One of the defining features of reality is weight. Fantasies have all the gravity-defying pleasure of an oxygen deprived high, but trying to recreate them in life evokes the spine-shrinkingly horrible sensation of throwing a piece of paper as hard as you can. Maybe it’s why fashion models are parchment light, as epitomised in Arthur [...]
Archive for the ‘Theatre’ Category
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Posted in Art, Dance, Fashion, Theatre, tagged tate modern, caroline trentini, rothko, simon russell beale, kenneth branagh, galileo, ivanov on October 20, 2008 | No Comments »
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Posted in Dance, Literature, Music, Theatre, tagged beauty, christopher walken, dorian gray, gate theatre, hedda, leo tolstoy, matthew bourne on September 29, 2008 | No Comments »
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion”, wondered Count Tolstoy, no doubt blinking in the cruel glare bouncing off a harlot’s milk-white bosom, “that beauty is goodness”. In Leo veritas. Beauty is more reliably bad-ass, and too much of it can kill.
It’s a truism beautifully told in Hedda, Lucy Kirkwood’s updated version of Ibsen’s [...]
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Posted in Dance, Theatre, tagged charlie victor romeo, daniel kitson, DOT504, edinburgh fringe festival, political theatre, verbatim theatre, zinnie harris on August 27, 2008 | 3 Comments »
I hesitate to add to the omnipresent blogblurb about the Edinburgh Fringe, which begs for a online filter similar to Crunky’s anti-Olympics app. But ‘most everyone is wrong, predictably. The much-discussed provocative political set-pieces were sour, shouty and grim: Gordon Brown in a gimp mask. Moving in a sort of instinctive, inevitable way, they nonetheless [...]
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Posted in Architecture, Film, Literature, Theatre, tagged Burbage's theatre, London, memory, Muppets, New York, Paris, Shakespeare on August 6, 2008 | No Comments »
So, the original site of Will’s first Theatre has been found. Londinia, the old tart, sweeps up her crusty skirts to show what she’s been hiding all along and laughs at our redfaced surprise.
We shouldn’t be shocked. Paris may be the curlicued, calorie-controlled charmeuse with the pristine avenues and neatly trimmed bush; New York may [...]
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Posted in Music, Theatre, tagged Balzac, incest, Lindsay Duncan, Matt Smith, Oedpius, Polly Stenham, Regina Spektor, That Face on May 21, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Is there anything more deliciously dangerous than the engulfing, sticky sweetness of musty, milky motherlove? It’s the unctious umbilical ambrosia that makes us all into trapped, tantrumming tarbabies. But it sure does taste like heaven on a rusk.
The west end’s latest fringe fosterling, That Face, is a spunky little warning about the parallel perils of [...]
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Posted in Fashion, Film, Literature, TV, Theatre, tagged Casablanca, iPlayer, 4oD, ITV Catch Up, Little Nell, David Tennant, John Galliano, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bungalow 8, Experimental Cocktail Club of Paris, Mad Men on April 16, 2008 | No Comments »
The line is Play it once, Sam, not Play it again, and now I know why. If the iPlayer had been around in 1940s filmworld Casablanca, Rick would be watching reruns of Sam on Later with Jools in his riad whilst Ilsa shunned gin joints to binge on out-of-season Desperate Housewives.
Introducing the ‘watch again’ concept [...]
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Posted in Art, Fashion, Film, Theatre, tagged Annie Leibovitz, glamour, hitchcock, Molly Ringwald, Paul Scofield, Vanity Fair on March 25, 2008 | 4 Comments »
If glamour is the ability to cast a sexual spell, Annie Leibovitz’s photographs have all the magic of a mute glove-puppet panda with a middle-aged man’s hand stuffed up it’s arse. Her famous photographic tableaux of the blue-blooded and the beautiful, now showing at the National Portrait Gallery and featured in a commemorative online Vanity [...]
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Posted in Fashion, Film, TV, Theatre, tagged BAFTAS, Tilda Swinton, Speed the Plow, Jeff Goldblum, The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other, Gareth Pugh, Richard Griffiths, Ben Wishaw, Anna Maxwell Martin on February 15, 2008 | 2 Comments »
This year’s bland vanilla brule of a Baftas was so impeccably tasteful in word, deed and outfit that it disappeared down it’s own self-satsifed throat and came out the other end as a few meaningless fart bubbles smelling of champagne and tuberose. The sole memorable moment centred around Tilda Swinton, who staggered onto the stage [...]
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Posted in Fashion, Film, Theatre, tagged almeida, homecoming, vogue, women on February 8, 2008 | No Comments »
‘dzooks. I have a moment, flipping through the falderals of that literary institution Vogue. Look at them all; look at us all. That night I go to the Almeida’s brilliant new sandblast of a Homecoming, and watch Jenny Jules as Ruth penetrate Pinter’s dank hotbed of sixties north London masculinity; teasing, manipulating, revelling. Revolting. Magnificent. [...]
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Posted in Fashion, Theatre, tagged clubs, Dealer's Choice, London clubs, Malcolm Sinclair, Nick Jones on January 17, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Wanna be in my club? No, me neither. It would all be very enthusiastic to start with. There’d be badges, and uniforms like this, and cigars, and mead, and trifle. Then we’d all get bored, and someone would forget to cancel the order of twenty-five dancing eunuchs, and we’d all get a bit tired and [...]
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