Sola scriptura?

This week on CW, Dolan Cummings explores what the Hebrew Bible really says about homosexuality, abortion and other contemporary moral issues, and asks who has the right to interpret scripture anyway, in a review of The Bible Now, by Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky. Meanwhile on the London stage, Timandra Harkness reviews Der Rosenkavalier at the ENO, and Miriam Gillinson reviews Improbable’s The Devil and Mister Punch at the Barbican and Stefan Golaszewski’s Sex with a Stranger at Trafagar Studios.

10 February 2012

Absurdly amusing kisses

Sex With a Stranger, Trafalgar Studios, London

Tovey and Winstone’s characters look like they long to be elsewhere. Tovey’s eyes dart about anxiously, constantly searching for something or someone else. Grace’s screeching laughter is far from a thing of a joy. And, even when the two kiss, it feels like they’re grappling about for a connection they cannot find.

A deliciously grotesque musical medley

The Devil and Mister Punch, Barbican, London

A puppet with a penis for a head lurches, lazily, towards Punch. It’s an absurd image, like a Dali painting that’s learned to walk, but it is affecting and frightening too. Puppets might not have souls but, by God, do some of them look evil.

The dangerous book for women and men

The Bible Now, by Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky (Oxford University Press, 2011)

The efforts of two critical Bible scholars to bring their expertise to bear on contemporary debates in which the authority of the Bible is regularly invoked or assumed are undermined by their haughty dismissal of anyone else who ‘feels qualified to interpret the scriptures’ without sharing the authors’ learning, and in particular their knowledge of Hebrew

‘How can this come to pass?’

Der Rosenkavalier, ENO, Coliseum, London

If you wanted to take Rosenkavalier at face value as a tale of young love you could, just about, with eyes half shut. But with eyes wide open the tragedy of the Marschallin, engineering the very abandonment she foretold, adds depth to the story.

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.