16 and 19 November 2016. Chroma, Multiverse and Carbon Life at the ROH

This Wayne McGregor triple bill was so much my cup of tea that I was more than happy to see it twice in four days. The music, choreography, dancing, staging and lighting synergised to create a hefty wow factor.
Chroma featured visitors from the Alvin Ailey company who had a very powerful presence. Unfortunately the Royal Ballet contribution lacked Stephen McRae but it all still seemed excellent. Multiverse was a new piece set to the music of Steve Reich. Firstly there was a piece from the 60s - It's gonna rain, featuring the looped voice of a preacher which became quite hypnotic. To choreograph this was quite a feat but it worked well with two dancers coming in and out of synchronisation. The second piece was a new work by Reich for the orchestra.
Finally, Carbon life had the band at the back of the stage playing pieces by Mark Ronson, as well as a rapper coming onto the stage. When I saw Carbon Life a few years ago, Boy George was the lead singer and this time round I could not help thinking he just had the edge.
Aside from the music and the dancers, the set design  and the lighting were fantastic and the programme discussed at length how McGregor attaches great importance to all these elements while not necessarily insisting that the music and dance fuse,  preferring to let them have their independent lives.

18 November 2016. Caravaggio at the National Gallery.

This packed exhibition is not so much of Caravaggio as of his influence. There are actually only six paintings by him, the remainder making the point that his revolutionary style impacted in his own country and beyond, particularly to the Netherlands. This was my second visit and I think the exhibition certainly merits more than one viewing.

18 November 2016. Picasso Portraits at the NPG

This is really quite a small exhibition but it has a huge impact. For me, what stood out was Picasso's contrasting of styles with such very different treatments of the same subject. Most notable were the different portraits of Olga, ranging from the quite classical to Woman in a Hat. I also had not realised he had produced so many caricatures with such a playful feel about them. A really worthwhile exhibition.

16 November 2016. Abstract Expressionism at the Royal Academy

This was my second visit to the exhibition, a chance to be cherished to see so many outstanding works falling under this banner. For me, the Rothko room stands high in the memory but that is not to detract from the others.

14 November 2016. Sunken Cities at the British Museum

This is an incredible exhibition of objects rescued from the sea at the site of the ancient Egyptian-Greek city of Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus. The exhibition was highly educational with some truly beautiful pieces, notably for me the statue of Arsinoe.

9 November 2016 Kiss Me at Hampstead Theatre

This brief (70 minutes) play opened engagingly with the female character alone on her bed and then preparing the room for the arrival of a date. Plunged into darkness, the man had entered the room when the lights came back on. It rapidly became clear that he was there to provide a service that he had done for many other ladies - a service of impregnation but without any emotional contact or any kissing. The play was set after th first world war and the lady in her early thirties was a widow wanting to get pregnant but she also found it impossible to avail herself of the service in such anonymous circumstances.
The man left having revealed enough about himself for her to track him down. When he comes back, they fall in love and have an affair. Then the bombshell of his unavailability with her inevitable devastation.
It was interesting to follow this unfolding drama and the writing cleverly made it very light and amusing. My criticism would be the extent to which it was thought provoking. We had the ideas of the difficulties of such practical sex, of her apparent progressive attitudes to sex and the importance of his love-making techniques. We also had his deception excused by not having been asked directly and we were reminded of the dreadful consequence of pregnancy for a single woman at that time. But none of that is particularly amazing.
Nonetheless an enjoyable hour and excellent acting and production.

3 November 2016. The Nest at The Young Vic

This was a very interesting evening, solely featuring an Irish couple who were struggling to make ends meet. The husband takes on more and more work as a haulier, finally agreeing to do a shady piece of dumping for his boss. He chooses to offload some toxic waste in the lake to which he and his family goes from time to time. As luck would have it, his wife visits the lake with the baby soon after and it damn nearly gets killed by the waste. He confesses and, not surprisingly, all hell lets loose. At first their marriage seems over but she later is more nuanced while he thoroughly beats himself up and finally confesses to the police.

The play provoked in me the thought of the tension between the man earning the money for his family and being accused of always being at work. Of course, this man - Kurt - is a bit more than 'at work' but then how many men are making dubious moral choices thinking that they are doing right by their families? The play exaggerates the tension to make the point.

31 October 2016. Amadeus at the National Theatre.

I had very little recollection of the first time I saw this perhaps some 40 years ago apart from the gist of it being about Salieri and Mozart. As this viewing made clear, the emphasis was very much on Salieri. He is the Austrian court's director of music who has come from Italy and recognises early on that the young Mozart is far more gifted than he. Mozart recognises it also and is painted as behaving in an almost infantile asocial way - stuck at the stage of finding 'poo' a cause of great merriment. Salieri is presented as feeling the greatest quarrel with God, who has given such gifts to Mozart when Salieri felt it was he who should have been rewarded for his faith. He does what he can to thwart Mozart's career and ensure that he lives in poverty. This does not, of course, stop Mozart from his composition and these are tied to Salieri himself - e.g., the Requiem is suggested as referring to Mozart's own demise but also to Salieri's soul.

It is a thought-provoking play, conveying to me the message that setting out on a mission to destroy another in the end destroys the destroyer. We are left with Salieri regretting his acts and confessing to poisoning Mozart - the only act for which he will have any lasting notoriety.

This was a typically lavish National Theatre production and the acting was of a high standard. However, by the end I felt almost assaulted by Salieri's confessions and regrets and by the intensity with which these were conveyed by Lucian Msamati. It need pruning in my view. Too many words.

29 October 2016. Madama Butterfly at Glyndebourne

I'd never been to this opera before and felt very lucky to be at this production under the design of Nicky Shaw.

The setting had been brought forward to the second world war and this seemed to work perfectly. The tragedy of Cio Cio San really believing that her GI husband was serious and would return to her was brilliantly played out by the Korean singer, Karah Son. Pinkerton himself was played by Matteo Lippi. The acting was as convincing as the singing and it was hard not to feel exhausted at the end of this emotionally wrenching tale.