Science Museum 15/10/10

2010-10-19T12:22:00.000-07:00

This small exhibition is set aside from the main drag of the Science Museum as if acknowledging the shaky idea that psychoanalysis is science. Freud urged it to be regarded as such. But psychoanalysis' status as hard science has always remained questionable. There are no courses in it at London's premier science school, Imperial College, for example.

According to the notes (and there are plenty of these throughout this exhibition) latest research in cognitive neuroscience is uncovering a body of evidence for unconscious mental activity. Ah ha, it is a science then!

Yet this is no proof of the unconscious as conceived by Freud. For him, the unconscious is a dung heap of repression and suppression where all our unmanageable feelings and fantasies fester. Neuroscience has yet to find this odure of the mind.

The closest to any kind of heap in the exhibition is the Noble and Webster sculpture – a tsunami of red cocks, balls and hands (molds from their own bodies) which are lit to cast a shadow on the wall behind of the artists' silhouettes. It’s a modern take of that profile cartoon of Freud with his nose and forehead made up of the outstretched torso of a naked women.

What is frustrating about this exhibition apart from being assailed by recorded voices of analysts explaining their work and plaques with overly long explanations of analytic techniques was the exhibition's sense of defensiveness. It seemed to be saying, rather with it's back to the wall, we really do belong in the august surroundings of the Science Museum. It feels vaguely muted and slightly muddled like a tormented soul stepping over the threshold for her first analytic session and unsure where to sit.

There's also a problem of voice - the explanations were both too esoteric - caught up in the highly specialist jargon of analysis - yet also too trite. The glass case with everyday objects - shoes, toy sports cars etc. that might unconsciously conjure for ourselves fantasies of status, youth, sexiness etc are today Sunday supplement cliches. We know this stuff already.

Also, anaysis is less a theory of mind than an active practice of healing. There were no patients in the exhibition apart from the drawings by one of Melanie Klein's child patients - his drawings of his father as Hitler were inevitably richly revealing. Though the photos of different analysts' empty therapy rooms merely showed that analysts have the same bad taste in interiors as the rest of us.

And yet, to see Freud's own copy of The Interpretation of Dreams (English trans 1913) - his greatest work - alongside his beloved objects from classical antiquity including the miniature Sphinx that was central to his theory of the Oedipus complex is thrilling. These very objects were the torches with which this creator of the talking cure shone a light into the darkest recesses of the human psyche. And we are still blinking in its intense illumination.

The exhibition also includes works inspired by psychoanalytical ideas include pieces by Arnold Dreyblatt, Mona Hatoum, Joseph Kosuth, Grayson Perry, Sonny Sanja Vadagma, Tim Noble and Sue Webster.

Soprano Soile Isokoski Wigmore Hall Monday 11th October

2010-10-11T12:08:00.000-07:00

The revelation of today's lunchtime concert wasn't Isokoski's limpid rendering of Schumann's Liederkries (Op. 39), it was the four songs she sang by Henri Duparc. This is a composer I've never heard of before. He stopped composing music at 36 after a nervous illness made it impossible for him to continue. What a loss. He lived for another 40 years and Duparc would have been a name we know - as long as he'd carried on creating songs like these.

There is a tension in his music between a yearning for German romanticism - Duparc was a fan of Schumann, Schubert as well as being a fervent Wagnerite. The fact he wrote lied is proof enough, perhaps. Yet, as a Frenchman he was resistant to the dominance of German art and culture and his studying (piano) with the arch-French composer Cesar Franck gives his music that diffuse quality that is uniquely French. These are songs are silk to wrap yourself in.

There is a piercingly precise quality to Isokoski's lyric soprano voice that thrills. My companion was gobsmacked to hear there was no augmentation to her voice. Were were sitting 20 rows back and the piercing insistence of her fortissimo top notes rained down on us like diamantine hail.

Through a Mirror, Darkly. Vertical Road, Akram Khan Co. Sadler's Wells 6th October 10

2010-10-07T02:46:00.000-07:00

These are the three things I learnt from Vertical Road, Akram Khan's newest dance work that premiered a couple of months back and was seen in London for the first time last week -

Dusting crouching dancers in chalky dust or talc makes for a vivid opening tableau, when they start moving the dust flies off them like smoke (see picture).

Tai chi is compellingly inventive source material for dance.

Loud, repetitive drum beats become annoying after about three minutes.

Oh, and make this a fourth – either tell a story, or don’t. Opaque suggestions of narrative are frustrating – like a fuzzy screen that occasionally coalesces into a movie. Make it both and annoy the hell out of your audience.

Khan didn’t perform which was a shame as he - spellbindingly - is both feral and controlled like a leaping tiger. Although it was hardly making do to watch Salah el Brogy as his central male figure – in equal parts, yogi and Christ. And sex god.

Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballet Russes, V&A. Opens 25 September 2010

2010-09-22T07:20:00.000-07:00

For Henri Matisse Sergey Diaghilev was Louis XIV, while Claude Debussy described him as '.. that terrible and charming man, who could make stones dance.'

Sergei Diaghilev was also described as a devil, a provocateur and a thief, but a hundred years on from the first glittering explosion of the Ballet Russes onto the Paris stage, we surely can only conclude the man was a bullish persuader with a nose for excellence all wrapped up with a phenomenal work ethic.

Sergey Diaghilev cajoled, lured, bullied, flattered and extorted the greatest names in modern art, including Stravinsky, Matisse, Picasso, Nijinsky, Chanel and Balanchine - urging them to collaborate on the most breathtakingly new theatrical productions the world had ever seen. It's a heritage that kick started the collaborative arts and establishmed modern ballet companies that seem such a permanent part of our cultural landscape now.

Of course, his only tangible legacy are the delicately faded costumes, properties and sets at, 'Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929' which is about to open as the glittering jewel in the V&A's autumn schedule.

The conceit of the exhibition is that we've stumbled back stage at a Ballets Russes performance. Walls are painted darkly, there are highlights and illuminations as if from a nearby stage. Music, particularly Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, seems to lure us deeper into the exotic gloom. This concept works well for Diaghilev was averse to his productions being filmed, there is barely any footage. We are only left with eye witness reports, ballet notation of the choreography and the properties themselves. The exhibition's corners are taken up with ladders, suitcases and boxes - the jumbled detritus of a touring dance company.

And, boy, did the Ballet Russes tour! The US, Europe and Latin America were all regularly blessed with the company's presence, but sadly never Russia itself due to Diaghilev's own complex feelings towards his homeland and the 1917 revolution that put paid to any further thoughts of his triumphal return. Revenue from touring just kept the company's expensive calvalcade afloat. Although Diaghilev was constantly on the run from an ever growing army of creditors.

It was that cultural bomb of Russia's revolution which seemed to shift the company's aesthetic away from the post-belle epoque exoticism of ballets like Sheherazade, The Rite of Spring and The Firebird towards a cooler, pared down modernism found in works of the 1920s like Le Train Blue, Chout and Apollon whose simple grecian tunics were designed by Coco Chanel typifying the androgynous mood of the Jazz Age.

Perhaps the most vivid quote about Sergey Diaghilev comes from Jean Cocteau, another of his many collaborators, 'That ogre, that sacred monster... that Russian prince to whom life was tolerable only to the extent to which he could summon up marvels.'

And what marvels they were. Do whatever you can to see them before they fade from sight forever.

Fauning over the volume. l'Orchestre National de France, Prom 71, 7/9/10

2010-09-08T09:33:00.000-07:00

What’s not to love about a programme including two of Debussy’s most famous works, Prelude a L’Apres midi d’un Faune and La Mer, alongside the 20th century’s most (in)famous ballet score, Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring)? There was certainly giddy expectation in the Albert Hall last night - musical devotees knowing exactly what they were about to receive.

Conducted by their (relatively) new music director, Daniele Gatti, l’Orchestre National de France were on stunning form (apart from an unseemly pile up by the brass section at the close of Dance of the Earth in Rite). Most distinctive perhaps was not the plangent sonorities of the fortissimi in La Mer and, of course, the Rite; but rather the exquisite, almost mystical, quietude that Gatti conjured from his 120-strong orchestra. It was this contrast, a kind of aural chiaroscuro between loud and soft, that gave these familiar pieces fresh mystery.

Perhaps it also comes from a particular kind of sensitivity of the predominantly French players to music that is such a part of their national culture? Sure, Stravinsky was Russian, yet what other piece of avant-garde music is more associated with Paris than this? There was that mythic riot in the Theatre Champs-Elysees at its premier on 29^th May 1913.

Without these three works would 20^th Century music have taken the adventurous course that it did? The breakdown in diatonic tonality towards dissonance and atonality, the shift from melody towards rhythm and the assertion of wind and brass over the violin’s orchestral dominance are all prefigured here.

But perhaps, more than any of this, these works taught us to listen with new ears.

Not fiddling for change/Julia Fischer/Chamber Prom/16 August 2010

2010-08-22T12:09:00.000-07:00

Julia Fischer’s violin playing is an exercise in effortlessness. As the 28 year old German lifts her 1742 Guardagnini to her chin, her left hand caresses the strings across the finger board up towards the instrument’s bridge as if to reassure herself that they are all in place and ready to sing.

Her eyes close and her chest lifts in a deep inhalation as her right arm controls her bow’s first downward trajectory – a sweeping gesture as if pushing an unwanted intruder away. With this movement we are immediately engulfed in her music making. Fischer and her instrument are one. And we, her audience begin to fly.

Fischer is a violinist’s violinist. Her playing shuns the showy pyrotechnics of Maxim Vengerov or Nigel Kennedy, though her technical virtuosity easily matches theirs. During her brief interview with Radio 3’s Catherine Bott between works at her recent lunchtime chamber Prom at Cadogan Hall (August 16th) her answer to how can she bring something new to a beloved warhorse like the Franck A Major sonata was, ‘I don’t like the pressure on performers to always bring something new. The Franck is great music and great music is always worth repeating. To bring something new is, I think, an unnecessary expectation.’

A modest yet perfectly sound response to our endless desire for novelty. Fischer is wise. Bott, and we the audience, humbly concurred.

Ripe and tasty. Spartacus ROH/Bolshoi 19/7/10

2010-07-21T09:32:00.001-07:00

Cheese comes in many forms. The variety on offer for the opening night of Spartacus kicking off the Bloshoi’s season in London was particularly ripe. The waltzing oom-pah of Arma Khachaturian’s lurid score almost distracted us from the goose-stepping ragged Roman army. Their wooden swords, hand-painted helmets and shields had the worn lustre of the am dram costume cupboard. The Roman’s wigs were straight out of central casting – Crassus’s (Alexander Volchkov) was resplendent in pressed curls and highlights, more Julian Clary than Julius Caesar. And Spartacus’s fellow escapees were as much scarecrows as slaves on the run. Such are the tawdry aesthetics of late 60’s Soviet theatrical style. Lest I go overboard, I shall only say the sets had the daube-like quality of work by enthusiastic ten-year-olds.

With such teeth-sticking diary product on display I bow to the genius that is the Bolshoi company. They transcended this tackiness like a troupe of jet-propelled superheroes.

The Bolshoi have a ballet technique that feels less as if it was drummed into them from an early age than if their bodies were somehow formed by the technique itself. And yet their bodies are not some platonic ideal of ballet loveliness, although the perfect lines carried by several of the corps were divine.

Take Nina Kaptsova (see picture), who danced the role of Phyrgria – Spartacus’s amour. Her limbs are bird-thin and her face a gaunt, she barely looks strong enough to stand let alone manage the gruelling demands of the role. Yet, when her arms are in 5^th position – raised above her head – their straightness combined with her lowered shoulders and extended fingers become stems of some exquisite human flower. Held aloft in gravity-defying lifts – her limbs became less human again becoming symbols of human fragility.

Yet she is a pale shadow to the evening’s main event, Ivan Vasiliev’s Spartacus. This man was the reason we leapt to our feet at the final curtain. For he had stunned us with each split-jete en tourant, each tumble and fouette - his upper torso and face thrust at the ceiling as if this time he might, just might break the laws of gravity and take flight.

With his raven curled locks, Rasputin-like dark eyes and the ability to embody character with Stanislavian intensity, Vasiliev just might be the lord of the dance.

Sucker Punch, Royal Court, 13/07/10

2010-07-14T02:53:00.000-07:00

It's shocking to be reminded of the brutality of racism in 1980s London. When the white working class Charlie (Nigel Lindsay) the thug who runs the south London gym (where Roy William's play is set) calls his black charges 'boy' we know it is the norm. And when he disowns his daughter for 'fooling around' with a black man he is only expressing the common codes of decency.

For the black lads themselves, lighter skinned Troy (Anthony Welsh) feels safe in calling his darker skinned pal, Leon (Daniel Kaluuya), 'rubber lips'. And both of them comfortably jibe the other about being a 'batty man' - the stab that made some last night's audience laugh too. We may remain stony faced a racist epithets, but for some of us homophobic taunts still a source of humour. This is a world of pecking orders based on brute violence, where white is right and status comes in the shape of a flash motor.

For we are in Thatcher's Britain during the Brixton riots - a bleak urban back drop of racial violence. The play's sweaty gym is a microcosm of all the fear, hatred, despair and crass materialism that's being played out on the streets.

Sucker Punch investigates two opposite ways of surviving this brutal landscape. Leon (played by the brilliant, charismatic Kaluuya) keeps Charlie on board to train and manage him, which for Troy is a sell, He is far more radical and violent than his friend. Troy escapes to the States and becomes represented by a black manager. Unlike Leon, Troy feels he's no Uncle Tom.

Yet, both are victims. For this play explores the ideological quagmires that trap young, disaffected black men. The lads are exploited whether they have white managers or not, whether they live in the UK or not. The superb metaphor of Leon being unable to untie his own hand bandages express his real powerlessness.

When Troy and Leon finally fight in the spectacularly staged, slow-motioned climax - Charlie's words resonate, "white people love nuttin' better than to see two black men beat up on each other.".And here we are, the mostly white audience, enjoying the awesome spectacle of just such an encounter - two dark, bloodied bodies in ecstasies of pain and exhaustion smashing the living daylights out of each other. It is thrilling. And sickening.

Interesting to note that this most bloodied and masculine of plays was brought to life by two women - staging by Miriam Beuther and direction by Sacha Wares.

Filling the God-shaped hole at the School of Life

2010-06-30T06:55:00.000-07:00

I learnt How to Fill the God Shaped Hole at the School of Life last week. The School is ploughing an erudite furrow in the rich intellectual alluvium of Bloomsbury. This is a perfect location as this corner of the capital thrums with the joy of book learning, pondering and cogitating like an auto-didactic librarian on speed. Several colleges of London University are a book toss away.

The School also looks like a bookshop so it’s surprising to walk down to its trompe l’oeil lecture room whose monochrome murals imply a messy, book-filled lounge looking out onto a garden more Hampstead than Holborn. We were fed and watered upstairs first with wine and snacks – the tuck shop before the school bell.

I sat next to Steve who’d had a spiritual revelation the previous week so he thought perhaps his god-shaped hole didn’t need much filling. Others, ‘a flurry of radio 4 listeners’ as someone said, were bright, middle class and mostly female. Many I’m sure were familiar with the residents of Ambridge, but luckily more besides. Several had been to School of Life lectures and sermons before. Students ranged between mid twenties and late forties. One woman was in her sixties.

Our lecturer was Mark Brickman a documentary film maker and all-out renaissance man (he takes several classes at the school). We’d been given homework via email a few days before – exercises in thinking about our spiritual pasts.

Referencing philosophy, cultural history, psychology and anthropology, Brickman took us whistle stop tour of spiritual hole filling. We had breaks to reflect and ruminate like masticating judges on Master Chef. Barely had we sniffed existential philosophy then we were nibbling a ripe slice of St. Augustine, and knocking back Buddhist meditation with a chaser of nihilism. The evening was more running buffet than set menu. Usefully, our input and personal throughts were an important structure for the evening. We kicked off early evening and had finished by 9.30pm.

In a break Steve explained how he was using meditation to assist his dealings as a day trader – perfectly personifying the current trend for all things spiritual while not missing the chance to earn some lucre. ‘It’s not about the money,’ he said, ‘the money is a sign that you’re winning.’

For me, I hadn’t realized I was filling my god-shaped hole with such useful wadding as love, friendship, gift giving and growing strawberries. Useful to be reminded, though.

Evening lectures at the School of Life cost £30

3 Times Table, Triple Bill Royal Opera House 10/6/10

2010-06-14T02:34:00.000-07:00

The current Royal ballet triple bill, Chroma, Tryst and Symphony in C runs counter-clockwise. This is wise. Balanchine's paean to classical form - its spectacle of spins, militarily precise corps de ballet and here with Sarah Lamb partnered by Steven McRae (standing in for Ivan Putrov). She was an exotic ingenue at her coming out ball, leaving me giddy and exulted. It's champagne cocktails on an empty stomach. If we'd begun the evening with this, we'd have ended up feeling deflated no matter what came next.

The Royal's embrace and mastery of Balanchine (this was their 51st performance of Symphony) is now total. Paris Opera Ballets Jewels revived last November (with ecstatic sets and costumes by Christian Lacroix) surpasses the Royal for glamour, but our home team's lyrical and technical mastery of the Russian master's 'pure dance' is also world class. It can even outshine New York City Ballet's more thrusting, athletic approach. When will more Balanchines become core repertoire for the Royal? What about an evening of all Stravinsky ballets? Apollo is already in the rep. Why isn't the violin concerto in there too?

Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon are choreographers have Janus-like responses to the body. McGregor is like a schoolboy holding a magfnifying glass and wondering what happens when you pull, contort or otherwise disturb the balance of dancers spiderish limbs. His movements are deliberately ugly and off kilter yet end up stressing physical perfection when each throw of the hips or awkward head angle resolves itself. It's like Kate Moss gurning followed by her dimpled smile. With nude costumes, a compulsive orchestrated score by Jack White III, Chroma is face-pinching a crowd pleaser.

Tryst should be an even bigger hit. Wheeldon's choreographic language is no dissection of classical technique. It is the beauty and unexpectedness of his positioning of groups, the coming together and parting of couples and his creative collaborations which keep his work up-to-date. Tryste, however, is played out to James MacMillan's discordant, repetitive and sometimes harsh score which is only leavened in the later sections.

Melissa Hamilton's solo followed by her pas de deux with Eric Underwood was pure Wheeldon magic. She danced alone into statuesque arabesques on a back lit stage while Underwood prowled the outer stage like a hungry shadow. Ballet has no more beautiful image of what? Ennui, alienation, loneliness? Whatever, it was poetry manifest. A line from Satre's Being and Nothingness made flesh.

This is the couple to watch.

Darkness visible, Come, Been and Gone, Michael Clark Co. Barbican 9/6/10

2010-06-10T07:50:00.000-07:00

Dancers in metallic orange cat suits, faces pressing to the floor, hips cocked, triangulated legs in static raises as David Bowie’s thrashing guitar rains down the ear-bleedingly loud final chord of The Jean Genie. Light cuts. And the audience, cheering, exuberantly applauds the end of Come, Been and Gone, Michael Clark’s newest work in front of a packed out Barbican last night. The dancers take their curtain calls. Clark himself is in the wings.

The punk ballet master’s absence is a reminder of the darkness we’d just seen before this explosive finale. Dancer Kate Coyne had only minutes before contorted, writhed and staggered in a remarkable body suit pierced with bouncing syringes accompanied by The Velvet Underground’s Heroin.

Clark’s own wrestling with drug addiction is well known. Were we watching biography? If so, Clark is in a much brighter place now, exuberantly reconnecting to his Puck-like self from the mid1980s. His own brief legato presence was muted and shadow-like. Yet Simon Williams and Nathan Cornwall with Clark’s jerky, juddering, stiff-armed choreography are baton bearers of his younger electrifying self.

In the row behind me were Jarvis Cocker, DJs Princess Julia and Jeffrey Hinton and Pop magazine editor, Ashley Heath. Clark’s showmanship and membership of the demimonde have always graced his shows with the best ballet audience in town. And if the music and dancing didn’t grab you urgently enough, those were Peter Doig paintings suspended over the screen at the back of the stage.

Wordy Rappinghood, Babel (words) premier, 18/05/10 Sadlers Wells

2010-05-19T06:39:00.000-07:00

There has never been such rich choreographic talent condensed in London. For neo-classicism with a dash of modern swagger Christopher Wheeldon Company delivers. Innovative collaborations in a minimalist setting and electronic scores more your thing? Russell Maliphant is the man. If deconstructed movement in a futuristic world gets you going, get cosy with Wayne MacGregor's electrifyingly odd ballets.

If you'd rather see a multicultural mash-up with live, plangent percussion and dizzying physical pyrotechnics, Akram Khan will always oblige. Alongside Khan now stands Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui whose Babel (words) premiered at Sadlers Wells last night.

As the title suggests, Babel is about language - that which as likely communicates as baffles. With a a linguistic and physically diverse smorgasbord of 16 international dancers and a playground of endlessly moveable and stackable wire boxes by sculptor Antony Gormley, we were entertained with the surreal, the barmy and the silly. A PVC clad glamazon (one part robot to two parts catwalk diva) was variously an automaton and a passive/aggressive airport security officer. She was also subject to extreme male attention - provided first by a pair of gabbling prodders to a fully-fledged regression by a French man to a cro magnon state. And back again - luckily.

What defines so much of this modern dance making and is true of Babel is the number of cross-fertilisations between artists happening now - pulling off something together that's bigger than a solo creator could manage. Cherkaoui collaborated with Damien Jalet on the movement and on the design with Antony Gormley. In the past he's also worked with Akram Khan and the drumming Shaolin monks.

It is this willingness to work across artistic boundaries that keeps these works surprising. And at times indulgent. With so much excitement about such collaborations there's always the risk of a lack of focus and editing that was evident here. A swift prune of 20 minutes of repetitive action, such as the relentlessly spinning boxes (we get it, language can put you in a spin!) would have made for a tighter, more immediate work.

The final image of Babel is a motley row of dancers attempting a kind of lunar walk with entwined legs - totteringly, hesitantly they stagger towards the audience - a slow motion wave that doesn't quite break. A beautiful final image then for our struggle to connect and the near impossible tasks of creative collaboration itself.

Gnosis - Akram Khan, Sadler's Wells 27th April 2010

2010-04-28T00:40:00.000-07:00

Does it really matter if we don't read the programme notes for Akram Khan's new ballet, Gnosis - the story of Queen Gandhari, a character from the Mahabharata?

What's the point in scrutinising explanations how Duryodhana (Khan) is raised from a child to man under the guidance of his blindfolded mother (Yoshie Sunahata), who uses her long white stick to stir her son's growth like a magical spoon? Why should we, when we are so transfixed by the physical hum of their lunges, lace-like hand work and rhythm as their feet pad a counterpoint to drum, cello and tabla? To watch Khan dance is to be bewitched in the moment.

Gnosis too was bewitched by accident and misfortune as Khan explains softly in the evening's first half - a master class in Kathak's improvisation and versatility - north India's spinning, stop-start dance form. Its hand gestures can be mirrored by the head and its dramatic twists and turns slot like tumbrels in a lock to the beats of a drum.

The work was to be premiered in November 2009 but a shoulder injury put pay to that, and further attempts at a premier seemed jinxed. So it was a happy and enthusiastic audience who cheered at last night's show.

But only after the stunned silence at the end. For we had just witnessed the transformation Khan's head, upper body and arms into an emanation of fire.

The Look of Love - Tom Ford's A Single Man

2010-01-08T10:21:00.000-08:00

If George (Colin Firth) and his lover Jim (Matthew Goode) - in Tom Ford’s artful, dream-like film - had been living in Southern California in 2007 rather than 1961, they could have got married. Today, with the passing of Proposition 8 by the Californian Supreme Court - the day after President Obama’s election - as it was reaffirmed that only those with vaginas can wed the posessors of penises, it is now no longer possible.

I mention this as the film’s emotional kick occurs when George and his long term friend and fellow Brit ex-pat, Charley (Julianne Moore) fall giddy and flirtatious onto her shag-piled floor. ‘Don’t you ever miss this?... Having a real relationship and kids?’ asks Charley. George, appalled, replies, ‘I had Jim’. ‘I mean a real relationship,’ insists Charley, drunkenly pouring acid on those freshly tossed rocks. Hardly a surprise then that George feels suicidal. If only he and Jim could have married, Charley might have understood. Afterall it would have been his husband who had died in the car crash after sixteen happy years together. Who’d have imagined fashion designer and fragrance man Mr Ford would be making such a topical political point in his first ever movie?

Of course it’s much easier to watch this film in a state of wide-eyed stupor than as a piece of hot political polemic. Try and name a more languorous, seductive and richly detailed film? Ford borrows visual motifs from Blue Velvet-era David Lynch – George’s slo-mo car shot driving past his neighbour’s daughter hopping on the sidewalk; the film stock flipping between grainy and sharp and the dizzying shifts between sepia to rich colour. With this his first feature Ford is a kid in a sweet shop with all this technical wizardry at his finger tips. Gee, I wonder what this button does? he’s asking. All the while Abel Korzeniowski’s hypnotic score soars around us like a turbulant sea in a dream occasionally drowned out by a pounding heart.

George and Jim had been living in Edenic bliss before Jim’s untimely car accident. As if to underline their love and George’s overwhelming grief, two sensationally beautiful young men, Kenny (Nichoas Hoult), a student at George’s college where he teaches English, and Carlos (Jon Kortajarena) a lean street hustler, in turn attempt to seduce him. It’s tough work being the hero of a Tom Ford movie, obviously. Yet George is like a vegetarian at a spit roast. His heart just isn’t in it. What’s left of it.

Not surprisingly George and Charley’s homes are peans to mid-century modern Californian luxury. Is that Slim Aarons taking pitctures next door? But more than this their surfaces, vases and wooden panelling are caressed by a sweeping camera making them worthy for our veneration. How we’d all love to possess the keys to George’s glass and dark wood house with its impeccable lineage - it was designed by John Lautner, Frank Lloyd Wright's pupil. But, of course.

Yet the loss at the heart of this seductive film played out with compelling conviction by Firth, give it a surprising weight. All played out in a house to die for.

Knight doesn't take Queen: Endgame, Duchess Theatre

2009-12-02T02:41:00.000-08:00

Is musical theatre really the panacea for these uncertain times? For the West End is currently taken with the plays of Samuel Beckett, that arch-miserabilist modernist. Just as the recent production of Waiting for Godot closed at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, Endgame opened at the Duchess, while Godot is about to return, re-cast, due to audience demand. And the actors in these productions - Mark Rylance, Simon McBurney, Patrick Stewart, Miriam Margoyles, Ian McKellan and Tom Hickey, are stellar names.

Perhaps our collective thinking goes something like this - the world is going to the dogs, but it hasn't quite reached the inertia, despairing and hand-wringing of Beckett's theatrical vision. The relief! There's redemption in all this bleakness. Or, as Nell (Miriam Margoyles) would have it in Endgame, 'nothing is funnier than unhappiness', the play's most important line, according to Beckett.

Talking of words, Hamm says, 'I feel a little queer', changed by actor, Patrick Magee to, 'I feel a little strange', with Beckett's approval, but has been returned to its original form in this production. Being surrounded by a joshing gang of sixth form students, I was surprised by their failure to snigger at this. In fact, I can't remember a moment in public in the last twenty years when the word 'queer' didn't cause laughter.

Endgame is an exercises in entropy and hopelessness, and the real world is heading nowhere good fast, but at least we seem less bent on ridiculing gays on our way to oblivion.

Music Matters - Kreutzer Sonata, Gate Theatre, Notting Hill

2009-11-20T01:49:00.000-08:00

The Kreutzer Sonata - adaptated by Nancy Harris from Tolstoy's novella - has a man, Posdneyshev (Hilton McRae), talking to us on a train about his relationship with his wife. He is a complex figure - part Ancient Mariner to the audience's wedding guest, who, we learn, was tossed on a sea of jealous fantasies about his beautiful wife's suspected, but unconfirmed, affair with a dashing violinist.

Posdneyshev is both a radical and a misogynist, who attempts to lure us with his man-to-man frankness on the condition of women (this being late 19th century Russia, he's no proto-feminist). A man in the audience laughed during last night's performance at the description of the wife as smelling like a peach so overripe she had the stench of a whore. Which is proof positive how some people have ended up in the 21st Century without stopping in the 20th at all. Posdneyshev's jealousy is Othello-like in his blind belief in the truth of the affair. He can inspire himself to murder without even needing an Iago.

The apparent affair between the piano-playing wife and fiddler is presented behind a lighted scrim, where the wife and her 'lover' perform snippets of the great Beethoven violin sonata, dramatising Posdneyshev's monologue. They supply a suitable accompaniment, as the sonata's first movement is all crescendi and rasping double-stops, perfect for his descent into murderous rage. It's gut wrenching stuff and powerfully dramatic.

The scrim reminded me how the original Kreutzer Sonata, the concerto-like piece in A major for piano and violin from 1803 by Beethoven, has become as layered with meanings and associations as a sunken ship. Premiered by George Bridgetower, the mixed race, 'mulatto' violinist, Beethoven's original dedication to him was revoked in a fit of anger after Bridgetower insulted a woman not knowing she was the great composer's friend. Perhaps this subtext of rivalry between a composer and a musician inspired Tolstoy's story. The sonata's name comes from Rodolphe Kreutzer, a famous French violinist at the time, who was awarded the dedication instead, although he never performed the piece and thought it unplayable.

Another nail in the coffin of art's chances of ever outflanking fact.

Limen, world premier, Wayne McGregor, Royal Ballet

2009-11-06T03:52:00.000-08:00

Is Wayne McGregor the dance-maker Michael Clark would have been if his career hadn't been stalled by drugs? I ask this because in McGregor's latest work, Limon, which had its world premier on Tuesday at the Opera House, the crack team of the Royal's first rank - Leanne Benjamin, Yuhui Choe (a new Miyako Yoshida?), Eric Underwood and Edward Watson - were given the thrusting hips, off balance precision and stop-start robotic movement which are pure Clark.

Yet, McGregor's aesthetic is to see his dancers as cells in some larger computer hard drive or as refined human machines given off-centre movements. His art is as much about collaborations with hi-tech scientists, composers and artists as it is about dance. And his choreography dismantles a classically trained dancer's urge to create pleasing physical lines with her body. Whereas for Clark it's about stretching ballet's refinement until it breaks - a butterfly in a vice. His work is often danced to the blasting rock of The Fall or Lou Reed. Either way, their effects are similar.

It's interesting to note that Clark's training was classical, while McGregor's was contemporary. Somehow they've found a similar dance language that straddles the middle ground. Without the lost years of Clark's troubled life, McGregor - who doesn't even drink coffee - is building a huge catalogue of work punctuated with ground-breaking collaborations. How much more could Clark have given the world without drugs? Though it's good to see him at the top of his game with his recent new work seen in Edinburgh and London.

Back to Limen - with Moritz Junge's neon bright costumes, Lucy Carter's impressive colour block lighting with artist Tatsuo Miyajima's video and set design, there's an overload of visual pleasure too. It's like Clark, minus the dark, troubled heart. A word to McGregor - with the lighted scrim at the start and the darkened lit curtain at the end - don't let your high-concept pyrotechnics push the dance to the wings. It's what we've really come to see.

Diamond Geezer, Jewels, Paris Opera Ballet, 1/11/09

2009-11-02T13:46:00.001-08:00

During his bravura solo in the final 'Diamonds' section of Jewels (or, Joyaux, as we are in France), Karl Paquette executed pirouettes of such technical mastery, we cheered. As he span on his right leg in precise gyrations with his left leg at 90 degrees, he achieved the as before unseen feat (by this member of the audience anyway), of facing each corner of the stage by turn. It was if there was an imaginary audience in the wings and upstage who had to see this brilliance for themselves as his body whiplashed towards each position, a precise and unstoppable blond Dervish.

An accolade then to the excellence of Paris Opera Ballet’s roster of male talent that Paquette hasn’t yet earnt the top title of etoile (star). What possible entry requirement could a dancer such as he be lacking? Wings?

Balanchine’s Jewels fits the French national company like Cartier on Princess Grace. Moreover, their elegant sets and costumes are by Christian Lacroix. Which begs the question, why does our Royal Ballet have to put up with those lumpen original costumes in their production of Jewels which the Balanchine Trust insist upon them wearing like a priggish aunt?

Rhapsody Fantaisie, World Premier, Morphoses, Sadler's Wells Friday 23/10

2009-10-26T04:06:00.000-07:00

When six couples come on stage at the start of Christopher Wheeldon's Rhapsody Fantasisie, it is an arresting an image as anything Wheeldon has choreographed before. The women were carried horizontally from the wings like human crosses over the stage. In vermilion jersey dresses and blunt-edged harem pants on the men, Mary Louise Geiger's cold lighting seemed to turn the dancer’s skin tones to a deathly pallor against the bright reds of their costumes (designed by Calvin Klein's Francisco Costa). If these were sentinels of the underworld, or ghosts perhaps, Wheeldon's characteristically individual choreography gave them the death-mocking vivacity of pulsing blood.

It is Wheeldon's arrangement of his dancers in intricate tableaux mixing refined with blunt and even perverse shapes that keeps us engaged. Similarly his smaller couplings are full of the unexpected. When Wendy Whelan and Andrew Crawford enter for their pas de deux, Whelan's head is cupped in Crawford's hand and is gently pushed like a ball, where it bounces back up and down, the figure is repeated back with Crawford’s head. This interplay, both odd and delightful, is mirrored by Rubinal Pronk’s entrance where is partner’s head seems to bounce on his puffed up chest a movement he mirrors on hers. These moments are full of play and seem to say that, no matter how serious or high art the enterprise, just below the surface is a delight in movement where bodies can bounce off one another like helium-filled balloons. Pronk, by the way, is a man to watch, a Dutch dancer of feral grace whose body is closer to liquid mercury than flesh and bone.

Fancisco Costa's costumes and artist Hugo Dalton’s projected sketches of dancer’s faces, bodies and hands are collaborations which Morphoses celebrates, harking back to the great Ballet Russes and Diaghilev’s explosive melding of avant garde musical and artistic talent. It’s impossible to imagine such combinations today causing the controversies of hundred years ago. In fact, there is something so slick and seductive about Wheeldon’s work and his creative partners, that he’s thus far producing a chic aesthetic that satisfies the super-refined tastes of the New York and London balletomanes. As a dance populariser, a role which he'd like to claim, we'll just have to wait. But as one of the aforementioned balletomanes, he needn't hurry.

Mother's milk. Mrs Klein, Almeida Theatre

2009-10-23T00:56:00.000-07:00

When Melanie Klein (Clare Higgins) accuses her daughter, Melitta (Zoe Waites), of being a ‘bad clinician’, the audience gasped during last night’s opening of Nicolas Wright’s ‘Mrs Klein’ at the Almeida theatre. Perhaps their horror was imagining themselves chastised by the very woman whose theories on infant development form the bedrock of their own working practice? The Almeida is a stone's throw from the consulting rooms of Hampstead, after all. Indeed the audience, in this small, claustrophobic theatre space became a Greek chorus to the emotional dance of death played out on the stage. Loud coughing accompanied Klein’s violent attack on her daughter, as she threw wine in Melitta’s face and stuffed a torn letter in her mouth: a gross parody of maternal feeding. It seemed as if Melanie Klein was choking the rest of us too.

This is the power of Wright’s play in this stellar production directed by Thea Sharrock - an exploration of the complex dynamics between Klein, her daughter and Paula, a Jewish refugee German analyst seeking both work and to become Klein’s patient: a lost child in search of her mother. She also acts as audience, referee and protagonist in the primitive battles between mother and daughter whose persecutory routines become murderous against the backdrop of Hans’ recent death, Klein’s son.

Clare Higgins’ Klein, whose bad-breast antics would screw the resolve of any infant to shove shit in her face, is pitch perfect. Our ambivalence shifts uneasily between sympathy for this, a bereaved woman, and repulsion that Klein abused both her own children by forcing them into analysis with her (the name Melitta, ‘little Melanie’ flags up Klein’s narcissism like a storm warning). And yet, this very abuse of her role as mother allowed Klein to theorise early attachment giving us a model of human development that enriches psychodynamic and analytic practice today.

Our ability to manage these discords at once is the challenge Klein’s work sets out for us. Can we truly hold both good and bad in the same object? Can we accept Klein's theories while despising her methodology? Our strangulated gasps during the performance, followed by wild applause at the play’s end mysteriously symbolised Klein’s own theories of integration. And we left the theatre enriched.

Mrs Klein runs until December 5th at the Almeida theatre, N1

The Bigger Story

2009-10-12T02:17:00.000-07:00

In the Telegraph Matt Lucas and Kevin McGee were once 'married'; while in the Mirror they were married without the inverted commas. In other newspapers and websites they were 'ex-partners' - which could have just meant they were no longer in business together.

When Boyzone's Stephen Gately died on Saturday after a history of depression, suicidal thoughts and possible addiction to anti-depressants, we are left wondering how his story may conclude after tomorrow's post mortem. An accidental overdose seems likely.

Gately was found by his, 'partner' (in the Telegraph) but who the Mail Online calls 'husband', for he and Andrew Cowles had a civil union in 2006. This may or may not mean they were 'married' according to where you read this story. Two things are certain, Gately's Catholic parents didn't attend his wedding/civil union or accept his sexuality.

There's surely a link between this slippery use of language and the mental health aspects of these two tragic stories. Research among young gays in the States suggests those rejected by their families are nine times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers. In the UK which has offered civil unions for gays, but not in the same language as straight marriage exposes the fault lines of our inability to accept full equivalence to gay relationships. Gays in civil unions do not have the same status and approval as men and women who marry. How odd does the phrase, 'heterosexuals who 'marry'' seem when we add those suspicious, wary, disapproving inverted commas?

Our newspapers' awkward inability to name exactly who is who and what is what shows us how far we still need to go before gays and straights enjoy the same privileges. And until we do, the statistically greater chance of addiction and even suicide will carry on blighting the lives of gay people.

Queuing for Heaven

2009-09-08T10:58:00.000-07:00

To Prom is to wait in a bus queue knowing several world-class orchestras will come along in quick succession. Hop on the right one and your journey will be more thrilling than a trip along the Bayswater Road.

This summer I hitched rides with the Eastern-West Divan orchestra playing Fidelio; The Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment with a semi-staged Glyndbourne production of Purcell's The Fairy Queen; London Symphony Orchestra playing Debussy and Mozart and the Budapest Festival Orchestra performing Prokoviev and Bartok.

Each journey cost a mere £5 for which you may be standing but within a baton-length of the action. Proming has the intimacy of a sauna with music straight from of heaven.

The stand-out concert was the Eastern-West Divan orchestra formed by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said who created a cynic-defying band of young Palestinian and Israeli musicians. For Barenboim (Said died several years ago) the orchestra stands against 'ignorance' rather than 'for peace'.

His from-the-heart speech on the history and meaning of the orchestra while noting the bravery that many players had shown in order to be in the orchestra at all - defying family and community resistance to their joining. The concert programme: Beethoven's sole opera, Fidelio. This was the last performance for the orchestra this year (resulting in awkward, tearful, hugs and farewells among the players on the Albert Hall's stage) and an apt billing - love conquers oppressive brutality. Indeed, art as the clarion blast of hope.

My Big Gay Icon

2009-07-26T11:51:00.000-07:00

The most interesting thing about the Gay Icons exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery isn't the absence of William Shakespeare (the 'icons' have to be in photographs, so Will didn't stand a chance), Oscar Wilde, Kylie Minogue or even Judy Garland, it's the diversity on offer. Even if Elton John's choice of Graham Taylor (manager of Watford FC) is the most perverse thing in the room (was Taylor gay? or maybe he soothed the pop star after his car-crash marriage to Renate Blauel?).

The images themslves are often banal - though Lily Savage's embittered fag-filled face on Blackpool pier is priceless - the choices odd and sometimes obscure, and yet, the pleasure of spending an hour and half in the company of men and women, gay and straight, black and white, who have stood against the tide of prejudice and hatred lifted my spirits.

For those, like the Observer's Barbara Ellen, who bemoan the lack of trash pop tarlets in the line-up as suitable inspiration for a youngster coming out from a provincial town I say, check out history. Metropolitan gay youngsters may have a dizzy few years on a diet of plastic pop - but losing it bars and clubs was never the road to liberation. It was won on the streets, against the odds and in people's faces. It's like suggesting the Suffragettes would have been more effective by attending the music hall rather than chaining themselves to railings. The word 'icon' has been cheapened, yet if its sense of a venerated image isn't to be lost then the likes of Nelson Mandela, Bessy Smith, Peter Tatchell and, even Lily Savage are the best torch bearers for tomorrow's gay youth.

By the bye, my 'gay icons' in no particular order are: John the Baptist (Christianity's matre d'), Leigh Bowery, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Buddha, puff pastry, things that are shiny and move (see also disco balls/Christmas), bubble wrap and Jean Genet.

Carlos Acosta's flights of fancy

2009-07-25T14:17:00.000-07:00

Does Carlos Acosta know when he's hamming it up? I ask the question after seeing his latest '...and guests' performance last night at the Coliseum. If he does,

he keeps it to himself, which is wise for when he and his three male chums make macho whoopy in the gloaming of Plisetsi's 1973 Canto Vital, a snigger or knowing wink would have had the audience in stitches. The conceit of four near-naked youths shooting arrows, clambering over one another, miming drumming and generally making frolicsome without eroticism looks daft. So daft, I had to look away.

Though the ladies in the audience seemed to love it. Which begs the question, is Acosta presenting a kind of high art Chippendales meat-fest? By the amount of male flesh on display including the raunchy unwrapping of Othello's loin cloth in the pas de deux of that name leaves me in little doubt.

And why not? Traditionally ballet's jewels - the glittering expose groins and buttocks of ballerina's have been the eye-arresting consolation for the reluctant husbands and partners of these women. At last the girls have something to ogle beyond the overstuff pouches of the male stars. In last night's series of ballets torsos were only covered in the final Spanish inflected piece, Majismo before finally being flung off again in the on-stage/backstage coda.

Tune! The Takacs Quartet, Sunday 3rd May 2009 , Brighton Festival

2009-05-05T02:45:00.000-07:00

To play a Haydn string quartet followed by one by Bartok just five minutes later, requires the kind of technique over which many string quartets will stumble, but the fall might be a valiant one all the same. The fact that the Takacs played the Bartok C major no 4 - a quartet that requires a tonal understanding at odds (ie.chromaticism) with regular modalities and technical prowess (the central movement is played pizzicato through the full range of dynamics) with greater ease and facility than the classical Haydn (his late F Major op 77 from 1799) is credit to their phenomenal skill and the fact that the quartet has been going since 1975 (albeit with several team changes and one death).

TheTakacs may now be an international band of musicians, yet the Hungarian folk/classical tradition is embodied by them. The Bartok here was as fresh as a first performance might be imagined in 1927.

If this quartet were a team of TV chefs - they'd have made a passable light sponge followed by an exemplary and technically advanced souffle full of exotic and delicious stuff.

Unfortunately, I had a train to catch and missed the second half performance of Schumann's String Quartet in A major Op. 41 No. 3. What a pity as the Takacs are part of the worthy forces pushing Schumann's chamber music back into the spotlight after his glory days in the late nineteenth century where his chamber music was seen as an early herald towards Brahms.

Haydn String Quartet in F major Op. 77 No. 2

Bartok String Quartet in C major, No. 4
Schumann , String Quartet in A major Op. 41 No. 3 (missed)

Dusty Bin, Les Ballets C de la B's Ashes, Brighton Corn Exchange 2nd Mary 09

2009-05-04T13:04:00.000-07:00

Ghent-based dance collective, C de la B's new work Ashes, choreographed by Koen Augustijnen was billed as one of the opening highlights of Brighton's 09 festival (curated this year by sculptor Anish Kapoor).

This was no highlight. A bunch survivors of some un-named catastrophe slowly moved from alienated separation to a kind of wave-like unity with a bit of trampolining on the side. Surely this kind of dirge would be more suitable at the end of an arts festival? Perhaps one that had incurred some kind of disaster like the ferry connection to the continent being down. In which case we wouldn't have to see it at all. That would be a highlight.

Perversely, Augustijnen chose coluratura Handel arias to accompany his hokum post apocalypse choreography (sung by the singularly good counter tenor Steve Dugardin and soprano Irene Carpentie). Handel's ouevre for contemporary dance was ambushed by American Mark Morris thirty years ago, and anyone bold or foolish enough to make a move on this music will risk instant comparison with a master.

While Morris's moves are humane, witty and moving; Augustijnen's are lumpen, acrobatic and crude. Noted the use of the roof-like trampoline in Ashes was a welcome distraction from the Bedlam below. Aside: why is repeatedly walking into immovable objects, usually walls, such a trope in so much contemporary dance? It's a cartoonish view of existential frustration. Pina Bausch can get away with this stuff, but then she had her dancers walk into walls in the 1970s. Les Ballets C de la B are still struggling to find the exit in 2009.

I assume Handel was chosen for the marked contrast between the soaring beauty of his baroque sonorites and the flailing movements of the alienated folk below - a point that's made in the first five minutes. It's a point that's made again and again for the next hour and a half. The real star of the show is a young timpanist who sashays between marimba and timpani (incuding gongs and bowed cymbals) with a grace facility patently lacking in the choreography below, which reminded me that the great Diamanda Galas was playing next door and we were stuck in here.

Revolutionary Road - Madame de Sade, Donmar West End 9/04/09

2009-04-10T00:04:00.000-07:00

Madame De Sade is a play in which nothing happens - three times over. Three acts where the real action - the Marquis' orgiastic whipping frenzies and bloody splatter-fests - are only divulged with keening pathos by M. de Sade (Rosamund Pike) and with coquettish exuberance by the Contesse de Saint-Foid (Frances Barber). The juicy stuff happens off-stage. Which is a pity.

The play's main protagonists invert the usual moral frame - where the Marquis's brutal sexual transgressions are held in holy esteem by his wife, sister-in-law and de Saint-Foid (a kind of 18th Century whipped up Jilly Cooper), while his mother-in-law, Madame de Montreil (Judi Dench) doggedly tries to protect her daughters from the tsunami of sexual violence and scandal. Yet she alone becomes mired with the play's true moral repugnance by prolonging the Marquis's imprisonment through her own duplicity. She is the only one deserving our disgust apparently.

Of course, this unholy tale is spun against the backdrop of revolutionary France, where the ancien regime is crumbling under the weight of its corruption and vanity like a vertiginous powdered wig encrusted with acres of lice-riddled lard. The implication being that the Marquis's transgressions are so abhorrent to the social order as his gloves-off brutality holds an unshaking mirror to the order's own corruption. It's a neat trick and one Freud would call 'projection'.

But Madame de Sade isn't a good play. Not enough happens and there's far too much declamation, like a long-winded speech night at the Women's Institute. But, it is a very interesting cultural artifact. Written in 1965 just before the emergence of the gay liberation movement, by the troubled and sexually repressed gay Japanese artist, Yukio Mishima, the play bubbles with the thrill of transgression. A society which 'projects' its anxiety, horror, disgust and violence into the body of a polymorphously perverse libertine writer, De Sade must have felt uncannily familiar for Mishima, who committed ritual suicide in 1970.

Madame de Sade is a part of a glorious, glittering, and now, mostly defunct, pantheon of gay literature where the prostitute, outlaw, thief and murderer are transformed into figures of reverence. I'm especially thinking of the work of Jean Genet, Joe Orton and John Rechy. Their idea of celebrating the outsider -wearing the hurled abuse of straight society as a crown of glory was an important, and necessary step to sexual emancipation. It may seem tired and hackneyed now, but it really was revolutionary then.

Pond life - American Ballet Theater, opening night Swan Lake 25/03/09

2009-03-26T00:38:00.001-07:00

How does Swan Lake keep us coming back for more? It's a cheese-fest. Von Rothbart is a malicious owlish no-mark from the 'he's-behind-you!' school of scary. Prince Siegfried is a dreamy mummy's boy unable to fire his cross bow at the pretty swan lady, the wuss, and the courtly dances have the hackneyed feel of a 'culture night' on a school trip to Budapest. Even Tchaikovsky's magical score, which can soar with heart-stopping transcendent melody, also slips at times into oom-pa-pa dirge. Those pesky court dances again.

In last night's opening of American Ballet Theater's version of the old warhorse, matters were further hampered by Zack Brown's costume designs which had the gawdy feel of a Disney Paris's Main Street party. Electric blue, bright purple and scarlet fail in fussy bustled dresses to suggest anything other than a five-year-old's colouring book. Yet Brown's sets, for a touring piece, had the weight and heft of a more permanent production, suggesting grandeur through scale. Though the attempted transcendence of Odette and Siegried's reunion in death, as the couple were magically reunited in the heart of a rising sun, was let down by a creased backdrop that could have done with a jolly good iron.

And yet, and yet... the moment Siegried (David Hallberg) was padding through the forest to the lake's edge - as scary with this cross bow as a toddler with a stick - Odette (Michele Wiles) appears in full flight swan mode among the craggy trees and dry ice - I was holding my breath. The cheese had turned to liquid gold in a way that special alchemical way only classical ballet seems to manage. Wiles's limpid arms, graceful in their wing-like action as a pair of sinuous snakes jutting from her shoulders; her poised legato balances, for in that magical realm she inhabits all the clocks have somehow stopped; her vulnerability and thwarted strength were conjured with limpid precision. We'd left Disney far behind and had awoken, where exactly? It felt like heaven.

American Ballet Theater's Swan Lake turns up the volume on all the signifiers of the chocolate box, yet somehow knows that you can't break this galumphing warhorse no matter how gawdy your painted sunsets. There is a confidence and thrust in their dancing that makes some European classical companies look plodding. From Von Rothbart's (Marcelo Gomes) audacious seduction of international princesses, like a playboy on Viagra, to the military precision of the corps de ballet's swan drills, we were in the hands of a superb company who knows to its very toes that even the stinkiest cheese can taste sublime.

Signifying Nothing - premier of Maliphant's Eonnagata, 26 Feb 09

2009-02-26T23:18:00.000-08:00

As Sylvie Guillem swept onto the stage of Sadler's Wells last night enclouded in a billowing crimson opera gown designed by Alexander Mcqueen, expectations were as high as any I've felt in the theatre. Yet here was one of ballet's great stars, a woman whose body of sprung steel enables a technique of dizzying virtuosity doing the one thing she should never do in front of an audience, she opened her mouth and... spoke. Guillem's halting English and rococco words concerning an obscure French hermaphrodite, Chevalier d'Eon, punctured our expectations as swiftly as a harpoon through a Zepellin. We never recovered from the blow.

This interminable performance of stilted set pieces, stop-start ideas and willful obscurantism gave off the stale air of an enclosed rehearsal studio where ideas were smothered at birth like unloved babes. What on earth were they all thinking? The 'dream team' of Lepage, Maliphant and Guillem became less than the sum of their parts as if their collective talents pooled became de-oxygenated sludge. Yes, the sight of Guillem using the heel of sword to write a table-top letter was pleasingly eye-catching in a cartoonish way and lighting director, Michael Hulls can be relied upon to create mesmerising lighting effects in which, in this work the performers ambled through rather than danced. And Lepage's simple 'tables as prop' concept was ingenious, as these everyday objects became doors, hiding spaces, walls, a stage, mirror or boat by their easy inversions and stackings.

But McQueen's costumes were the only real stars on last night's stage. The tricky balancing between historical reference and allowing dancers to move easily has tripped up many a ballet costumerier with far more experience than this catwalk king. Yet his crinolines, kimonos, tulled capes and skirted gilets floated and scooped the air with a pleasing lightness sadly brought swiftly back to earth by the stultifying ponderousness in the rest of the production.