28 December 2017. The Jungle at the Young Vic

This acclaimed production at the Young Vic explores what is an appropriate response to the jungle camp at Calais.It is the work of two Oxford graduates - joe Murphy and joe Robertson - who brought the Good Chance Theatre to the camp before the French demolished it. The action takes place in a re-creation of the Afghan restaurant at the camp. The action starts at the end - with the CRS coming to demolish the camp as well as with the death on a motorway of one of the young men we subsequently get to know.
The play features the British who come to help alongside the camp's inhabitants who are desperate to get to UK - a land that exists as an ideal of tolerance and good law in their minds. It is a sobering evening and I came out feeling quite subdued by the events. We certainly have to face whether we should be doing more and are asked to contrast our response with that of Jordan. We are also offered evidence of May's apparently distinctly un-Christian approach as Home Secretary in her failure to welcome unaccompanied children. However, there was a time when I felt we were being rather hammered and this seemed unnecessary given the nature of the audience - surely Guardian readers all.
The acting was amazing as was the choreography of the brawls that seemed to flare up all too easily in the camp. All in all, for me, an affecting evening but not one that quite lived up to the five stars for which I had prepared myself.

27 December 2017. Follies at the National Theatre

I really enjoyed this Sondheim musical at the National Theatre, staring Imelda Staunton as Sally. She is one of the ex-dancers attending a reunion at the Weismann theatre in New York before it is demolished to make way for offices. The play consists of present day drama explained by flashbacks to the time when Sally and her contemporaries were performing. She had a best friend Phyllis and they were suited by Ben and Buddy, a couple of friends who waited for the girls each night after the show. The complication was that Sally really had fallen for Ben but ended up with Buddy. Phyllis seemingly was happy to try and fit to Ben's privileged world but, as we are told by the characters in their present-time coming together at the reunion, she ended up materially comfortable but without intimacy.
Even now Sally still loves Ben and hopes the reunion will be her chance to rectify the mistaken paths of the past. This is not to be, however and she ends the play still with the wretched Buddy who has always felt her lack of ardour for him.
so, essentially we have a quite sad play that explores the follies of human relationships. Each character has their own folly - or paradox and these are explored and made explicit at the end. I found it thoroughly engaging and insightful as well as being the usual high end National Theatre production.

20 November 2017. St George and the Dragon at the National Theatre.

I made the mistake of reading the two and three star reviews for this new play before leaving home and so did not exactly hurry to the National Theatre. In the event, I had a better evening than anticipated. The play is somewhat childish and no work of Shakespeare but it does confront us, in its own way, with our contemporary condition. St George moves through three eras charging himself with slaughtering dragons - which one has to interpret as the 'things' that cloud our lives. In medieval times, the job was easy. The blight was a lion living handily in a cave that exacted its toll on the villagers. George engages in a great battle and slaughters this incarnation of the feudal barron. We move next to the Victorian industrial era where the dragon is harder to define but can still be seen as the simple profit-maximizing capitalist system. The dragon has metamorphosed into a top-hatted boss. Finally, we are in our present day. Here the dragon is the most difficult to slaughter. The 'thing' that bedevils us is now within us. The writer, Rory Mullarkey, presents us with hen parties, pub crowds watching football, and workers cleaning up rubbish. He presents us with, what could be summarised as, our God-less lives and - unless I missed something - rather leaves it to us to puzzle the solution.
So overall, I am not so sure the critics got it right. The play is a confrontation and perhaps its playful manner is a necessity to hold the mirror to us. The acting was excellent, especially John Heffernan as George. The play would, however, have benefited from some tightening. It does not take 145 minutes to make these straightforward points.

14 November 2017. Albion at the Almeida.

This is a hefty three hour play, inviting the audience to consider the state of the nation and its divisions. We are in the garden of a grand ancestral home of a formidable lady from London and her rather compliant husband and lesbian (not that she's 'out') daughter. A visit by a successful writer friend soon develops into an affair with the daughter - who was also the object of attention of the lad from next door. Also with us from the outset is the girlfriend of the dead son of the owner. He makes the occasional apparition appearance on stage. To the girlfriend's annoyance the mother has recently scattered his ashes on the garden. The mother gets exasperated that the girlfriend is failing to 'move on' but is given a jolt by the news that the girlfriend is pregnant by the frozen sperm of the son.
The house and garden are tended to by an elderly couple but their placer is usurped by the far more efficient Polish Kristina. The owner restores the garden and has grand designs to get everything back in shape but the project falls through and she eventually sells to the highest bidder who will turn the house into flats, with a piece of garden allocated to each flat. The bereaved daughter in law plans to buy the flat with the garden that has the ashes scattered on it.
So there is plenty here to get your teeth into. The mother seems quite ruthless with a healthy dose of entitlement. She is the caricature of the formidable English upper middle class. The gardener and his wife are the perfect representation of those for whom the world essentially stops at the village boundary. The lesbian daughter and her 'old enough to be your mother' friend go off to live in London, despite the mother's entreaties to her friend to give up the affair. They and the Polish cleaner speak for other sides of Britain.

13 November 2017. The Suppliant Women at The Young Vic

This play by Aeschylus, in a version by David Greig, opens in Greek style with the libation - or offering of thanks - by a representative of Southwark council. She described the financing of the staging and ended by emptying a bottle of red wine across the front of the stage.
The play is unusual by having the Chorus as the main focus. Unusually again, the chorus was made up of local amateurs who had been trained for their role as a group of women who had fled from Egypt to Argos where they ask king Pelasgos for asylum. They are trying to get away from the enforced and unwelcome marriages that they would have to suffer at home. The King, after due deliberation and a referendum, agrees to take them in. However, they are pursued by the men of Egypt. After a confrontation, they are seen off by the king and all seems to end happily.
This is the first play of a trilogy but the other two were lost apart from a fragment that is read at the beginning. It lauds the penetration of the earth by the rain of the sky to give the abundance of life on earth.
The play only lasts ninety minutes and is thoroughly engaging with a musical accompaniment to the rhythmically delivered text.

10 and 17 November. The illustrated farewell, The wind, Untouchable at ROH

I saw this triple bill twice and enjoyed it on both occasions. The first piece, by Twyla Tharp featured Sarah Lamb with Steven McRae and Mayara Magri with Joseph Sissens. It starts off with Lamb and McRae dancing a pas de deux before being joined after approximately 10 minutes by other members of the company. The dancing was precise and engaging, to music - The Farewell - by Haydn.

Next came The Wind, a new ballet by Arthur Pita who had choreographed Metamorphosis. This piece also featured Edward Watson as Mawarra - a ghostly warrior figure overlooking the action. This takes place on a windswept ranch in Texas to which Letty Mason arrives by railroad. She attracts the attention of the cowpunchers as well as the cattle buyer Wirt Roddy. She marries one cowpuncher, only to be raped on her wedding night by Wirt. In revenge, she shoots him. I noticed much more detail the second time. Whether this was the more emphatic acting by Francesca Hayward over Natalia Osipova as Letty, I'm not sure. both got great applause - and flowers - at the end. The husband was played by Thiago soares the first night and Tomas Mock the second. Wirt Roddy's part was taken by Thomas Whitehead and Mattew Ball on the two nights.
The stage was somewhat dominated by three huge windmachines and a railroad track to the right hand side of the stage. The machines were so powerful that their effect could be felt in the Grand Tier. The were used to power visual effects such as the bride's veil streaming out from her bonnet. All in all, I found this an engaging thirty five minutes, with music composed and played on electric violin and slide guitar by Frank Moon.
Finally, we had Untouchable, choreographed by Hofesh Shechter to music of his and Nell Catchpole's composition. The piece seemed to me more abstract, consisting of twenty members of the Company moving in and out of a parade formation. I found my concentration drifted likewise which is not to take away from the piece. It's just that it didn't command my undivided attention.

9 November 2017. Beginning at the National Theatre

This innovative play followed its two characters for the one hundred minutes in the aftermath of a house-warming party held at the female's - Laura's - house. She has locked eyes with 42 year old Danny who stays on after the others have left. Both fancy each other but he is more than hesitant. She  is 38 and confesses that she wants a father for a would-be child. More immediately, she also wants to have the ensuing Sunday as a couple, rather than her suffering the singledom than she finds so difficult. We witness them both finishing off the wine, with him dodging around the room to avoid physical intimacy and even starting to clean up after the party. Only after a good hour and quarter, does she unlock his unwillingness with words "I want you" - or similar.
It is an interesting evening, as we witness the realities of many people's reluctance to just get down to business - particularly as he takes on board his potential responsibilities for the child that will be conceived. The acting by the two characters, constantly on stage, was excellent.

28 September 2017. Cat on a Hot tin Roof at the Apollo

This Young Vic production directed by Benedict Andrews was fantastic. My seat was one row back from the stage so that I was within two metres of the actors much of the time - A dressing table and chair, the site for a reasonable amount of the action was directly in front of me.
I had seen the play before but I'm not sure I'd fully appreciated the broad sweep of issues with which it dealt. It is easy to get caught up in the issue of sexuality and miss the discussions of growing old and dying, of attraction and sexual responsiveness and frustration, of being able to communicate.
The acting by Sienna Miller, Jack O'Connell and Colm Meaney was superb. 

18 September 2017. Wings at the Young Vic

This was an extraordinary 70 minutes - for the writing (Arthur Kopit), acting (Juliet Stevenson) and direction (Natalie Abrahami).
Juliet Stevenson plays the role of Emily an aviator and does so most of the time suspended by a sling. She whooshes up and down, to and fro, echoing her previous life while trying to make sense of her new post-stroke reality. This is brilliantly, disturbingly conveyed. Her drifting in and out of lucidity, her frustration at loss of power, her desperate trying to make sense - all come across clearly and affectingly.

12-16 September 2017. Venice Biennale Viva Art Viva.

12 Sept. Belarus

In a small building near the Giardini, the Belarus presentation centred upon a 33 minute film of 33 characters. Named the Table, the film paraded the characters, so that as one disappeared to the left, another appeared to the right. The viewer sat at a table opposite. It was a quite captivating experience and I sat through it in its entirety. It started with the artist and also featured a naked model, a woman with a very ample bust, another woman in three stages of being let down on a date (preparation, waiting and realisation).

Giardini Marinaressa. An installation of sculptures of bathers by Carole Feuerman, part of the European Cultural Centre ‘Personal Structures: Open Borders’ exhibition.

Cyprus. Housed in a building by the Arsenale, the exhibition entitled 'The future of Colour', featured works by Polys Peslikas.

13 Sept. In the Giardini

The central pavilion featured two parts of the exhibition Viva Arte Viva.

Rather than describing all of it, the exhibits that stood out for me were:

McArthur Binion. A great display of seven or eight of thid artists identity behind a grid paintings.They were excellent and followed on for me the exhibition in London at Massim del Carlo.

Marwan. These were also excellent paintings – of heads.

Firenze Lai. An interesting set of paintings, including one of a man on a woman’s lap, entitled Autism.

Rachel Rose. A very pleasing animated video called Lake Valley, showing a dog’s life at home and going for a walk in the park. It seemed to go into a dream sequence before concluding by panning out from the park to the town it was set in.

Other than these, I thought the following were interesting:
Yelen Vorobyeva and Viktor Vorobyev. The artist is asleep.

Tibor Hajas. A series of quite strange photos of the artist naked and experimenting with his body.

Sebastian Diaz Morales. A video of a man in suspension / floating.
Francis Upritchard. Some disturbing sculptures - with a voodoo feel

Huguette Caland. Interesting 

Nevin Aladao. His works entitled 'Traces' featured instruments that self-played in public spaces. 

Cerith Wyn Evans. A video at the spot where Pasolini dies, featuring a large ‘sign’ with the words “on the banks of the Liveriga, silver willows are drowning in wild profusion of the boughs dipping into the slowly drifting waters.” The sign was set fire to. Quite engaging.

Olafur Elaisson. This was a room containing a workshop staffed by unpaid refugees. They were making the wooden struts that were to make up lampshades.

Outside, in the Stirling Pavilion, there was a library of books chosen by the exhibiting artists, together with the Mondrian Fan Club.

National Pavilions.

In my order of appreciation, the pavilions worh writing up were:

Germany. This extraordinary performance required queuing under the mosquito infested trees. The performance called Faust by four actors was all in slow motion and felt disturbing and abusive. We strained to watch through glass apertures in the walls and more extraordinarily though a glass floor. Conceived by Anne Imhof the normal performance is four hours long. However, in the summer it is only 1.5 hours because of the heat and really we only got a glimpse. Outside, two dogs in a cage added to the sense of menace but also of how the threat can be neutered by collaboration as one of the actors interacted with the dogs by adopting their pose.

Australia. The pavilion showed two videos. One, vigil, was a clever short film of refugees cut in with horrified onlookers – horrified at the plight or the prospect of the refugees. The other film was an imagined film made by indigenous people of Australia of Sydney harbour before the English ‘discovered’ it.

Poland. A film of five adolescents who one by one came into the room and started to chant “trust, hate, love hope”. An engaging film which reminded me of the Belarus use of people entering and leaving the frame.

United States. Mark Bradford’s work was arresting. One entered the pavilion to a room with a huge Kapoor-like blob, made up of pulped posters. It is entitled Spoiled Foot. Then a room with a threatening medusa and another called Saturn Returns with faeces-coloured material covering the walls. Next a room with three paintings. The way out had a looped video called Niagara of a man walking away down the street.

Canada. A pleasing water installation. I don’t know what it meant but it was nice to engage with it.

 Greece. The installation by George Drivas was called ‘Laboratory of Dilemmas’. It centred on An imagined ‘discovered’ film of a medical experiment to come up with a cure for hepatitis. After seeing the video on a set of screens upstairs, viewers had to negotiate a labyrinth downstairs to get out. It felt quite disturbing.
Austria. A fun time for visitors who were invited to enter a caravan with various holes cut in it. They then follow instructions to poke their arms, legs or head through.

Japan. The Pavilion had been transformed by Takahiro Iwasaki to realise 'Turned upside down, it's a forest.' Unsuspecting visitors outside climbed stairs to find themselves poking their head through a hole in the  floor.

France. An innovative idea by Xavier Veilhan who invited musicians from all over the world to come and collaborate in the pavilion.

Finland. Finland housed an installation called The Alto Natives. This seemed a technically clever installation of a blob and virtual reality films. It was meant to represent God and a human coming back to inspect earth.
Czech Republic and Slovakia. The pavilion featured a multi-media installation by Jana Zelibska.

Switzerland. A homage to Giacommetti who apparently never represented Switzerland. The main item was a double screening of two films with the same soundtrack.

Great Britain. Phylida Barlow filled the pavilion with large objects all under the title folly.

14 September

Fondazione Prada. The boat is leaking. The Captain lied’. An exhibition curated by Udo Kittleman of works by Thomas Demand, Alexander Kluge and Anna Vierbrock. This extraordinary exhibition/installation took up three floors of the huge and incredible palazzo in which it was found. Alexander Kluge’s assemblies of film clips as well as presentations of films in their entirety stole the show for me, alongside the extraordinary constructions by Anna Viebrock to make the Ca’ Corner della Regina suitable for the exhibition. It was absorbing and I could have spent days watching the films, I felt.

Nigeria at San Stae. This quite small ‘pavilion’ comprised three pieces. The entrance was  draped with material coupled with small mirrors. Then inside were a collection of eight black angels.

Beauty and the Beast by Judi Harvest and Quentin Garel An exhibition with pessimistic and optimistic outcomes. Artistically, I preferred the pessimistic

Antigua and Barbuda. This pavilion deserved support for its exhibition of work by the late Frank Walter.

Iraq. The highlight of this for me was the collection of artefacts. These were incredible with a 6000BC effigy of a woman and a 4000BC toy. Quite amazing.

Palazzo Bembo. A continuation of the European Cultural Centre ‘Personal Structures: Open Borders’ exhibition. There were a number of artists were on display. I particularly like the work of a Lithuanian – Jolanta Smidtiene.

Suse Benedict Stoisser - Now more than ever

Ty Watlinger - Austria

Denis Defrancesco - King Kong Balls

Denis Defrancesco - The Pin Lady

Guatemala. A quite large exhibition curated by Daniele Tedeschi featuring amongst other items a huge toilet brush on a flower pot.

Scotland. The film by Rachel Maclean had received good reviews. Although it was engaging, I doubt that I will remember this story based upon the Pinnochio fantasy for long. The programme notes reveal the idea that it was about the temptation to sell out to untruth, thinking it is just as good as truth and will get you further. However, Maybe I was too tired at the end of a day’s walking around Venice.
The Golden Tower by James Lee Byars.

15 September At the Arsenale

Continuation of Viva Art Viva

Standout artists at this rather mediocre exhibition were:

Lee Mingwei. He had a clothes repair table to which exhibition goers could bring items for repair.

Anna Halprin.

An interesting film of a San Francisco ‘tree hugging’ ceremony born from multiple murders in a national park.

Charles Atlas. A huge screen with an array of sunsets and a conforting environmental voiceover

Marie Voignier. An interesting video of a hunters’ assistant reading out his memoirs about his loathsome clients.

Michel Blazy. A strange installation of books with water dripping on and destroying them. Plus a collection of trainers with plants in them.

Guan Xiao. An amusing video on the statue DAVID

Irina Koruna. A garish installation reached by climbing a flight of noisy stairs.

Huguettwe Carland. An interesting trio of woman made up of what resembled cooking smocks.

Kader Attia. A clever installation of screens with an opera singer whose voice activated pans of semolina.

Pauline Jardin. An irreverent look at the girl whose visions are the basis for Lourdes.

Nevin Aladag. An amusing tryptich of videos of self-playing instruments.

Liu Jianhua, A large installation at floor level of gold blobs.

Alicja Kwade. The best was last. The mirrors and objects of 'One in a time' made an engaging ending for this part of the Arsenale.

Outside there was a collection of stones which had sound installed in them. Entitled Pars pro Toto, the work was also by Alicja Kwade and attracted a lot of bemused looks

National pavilions worth recording were:

Tunisia. Issuing passports in a playful citizens of the world piece.

Singapore. A huge boat assembled with wax.

Argentina. An enormous horse and small girl.

Turkey. A clever sound installation occupying a huge space.

Malta. A rather irreverent exhibition poking at the islands Catholic roots.

Georgia. A standout installation of a shed-house with water pouring into it.

Latvia. Some crazy fantasies of giant grasshoppers eating tourists and eating human worms.

New Zealand. A huge video based on Captain Cook

Italy. A staggering installation of water and mirror by Giorgio Andreotta Calo accessed by climbing a flight of stairs to see the roof reflected in the water and everything reflected back in the vertical mirror. It felt very disconcerting.

Lebanon. An amazing installation of sound a light in a huge space in Arsenale Nord.

In the Giardino delle Vergini, I liked;

Hassan Khan's 'Composition for a public park' was a sound installation in the garden.

Attila Csorgo’s hypnosis video.
Fiete Stolte. Printing My Steps. An ingeniously simple installation.

16 September.

In the pouring rain, I made my way to the Wales in Venice installation by James Richards. The entrance room contained a rather lovely sound installation that made the visit worthwhile. On the other hand, the videos and inkjet prints left me rather cold. The main video was inspired by some extraordinary archive photos of Albrecht Becker who seemed to use his body as an experiment and art work. These were interesting enough but the rest of it seemed to me rather pretentious.

Next was the far easier to understand “Doing Time” by Tehching Hsieh. This extraordinary performance artist spent a year in 1980/81 waking and punching a time card on the hour every hour. Five months later, he spent a further year  in New York living outdoors and without taking shelter of any kind. He had also jumped from a second floor window, recording it in the name of art:

and laid out photographic paper, filming them darkening before flipping them over:

From there, I made my way to the Diaspora Pavilion. This exhibition in the Palazzo Pisani, Santa Marina needed the purchase of the guide booklet to make sense of it. Even then, a lot of the exhibition seemed rather inaccessible or unnecessary. I give you the bathroom not to be confused with a real bathroom as an example.

However, other bits were thought-provoking. For me Yinka Shoinbare’s “The British Library” stood out. It was a room with a vast number of books, each with the name of of first and second generation migrants to Britain who have made a significant contribution – e.g., Freddie Mercury

Finally, I visited the Azerbaijan Pavilion, which contained an interesting entrance with the words of many people projected on the walls, talking about their country.

Upstairs were some interesting installations comprised of musical instruments.

And so ended my Biennale, apart from a sighting in a gallery of two amorous golden tortoises.