Forgive my relative ignorance, but I knew very little about the work of Anselm Kiefer before coming along to this exhibition at the Royal Academy. I had seen a few of his mixed media works in various settings, but did not come in with pre-conceived notions of the weight of history or bombastic symbolism in […]
I think I was a little dazzled while seeing this play, not by the big name draws in their Broadway debuts, or by the direction, but, not having seen any of Tom Stoppard’s plays previously, by his way with words. While I still have nothing to compare it to, this revival of The Real Thing […]
Egon Schiele had something of a moment in late 2014, which is perhaps somewhat earlier than expected given that the centenary of his early death will be in 2018. Nonetheless, it was my privilege to be able to see not one but two top class exhibitions on either side of the Atlantic, the first, Egon […]
Does anyone remember how I was having a small rant in my review of Ballyturk about how I don’t like things that make no sense on purpose, such as David Lynch films? Well, it turns out I am a lot more tolerant of it when it’s an art show, probably because it’s easier to make […]
“I can see they’re acting, but I’m not sure why.” This was the initial reaction to Ballyturk of one of my theatregoing companions, but it essentially sums up most of the reviews I’ve read of Enda Walsh’s play recently staged at the National, having debuted at the Galway International Arts Festival earlier this year. I […]
Ok, I almost need to draw you a diagram for this one. You know Shakespeare, right? Macbeth, with the witches etc? Well Verdi wrote an opera of it in 1847. And then it was staged by a South African company at the Barbican. But they staged it as if they were a group of Congolese […]
At what point is it ok to call an exhibition out on being mainly an advertisement? This is how I felt about this one room exhibition on the John Lewis brand of department stores, which I briefly visited while at the Design Museum recently. The stated aims of the exhibitions are to mark 150 years […]
A lot of the reviews of this exhibition talk about how by trying to make a point of difference it positions itself firmly for those already familiar with Kahn’s work, but, coming with no preconceptions, I found it both interesting and educational. Louis Kahn was born in 1901 in what was then Russia but is […]
There is always a danger in reviving a play about youth in which the setting plays such an important role that it will lose its relevance, but this does not seem to have happened at all to Kenneth Lonergan’s play, which premiered in 1996. Granted, its 1982 setting was already over a decade old when […]
Toulouse-Lautrec’s prints and posters are almost one and the same with what we imagine of fin-de-siècle Paris, and I don’t think it would be overstating it to say that some of his images have been reproduced ad nauseum. I thought that this exhibition did a good job of acknowledging our collective image of the Paris […]
