Arriving precisely when he means to: Peter Jackson's triumphant return to Middle Earth

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

‘I think I’m quite ready for another adventure.’ This is how Bilbo Baggins ends his journey in Lord of the Rings, having yielded to the ravages of age and thus being accorded a place on the last ship to the Undying Lands. But the question abounding in critics’ reviews is: are we ready for another adventure? And do we really need one?

The film Jackson has made is a rollicking, hilarious and tender frolic through Middle Earth. Admittedly, by its very nature, it is not as epic as its predecessor. Its evil characters (comically cockney trolls, a hostile but amusingly jowl-wobbling Goblin King, even the scarred albino menace Azog the Defiler) fail to inspire the terror of Sauron and his Nazgul. And there are some odd moments that could perhaps have been culled, such as the episode with the mushroom-eating, bird-poo covered wizard Radagast, which feels disconcertingly like a bizarre flight into a hallucinogenic video game.

But Ian McKellen’s wizard Gandalf, by turns twinkle-eyed and splendidly wrathful, gives the film a powerful sense of both warmth and gravitas. And the story is carried expertly by Martin Freeman’s ingenuous, endearing embodiment of Bilbo Baggins. As an actor he elevates himself from Elijah Wood’s somewhat cloying, wooden Frodo – you cannot help but relate to Bilbo as someone uprooted from his home and muddling through the unknown. He disarmingly tackles challenges big and small, from protecting his mother’s antique glory box against the boot-scrapings of impolite dwarves to protecting the exiled dwarf-king from a beheading by a vengeful, merciless Azog.  

It is the film-stealing riddle scene between Bilbo and Gollum that makes another trip to Middle Earth feel truly worth it – brilliantly-timed, wretched, ominous and hilarious all at once. Andy Serkis’s superlative facial expressions are transmuted to create a CGI character that perfectly sustains the schizophrenic Smeagol-Gollum dialectic conceived with such inspiration in Lord of the Rings. Serkis fully makes you feel the spectrum of Gollum’s emotions: his gambolling joy at playing games with Bilbo; his primative urge to kill this intruder into his world; his innocent, excruciating pain at losing the ring. And the teetering repartee between Bilbo and Gollum, which veers from playful to menacing in an instant, gives you a real sense of their terrors, prejudices and weaknesses, to the point where you wish you could go down to the goblin cave in which they spar and save them both.

So for me at least, the answer to whether we need The Hobbit is a resounding yes. Not simply because I am an ardent fan (who, I admit, is to Lord of the Rings what the devoted Samwise Gamgee is to his Mister Frodo.) But also because I think Peter Jackson has given us a film which not only pays homage to the meticulously realised world Tolkein created but which emphatically enhances our appreciation of that world. He has indeed vastly augmented a small book in order to realise it on the same colossal scale of his first film trilogy, for which he has faced not insignificant derision. But it doesn’t feel that this is arbitrary or excessive, because Jackson has faithfully incorporated elements of The Silmarilion and Tolkein’s own appendices, and made with them a film that still speaks to our own times of the uncertainty of life, the unlikely friendships that can be forged and the courage that can be found in every day actions.

If you have given up 30 hours of your life watching the ‘Making of Lord of the Rings’ DVD appendices (yes, I have. Twice.) you will know how much love and painstaking devotion went into every detail, down to the last curlicue of elvish written on the thousandth extra’s sword and sheath. And I believe the same, justifiable commitment has been made to The Hobbit – so do not take Peter Jackson for a conjurer of cheap tricks. Oh no. He is a maestro of his craft, and I would wholly recommend you go on his unexpected journey. For when you step onto the road, there's no telling where you might be swept off to…

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Mirth in mime from former Cirque du Soleil clown

Julien Cottereau – Imagine Toi

13 – 24 December, Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre

On a sparse stage, lit with beautifully suggestive lighting, a man gambols alone. Alone, but in an instant his stage feels almost tangibly populated with a host of props, animals, beasts and ghouls. Julien Cottereau exists in a realm conjured by nothing but a twisting body and extraordinary vocal gymnastics.

Here is a man who has channelled the French discipline of mime into a show that is at once a loyal homage to the old greats and a contemporary, accessible and hilarious interpretation of their genius. With a Chaplin-esque rapport with the audience and facial contortions worthy of the virtuoso Marcel Marceau, Cottereau charms and dissembles his way through plots that are both playfully funny and poignantly emotive. He gets entangled in skipping ropes of imaginary chewing gum, plays spiralling ball games with metamorphosing dogs, and fights with snarling monsters conjured only by his ventriloquist roars and cunning sound amplification. But he also falls desolately in love (with a damsel chosen from the audience), has to sacrifice his injured pet and ends with a liberating, ecstatic dance into freedom that sent shivers down my spine.

And this is a show that works for children and adults alike – I have never heard both infectious, cackling laughter from children and genuine belly-laughs from their parents in such earnest. I found that at times the pace drags a little, and that some sketches could be more coherent and succinct, but the overall effect is to enchant, to tickle the funny bone and to dumbfound. I can only feel thankful that the dumbfounding is confined to the audience and that Julien Cottereau continues to create whole worlds with that limber, hypnotic, wonderfully uncanny voice of his.

A disclaimer: I work at Southbank Centre, but the views above are all my own.

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Humming silk worms, living statues & human fat - the Art of Change explores what it means to be alive.

Art of Change – New Directions from China

Hayward Gallery, until 9 December

A pillar of human fat. A life-sized triceratops. An Alice in Wonderland-esque rabbit hole through which you enter an eerie domain and receive a hoarsely whispered wish. The variety and impossible strangeness of this exhibition gives it an uncanny vitality, the like of which I have never before experienced in an art gallery.

I visited this exhibition expecting to have my slight scepticism about modern art confirmed by a collection that had moved so far from traditional mediums in its rebellion against the authoritarian censorship of the Chinese government that I would struggle to recognise it as art. But instead of the art being subsumed by politics, I found that most pieces had an aesthetic or artistic vision with which I could identify (or at least recognise as such). And often they provoked an unusually visceral engagement – the sound of live silk worms moving, the woman standing with their head protruding through a hole in a wall-mounted shelf, an impossibly suspended figure frozen in an impossible fallen motion who, with a jolt, you realise is a living person – all of these force you to connect with life, with humanity, with what it means to be human.

The introduction to the exhibition says that the works ‘not only reflect the energy and dynamism of present-day China, but also its extraordinary contrasts and contradictions’. Which I think is remarkably true; there is a sense of the apolitical, the inquisitive, even the entertaining, in conflict with a deep-rooted need to comment on the state of contemporary China. You are faced at one moment with MadeIn Company’s harrowing The Starving of Sudan, which forces the viewer to contemplate their own voyeuristic tendencies and also has implicit connotations for China’s own, potentially self-interested, involvement in Sudan and Africa as a whole. And yet this work is mounted in a room at whose centre lies a white cube from which apparently random objects are flung high into the air, distracting, amusing and perplexing the viewer simultaneously.

But because of the nature of these works of art, the effect is not necessarily jarring. Rather it forces you to contemplate the juxtaposition of diverse artworks and the disparate moods they create, and to wonder to what extent this is reflective of the need of the artists to express themselves in fluctuating, ephemeral and impersonal ways.  You do indeed recognise an Art of Change in these pieces, and that change, for me at least, is emphatically a positive one.

So I would fully recommend you catch the last weekend of this exhibition before it closes on Sunday. And don’t miss out on the wonky ping-pong table… I challenge anyone to achieve a rally of more than four hits!

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Piss-pots and polemic in Alan Bennett's People

People by Alan Bennett

Lyttleton Theatre, running until April 2013

From dilapidated fur coats to prized chamber pots full of celebrity urine, this play is not afraid to send up the higher echelons of our society. Nor is it afraid to denounce every other aspect of England through the prism of the decaying wealthy, from the voyeurism of National Trust visitors to the banalities of the porn industry.

People’s premise lies in its lamentation of the future of a decrepit stately home, whose fate must be handed over either to the pompous, impervious National Trust, to the money-grabbing, elitist private collector or to be funded by a proliferation of dirty porn films. The inhabitants of the house, Dorothy Stacpoole and her beleaguered companion Iris, are brilliantly portrayed by Frances de la Tour and Linda Bassett. They are relics of a bygone age who wish to let the past decay as they believe it should, rather than have it dredged up and prettified for the commercialised whims of the National Trust. And although this doesn’t always feel like an entirely satisfying alternative to commercial conquest (there is a sense that Bennett can’t quite think of the alternative he would substitute), you root for them throughout.

My main issue with the play was the abundance of clichés. Bennett evidently exploits these consciously in order to dissect and censure the stereotypes of the world he is portraying. But as an audience member they can feel slightly tired and predictable. The play seems caught between a camp musical (typified by the cringingly cheesy sequence of the manor house being swept clean by a bizarre troupe of miming, dancing workmen) and biting satire (in which even the archdeacon’s aspirations include ‘exclusive celebrity eucharists’).

It feels that something is lost in the space between, a sense of subtlety that would give Bennett’s acerbic polemic true resonance. Dorothy fights to assert that Stacpoole Manor ‘is not Allegory House’, but Bennett ironically falls into the trap of metaphorising too strongly. In doing so he loses the nuance of his argument, which is actually a complex blend of pro-conservative preservation as personified by Dorothy and anti-Thatcherite condemnation of the 1980s as a time in which the country became fixated on the monetary value of everything. 

However, I did frequently laugh out loud and also felt a heart-wrenching sadness for the impossible predicament in which Dorothy and Iris find themselves. The play does force you to think about the dismaying decline of our country into a place that now seems to be ‘just a captive market to be exploited’, as Bennett puts it in his enlightening article in the London Review of Books. All the actors play their parts brilliantly, seizing roles that risk obvious caricature and moulding them into believable characters – Miles Jupp as the cloyingly plummy auctioneer and Nicholas le Provost as the bumbling National Trust enthusiast excel at this particularly. Bennett’s scintillating wit and the touching poignancy of Dorothy’s plight ultimately win out to make this play highly enjoyable and disquietingly thought-provoking.

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