Day: March 11, 2018

Napoleon Disrobed at the Arcola Theatre review ****

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Napoleon Disrobed

Arcola Theatre, 7th March 2018

Here is JL David’s preposterously heroic painting of Napoleon Bonaparte Crossing the Alps. The Napoleon of Simon Ley’s alternative history The Death of Napoleon, is of a somewhat different hue. Ley’s novella, his real name was Pierre Ryckmans and he was a Belgian academic specialist based in Australia, imagines NB is smuggled out of St Helena, returns to Paris via Antwerp, and attempts to hook up with the faithful in order to mount a comeback. It all ends rather more prosaically.

This novella forms the basis for this play-ful diversion from Told By An Idiot. co-produced by Theatre Royal Plymouth. Told By An Idiot exists to put the fun into theatre so it is easy to see why this story, about an extraordinary man rendered ordinary and having to deal with the consequences, attracted them. When I say them I mean two gifted Hunters: Paul Hunter co-founder and driving force behind TBAI, and here our Napoleon, and director Kathryn Hunter, theatre’s acting chameleon, last seen in the Emperor at the Young Vic.

The final, and, for me, most valuable contribution however, came from Ayesha Antoine, who plays … everybody else, including Ostrich, the young woman who proves NB’s salvation. The play kicks off with some gentle, and very funny, Napoleon related banter with the audience from Paul Hunter. We cut to the escape from St Helena, NB masquerading as Eugene Lenormand, brought to life with a few well chosen props, the first of a dizzying number of costume changes from Ms Antoine, and the unpinioning of Michael Vale’s raised platform set to create the swelling sea. Sight gags, aural interruptions, wordplay and anachronisms a plenty, take us energetically through NB’s missed meeting with the Bonapartistes in Bordeaux, his train journey from Antwerp and his rendezvous with widow, single mum and melon shop owner Ostrich. The tone then shifts from the affectionately comic to the comically tender as NB abandons his ambitions and his destiny, his double on St Helena having pegged it early, to settle down with Ostrich, whoever she might be.

This is a piece that revels in the artifice and wonder of theatre which delivers more than you might expect or deserve. It might not quite deliver the contemplations on identity and freedom that the director might have imagined, is NB really who he says he is?, but you would have to be a serious miserabilist not to be won over by this. Plainly I am not as miserable as I think I am.

Black Panther film review ****

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Black Panther, 6th March 2018

The Tourist fancies himself as some kind of high culture dandy so he is normally dubious about fantasy, superhero, action genre films and the like. No plot. no characterisation, lazy, frequently daft, stultifyingly dull effects. There are exceptions if the ideas and treatments warrant it, Blade Runner 2049 most recently, but recent trips to see Star Wars instalments have proved tiresome.

So no interest up to now in the Marvel Studios output. The reviews though made Black Panther sound different, not just because of its Afrocentric setting and largely black creatives, but because of the quality of the result and the originality of the plot. And the Tourist doesn’t want to come across as a hair-shirted, intellectual humble-braggart, intent on only seeing what is good for him.

Black Panther didn’t start off too well. Hoary flash-back set-up, a few listless character tropes, an overwhelming soup of visual influences. But then I unclenched my elitist buttocks, stopped thinking about the smarmy things I could say about it and went with the flow. A flow of utter nonsense of course, but it is childish fantasy, so why bother analysing it, and a fall and rise redemption narrative arc which was telescoped from that first flashback, but it looks marvellous, literally, and the performances are brimming with, cliche alert, brio.

The powerful messages, the evil of Africa’s historic colonisation, the contrast between African and African American inheritances and stereotypes, the harnessing of technological power, are not laid on with a trowel, and the film dials down the visual effects in lieu of something more, frankly, stylish. The Afrofuturism aesthetic is, obviously, pretty cool, but director Ryan Coogler, and the artistic team led by production designer Hannah Bleachler, resist getting too pleased just with the look of the thing. In big screen Wakanda the technological is wedded to the organic, the past to the future, with plenty of sun-saturated daylight. A complete contrast to your standard fantasy setting even if the origin myth is not.

The cast is outstanding. Chadwick Boseman’s King T’Challa does border on the Hamletian instrospection, but this sharpens the focus for Michael B Jordan who plays aggrieved cousin Erik “Killmonger” Stevens, flip sister Shuri (Tottenham’s finest Letitia Wright), cheerfully sadistic Afrikaans baddie Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis) and Forrest Whitaker’s Polonius like Zuri. Daniel Kaluuya as W’Kabi does his trademark, who the f*ck do you think you are, scary stare and Martin Freeman, as Everett K Ross, once again, amiably wanders in from an entirely different movie set in Surrey. I do hope both these chaps don’t give up on the stage with all these Hollywood capers. Danai Gurira’s striking warrior Okoye and Lupita Nyong’o’s graceful spy Nakia should be gifted their own fictional nation on this showing. I am hoping some enterprising London theatre might sport a showing of Danai Gurira’s play Eclipsed which starred Lupita Nyong’o in its Broadway run.

To whom it may concern at Marvel. Let’s have another one of these please. You have a new devotee.

 

Modigliani at Tate Modern review ***

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Modigliani

Tate Modern, 5th March 2018

One Modigliani nude or one Modigliani portrait is a thing of not inconsiderable beauty. Less so, one hundred, or what feels like hundreds. The elongated bodies, the mask-like faces, the blank, almond-shaped eyes. Look beyond the USP’s though and the influences, from which Modigliani never really escaped in his short life, are clear. Cezanne, Kees van Dongen, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Braque, his mates Soutine and Brancusi, the art of Africa, the Khmer art of Cambodia. If you mix with the best there is a chance your own work might fall a little short though.

Mind you this has proved a pretty popular exhibition I think. I postponed on a couple of visits to the TM, put off by the queues. If there’s a queue to get in, I reckon, you ain’t going to get to see much. This may reflect the virtual reality recreation of AM’s last studio space in Montparnasse which forms part of the entertainment. No surprise that I can’t be doing with that sort of thing. It probably also reflects his bad boy reputation. He managed to hold out until he was 35, eventually succumbing to the TB which he carried through his life, but was permanently poorly and penniless,not helped by knocking back the absinthe and smoking prodigious quantities of hash, in part to hide the TB symptoms. He dressed like a dandy, when he wasn’t getting his kit off in public, never missed a party, and wasn’t picky in his choice of lady friends. He was a very good-looking chap. He read all sorts of dodgy literature to prepare himself for the life of bohemian excess, Nietzsche was a favourite, as well as immersing himself in all that Antiquity and the Renaissance had to offer in his native Italy, and, when in his cups, he reportedly worked like a dervish.

Barely sold a canvas in his lifetime and destroyed a lot of his early stuff. Relied on mates and dealers for studio space and materials. Moved to Paris in 1906 and lived in Montmartre and Montparnasse, natch. Eventually his dealer Leopold Zborowski sorted out a public exhibition for him in 1917 in Paris to showcase his nudes, but this got “closed” on its opening day by the coppers because it was too dirty, what with loads of lady fluff being on show. Dumped his muse, poet and art critic Beatrice Hastings, to take up with young toff dauber, Jeanne Hebuterne, with whom he had a daughter. Wants to marry her, but Mum and Dad unsurprisingly think their daughter can do better than a penurious, drug addled artist, raddled with TB, and say no. He dies, she, eight months pregnant, chucks herself out of a window.

And if all that were not the epitome of artistic excess, he goes and gets himself buried in Pere Lachaise. So AM had, and has, a reputation to keep up. Which has been fuelled by avid collection of his many works (and plenty of fakes) through the last century. The first work in the exhibition is a self-portrait from 1915 where AM sees himself as Pierrot, the sad clown, the trusting fool, one eye obscured, which sets the scene for AM’s invention of himself as the ultimate bohemian artist.

Is the art any good though? Well there is a salacious thrill in the room of nudes but, engage your brain and it soon passes. His models wear expressions of complete indifference. The transactional nature of the nude painting has rarely been more apparent. Cliched soft-porn? Don’t ask me, there’s some worse stuff from the High Renaissance, but it’s pretty sleazy. The portraits show more variation if you ask me, with posture, expression, colour, there is much to ponder and, I admit, enjoy. There is much biographical significance given his wide circle of mates in the heady atmosphere of Paris in the 1910’s (and the 1890’s, 1900’s and 10920’s mark you). Cocteau, Picasso, Gris, Rivera, amongst some lesser lights.

There still seems to me to be a hefty distance between artist and subject, and not just because he painted masks. Not quite the distance that Cezanne employed to allow him to concentrate entirely on what he saw in his portraits. (Cezanne Portraits exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery review *****). Modigliani does not, alchemically, turn people into brush strokes even though his portraits echo those of Cezanne. Nor is this the confrontational distance that his mate Chain Soutine conjured up in his portraits of hotel folk, the f*ck you stance of his bell boys for example, (Soutine’s Portraits at the Courtauld Gallery review ****). No this is a distance, a lack of connection, which seems to me to be closer to neo-classical portraiture. Filtered through the lessons of cubism, Modigliani can then focus on what, I think, he mastered, to wit, the line. It is not the colour, the brush stroke, the paint, which excites, but the first marks, the lines that create the structure. The shape the faces, the curve of the thighs. One of AM’s nudes is even explicitly posed to ape Ingres’s Grande Odalisque.

Which maybe why I found the room of sculptures the most interesting. Modigliani didn’t persist with sculpture beyond a year or so in 1912: the work was tiring given his ill-health and the materials expensive. The limestone busts on display here are thrilling. The elongated faces, almond eyes, swan necks would all be exhausted in two dimensions but the debt to antiquity is here more vivid. The volume which is absent from the paintings brings a new, literally, dimension. The room prior to the head vitrines shows some of AM’s preparations and sketches for more substantive public sculpture where, again, the artistic precedents are writ large.

AM left Paris in 1917, at the behest of his dealer, (artistic not drugs), and headed to the French Riviera with Jeanne Hebuterne. Other artists did the same. There is a distinct shift in the intensity of his work, reflecting the light maybe, but maybe the poor fellow eased up a bit on the sauce. There is even a tiny landscape. It’s not much kop though. Still everything here seems a bit less of a struggle, less of a show than the wall to wall nudes of the prior room, mostly from 1917, with a few later, softer examples.

Gaugin, van Gogh, Monet, Cezanne, Picasso, Modigliani. These are the biggest brands from the years when Western art was ruptured. I take a bit of persuading on Gaugin, but it’s not tricky to work out what’s special about the next four. But Amedeo Modigliani. Hm, on the basis of this exhibition I am not so sure. Definitely worth seeing this uncluttered, expansive, extensive and expensive collection, this is big bucks art after all, and there are a fair few paintings here secured from private collections, but not a patch on the Cezanne portraits which were, until recently, gracing the walls of the NPG (and where, mystifyingly, there were no queues on the occasions I visited).