Designs for life

This week on CW, Nicky Charlish reviews the exhibition Terence Conran – The Way We Live Now at London’s Design Museum. Charlotte Starkey reviews Braham Murray’s How to Direct a Play, and in London theatre, Miriam Gillinson reviews a revival of Philip Ridley’s The Pitchfork Disney at the Arcola and Matt Trueman reviews Chris Lee’s Shallow Slumber at Soho Theatre.

4 February 2012

The play’s the thing

How to Direct a Play: a Masterclass in Comedy, Tragedy, Farce, Shakespeare, New Plays, Opera, Musicals, by Braham Murray (Oberon Books, 2011)

The book is not a bible in how to direct a play; it is one man’s account of what has, and has not, worked for him – a passionate, dedicated, lived and lively statement of what can happen when theatre is performing powerfully; and Murray believes deeply in the importance of theatre for the world beyond the stage.

A dab hand

Terence Conran – The Way We Live Now, Design Museum, London

The link between science, manufacturing, and the production and development of the day-to-day technology we take for granted, and whose loss we would note very quickly, is not widely recognised. Conran, with his reputation for artistic and profitable practicality as his calling-card, has a vital role in combating two centuries of neglect.

Landmines for the brain

The Pitchfork Disney, Arcola Theatre, London

Bubbling away in this cauldron of emotion and ideas, is the theme of homosexuality and exclusion.  I have never before extracted such a concrete idea from one of Ridley’s plays, but this theme is impossible to ignore in Edward Dick’s clear-headed but head-spinning production.

A knowing bow

The Emperor Jones, directed by Dudley Murphy (1933)

The Emperor Jones is not a great film, and its source play is not a great work of drama, but both are important, and both have small moments of greatness - in the film’s case, mainly through the titanic presence of Robeson subverting some of the well-intended, but ultimately destructive, tendencies of O’Neill’s character portrayal.

Fixing things is Moira’s fix

Shallow Slumber, Soho Theatre, London

Shallow Slumber is no mere in-yer-face exercise. Beneath it are nuanced social points about class and the co-dependence of the care-system and its clients. Not only is Dawn aware of the injustice behind the assumption that she needs a social worker, deep down she knows that, in her case, it’s a fair one.

Reading Margaret Thatcher

Why is Maggie such a current issue in the arts?

Investigating the legacy of Margaret Thatcher may seem, at first, to be a retreat from engaging with modern politics, but I believe exactly the opposite is taking place when contemporary artists turn to her. One way of understanding the present is to interrogate the past.

Watch from an angle

The Trial of Ubu, Hampstead Theatre, London

Certainly, the text is delivered with all the tonal variation of Morse code. Reported back, it is stripped of emotion and, to a certain extent, intention. Punctuation becomes garbled, replaced with a steady, but stuttering, flow of words; pauses are scrapped as they struggle to keep pace; language warps. But do we not learn more from a fingerprint than from the lines on a palm, even though the contours offer less contrast?

McCullin’s War

Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin, Imperial War Museum, London

A key characteristic of the exhibition is the lack of colour photos used by Don McCullin during his career. McCullin said himself, ‘I thought that black and white images in war were much more powerful,’ and his photos reinforce this statement.

A good old fashioned postmodern rom-com

Constellations, Royal Court, London

Payne isn’t conclusively determinist. His characters still act freely, but their freedom is more limited than either would like to believe. Everything here is contingent: every decision, responsive; every happy ending as sweet and brittle as honeycomb.

To what end?

L’Autre, Southbank Centre, London

L’Autre is an advocation of play. Stellato defies the accepted order of things, the one that says square pegs belong in square holes. He encourages us to see with fresh – often quite disbelieving – eyes. At several points, gravity seems to stand back and gift Stellato the floor. He walks a plank that oughtn’t support his weight, until, in a hauntingly tranquil final image, he dissolves into darkness.

Tranquilised gentility

Mundo Paralelo, Southbank Centre, London

Yann Tiersen style piano music twinkles throughout. Gracious courtly bows and dainty curtsies follow each act. Eliza Doolittle at the Embassy Ball was not so mindful of her p’s and q’s.

Lost in a deluge of action

Our New Girl, Bush Theatre, London

Harris throws in just enough sinister hints about this new nanny, and her oddly intimate knowledge of Hazel’s family,  to keep these early encounters fizzing nicely. But despite these Ortonesque overtones, the atmosphere gradually flattens and the over-defined characters, with little room to develop, hit a dead end.

A nice line in feigned ineptitude

Pss Pss, Southbank Centre, London

The ladder, handily placed by a stagehand at the back of the stalls, is hauled through the audience, fast-ducking as it swishes overhead. Placed upside down, apparently unwittingly, it becomes an object so unusual that it is capable of surprising us just as much as them.

A moving magic eye

Haptic and Holistic Strata, Linbury Studio, ROH, London

For long swathes, he stands stationary, but when he moves, each action chimes perfectly with its surroundings. Despite the fact that Umeda could teach Peter Crouch a thing or two about ‘the robot,’ he rejects the virtuosic for the maximum effect. Sometimes its as simple as shifting his weight from one foot to another.

The Master Storyteller

Almodóvar on Almodóvar, by Pedro Almodóvar and Frederic Strauss (Faber and Faber 2006)

Throughout this collection of interviews, which took place of a series of months, Almodóvar exudes a well balanced streak of eccentricity, coupled with a sense of professionalism that is rooted in formality and devotion to his work. He explains in-depth the many disparate influences which inspired his earliest films, from Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe to the varied iconography of popular culture.