Catherine Bennett resumes the weekly look at the performing arts world, with the sad end of Jerusalem, the luck of a cabbie, and French revolt. Do you hear the people sing?
Adam Alcock reviews Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons and his own Four Elements at York Opera House.
Catherine Bennett highlights the trends in the performing arts world today.
Jonathan Cridford reviews 'Ghosts', one of the Freshers' plays for this year.
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird,
meaning
Death
Those who sit in the stye of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death
- T. S. Eliot, Marina
Director Jonathon Carr, in staging the masterful Stockholm, has chosen well. There is nothing as rank as the shattered intimacy of private lives. Watching two people tear themselves apart is almost too painful to witness, or for words. But it cries perverse fascination. For it is coded, into every gene of our sheltering souls, to negate negation; to render the darkness light or hope for a better future. Bryony Lavery’s claustrophobic two-hander offers no such consolation, only a shrill-shrieking warning from the rooftops of modern suburbia.
Lavery paints, in dramatic dialogue high poetical, two portraits; one is of Todd (Chris White) the other of Kali (Serena Manteghi). This young couple’s dream is also their nightmare, and their nightmare a means of communication; a sounding-bobbin to make the blackness resonate or yield-up a scrap of meaning. The life they lead together, so seemingly perfect, is merely a foxhole from which to escape the demands of contemporary living: its endless rounds of perfect dinners, the ideal holiday, the truest possible love. They spend their afternoons together watching the films of Ingmar Bergman, searching for a contentment which they know to be a lie. For them, there is food, music and the comfort of a cathartic fuck. There is also paranoia, violence and intimations of murder and infanticide. Their situation is torture but perpetual. They do not seek a way out of this mental torpor, for they are incapable. They cannot affect change any more than we can stop the world from turning. They will be released by that which they both hold a morbid fascination: the endless otherness of death.
All Lavery offers us, in a sense, is the tawdry simplicity of discord and disharmony. A tale of woman verses man, or vice versa. But the winnowing horror of this hour’s worth of vital theatre is worth a thousand such melodramas. Todd and Kali are animals tearing away for sport, or two ship-wrecked frantics, clinging desperately each to each as they enter the whirlpool. They are also the weak, the damaged and the wretchedly human. They are given gorgeous form and movement by two actors of tremendous talent. White’s Todd is a study of self-righteous victim-hood, one moment a hen-pecked boy with the face of a sainted mooncalf, the next a nihilistic masochist, strangely in tune with the music of domestic violence. This turn is an affirmation and apotheosis of his good work in Jez Butterworth’s Mojo last term. Serena Manteghi also, in essaying the dizzying highs (and lows) of Lavery’s Kali, triumphs absolutely. She is an actress of ever-increasing invention, subtlety and surety, freely footing with dextrous grace around the potential pit-falls of a pitiless text. Neither entirely oppressor or oppressed, she sketches in broad strokes the vivid outlines of a sexual and psychological enigma.
Sarah Howell is to be congratulated for bringing a poised, delicate gloss to the difficult, dream-like dance macabre. Gareth Prescott also deserves credit for lighting the bravura performances with simple, sympathetic artistry. Carr’s plan for the Drama Barn, a promenade in three distinct mini-acts, is to be commended for its vision but unfortunately falters short of fulfilment. The opening scene, conducted backstage in the eternal ‘player’s lounge’, cannot quite rise above the relative squalor of its surroundings. The action is more comfortably confined in the sufficiently metamorphic space of the main auditorium. In spite of this, this writer is happy to report on the best Barn showing he has witnessed since last year’s production of Simon Stephens’ Bluebird.
Wrong quote. I suggest Beckett?
It is Eliot, I may assure you. From the poem 'Marina'.
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