At Home He Feels Like A Tourist

  • The Here and This and Now at the Southwark Playhouse review ****

    The Here and This and Now Southwark Playhouse, 10th January 2017 OK homo sapiens. Enough with the exceptionalism. There is nothing special about you. Maybe you are more “intelligent” than any species that has inhabited the earth so far but you have only been around for a couple of hundred…

  • Bomberg at Pallant House Gallery review *****

    Bomberg Pallant House Gallery, 9th January 2017 Best British painter of the twentieth century? The mighty triumvirate of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and David Hockney from the second half of the century certainly would be in with a shout, though Bacon is easy to admire though sometimes hard to like, and Hockney…

  • My top 10 plays of 2017

    Message to self. Do not drone on. Nobody will read this. You are seemingly dispossessed of any edit function. And there are literally millions of other lists of best plays/theatre of 2017 produced by people who know what they are talking about. This may be your blog, intended to consolidate…

  • Cezanne Portraits exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery review *****

    Cezanne Portraits National Portrait Gallery, 14th December 2017 Frankly they could have hung the 50 or so paintings here upside down and turned the lights off. I would still have given it 5 stars. It’s Cezanne. The painter who showed all the other painters who have come since how to…

  • Dali/Duchamp at the Royal Academy review ***

    Dali/Duchamp Royal Academy, 29th December 2017 I don’t really get Salvador Dali. Maybe it is the over-familiarity with images of his work. Maybe it is the obviousness of the in-yer-face Freudian, symbolism. Maybe it is the flat, lifeless effect of his paintings. Maybe it is the fact that once he…

  • Daisy Pulls It Off at the Park Theatre review ***

    Daisy Pulls It Off Park Theatre 200, 16th December 2017 Funny thing the memory. Even more curious is consciousness itself. It used to be that clever folk conceptualised consciousness as a kind of “theatre of the mind”. Apparently now the cutting edge of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy says this dualism…

  • Titus Andronicus at the Barbican Theatre review ****

    Titus Andronicus Barbican Theatre, 13th December 2017 Titus Andronicus is a comedy right. Yet I see it is customarily bracketed with the other Shakespearean tragedies, and here forms part of the RSC’s latest take on the quartet of Roman tragedies, entitled, er, Rome. Now I know this comedy/tragedy/history play division…

  • The Florida Project film review ****

    The Florida Project, 13th December 2017 I missed out on Sean Baker’s previous film, Tangerine, shot entirely on an I Phone camera. It was on the “to-see at the cinema list” but I failed to get round to it. More fool me. This clearly needs to be put right based…

  • Peter Wispelwey (cellist) at Kings Place review ****

    Peter Wispelwey, cello Cello Unwrapped: Bach Through Time Concert III. Kings Place Hall 1, 8th December 2017 JS Bach – Cello Suite No 1 in G, BWV 1007 Benjamin Britten – Cello Suite No 3, Op 87 Gyorgy Ligeti – Sonata for solo cello JS Bach – Cello Suite No…

  • Happy End film review ****

    Happy End, 7th December 2017 Michael Haneke is a light-hearted fellow. At least that is what he claimed in a recent interview I read. I still have my doubts. Mind you he clearly has a sense of humour. Albeit of the dark variety. As his films reveal. It is a…