Thatcher on stage, London International Mime Festival and war photography by Don McCullin
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It isn’t only the transformation of this couple’s physical appearance that causes the breath to catch in one’s throat. This switch from sprightly to stumbling is painful enough – but it is the change in the way these two communicate that really impresses.
London theatre, multiculturalism and the symphony
If we subscribe to the belief that the symphony is the ultimate symbol of classical music generally, the highest, purest classical form, it follows pretty quickly that the best of classical music is firmly confined to the past. Pushing so hard to expand the cultural reach of mainstream symphonic tradition is ultimately a deeply conservative thing to do.
Democracy, tolerance and equality are ‘core values’ that are frequently cited as the cornerstones of a British way of life, but as Rattansi points out, these values are vague, simplistic and not exclusive to Britain, and - especially historically speaking - have not always acted as the uniting undercurrent of British life.
