Theatre review: nut at NT's The Shed

nut

By debbie tucker green

The Shed, National Theatre

The deliberately contrived lower case letters in debbie tucker green’s name and the names of her plays do not, thankfully, translate into the content of her work. There is little contrivance in nut’s whip-crack dialogue and its depiction of a reclusive young woman fighting her demons.

nut opens as protagonist Elayne holds a bizarre conversation with her friends Aimee and Devon about who would write their eulogies, how they would ‘go out’, and who they would invite to their funerals. The surreal dialogue is peppered with telling insight into the serious undercurrents underlying many young, banterous relationships that are struggling to stay jocular in the face of real problems. But the lengthy scene peters out into confusion towards the end as it loses its sense of focus.

We’re catapulted into a gripping duologue, however, when we cut to Elayne’s sister having a painfully plausible spat with her ex-husband about custody of their child. Anyone who has ever fought with a loved one will squirm with recognition. It is only when Elayne’s sister visits that the link between them is established and the uncanny nature of the first scene is explained. Slowly everything assumes a retrospective poignancy and anguish that endures through the final scene as the innate love between the sisters seems as ephemeral and extinguishable as the burning cigarettes that pepper the play.

Tucker Green's language artfully combines naturalistic sparring with poetic nuances that resonate throughout the play. And the actors’ delivery is mostly pitch-perfect, particularly from Sharlene Whyte as Elayne’s sister and Gershwyn Eustache Jr as her ex, who make you feel the voyeuristic discomfort of watching a real couple puzzling out their personal conflicts. The unique set design from Lisa Marie Hall – all curved rusting poles and furniture that seems to mutate into sculpture – creates a beautiful, functional and ensnaring cage in which the characters pace and snarl.

Ultimately it feels there is something missing that would have turned this from a good play into a great one. Perhaps it is lost in that first long scene where the characters’ interactions don’t always ring true, and leave you fearing a lack of emotional investment. But by the end of the play, you sense the burn of the cigarettes Elayne inflicts upon herself as if they are on your own skin, you inhale the oppressive smoke into your lungs and feel truly affected by the daily grind of this vignette of lives struggling for air.

This is a feisty little play, not flawless but absolutely worthy of being programmed in the experimental space of the NT’s The Shed. It makes you intensely uncomfortable and laugh out loud simultaneously, and leaves you feeling shell shocked – in its very conflict lies its power.

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Mount Kimbie make you want to dance away your faultless youth all night long...

Mount Kimbie Live

Koko, London, Thursday 14 November

This review first appeared on More than the Music

Kai Campos and Dominic Maker have perfected a tricky balance in their live sets: they fluctuate between using live vocals, guitar and drums to faithfully enhance tunes from their most recent album Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, and also produce exhilarating live remixes that tantalise the audience and stay faithful to their electronic roots.

Campos does the majority of the singing, and although his voice isn’t flawless, it brings an appropriately gritty sincerity to songs like Home Recording. Live drums make the thumping percussion refreshingly authentic and serve to complement the band’s glitchier beats – Maker even cracks out some impressively precise clapping into the mic which is rather mesmerising. In Blood and Form, Campos’s guitar and vocals provide a delicate counterbalance to the tune’s relentlessly electronic industrial sounds. And when the duo sing in unison on Made to Stray, there is an extra umph that turns Campos’s sometimes weak voice into an irresistible pull on the audience to join in.

Mount Kimbie’s achievement in bringing their post-dubstep electronic sounds into a live forum is at its zenith in their collaboration with spoken word rapper King Krule. On Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, the two tracks with Krule’s vociferous vocals can jar against the mellow delicacy of the rest of the album. But in the live set he brings an energy to the stage that enlivens crowd and band alike. As he moves from spoken-singing to truly impassioned rapping, Campos and Maker’s increasingly insistent drones seem perfectly matched to the paroxysms into which Krule sends himself.

This duo have moved on from the electronica of their first album, Crooks and Lovers, to hone a sound that embraces everything from trip-hop, dubstep and rap to techno and even free jazz. This heady mix explodes onstage into a varied and immersive experience that is musically assured and excitingly experimental. And as well as the cerebral enjoyment you can take from Mount Kimbie’s music, it also makes you want to dance away your faultless youth the whole night long.

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Gig review: 'Like taking a wholesome walk through the forests of the world' - Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit

Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit
Hackney Empire, 10th October

This review originally appeared on More Than The Music

Johnny Flynn has recently taken a hiatus from music, instead gracing the stage at Shakespeare’s Globe and the West End to act in Richard III, Twelfth Night and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. Now the tousled English folkster has returned to the folk scene in which he cuts such an inimitable figure. This current tour, promoting his new album Country Mile, proves that he has not lost his touch.

Flynn’s voice appears effortless, slipping the notes into each phrase like delicate fingers into a perfectly fitting glove. He is as pitch-perfect live as he is on recordings, and brings an additional frisson to his performance with his unforced authenticity and the occasional well-placed extra glissando. The Sussex Wit (made up of Flynn’s sister Lillie on vocals, flute and melodian, David Beauchamp on drums, Adam Beach on bass, Joe Zeitlin on cello and newest member Cosmo Sheldrake on keyboard) complement Flynn beautifully. The band sit separately on a sparse stage, silhouetted by backlighting; a beguiling set-up that belies the perfect synchrony of their performance as a seamless whole. Lillie’s voice adds an ethereal aura to her brother’s earthy tones, which together mingle with miscellaneous folk instruments to create a sound that maintains its integrity as much at Hackney Empire as it did at their intimate Rough Trade record store gig two weeks ago.

The set was compiled from a satisfying mix of old favourites and new songs. Many of the new ones do sound remarkably similar to those from his previous two albums, A Larum and Been Listening – Flynn’s sound has definitely not been revolutionised, lending a certain sameyness to the gig. But if you like intriguing, imaginative folk then that’s no bad thing. From the heart-warming Einstein’s Idea (written when his son was born – cue every woman in the crowd melting) and the two-part contrapuntal harmony of After Eliot, to the vigorous trumpet-enhanced folk-rock of Howl and the rollicking Tickle Me Pink, there is plenty of diversity within Flynn’s oeuvre to keep you wanting more.

Flynn’s music always instills a certain emotional heft, with his catchy hooks and ambiguous, poetic lyrics. Seeing him live, you feel this even more keenly – there is a lack of pretension in these songs that makes you want to slow down your pace of life, pick up a banjo and strum your heart out. Watching a Johnny Flynn and the Sussex Wit gig is like going for a wholesome walk through the forests of the world, taking in everything from acorn to oak and emerging covered in mud with ruddy cheeks, much like Flynn’s own, and gratifyingly invigorated by your nourishing musical experience.

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'The poeticism of the prose is exquisite': a review of The Tilted World

By Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly
Published 1st October 2013
This review first appeared on We Love This Book.

Husband and wife writers, poet Beth Ann Fennelly and novelist Tom Franklin, have composed a poem of devotion to their land and to love in the form of lyrical novel The Tilted World. They weave a tender tale of lost souls in the Deep South and of discovered solace amidst the cataclysm of the great 1927 Mississippi flood.

The palpable threat of the flood is manifested through the prism of Dixie Clay – already emotionally drowned by her unhappy marriage to a bootlegger making whisky in defiance of prohibition law – and through Ingersoll, an emotionally stagnated prohibition agent, come to Mississippi as the flood waters threaten to burst the levees. When this strange, mud-caked man appears through the rain to leave a baby on Dixie’s doorstep, the world will tilt and warp the boundaries of law, friendship, community and love.

The Tilted World takes time to absorb the reader in its delicately rendered tale. The structure, which inhabits Dixie’s and Ingersoll’s thoughts episodically, does not immediately fully realise their psychologies, and boredom occasionally threatens in the opening chapters. The syntax can seem almost wilfully excluding – it is not clear from the start that the narrative voice has sprinklings of southern American phrasing, so the lack or direct and indirect objects and unnatural verb uses can be confusing. But slowly the lives of Dixie and Ingersoll become compelling, and representative of the lives of all those who lived through prohibition, who lived through the war, and through the upheavals of the Deep South at the turn of the century.

The poeticism of the prose is exquisite; metaphors are sprinkled through the book, giving you pause even as the plot surges on like the flood that propels it. Beautiful images that conjure a very specific time and place are simultaneously timeless: in the heavy wind of a low-flying navy plane ‘the corn [is] blown into italics all around’; when the Mississippi river is at breaking point Ingersoll can ‘feel the levee wavering like a struck tuning fork’; the sky is ‘gauzy and low, like a rafter cobweb Dixie Clay yearned to knock down with a broom’.

The Tilted World is a deeply-felt, elegiac homage to a particular time and to the endurance of love, unafraid to shy away from the mundane realities of life, rewarding the reader’s commitment to its tilted world.

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A universal tale of mystery and enlightenment: Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things

Published 1 October 2013
This review first appeared on We Love This Book.

From the author of the multi-million bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, comes something quite its opposite. The Signature of All Things is an epic, universal tale traversing the 19th century on a voyage of mystery and enlightenment, taking in multiple continents, scientific theories on evolution and the entire spectrum of human experience – including birth, love, death, heartbreak, religious doubt and sexual turmoil.

The novel tells of the bold, brilliant Alma Whittaker, blessed not with beauty but with a formidable intellect and a voracious desire for knowledge. As she immerses herself in scientific pursuits, her botanical specialism in mosses leads her to revelatory ideas about time and evolution. These ideas are challenged by the man she falls in love with, and Alma’s all-encompassing need to seek answers impels her to investigate the enigmas of her own lover’s past.

Gilbert uses Alma’s science to enrich her human plight, rendering one person’s instinctive, evolutionary battle for survival into a compassionate, tender account of unerring fortitude. There is something of Jane Eyre in Gilbert’s heroine; Alma’s plainness is negated by her resilience and enduring faith in life.

Gilbert’s prose is not perfect – she occasionally labours a metaphor or employs a clunky turn of phrase that seems almost to complement Alma’s own unwieldy demeanour. And the plot is absorbing, but occasionally one can feel a little like Alma, adrift in a tempestuous sea of subtle narrative hints: ‘all she had ever wanted was to know things, yet […] all she did was ponder and wonder and guess’. That said, however, The Signature of All Things is an accomplished and irresistible novel. Expertly researched and exquisitely realised, it compels the reader to adopt Alma’s own unquenchable need to know everything, from the minutiae of her world to the grand narratives that inform it.

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Man Booker Prize shortlisted Eleanor Catton at Southbank Centre

Eleanor Catton at Southbank Centre
Tuesday 10 September
On The Luminaries, shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize

‘The novel is the most expansive and supple form that exists. It is almost like a virus; it keeps adapting to remain resilient. It pushes the boundaries of what is possible.’ A resounding testimony of faith in fiction from one of the most talented writers of fiction today; Eleanor Catton’s talk on the night of the announcement for the Man Booker Prize shortlist proves her worthy of her place upon it. She spoke yesterday with eloquence and erudition on everything from the beauty of paradox to the mathematics of the Golden Ratio.

Her shortlisted novel The Luminaries is set in the New Zealand Gold Rush of the 1860s. A weighty tome of 832 pages, is has been hailed as an ‘ambitious’ work not because it is somehow deficiently aspirational, but because it interweaves through an immensely complex structure (based upon rigidly adhered-to astrological schema) a rollicking tale of murder, greed and revelation that defies the seeming arbitrariness of its composition.

Catton was captivated by the notion that ‘each aspect of the zodiac planets governs a part of the self that makes a whole’, and accordingly based each of her characters on a zodiac sign and determined their behaviour by its defining features. The chapters are also governed by the Golden Ratio, necessitating that each is half as long as the preceding chapter (hence the sizeable length of the novel).

This may seem an artificial construct that could impose a certain clinical flavour upon her writing, but the reverse is the case. She gives a typically unassuming caveat to the potential strangeness of her self-imposed structures: ‘my internal monologue is saying ‘don’t sound like too much of a crackpot’ at this point...’. But crackpot she certainly is not; Catton is clearly an author who thrives upon structure but who populates that structure with a world both vividly realised and compelling. Her desire to use the Golden Ratio stemmed from the sense that it is appreciated as beautiful in the visual arts, in mathematics and even in the simple shape of a door or a book, and that its beauty could be manifested in literature but has never been tested. The Luminaries seems both empirically and emotionally to prove the truth of her hypothesis.

The skill of Catton’s writing is in forming her characters fully, allowing their psyches to develop and absorb the reader while building them as ‘spheres within spheres’, each entwined with the next so they become parts of the whole. She cited the influence of Martin Buber’s philosophical tract I and Thou, which led her to investigate the notion that the zenith of life is found when souls truly comprehend each other, understanding themselves to be kindred spirits within humanity.

If this all sounds highly conceptualised and abstract, Catton’s flair is for combining such ideas with a characteristic down-to-earth quality in both her writing and her speech. In last night’s talk, she shrewdly compared the novel to TV box sets, acknowledging that the latter can now ‘give space for psychological complexity’ almost as holistically as the former. Similarly, she acknowledged the pressures on a New Zealand writer shortlisted for the Man Booker; as only the third nominated Kiwi and youngest ever shortlistee, she hopes that she can set the standard for a new generation of writers from her country to contribute to its relatively nascent canon.

She wears her virtuosity with a lightness of touch that turns her systematised, byzantine novel into a timeless human tale. Catton speaks of writing dialogue (one of her particular strengths) as ‘an orchestration, requiring the writer to be a composer, and to be invisible'. And The Luminaries truly is a structural, narrative and emotional symphony, worthy of the praise being heaped upon it.

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Seamus Heaney: we can be consoled that 'Death's edge/ Blunts on the narcotic strumming' of his words

Seamus Heaney, one of the greatest poets of our time - his is the death not only of a naturalist at one with the natural world, but of a lyricist, a balladeer of our times who was gifted with the grace of rendering our political, ecological and personal upheavals with a deft, melodic turn of phrase. His words were as the birds to whom St Francis preached: they 'Danced on the wing, for sheer joy played/ And sang, like images took flight [...] His argument true, his tone light.'

His poetic soul will endure and be remembered for its brilliance, but he will also be remembered as a great and good man. To use Heaney's own phrase, ‘in his presence, time rode easy’, anchored on his mild humility and generous embrace of all people. All who knew him have attested to this: 'a joy to be with and a warm and caring friend' Bill Clinton; ‘a very humble, modest man' Jimmy Deenihan, Irish Arts minister; 'a person of truly exceptional grace and intelligence' former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion; 'He wore his huge wisdom very lightly and he gave so generously of his time' Bishop of Derry Dr Edward Daly.

We can be consoled that Heaney's words will remain as a testament both to his virtuosic poetic skill and to his generosity of spirit. In The Folk Singers, he acknowledges that 'Death's edge/ Blunts on the narcotic strumming' - we can rest assured that people will be strumming to his tune for generations to come, and finding solace in the enduring quality of his ‘time-turned words’.

To read my Southbank Centre blog post on Heaney’s death, see here.

Theatre review: pulsing eroticism and galvanising hate in Mies Julie

Mies Julie
Saturday 17 August, Oxford Playhouse
World tour commences 2014

««««

An insistent drone pervades the still air. Red light seeps through the mist, casting elusive shadows amidst the sparse set. A slowly rotating ceiling fan catches the eye, slicing the air with ominous intent, presaging the unrelenting suspense to come. And thus the scene is set for one of the most formidably visceral, psychologically afflicting plays of the decade.

Director Yael Farber has taken August Strindberg’s 1888 play Miss Julie, a tale of power, lust and class limitations, and thrust into its melting pot the cataclysmic catalyst of post-apartheid racial tension. Julie is the white daughter of a South African farm owner; John is the black farm hand to whom she directs her quivering desire one hot night, with devastating consequences. What follows is a heady battle between man and woman, black and white, master and servant, colonial domination and native subjugation, intellect and physicality, love and lust, self and self-destruction.

Every movement in this play is exquisitely choreographed to feel at once naturalistic and aesthetically sublime. The physicalisation of John and Julie’s conflicting impulses forms a sparring dance that leaps across the stage and draws you into its gravitational pull. The capitulation of their coupling is an erotic, animalistic union that seems at once inevitable and catastrophic, epitomising the irresistibility of John and Julie’s subconscious need to play out the impossible, irrefutable differences between them.

Hilda Cronjé as Julie exudes sexuality and uses her commanding, almost metallic voice to augment the purposeful thrusts of her physical and emotional needs. But there is something about her that is not only unlikable but also slightly irritating – it makes her initial maltreatment of John hard to endure, and her interactions with her beloved nanny and John’s mother Christine (a stoic, spiritual performance from Zoleka Helesi) feel insincere. But as John, Bongile Mantsai is truly transfixing. His vocal control and bodily power belie a man who at once knows what he wants and has no idea how to achieve it. His instinctive reactions to Julie are brilliantly conditioned not by, as William Golding puts it, ‘a civilisation that knew nothing of him but was in ruins’, but by his own natural moral compass and his proud self-control. He resists Julie’s brazen advances with impressive rigour, relenting only after he has warned her she goes too far: ‘I am only a man’.

Farber’s consummate production perfectly complements the actors’ power. The portentous music, performed live on laptop and saxophone by Mark Fransman and Brydon Bolton, creates an atmosphere taut with reluctant, unresolved cadences and dissonant chords. This is occasionally punctuated by the eerie interjections of renowned Xhosa musician Tandiwe Lungisa as one of John’s spectral ancestors, added to Strindberg’s original cast by Farber to prowl the stage with guttural murmurings that shake the soul. And Patrick Curtis’s set design, a sparsely populated kitchen in which all the action takes place, provides the obstacles around which John and Julie can perform their mating dance and destruction.

Farber’s crowning achievement is successfully, agonizingly to cleave the timeless concerns of Strindberg’s story to the very specific concerns of post-apartheid South Africa. She slowly strips away the layers of grime, sweat and skin that cloak John and Julie in social convention and ancestral history, until they are laid bare with just their passions to speak for them. Farber then builds up the layers again, excruciatingly, one by one, until there is no way they can overcome the impenetrable barriers between them. Mistress and servant dream of escape and equality, but they only prove to themselves and to the shellshocked audience that they cannot undo the binding reality of ‘the new South Africa, where miracles leave us exactly where we began’.

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Book review: Man Booker Prize longlisted novel The Lowland

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
Publishes 26 September
Review first appeared on We Love This Book

'at once blisteringly specific and edifyingly universal'

Jhumpa Lahiri’s masterful account of two boys growing up in 1970s Calcutta,The Lowland, has been nominated for this year's Man Booker Prize. It tackles the nature of memory, the mutability of time and the impossibility of true communication, while examining how the boys' tragic experiences echo through generations to come.

Amid the growing allure of Naxalite Marxism, inseparable brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra mature to lead very different lives, with different ideals. As Udayan becomes embroiled in communist politics and Subhash forsakes his roots to move to America, their bond undergoes a partition that begins an ineluctable series of partitions – physical, emotional, political and psychological – which punctuate Lahiri’s intricate exploration of what it means to feel isolated, to feel whole and to feel loved.

To read the rest of the review, see here.

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Guardian Witness, A Book That Changed Me: T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems

In praise of T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems
On Guardian Witness

Every dreary day that I walk over London Bridge with hoardes of city workers streaming towards me in their grey suits, against a grey sky, I think of T.S. Eliot’s crowd who ‘flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many’.

In this he encapsulates a sense of banal futility that still pervades our world now, and yet when I think of his Selected Poems I do not think of them negatively. To me they are full of necessary realism, of perfectly articulated truth and, ultimately, of hope.

I once read 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' aloud to myself, sitting at my kitchen table at the age of 21, panicking about what to do with my life. It made me feel so calm, so accepting of the fact that we cannot squeeze the universe into a ball and know what to do with it, that my panic receded into unexpected contentment. The commonplace elegance of his words, the utter joy in linguistic play and the profound, enduring resonance of his words turns even the most depressing of thoughts into beauty. It makes the things that sadden me in this world seem but fragments within a more positive whole.

To read on Guardian Witness, see here.
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Album review: in praise of Laura Marling's Once I Was An Eagle

Laura Marling, Once I Was An Eagle

Released 27 May 2013, Virgin

Experiencing Once I Was An Eagle is less like listening to an album and more like walking before an epic tableaux, tracing its narrative and absorbing yourself in its intricate threads. The tracks are not individuated, autonomous entities but run into each other in an inexorable story that the teller is fated to tell and the listener is compelled to hear. From the wilderness of the lurking beast and the eagle and dove's eternal fight, through the fierce cry of the master hunter, to the gentle damsel by the shore and the hoped for contentment of a happy ending, the album tells its epic with heartfelt truthfulness and musical virtuosity.

Marling’s vocal control is phenomenal. Her vibrato on the title track ‘Once I Was An Eagle’ undulates like lush hills, trailing off into a valley of silence with the held note of the violin running through it like a stream, while each perfect vocal glissando of her chorus is a trickle of water spilling over the rocks into little pools of exquisite sound. And the themes of her album are similarly metaphorised in the beauty of the natural landscape and the elusive complexity of the humans who inhabit it. With every meticulous nuance of her voice she captures this complexity, expressing overwhelming power, consuming compassion and every emotion in between.

The music itself is a genre-defying mixture of country, folk, bluegrass, classical guitar that borders on flamenco and Fantasia-esque film music. She employs unusual tunings and instruments including organs, lap steels and pipes to enhance her skilful guitar riffs. Those riffs become motifs that transmute and tie together the threads of the life she weaves, perfectly marrying with the progress of the narrative. In ‘When Were You Happy? (And How Long Has That Been)’ she sings ‘The more I think the harder I breathe’ – that may be true, but the unique sounds and ingeniously expressed thoughts of this album are a breath of fresh air for the listener.

Marling dazzled with her entrance onto the music scene at the age of 18 with the delicate debut album Alas I Cannot Swim (2008). She has since turned that precocious youth into a self-possessed maturity, accepting that it is impossible to ‘know what it is you don’t know’. Her most recent album, A Creature I Don’t Know (2011), is full of her characteristic innovation and ingenuity but the power of her emotional, musical and lyrical hooks was slightly lost in complex obscurity. Now, she has combined the lot to produce a unique musical perspective on the world that is at once virtuosic and eminently accessible.

Marling has always had great literary sensibilities – her prevalent bird metaphors allude to Shelley’s skylark whose ‘sweetest songs sing of saddest thought’. But for Marling, birdsong is a reminder of the transience and pain of life not because the birds are unaware of this but because the birds, as in ‘Love Be Brave’, ‘suffer so; do they sing because they know this life don’t go slow?’ Marling’s music does something similar – it doesn’t shy away from the pain of life but makes it into something beautiful. It is a music in which you can dissolve yourself, fade far away and quite forget the world around you while sharing Marling’s ‘pleasure pain’ as if it is, exquisitely, your own.

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Hush, listen... Exploring the power of sound at the National Theatre

The Hush

The Shed, National Theatre, until 3 August

What is the true power of sound? What can it make you feel, remember, believe or hope for? This is the question asked by pioneering electronic music producer Matthew Herbert in his first foray into the theatrical world. We all know that a particular smell or a particular song can immediately transport you to a previous time or place, but if you isolate ambient noise and focus in on that, what kind of sonic journey can that take you on? And how can this help us appreciate the world we live in?

Herbert, together with NT associate director Ben Power, has created an avant-garde piece of theatre in which sound becomes a character, engaging with the actors, eliciting emotion and responding to and shaping the dialogue. Two foley artists stand on a balcony above the set, creating a variety of subtle sounds with which the performers, Tobias Menzies and Susannah Wise, interact below. From purposeful footsteps falling on a tray of gravel to a lapping lake conjured by hands splashing in a glass tank, they provide a soundtrack to Tobias and Susannah’s past and potentially future lives. This aural illusion is conjured within an apparent sound studio, that may also be a kind of therapy centre, or perhaps a futuristic facility to which people can come to recreate happy memories from a bank of sounds that has been preserved in an otherwise dystopian world. Herbert lets you come to your own conclusions.

The beauty of having the foley live on stage is that you are torn between watching the passions of the actors and the actions of the sound-makers. Its presence makes every moment feel enhanced and vividly realised, yet somehow also artificial, laden with the irony that none of what the characters experience is real. There is a distinct sense of pathos throughout the whole piece, precisely because of this dialectic between the invocation of desired memories and the production of actual sounds. Because these are made with the most mundane of objects, they simultaneously create and confound the fantasy.

Herbert seems to be examining the future of our fractured world – these soundbites, however accurately crafted, can never come together to be an enduring, meaningful, tangible whole. Are we destined to remember our perceived halcyon days by trying vainly to record, sample, index and replay every single decibel of sound, every byte of data? In these days of virtual realities and cyber socialising, should we instead be trying to experience life in reality and not expect every sense to be at our fingertips whenever we click our fingers, or a button? You can go and see The Hush and ask yourself these questions. And you can also experience it on a purely sensory level, appreciating the technical prowess of those who manipulate sound and valuing the sonic experience in a way you may never have before. It’s worth going along with open ears just for that.

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News article: JK Rowling publishes novel under pseudonym

So it seems JK Rowling doesn't need that touch of Harry Potter magic to sell books. She may have written the most successful series of all time, but she is also the author of a noteworthy novel published under the pen name of Robert Galbraith. The Cuckoo's Calling is, tellingly, a bestseller without the readers' knowledge of its true author. When it was published in April this year, The Times Saturday Review said that Galbraith 'delivers sparkling dialogue and a convincing portrayal of the emptiness of wealth and glamour', and the author has achieved the accolade of comparisons with prestigious crime writers Ruth Rendall and PD James.

The book follows war veteran and private investigator Cormoran Strike as he begins interrogating a model's suicide and gets quickly immersed in an enigmatic world of crime and secrecy. It was The Sunday Times that identified The Cuckoo’s Calling as an unusually assured debut novel and decided to investigate its authorship. Upon discovery, Rowling told them: 'being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience. It has been wonderful to publish without hype and expectation and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.'

Alas that she is now doomed to the same relentless judgment and critical scrutiny that was inflicted upon her when she released The Casual Vacancy, to a mixed reception, last year. That was by no means a flawless book (see my review here) but did not deserve the ferocious vilification it received from Jan Moir in The Daily Mail and others. The Cuckoo’s Calling is now likely to receive similar levels of attention. It has currently sold over 1,500 copies in hardback, a very respectable amount for an unknown author that would place it at around 30^th on the bestseller list; and of course, sales will now skyrocket with the breaking news of its true authorship.

On publisher Little Brown’s website, The Cuckoo’s Calling is listed as the beginning of a unique series of mysteries - the question is, will that series be thwarted by this discovery, or will it become a Harry Potter for grown-ups in the way The Casual Vacancy never could?

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PS I particularly like this review of The Cuckoo's Calling - it reads as if it could just as easily be about Harry Potter, complete with pun...

'Laden with plenty of twists and distractions, this debut ensures that readers will be puzzled and totally engrossed for quite a spell' (Library Journal)

Seasfire live review: dreamy electro-pop turns to awkward rock

Seasfire review on morethanthemusic.com
Tuesday 11 June, XOYO

Seasfire seems to be a band that hasn’t quite made up its mind. They fluctuate, sometimes within songs, between poppy dream-synths, pop-rock and anthemic prog-rock. Watching them is a little like flicking through a photo album of your younger brother’s teenage years – the melancholic phase, the rebellious phase, the spotty awkward phase, the cool and sophisticated phase. Some of Seasfire’s tunes create atmospheric, accomplished soundscapes that prove their potential to get out of the teenage years and face the world. Others feel like moments you’ll look back on and cringe at in years to come.

Read on here...

Tune in, drop out: on switching off the smart phone and rediscovering the joy of museum-going alone

New article on The Flick:

In this age of constant socialising – in reality, in 140 characters, in likes, comments and statuses – I rediscovered a rare joy recently. Visiting the V&A this weekend toute seule, I remembered how liberating it can be to stand alone in the presence of great art. Despite being surrounded by hordes of infuriating tour groups (who seem to personify chaos theory, moving randomly into your line of sight, oblivious to your apoplectic foot-stomping) I found that it was still possible to achieve an oddly tranquil state of mind.

To read the rest, click here...

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Theatre review: the wistful, wandering wonderland of Peter and Alice

Peter and Alice

Noël Coward Theatre, until 1 June 2013

Childhood disintegrates until it has become nothing more than the forgotten dust in the corner of a long-abandoned toy box. This is the unexpectedly bleak message of Peter and Alice, writer John Logan’s (Skyfall) imagined exposition of the real-life encounter between Peter Llewellyn Davies, the man who inspired JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, and Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. As Peter, Ben Whishaw resembles a dilapidated, emaciated teddy bear, becoming visibly more broken by the memories of his painful childhood and adulthood encounters with death. Judi Dench’s elderly Alice Liddell is more a rocking horse: haughty, ornate and rigid with disuse, but becoming stiffly animated when thoughts of play and childhood innocence occur to her again.

It is worth watching this play for their portrayals alone. From the first bristling moment of encounter, Alice and Peter are fully-formed, intensely complex characters with a sparring dynamism worthy of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Whishaw and Dench bring to their parts a gravity, warmth and poignancy that makes every one of their words fly up with Peter Pan to the soaring joys of childhood or burrow down a much less fantastical rabbit hole than the fictional Alice enjoys, fathoming the real depths of despair and suffering.

Logan is not afraid to explore these depths – his characters’ torments come from their exposure at a young age to complicated, confused older men who revered, to the point of problematic rapture, the innocence of youth. Both Barrie and Liddell here reveal disillusionment with ‘that place adulthood’ that ultimately scars the adults into which their children turn. The real Peter and Alice remain trapped in Lewis Carroll’s metaphorical darkroom, never to let in the light for fear of ruining the suspended moment of the photo which captures irretrievable youth. And you leave the play feeling this entrapment so intensely it is hard not to crave halcyon childhood abandoment, only to realise that being trapped in Never Never Land is, as Logan suggests, just as bad.

The shortcomings of the play are the script and plot devices – Peter and Alice didn’t have the extensive workshopping most new writing would usually undergo before a West End debut, which seems to be to its detriment. Logan’s writing is heavy with metaphor – sometimes it is flightily poetic, but at others it feels distinctly laboured. Similarly, the devices of flashback to scenes with Barrie and Carroll (brilliantly played by Derek Riddell and Nicholas Farrell respectively) and slightly contrived manifestations of the fictional Peter Pan and Alice confuse the plot and disperse any narrative drive.

Despite this, I left the theatre feeling edified and challenged – although part of this challenge was to remember that life is not as desolate as this play forces you to feel. When Peter says ‘I know what childhood’s for. It’s to give us a bank of happy memories against future suffering’, you hope your own life has given you a bank worthy of Mary Poppins’s levitating bankers. The same may not be able to be said of the real Peter and Alice, but Whishaw and Dench bring them to life with such force that you cannot but be swept along your corridor of tears in this confounding, capricious, captivating wonderland.

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Stripey surrender - Patternity festival

Patternity: Pattern Power – Superstripe

Londonnewcastle Gallery, Redchurch Street. Until 21 April

Have you ever thought about the cultural value of patterns? Have you looked at an electricity pylon, a stair railing or a zebra crossing and seen beyond the mundane to perceive the aesthetic enticement of visually ordered beauty? Or thought about how patterns make our world comprehensible, navigable and supremely elegant?

Well if not, you might after you’ve been to Patternity’s Pattern Power – Superstripe festival. They take the ethos of their award-winning cultural exploration of pattern – to find and celebrate the pattern in everything – and manifest it as a vibrant, hypnotic and wonderfully miscellaneous series of workshops, talks and exhibitions. This particular festival is all about stripes. When you enter, your retinas will be seared with more monochrome linear tessellations than you ever thought possible. The exhibition titillates your visual taste buds (to mix a metaphor as much as they mix up their curation) across a range of stripey subjects; from rigid diagonal lines swathing a curvaceous naked form in the work of fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø to Soulwax's Any Minute Now album cover, whose title recedes into impenetrable vertical stripes if you stand straight on but becomes blindingly clear when you to move to the side (and addles your brain in the process).

The festival appeals to our natural human tendency to aphonenia (recognising patterns that don’t exist – that face you thought you could see when you last looked up at the clouds). Patternity doesn’t just explore visual patterns, but through myriad events it delves into patterns in music, psychology, space, nature and even health and wellbeing. The beauty of patterns, be they gratifyingly symmetrical or enthrallingly chaotic, is celebrated in every way, down to the stripy mint humbugs scattered around the curated shop. The founders Anna Murray and Grace Withingham believe that their work can help alter patterns of the mind:

As human beings we can get stuck into very negative ways of thinking. Becoming more aware of these “bad” patterns can help us to work on replacing them with more positive ones. Good patterns of thought and behaviour encourage more healthy ways of being in the world — surely the most enduring of excellent patterns to discover!

Thus the festival even encompasses yoga, meditation and soothing conversations over a cup of Patternitea. So whether it is the banality of a barcode, the jauntiness of a sailor top or the ethereality of Saturnalian rings, stripes are everywhere - and Patternity streaks its way into your head like a monochrome mirage that confounds your eyes and stimulates your brain in equal measure. Check out their stuff here.

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Tilda Swinton sleeps in a glass box – ‘maybe’ madness?

The Maybe

Tilda Swinton & Cornelia Parker, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Has the art world gone mad? Or perhaps to sleep? Today, Tilda Swinton is slumbering in a glass box at the Museum of Modern Art as a ‘surprise’ performance piece. She will pop-up at unannounced locations within the museum throughout the year, presumably thereby fulfilling the ambiguity of the piece’s title The Maybe.

Is this the ‘still life’ of the modern age? Does it allow us to appreciate a greater level of stillness, allowing a living human to be examined and observed asleep, expressionless, unpenetrable? Or is it just a meaningless stunt that has assumed an apparent legitimacy because Swinton is one of those rare creatures, a respected celebrity?

What’s more, this isn’t even the first time this piece has appeared. The Maybe premiered in 1995 at London’s Serpentine Gallery, which thus deprives it of the novelty factor that might have been its saving grace, might have made it fresh, modern, even innovative. But between then and now, we’ve had David Blaine imbecilically starving himself in a plexiglass prison over the Thames, Damien Hirst pickling and preserving multiple unfortunates in formaldehyde-filled vitrines, and Southbank Centre proposing a floating glass box as its pioneering new performance space (in which I’m sure much more legitimate performance art will occur). Do we really need another see-through spectacle, an attempt at meaning that is as transparent, vacuous and hollow as the box that contains it? I think not.

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Daughter - If You Leave: album review

Daughter, If You Leave

Released 18^th March 2013

‘If you’re in love then you’re the lucky one/ Because most of us are bitter over someone.’ This optimistic outlook typifies Daughter’s debut album release If You Leave, a haunting electronic-folk concoction that sits somewhere between The XX and Laura Marling. Singer Elena Tonra has clearly suffered acute heartbreak and some of these songs are genuinely evocative, musically compelling explorations of those universal but excruciatingly personal experiences. But much of the album blurs into wistful oohs and bleakly minimal guitar refrains to leave you feeling drained and rather uninspired.

The subtle changes Daughter have made from their stunning debut EP His Young Heart – a more acoustic, intensely moving, deceptively simple exploration of love and pain – have made their sound feel a little generic and so less potent. The band have been praised for their originality and there are still signs of that in If You Leave. But the moments of fresh creativity seem to shine out from among forgettable fillers and misguided attempts at more upbeat songs (which are essentially the same as the more melancholy tracks but with an incongruously faster tempo).

Tonra’s gossamer-fine voice does send shivers down the spine, and there are moments when the shockingly bold honesty of her lyrics brings home the brutal emotions of a cataclysmic breakup. The best track on the album, ‘Youth’, is a desperately dystopian vision of youth and disillusionment. It begins with beautifully tender vocals over iterative, intricate fingerpicked guitar riffs, builds through a drum-punctuated bridge and reaches an intense climax of resonant post-production echoes and blossoming cymbals. And the three members of Daughter (singer Tonra, guitarist Igor Haefeli and drummer Remi Aguilella) magnify their sounds and manipulate their instruments in such a way as to conjure the impression a full band working seamlessly together to create striking soundscapes. From sparse beginnings out in the wild, their melodies and rhythm grow to embody passionate railings against this foul world that reach King Lear proportions.

But instead of Lear’s elegiac raving in the untamed outdoors, you feel as if Tonra is producing the same overwhelming emotion but in a stifling living room where its energy is dissipated and somehow inappropriate. As she says on ‘Smother’, ‘I’m a suffocator’. By the end of this album, you don’t feel you have come through a musical catharsis and enlightenment but that you have been numbed by the repetition and desolation of these songs. Daughter undeniably have an interesting sound and an elemental rawness that could become something great. But listening to the entirety of If You Leave is a dampening rather than revitalising experience. I look forward to watching Daughter play a gig to see if there is a visceral passion in their live performance that brings out the power in these songs, a power you can feel vibrating just below the surface but unable to break out.

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Does the digital revolution mean the death of film?

Side by Side: The Science, Art and Impact of Digital Cinema

A Documentary

Every movement in every artform across the ages is inevitably accompanied by resistance to change, tentative excitement about innovation and progress, and a wistful gaze through rose-tinted glasses at the past. Our cinematic versions of these glasses are very fetching 3D ones, which perhaps perform the dual function of making us nostalgic for a simpler, more innocent age of cinema and enlightening us to the potential of the digital revolution.

Side by Side is an intelligent documentary looking at how the landscape of filmmaking is being transformed by such proliferation of digital technology. It ranges from the specific scientific developments involved in capturing moving pictures to the age-old philosophical question of whether our rapidly changing world should welcome technological developments or remain wary of the razzle dazzle of modern pretenders.

Although not a flawless documentary, it’s worth watching just to be enlightened about the myriad techniques available to filmmakers in the digital age. But it really shines as a platform for the debate between those who champion new methods and those who believe that traditional photochemical techniques will always have more artistic integrity. Director Chris Kenneally and producer Keanu Reeves have consulted a wide variety of directors, cinematographers, colourists, actors and industry experts to tease out the nuances of these two sides. The result leaves you with a sense that digital has opened up brave new worlds but that the teachings of the old film masters and the unique effects of celluloid must not be abandoned.

Much of what the documentary records is fairly obvious: art is led by technology and vice versa, the marriage of technology and art can help to ‘outpace the audience’s imagination’. And frustratingly it doesn’t always tell you immediately who the talking heads are. But the expertise of those heads, from staunch digital advocates George Lucas and James Cameron to the more equivocal Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, gives both an interesting overview and quirky little insights into the history and current practice of Hollywood fimmaking. The extent to which digital is democratising the industry, and conversely is jeopardising its more traditional counterpart, is still very much unresolved.

So if, as cinematographer Michael Chapman avows, ‘cinema was the church of the 20^th century’, where does that leave us now? We may have our 3D glasses on but are we seeing, experiencing and creating more through them? Or will we end up with the inevitable headache from watching a film in more dimensions than it should aspire to achieve, or from whizzing our eyes about at 48 frames per second, or from seeing colours so searingly clear that we crave the distinctive grainy aesthetic of celluloid? It seems somewhere between the two. And I think if you watch Avatar or Sin City, you can't deny the exhilarating possibilities that digital affords. But it is clear from the way that these eminent filmmakers talk about celluloid that there is a unique magic to film and a visceral engagement with it that cannot, and should not, be lost in the furore. But do watch Side by Side, and make up your own mind.

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See a trailer for Side by Side here

Cloud Atlas: puzzling, dazzling, discombobulating

Cloud Atlas

Released 22^nd February 2013

Who would have thought one film could contain such a confusing cumulonimbus of character concoctions? Directors Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer have tried to translate David Mitchell’s epic novel into a digestible film, and their success is mixed. Cloud Atlas can feel like a daunting thousand-piece jigsaw, with seemingly unconnected fragments that must be painstakingly fitted together without the conviction you’ll ever quite get the full picture. But it can also be a beautifully rich tapestry, woven from a giddying array of genres and across many epochs, its threads interweaving to tell thrilling tales through a smorgasbord of ideas and intricate details.

Those character concoctions are the directors’ audacious filmic solution to the six-part structure of Mitchell’s novel. Each actor is reincarnated in different roles, sporting impressive prosthetics through which their acting calibre can (mostly) still shine through. So we witness Halle Berry as a gritty 1970's journalist, a silver-wreathed oracle from the future and even (only just believably) the white Jewish wife of a composer in 1930's Edinburgh. The most startling reincarnation is Hugh Grant, who plays a series of rather preposterous villains including an unexpectedly convincing, bloodcurdling cannibal.

The brilliance of the film, for someone who has read the book, is that the directors have taken a seemingly impossible combination of plots and made them exhilarating and surprisingly resonant. Themes of retribution, subjugation and accountability are nicely teased out – occasionally the script is too obvious, which I think is why some critics have accused the film of vapidity. But Cloud Atlas does have something to say about how your actions affect those around you, what your legacy will be when you’re gone, and questioning what freedom really means and whether any of us truly achieve it. And it does this with such style and technological daring that you cannot but be impressed.

Prolific links between the narratives, from theme to plot to subtle camera angle cuts, are revealed with breathtaking dexterity. One such tense moment intercuts between two scenes: a black runaway slave tightrope-walks the ship’s rigging to prove his worth to hostile, murderous sailors below; and a futuristic battle is fought on a precipitous sky-high walkway by rebels rescuing a genetically-engineered clone from perpetual servitude. The inevitability of enslaver and enslaved is made palpable as every camera angle is mirrored, reminding us of the ominously repetitive nature of humanity's flaws.

But watching the film with someone who hadn’t read the book did raise the question: without an anchoring knowledge of Mitchell’s more clearly divided narratives, would you understand what on earth is going on? The hasty cuts between scenes can be bewildering and take serious concentration to follow. There is also the temptation to play the ‘who’s who’ game – the prosthetics may be remarkable (and admirably racially non-discriminatory) but they are sometimes artificial to the point of farce – Hugh Grant as a geriatric cockney geezer and Hugo Weaving as an ostensibly Korean bad guy spring to mind. More time can be spent deliberating about, marvelling or laughing at the metamorphoses of these famous actors than paying attention to the earnest film the directors have tried to make.

Mitchell’s novel has a wonderful capacity to absorb you in six discrete worlds, each with their own inimitable voice in which you completely invest before moving on to the next. Each is disorientatingly different but immediately hypnotic. By intercutting the characters' tales, the directors have achieved a distinct kind of dramatic intensity but lost some of the novel’s immersive quality and some of its coherence. It takes time to appreciate fully a tapestry of this ambition and intricacy, weaved of such multifarious threads. And perhaps the medium of film, by its very nature, can never allow enough time to devote to such complexity. But the threads are beautiful nonetheless, and I think it is worth the 172 minutes to entwine yourself in the exquisite stories they spin. 

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