The Salterton Arts Review 2025 Countdown
It’s been another jam-packed year here at the Salterton Arts Review. Join me as we review a few highlights and reminisce about the year that was. It’s the 2025 countdown!
The 2025 Countdown: A Year in Review
2025. What a year! A challenging one in many ways on the personal front, which I won’t go into here. But nonetheless a year full of things that I love, like art and theatre and travel, unexpected moments and new discoveries. I’ve continued to push my theatre boundaries, both in terms of some of the performances I’ve seen (this one is a good example), and in terms of trying out new theatres in London. In 2025 I added Theatro Technis, Sadler’s Wells East, the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, Greenwich Theatre, and more, to my mental map of London. I also got to some of the museums I’ve had on my (literal) list for years, including Queer Britain, Dr Johnson’s House, and the Wimbledon Windmill Museum.
In putting together this countdown, I looked back over the year, and tried to balance the different types of experience that have made 2025 special. There’s a little bit of travel, some theatre and performance, and art. They aren’t necessarily the things I gave the highest ratings to at the time, but the ones that have stuck with me since, the ones I keep coming back to mentally.
As I look ahead to 2026, I hope I will continue to have the same opportunities. To spend my spare time at places that inspire me. To travel, and broaden my horizons. Some very memorable experiences didn’t make the list this year, like a cross-cultural conversation powered by translation apps, or my longest walk yet following a lost London river. I treasure them all, and look forward to more of them.
5. Rome Museum, Grenada
The fifth entry on our list is definitely one that’s here because of its emotional resonance rather than any other, more officially museological, qualities. Rome Museum is a place I found out about by chance while visiting Grenada earlier this year. It sounded too curious to pass up, and so we incorporated it into an excursion where we had hired a taxi for the day. Our driver, a local, hadn’t heard of Rome Museum, and so we navigated there partly by Google Maps and partly by asking passers-by where “the museum” was.
When we arrived, were were momentarily disappointed, as Rome Museum didn’t seem to be open. But the sister of founder Joseph Rome came out after a minute or two to show us around. It probably wasn’t the same tour we would have had from Mr. Rome himself – our host was much more interested in establishing whether the Urban Geographer and I had ‘a good marriage’ – but it was a unique and genuine connection.
Unique and genuine are also adjectives I would apply to the museum. Mr. Rome, having seen huge change within his lifetime, collects objects that have fallen out of daily use in his community. On many of them he has written labels explaining their use, and their meaning to local people. The outdoor, humid conditions aren’t at all conducive to keeping the objects in pristine condition, but I was impressed by Mr. Rome’s urge to preserve and document his community’s heritage.
This experience was also a good example of how getting an idea into my head sometimes leads to unexpected results. Prior to coming to Grenada, I had no idea this museum existed. But once I did, I was on a mission to see it. And that mission took me to a place I never would have seen otherwise, to meet people I never would have met. On my birthday, no less: a perfect gift to myself!
4. Hamstrung – The Glitch
Next up in our 2025 countdown is Hamstrung, by George Rennie, which I saw at The Glitch. I thought the premise – a one-man version of Hamlet told from the perspective of Yorick (AKA the skull) was extremely clever. Rennie reworks and subverts different scenes as Yorick meddles and japes and brings about many of the play’s most memorable moments. Along the way, he begins to realise that all is maybe not what it seems, and that something may in fact be very wrong.
Hamstrung is a work that strikes a perfect balance between humour and emotion. It isn’t long, and it’s just Rennie and the audience, but it’s very effective. Reading more about it after the fact, I learned that the show came about as a means for Rennie to reengage with theatre on his own terms. He’s poured a lot of himself into Hamstrung, and it shows.
This isn’t even the only one-person show I saw this year based on Hamlet. There was also Crownless at Voila! Theatre Festival. I do like these small, creative riffs on well-known Shakespearean works. A lot of the Bard’s plays are versatile, but there’s only so much you can do with the originals. A gender-swap here, a bit of celebrity casting there, transposing a story into a new setting. Once I’ve seen a few versions, I struggle to summon the same emotions each time. But digging into these small corners of texts continues to be endlessly fascinating.
3. Noah Davis – The Barbican
This is the only art exhibition that’s on the list for my 2025 countdown. That isn’t to say I didn’t see good art and exhibitions this year, because I did. But out of all of them, this one really stuck with me. Noah Davis was a retrospective of work by this American artist, who died of cancer aged 32 in 2015. It was an excellently-curated exhibition which showed the depth and breadth of Davis’s work. He refused to be pigeonholed into one style, or to fulfil the expectations of a White gaze, and instead painted works that ranged from abstract to dreamlike to realist, painting joy and broken promises and hope.
Experiencing Davis’s work for the first time was inspirational. As was reading about his efforts in his community. It’s a shame I’ll never have the chance to visit his Underground Museum (which closed in 2022). And that David never got beyond a few early collaborations with other institutions. His approach to painting, and to art, was so insightful and multi-faceted, he would surely have had a strong perspective on current events in the US.
This was also just a really good exhibition. The selection of works, the flow, the information provided, all excellent. Despite being an exhibition of (almost) all paintings, it felt varied and engaging. I left wanting more, which is no mean feat in the large Barbican space. The curators brought Davis to a new audience with a clear vision and without diluting who he was as an artist and a person.
2. The Rite of Spring – The Southbank Centre
We’re at the penultimate entry now. And, like Noah Davis, this is another one that’s on the list because of how excited I felt after seeing it. I like a bit of Stravinsky, and I also like a bit of MimeLondon. This is the format the former London International Mime Festival has taken in recent years. It’s more focused on workshops and other events for artists, but still includes a couple of productions each year. In 2025 I also saw Moby Dick by Plexus Polaire, and Heka by Gandini Juggling.
The Rite of Spring came to us courtesy of Italian company Dewey Dell. It takes Stravinsky’s famously shocking 1913 work, and manages to make something entirely new, yet still avant-garde and somehow shocking, out of it. This was a multi-disciplinary effort: set and lighting by Vito Matera, additional soundscape by Demetrio Castellucci, costumes by Dewey Dell and Guoda Jaruševičiūtė. The setting is a curious insect world, crossed with a performance by Loie Fuller, and, as I said at the time “some sort of cursed Star Trek away-party”. The dancing was a blend of contemporary styles including breakdancing.
I have hardly ever seen an audience as stunned as this one was at the end of The Rite of Spring. We sat there, unsure if it was over, unsure whether to start the applause. And the company let us sit in that uncertainty for what felt like minutes, until some brave soul broke ranks and started clapping. Dewey Dell have retained the avant-garde, animalistic, ritualistic nature of Stravinsky’s original work, and reinterpreted it into something that reaches contemporary audiences on the same emotional level. Really wonderful stuff, and a great example of why these festivals are so important in bringing different perspectives to the London stage.
1. Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry – Le Château de Chantilly
And finally, the top spot on the 2025 countdown. It’s another one that took me away from London, but one which was very much worth the trip. In 2025 the Château de Chantilly, which I had visited once before, staged a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition. They had just finished restoring their most famous manuscript, Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, and put it on display. It’s not been on public display for decades as it’s too fragile, and is unlikely to be exhibited again. Especially like this: the pages showing each month of the year were unmounted and displayed so you could get right up close to them. A history and art nerd’s dream.
The exhibition itself was also well-thought out. The introductory galleries explained the history of the manuscript and how it got into the Chantilly collection. The curators had also gathered all the other examples of devotional works commissioned by the Duc de Berry: truly extraordinary. The excitement built, and the Très Riches Heures felt really special by the time you reached it. The paintings, by the Limbourg Brothers, are absolutely exquisite. No wonder so many of my fellow visitors had brought their own magnifying glasses!
I wrote a very good post about it, if I do say so myself, take a look if you’d like to know more. But suffice it to say this was a special moment. To have realised this exhibition was on, and to have the means and opportunity to visit, was fortuitous. I also got to see more of Chantilly this time around, and to understand more about its history. But to have stood in front of those illuminated pages, taking in each detail, was an experience I won’t soon forget.