MUSINGS FROM THE STALLS: RECENT THEATRE

THEATRE/PERFORMANCE

Dear Octopus @ National Theatre Lyttleton

Many may be quick to dismiss this 1938 piece by Dodie Smith as a creaky, old-fashioned trifle, but there is much to savour in this multi-generational gathering for a golden wedding anniversary on the cusp of the 2nd World War. Elegantly, crisply directed and performed (with the exception of the child actors, who tend to breathlessly race through their lines, diction sacrificed), with a grandly revolving stage that cycles the audience gracefully across the various rooms in the family home, the material settles in with a novelistic coziness. The breadth of family members, old friends and staff assistants can be unwieldy at times (a graph would be helpful initially), but the primary actors craft dimensional, singular characters whose personalities and struggles emerge sharply etched as the play develops unhurriedly and leisurely. Nothing terribly urgent troubles the surface, no incidental business drives the plot, yet a constellation of hesitant, charged emotional interactions crackles like electrical lines buried underneath the ground.

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Still reeling from the degradations and losses of the first Great War and with the looming, rupturous conflict to come, every fleeting gesture to communicate, to heal or understand, to break through, feels precious and poignant. Lindsay Duncan, magisterial and poised as matriarch Dora, suggests the beating heart under a cloak of icy aloofness. Bessie Carter gives tremendous spiritual weight to Fenny’s buried longing for Billy Howle’s feckless, benignly neglectful Nicholas, mutual wariness standing stubbornly in the way of progress. A lovely elongated sequence near the close, embodied as a toast, lyrically explains the bewildering title. Smith’s perspective on these flailing individuals is forgiving and sympathetic, the study humane. An understated melancholy floats gently amongst the assemblage. Admidst disruptions and misfortune, the instinct is to still try to be together, successful or not. Dear Octopus closed on 27 March

https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/dear-octopus

Comeuppance @ Almeida Theatre

For those old enough to remember the 1983 film The Big Chill, this recent piece by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins revisits that cultural watershed’s basic premise of a group of old friends gathering for a reunion and taking stock of their lives, confronting long-held resentments and exposing ingrained shortcomings and vulnerabilities. Jacobs-Jenkins universe is a more inclusive place-racially, sexually, politically. On the surface a motley collection of personalities and types, the abiding principle that holds them together is their mutual outsider status (in school they bonded as members of MERGE, the Multi-Ethnic Reject Group). This is an American generation, now approaching middle age, that has lived through a very schizophrenic era of history: 9/11, terrorism, Columbine and myriad other school massacres, police violence, Trump, Covid, climate crisis, the invasion of Ukraine, a litany of events that has loosened any sense of an ordered, known world.

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The spectre of death hangs hazily about the fringes and will, at various points, possess each character (this gimmick allows the audience to appreciate the skilful American accents of the cast as they revert to their British-and Scottish, in one case-inflections when taken hold). Each individual has his/her proximity to and familiarity with death given their life circumstances. This high-concept stunt doesn’t always feel gracefully integrated. It’s not certain that Jacobs-Jenkins has anything particularly new to say with the material, but the actors acquit themselves well (not all are likeable, admirably) and Arnulfo Maldonado’s cosy front-porch set with warmly-lit front rooms just distinguishable enough that an audience may wish to walk through the front door into their alluring environs gives the performers a comfortable, sound safe place upon which to spin out their ongoing psychodramas. All five people are on a collision course with the consequences of their actions, both past & present and the spirit that moves around/admidst them may know quite a lot more about the length of their futures. The play seems headed for an explosive conclusion, but closes on a quieter moment, two people listening closely to a sound fading beyond human detection. Comeuppance runs through 18 May

https://almeida.co.uk/whats-on/the-comeuppance

FROM THE STALLS : RECENT THEATRE

THEATRE/PERFORMANCE

Nachtland @ Young Vic

A German brother and sister uncover a work of art by one A. Hitler while cleaning out their recently deceased father’s attic, occasioning an explosive, excitable response in which ethical and moral rectitude is efficiently jettisoned in pursuit of profit (and peculiar pride). Left desolate and bewildered is the brother’s outraged Jewish wife, who has quite a different take on matters. Marius Von Mayenburg’s provocative play is certainly ballsy and hurtles along with brazen pace, continually shocking in word and deed, but the gleeful focus on the appalling spirals to a cartoonish absurdism that defeats any real way for the material to crawl under the skin and truly unsettle.

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Characters are used primarily in service to moving plot and conversation along as Von Mayerburg sees fit, evincing no inner life apart from the central mechanism-less incorporated than exploited as pawns. The themes of toxic emotional and mental entanglements of cultural legacy, the schisms created, and what constitutes value in art become casualties of the relentless desire to affront. Most problematic is the interfaith marriage, which lacks all credibility (would these two individuals, coupled for years, not have already had the difficult dialogues that this sudden situation leads them to confront?). Still, the cast is more than game and the work does, despite not reaching as far as it could, exert a fascinating, breathless stunned awe at its overt audacity. Nachtland runs through 20 April

https://www.youngvic.org/whats-on/nachtland

Nye @ National Theatre

If you have longed to see Michael Sheen in his jammies, comporting himself with wondrous, abandoned adolescent whimsy (and even performing a big-band song and dance number, which he delivers with respectful aplomb), make haste to the Olivier Theatre. From what will be his deathbed (and aptly within the bosom of the institution he helped to found, the NHS), his spirit loosened to travel through a whistlestop tour of his life, Welshman Nye Bevan floats from childhood struggle with authority figures to campaigner for the coal mines and eventually to thorn-in-the-side common man in the halls of Parliament, where he famously, truculently battled with his upper-class MP peers (and even Winston Churchill!).

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The journey is rendered, elegantly, as a hallucinatory fantasia, Bevan wandering the primary environments of his life. At his bedside, his wife and lifelong best friend battle for supremacy and position over Bevan’s expiring body. One particularly lovely sequence has Bevan and best friend unfettered in a local library, riding the waves of surrounding words and knowledge, physically borne aloft by the supporting cast as inspiration lifts them high (this suggests a system by which a young Bevan surmounted his congenital stammer). This is a gentle, graceful and fanciful history lesson which seems content to be a light-hearted and playful encomium to a trailblazing politician and crusader. Nye runs through 11 May

https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/nye

Hadestown @ Lyric Theatre

The fact that a good component of the audience immediately started clapping as performers took the stage and singing along to the swampy-sass of opener “Road to Hell” signals that this moody, vigorously feral work by Anais Mitchell has become a phenomenon amongst a particular generation (the latest iteration of a “Rent” or “Spring Awakening”). Melanie La Barrie’s priestess-like Hermes presides over a New Orleans style bar, insalubrious and damp, like a portal to the infernal. Indeed, the devil cavorts in the vicinity, attracted to fair maidens who may be neglected by careless suitors. It’s the Orpheus and Eurydice myth refashioned as a folk-rock song cycle.

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A trio of backup singers (like a Dark Fate version of the Andrews Sisters) comment on impending doom and dangers. Immature, ethereal Orpheus (a winningly distracted Donal Finn) becomes so consumed with crafting the perfect love song for Eurydice (sensible Grace Hodgett Young) that he is blind to the emergence of Zachary James’s wily, confident Hades blasting on to the scene with rock-star charisma and crafty technique, soon whisking Eurydice off to Hell (he is having major issues with his dissatisfied wife Persephone-a gloriously frustrated Gloria Onitiri- who longs for a return to the world above). Will Orpheus find the strength and resolve to journey to Hell to retrieve his love? Will he be able to go the distance? The music has purposeful drive and momentum, there’s demonic chic to spare and even a bit of poignancy amidst the big production. Tragedy is seen in very contemporary terms: fatal, crucial mistakes may be made, but a redemptive reset is infinitely possible, the boundaries flexible and fluid, hope inextinguishable. Hadestown is booking through 22 December 2024

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GESTURAL: MIMELONDON PT. I

ANTECHAMBER @ BARBICAN PIT

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As with their astonishing 2022 work Stellaire, the two-man imaginative powerhouse that is Steroptik (Romain Bermond and Jean-Baptiste Maillat) offer yet another joyous testament to the pure process of creation in their latest piece Antechamber. A screen is bookended either side of the stage by the duo’s magical kit, replete with projectors, scrolls, paper cutouts, keyboards, computer programmes, all of which will contribute to an unfolding narrative onscreen (the audience’s focus continually transfers from the images progressing and developing cinematically in front of them to the exertions of the artists creating them in breathtaking real time). The men’s absolute calm given that every movement must be timed with complete precision to avert the whole work from unravelling is quite a feat, a swerve of paralysing panic.

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The central story is slightly less linear than in the previous piece, and the use of harder materials gives a heavier feel to the visuals overall (gone, mostly, are the pencils, charcoal, sand and shadow play in favour of paints and ink, as well as a more percussive soundtrack). It’s groovier and more psychedelic , as if the two characters have been dreaming each other prior to actually meeting, calling each other into life (whole universes of vision and wonder churn within the figures). With awe, an audience watches lines, squiggles, splashes and splays build into landscapes and interiors, immaculate illustrations sketched and animated with staggering immediacy. Unlike Stellaire, which culminated in a gloriously extended, furiously wrought catalog of live-action pictures that took an audience through the stages of a couple’s life, this rather disappointingly ends on a traditional animation, both men having left the stage, its length tripping into overstatement. But this is a minor critique in a work (and of artists) achieving at such a high level.

https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2024/event/mimelondon-antechamber

BOY ON THE ROOF @ SHOREDITCH TOWN HALL

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This delicate and tender work detailing the intersecting lives of a series of ordinary residents on an unidentified British street is so finely observed and expressed that it almost immediately surmounts what could so easily play as mere issue-oriented fare. Liam, the personification of surly, sulky, hot-tempered teenager suffers from ADHD. His exasperated, helpless parents endlessly wring their hands, defeated and impatient, given to quick disciplinary actions that only exacerbate tension. A few doors down, hard-of-hearing 91-year-old Albert, who recently lost his wife (poignantly, he still addresses her walker and speaks to a prominently displayed photo of her, cheekily turning away from it to add an extra shake or two of salt to his meal), stumbles through the motions and rituals of his life. Circumstances bring about a meeting between Liam and Albert, precipitating an unlikely friendship, two otherwise lonely and isolated people (in their own ways) finding a connection. Crucially, Albert can view Liam objectively, championing his strengths, using the totems of Liam’s life as a way into more clearly learning his school lessons. Albert is brought out of his lethargy and stasis in his tutelage of and affection for the troubled boy.

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The trio of ingenious performers play all the central characters, including Liam, Albert, mom, dad and single-father neighbour with indefatigably crying child (whom Liam, of all people, seems to be able to calm). Given that the actors wear neutral masks with fitted hairpieces, all communication is predicated on behaviour and gesture, here accomplished with minimalist ease. No movement is overdone, the emotional calibration is exquisite, at times so beautifully sculpted that for a moment the eye is fooled into very nearly recognising an expressive motion or fluctuation cross the “face”. Impressive video projections open up the space, a streetscape outside the windows that the characters seamlessly join/leave as they walk in and out of doors. Occasionally (as the performers prepare for new scenes), the screen opens wide to show a cross-section of the other inhabitants of the road, quick sketches of dramas and situations taking place simultaneous to the main narrative, the whole panoply of messy life. The creators tend toward the positive, the piece concluding on a tidy, neatly wrapped note, understanding reached, but it’s hard to begrudge the cosiness when the characters have been so sympathetically, warmly rendered.

https://www.vamostheatre.co.uk/shows/show/boy-on-the-roof

TAKEAWAY: KIM’S CONVENIENCE @ PARK THEATRE

Theatre/Performance

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For those familiar with the hugely successful five-season sitcom available on Netflix, this 80-minute stage version is a tight compression of the themes and tones that sprawled across the storied comedy’s lifespan. Ins Choi’s theatre production, which set the Toronto fringe aflame in 2011, is actually the progenitor of the tv sensation, the blueprint for what followed. Choi stars in this version (the first in the U.K.) as Appa, the owner of the titular corner shop located in Toronto. Originally, he portrayed son Jung, so has come full spiritual circle in the play’s universe (the actress who originated the role of daughter Janet, Esther Jun, returns here as director, carrying on the generational connection).

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Appa is an irascible, exasperating presence, in constant emotional battle with his two acclimatised children, tradition dictating they inherit the store and carry on legacy (his distaste for his kids’ choices has already cost him his relationship with his son, who has refused to speak with his father for some time, although he still meets up with his mother at church affairs). He is cheerfully, amiably racist and dismissive (with an all-encompassing gusto), instructing Janet in observance of types entering the shop, who is the more likely to steal. He nurses a deep grudge against the Japanese for historical injustices (somehow, Choi, through a nimble gleam in the eye, makes his wildly outrageous, generalised statements hilariously, ridiculously scandalous without veering into abrasive offensiveness). He is a proud, exacting, simple man, a hardworking Korean immigrant who came to a foreign country for opportunity and built up a business, setting a claim to self and family. Appa can’t imagine why his children would spite him to seek alternatives to what he has already provided for them. The laughs churn away consistently, but underneath Choi mines a steady vein of heart and soul, a series of tentative gestures as a family struggles for breakthrough increments of understanding.

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Choi and Jennifer Kim as Janet are given the greatest amount of exposure, their interactions spiky and charged, love always suggested beneath the snipe. Miles Mitchell deftly portrays multiple characters, including a slick estate agent nosing around for a property developer (Mr. Kim is in danger, as so many independent traders, of being subsumed by much bigger players), a tearaway childhood friend now a cop who looms as potential romantic interest for Janet, as well as a nicely-detailed cross-section of customers. Namju Go as Umma gets the most short shrift, fluttering briefly in and out, a far cry from the dimensional character in the series. Brian Law as Jung makes a late, effective appearance, culminating in a piercing moment between son and father, a tender conclusive reconciliation pitched just right, avoiding slide into cloying sentimentality. Jung’s arc is the farthest from the portrayal on tv, which was much sunnier and upbeat. Here, the melancholy and despair run deep in Jung, a lost, lonely and depressive figure. Mona Camille’s production design of the store is so stunningly photorealistic a viewer may have to actively prevent the self from the inclination to pick up a basket and shop. 80 minutes seems not at all enough time in the company of this amusing, endearing piece-at the close, it’s easy to long for a second act. Kim’s Convenience runs through 10 Feb

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https://parktheatre.co.uk/whats-on/kims-convenience

SHINING: CANARY WHARF WINTER LIGHTS 2024

Exhibition

This latest edition of the now-venerable annual event across London’s modern “financial state” is a return to form after a few lacklustre years, most of the works more hit than miss. A somewhat despairing sameness has infiltrated the commissions in recent memory, inspiration and excitement lacking. The 2024 programme soundly corrects the backslide.

Vendel & De Wolf handily provide the outstanding piece Sign, which sets alight the circular space of Westferry Circus in the unsettlingly spellbinding amber light of brushfire, evoking both danger & wonder, majesty & alarm, a true senses-fooling marvel. Rotations, spins and movements comprised many of the selections, including Juan Fuentes’s Kinetic Perspective, a balletic symphony of hoops (reminiscent of bicycle tire rims) keyed to a traditional Japanese soundtrack, a graceful undulating dance of colour-a hymn, perhaps, to the carbon-emission friendliness and mental-health benefits of a less harried mode of commute; the cosmic Marbles by Gertjan Adema suggests planets in motion, revolving & whirling in a vast solar system; the pyramidal Vessels of Limbic Cinema sketch arcane geometrical languages of lines and points; Frankie Boyle’s Biophilia snakes through the Crossrail Place Roof Garden, a sinuous stretch of bioluminescence; Juan Fuentes’s (very busy at this event) Neuron is a kaleidoscopic flash of pulsating colours, a grounded fireworks display, again in correspondence with music, clubby overtures unfortunately-but in generosity to nearby residents-played at too low a volume for primary impact.

This Is Loop’s Geist pulsates with hypnotic and consuming textures of light waves, beating out codes and commands to the subconscious. Only a few manage to slightly disappoint: Marcus Lyall’s Idle Time certainly impresses in scale, vision and design but the towering laser-created characters seem a bit lost & wan, a viewer waits in vain for the work to break open wide; Squidsoups’s musical Submergance, in which the public is invited to walk amidst a series of hanging cords of snowdrop lights as a dazzling display unfolds around them, duly impresses but suffers somewhat from seen-it-before syndrome; Those Guys Lighting’s On the Wave of Light, installed in a rippled pattern along the balustrade overlooking the river, mirroring the flow of the Thames, feels overwhelmed by the space & vastness beyond, too muted and modest; poor Simon Chevelier’s Les Oiseaux, a pair of illuminated wingspans taking off in flight from Cabot Square, were judged too fragile for the windswept environs of the plaza the night I attended. Yet even the less successful or ambitious works this year still work at some level of pleasure. To truly appreciate, you must be in their live, wired presence. Winter Lights run through 27 January I may try to load a few videos onto Instagram for more vibrant effect

Winter Lights

Winter Lights

Winter Lights

WALL HANGINGS: RECENT ART CRAWL

EXHIBITION

Christopher Page @ Ben Hunter

The standout piece in Earth Sky Body Ruins is Page’s perceptually transformative trompe l’oeil work sky mirrored earth mirrored sky existing in a disconcerting state between total present collapse and uncertain future. A ruined architectural space of blasted brickwork, a striking orange haze commandeers the horizon, beckoning the viewer to walk through the dimensional space, tempting oblivion. Along with collaborator Clementine Keith-Roach’s faux-terracotta funereal vessels depicting striking scenes of a writhing crush and tangle of limbs, an excess of movement and chaotic energy, the show interrogates a liminal moment between catastrophe and rebirth, the suspended moment when circumstances could tragically turn, no promise of regeneration. Closed on 10 November

Daisy Collingridge Splanchnic @ T.J. Boulting

Collingridge’s figures, composed of layered quilted panels mimicking the machinations of viscera and sinew, are a declaration of the invisible made seeable, the internal made external, coaxing to the surface a system and structure of organs. The term which gives this exhibition its name is a Greek anatomical word for such a display. Her practice softens the raw textures. An oversized head invites a viewer to, should you be so inclined, climb inside, soothing and unnerving in equal measure. Collingridge creates cross sectional works that hover between a cartoon and a nightmare. Closed 11 November

James Dearlove Tales of the City Tales of the Sea @ BWG

Lounging boys (mostly) drift in apocalyptic landscapes, roiling & convulsing environments that appear in the opening stages of an absolute breakdown. Colours have bled out, spirits have fled, a dangerous malaise has settled in the frame, a perversion of oppression. Dearlove illustrates this unfolding tale with a seductive concentration, informed by both a physical move from the expanse of London to a coastal town in Southwest England and the perpetual uneasiness of a gay person negotiating conflicts both urban and rural. A certain alienation has claimed all of society, a world spins in disharmony. Closes on 15 November

Gareth Cadwallader Let Me See The Colts @ Josh Lilley

Of tiny scale, these pieces require the viewer to draw in close and focus, to collapse the grand space around them and concentrate on detail. As a majority were produced during lockdown, strange suspended states of activity fill the frames, a drifting sense of self and purpose. It seems the mind has wandered off in reverie. The people in frame are engaged in figuring out solitude and recalibrating their grounding, discovering new sources of satisfaction, sometimes in the softest of pleasures. Affable, affectionate, Cadwallader insists on a path out of apprehension. Closed 11 November

Angela Glajcar Vital Materiality @ Pontone Gallery

Glajcar creates topographical phenomenons out of her wide sheets of heavy paper stock, manipulations of true wonder. Through a series of very viscerally physical puncturing, tearing and ripping, Glajcar layers pieces together in various combinations producing intriguing landscapes suggesting a multitude of natural environments, from mountains to caves to wintry forest, the paper providing its own seductive shadows and dimensions. The major piece, situated just inside the door, has a fascinating pull, pulling the viewer (very willingly) in to an infinite horizon. Closed on 12 November

FOOTLIGHT PARADE: RECENT THEATRE ROUNDUP

THEATRE/PERFORMANCE

Pygmalion @ Old Vic

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There’s more than a whiff of the panto in this latest revival of the George Bernard Shaw classic (also the inspiration for “My Fair Lady”). Bernie Carvel hams up the priggish prissiness of Professor Henry Higgins and Patsy Ferran similarly stokes the hearty, hardy Cockney sass of the irrepressible Eliza Doolittle. The animated, slightly cartoonish spirit settles somewhat in the second half as the production addresses some of the more now-troubling class and gender presumptions, as the two warring leads begin to see each other more clearly and fairly. Thank God for the sensible, grounding presence of Michael Gould as Higgins’s associate Colonel Picketing and Sylvestra Le Touzel as Higgins’s long-patient mother. Pygmalion closed on 28 October

Bourgeois & Maurice: Pleasure Seekers @ Wilton’s Music Hall

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Alt-cabaret master practitioners Bourgeois & Maurice shriek on to the scene in Technicolour glory, parading onto stage like a vision manifested from a sugar-induced high. Slightly alien, pulsing with profligate energy, they announce a moratorium on cynicism & pessimism, devoting themselves to a cult of pleasure & optimism. Through sharply clever, riotously witty songs, they confront modern anxieties and perplexities (even in one instance boldly casting newborns as an invasive, marauding force, a proliferating army hellbent on gobbling up available but dwindling resources) With a mischievous gleam in the eye, an audience is wont to forgive any possible affront (and because the insight is so keen and spot-on). George Heyworth, as Maurice, is a gifted improvisatory performer, as well, quick with the audience. There’s even time for tea and a brief, quiet discussion of each other’s activities during lockdown, and the suggestions of loneliness, boredom and low-level fears of that bewildering time lead directly to the declaration at hand, this overture to glorious excess and exhilaration, an admonishment to what would tear us down. If the new-wave band the B-52’s were to slide into longer-form performance art, this would be it. Surreally silly, this is an infectious confection. Bourgeois & Maurice Pleasure Seekers closed on 23 September

What It Means @ Wilton’s Music Hall

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A reluctant revolutionary, closeted writer Merle Miller is tasked with responding to a particularly vituperative, scathing 1970 article published in Harper’s Magazine by Joseph Epstein in which he expressed his sincerest wishes to wipe homosexuality off the face of the earth. Forcing himself outside of his comfort and privilege (he watches the demonstrations of the nascent gay liberation movement from his safe perch above the New York avenues), each word fed into his typewriter moves him tentatively closer to admission. He battles with himself, musing over whether he is prepared, given his age & position, to become a civil rights warrior. Richard Cant is a dry, droll delight as Miller, every word considered and shaped to verbal perfection. A jarring and sudden interaction with a troubled young gay man in which Miller must take an even more perilous step nearer to (and make a personal investment in) the swirling social upheaval momentarily throws the carefully crafted environment awry, but the script quickly reasserts its tone. In a compelling closing moment, Miller is cut off mid-statement, a clear indication that his voice will be taken up by succeeding generations, the story continued, ever-evolving and (hopefully) progressing. What It Means closed on 28 October

Tribe @ Young Vic Studio

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Difficult to critique by traditional standards, this collaboration between Young Vic’s Taking Part programme with the Beth Centre (Women in Prison)-the third of its kind- is in effect a workshop, a piece created from the direct experiences and perspectives of the seven women who form the cast. The audience is in their command for the 60-minute length, a chorus of voices and stories, singing themselves a hymn of confirmation and confession. These lives, their particular struggles and downfalls, are full of animation, spirit and resolve. Sisterhood, not always easy and smooth, is the glue that sustains them (the dominant beauty salon setting is their refuge and community hall). The other half of the stage is given over to a lush garden with swing, reached by a series of stepping stones, a locus of solitude and reflection for each woman when the noise and crush become too enormous. Unpolished, unvarnished, there are stumbles, lines are called for, yet the lack of technique actually works in the production’s favour, providing a pleasant human-scale warmth and sentiment. Some of the performers excel: Yellow (all characters are designated by colour) has a natural easy charm and composure that easily lends itself to leadership; Pink has a pixie-like comic energy; and Brown brings a fierce Viola Davis style bearing to her role and a charismatic quick-wit. The information behind any of their incarcerations is not provided, a sure signal that these women are more than one fact by which greater society might wish to define them. Tribe closed on 4 November

LAWN ORNAMENTS: FRIEZE SCULPTURES REGENT’S PARK 2023

EXHIBITION

Although a few works seem to have “left the lawn” (perhaps in solidarity with the closure of the Frieze Fest proper or due to purchase), the majority remain in place through the end of this month providing an aesthetic and conceptual kick of energy to a corner of Regent’s Park.

Ghana Amer’s My Body My Choice is a flagrantly fertile assertion of self, a personal command to tend to one’s own garden, allowing no outside arbiter of ownership, no intervention. Zak Ove’s The Mothership Connection, a colourful explosion of Afro-Futurist elan, blasts off for a wild thrusting future of influence and authority, dragging along its rich tapestry of cultural myth, legend and fable. Josh Smith’s Friend, a representation of the Grim Reaper, haunts the ground, a black vortex for face and discomfiting shapeless cloak, the full effect leavened by some felicitous cartoon proportions in the limbs.

Sleepwalker, a truly unnerving bronze work from Tony Matelli, achieves an uncanny and distressing approximation of skin, a pallid and exhausted hue, a weary and lost looking gentleman arms aloft in zombie gesture wandering plaintively in just his pants across the grounds-so real a viewer approaches warily. Catherine Czudej’s Fat Man With Flowers 2, like a gentle character crafted from balloons, stands serenely offering a bouquet of flowers, fragile and delicate but resolved to brave gesture. Hank Willis Thomas’s powerfully straightforward All Power to All People, an Afro pick soundly grounded and embedded in the landscape with peace sign affixed as mid-support, the length of handle ascending forcefully to Black Power salute, is simple, unequivocal celebration of pride. Yinka Shonibare’s Material, like a vibrantly patterned piece of Indonesian fabric that has caught the wind, billows sinuously, mimicking the movements of people and cultures throughout history.

There are an animated, spirited assemblage of spiders crawling the length of Suhasini Kejriwal’s cacti-like Garden of Unearthly Delights, a playful conversation between global natural environments, drawing upon the exotic and the provincial, a synthesis of content. Temitayo Ogunbiyi’s You will Carry Dreams, Memories and New Beginnings is an assemblage of grinding stones cast from repurposed gas-head and water-tap fittings, etched with encouraging phrases, stretched out as if each is a step in an elongated journey of discovery, a migration of self. A viewer is witness to the breadth of material approach in these disparate works-there is much to appeal to a variety of tastes. Frieze Sculpture is in place through 29 October

https://www.frieze.com/tags/frieze-sculpture-2023

REFLECTIONS: A MIRROR @ ALMEIDA THEATRE

THEATRE/PERFORMANCE

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The stage is set for a wedding, bustling with activity. Officious inspections and consultations abound, musicians practice quietly in the corner. The only disquieting note is the tag team of authorial figures who move about the room with a hardline military rigour, clearly unnerving bride, groom, best man, venue manager and staff. As soon as they are satisfied with whatever concerns they may have, they depart and the play proper begins. Immediately, the audience is implicated as co-conspirators in what is actually a samizdat theatrical production the themes of which are critical of the standing government. The wedding was a front for what is an illegal gathering. So the ruling party did have a legitimate concern over the event.

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This will be the first of many a twist and turn, and not even the most seismic, in a brilliant, clever, dazzlingly labyrinthine script by Sam Holcroft, a next-level contemplation on the responsibilities & uses of art and witness, truth, representation, suppression, rebellion. Occasionally, the play will halt as fear of a raid descends. Johnny Lee Miller is revelatory as a bullet-headed government functionary for the Ministry (working for the Culture Secretary) in charge of reading scripts for approval to publish. He becomes engaged (enamoured?) with a young playwright (Michael Ward) who is attempting to capture the raw aspects of his working-class environment using his neighbours’ travails, heard through his thin walls, as his material. Whereas his colleagues would outright refuse (and squash) such outrage as radical dissension, never allowing it through proper channels, Miller’s Celik fancies himself a partner-in-crime, guiding his “protégés” through a process wherein their subversive thoughts may be smuggled into favour under the guise of crowd-pleasing whimsy. Miller has the manic gleam of the individual wholly convinced of his righteous conviction, a fantasist who believes himself a true ally to those who bravely work against the grain who never really sacrifices or has to bear the cost of actions. He creates an operatically conflicted character, fascinating in his self-delusion.

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Caught in the machine are Bax (Geoffrey Stretfield), a one-time prodigy now respectfully established writer, dissolute & smug with privilege and assistant Mei (Tanya Reynolds), initially timid in opinion but clearly freeing herself intellectually and carnally in response to the younger writer’s candour. Despite all the heavy issues, Holcroft (and director Jeremy Herrin) sustain the nimblest of tones, a mischievous bravura. The sheer childlike thrill of play acting is extolled. But Celik is possibly right on one count: one facet of art is to instruct and expose, but its other obligation is to elevate. Mere observance of misery & heartache is just documentary-it’s how it is shaped and structured for purpose that counts. Finding the balance is where true art is found. Adem (Ward) has the base but no story, Bax has only empty, fake uplift. Celik may be awkward & clumsy, lacking talent himself, but he knows this much. It’s best to sit back and let the wonder of this landmark piece wash over you-and rock you senseless with its final upheaval. The revelations & reversals will be lodged in your brain for weeks, all solidly and logically supported by the razor-sharp script. A Mirror continues through 23 September

https://almeida.co.uk/whats-on/a-mirror/

SWEET & SOUR: CANDY @ PARK THEATRE

THEATRE/PERFORMANCE

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A Northern lad suffers an identity crisis when he inexplicably falls in love with the drag persona-the titular Candy- of a childhood friend. The premise on the surface seems gimmicky, lending itself to lots of potential for inappropriate, immature content, reducing the dilemma to a sweaty, insecure jape. Yet in Tim Fraser’s supple, subtle script and Mike Waller’s thoughtful, questing performance, the material is treated with respect and seriousness as a study of a man having to confront a hitherto unexamined life. Against a tinselled backdrop, microphone front and centre, Candy’s weighty presence felt, Will takes the assembled crowd into his confidence, unspooling his tale. Waller is entirely at ease, riffing with individual audience members, moments of improv effortlessly folded into the loquacious monologue (Walker’s fierce, but unemphatic, concentration is a marvel, his steely, but never belaboured, focus driving the narrative).

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The assured delivery is very much a result of Waller having toured the show intermittently since 2020, but even more impressive is his ability to keep the material fresh. There was nothing stale or robotic about the performance. Waller fully inhabits Will, foraging into deep wellsprings of fragility, fear, desperation, all bubbling under a choreographed surface of imperturbability and composure. It’s startling to hear Will dryly, casually discuss personal moments that reveal deeply troubling aspects of mental health issues, profound loneliness and existential crisis (it’s to Waller’s credit that he communicates the horror of it as if he is just coming into awareness himself). There’s a particularly harrowing experience at a train station that has an especially intense impact. Waller assumes all characters in the script; his initially dismissive attitudes towards family members & a friendly boss deepen into greater sympathy & understanding the closer he explores himself, when he is able to perceive outside his own narrow perspective and recognise his own failings. The most poignant example of this is in his treatment of his aunt, whom he has somewhat cruelly & mercilessly designated Toadface, illustrated as a figure permanently fixtured on a sitting room chair consumed in watching regularly cycling rom-coms. As he will come to know, everyone has a story, everyone is shaped & distorted by life.

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In a more generalised sense, Candy may be a metaphor for the siren call of an unexplored life, the frustrations and disappointments of not being strong enough to break free of constraints. Billy (and thus Candy) represents someone who bravely left the small town for glory, to tread their own path. Nico Rao Pimpare works in concert with Waller to keep temporal & character transitions cogent & efficient and to gradually build to a devastating emotional denouement. Will is revealed in all his naked humanity, vulnerable & raw-and joyously, dangerously alive. Candy closed on 9 September

https://parktheatre.co.uk/whats-on/candy