Ruth Asawa, Modern Art Oxford
There is a sharp divide between those yet to encounter the work of Ruth Asawa and those that have. The latter tend, as a consequence, to be quite obsessed. She was an exceptional artist, and her work the result of a full – if at times difficult – life.
Best known for her lobed biomorphic forms – suspended works, crocheted from fine wire, recalling long-necked fat-bellied gourds or welling flower heads – the work on display in this exhibition, Citizen of the Universe, ranges from textile patterns made with laundry markers, to detailed plant studies and origami models for civic fountains.
Asawa was born in California between the wars, to a family of Japanese-American market farmers. She, her mother and siblings were forcibly interned in 1942, along with 120,000 others of Japanese ancestry. Asawa left the camps to train as a teacher but was unable to graduate: it was not deemed safe for her to receive a work experience placement so she was not considered to have completed the course.
Instead, the tides of circumstance carried her to Black Mountain College, a radical creative institution where students and teachers lived and worked side by side, and where Asawa received instruction from some of the most important figures of her day, among them Josef and Anni Albers, and R Buckminster Fuller. By the time she left, her creative spirit and self-belief had been liberated, and she had already developed the looped wire technique with which she would craft her best-known works.
Citizen of the Universe goes beyond Asawa’s sculptures to look, too, at the way she combined art-making and family life. Her San Francisco home – complete with six children and an abundant vegetable garden – was documented by the venerable photographer Imogen Cunningham, a close friend. One of Cunningham’s photographs – blown up to cover a wall – shows looped and gathered wire works suspended from the ceiling all around the family home. They were part of the environment.
Asawa slipped out of view in the commercial art world as her commitment to arts education in the US public school system grew. She launched a programme that spread across San Francisco, an enterprise described here in the insightful film Of Forms and Growth (1978). There is plenty of less-seen material here too – notably a marvellous drawing of her baby son asleep in an ocean of patterned sheets. For those who have yet to discover this inspiring artist, your obsession starts here.
There’s no soprano, the tenor doesn’t get the girl and there’s an awful lot of talk about God: is Saint-Saens’ Samson et Dalila really an opera at all?
That’s always been the question when it comes to a work that started life as a biblical oratorio in the style of Handel and Mendelssohn (complete with choral fugue) and ended up as a grand opera.
Tension is part of the package – an attractive part, one assumes, for director Richard Jones, whose highly stylised productions tend to mine the discomforts and miscommunications, the incompatibilities and insufficiencies of his various communities: the awkwardness of unfulfilled desire, rage, revulsion, horror, disdain. What he doesn’t do, however, is sex. Which is a problem in Samson, because it’s full of it.
The whole of Act II is a seduction scene. Bar by bar, the Philistine sex-bomb Dalila breaks down the waning resistance of Samson, leader of the oppressed Israelites, in some of the 19th century’s most voluptuously beautiful music. It’s all an act. Dalila wants to lure Samson not just into her bed, but into a trap. But the desire is real; it has to be.
The tone is set, in Jones’s new staging, by Andreas Fuchs’ lighting, bouncing cool off the corrugated iron of designer Hyemi Shin’s Nissen hut. No diaphanous boudoirs or come-hither draperies here – no heat either, in the middle of Gaza. It wouldn’t be a problem if Elina Garanca’s Dalila and SeokJong Baek’s Samson generated their own. But theirs is a wary seduction.
By the time everyone breaks out in the famous “Bacchanale” in Act III, we’re firmly into Jones’s home territory of garish, gyrating horror and the moment has passed.
Conductor Antonio Pappano and the Royal Opera House Orchestra and Chorus are giving us the full blood and sweat. From the despair of the opening bars, grunting raw in cellos and double-basses, to the manic shimmer of the Philistines’ victory celebrations, Pappano’s score is pure 1950s Technicolour.
Tension may be built into this gloriously odd piece, but for real success it needs to be the push-pull tug of desire and restraint, intellect and instinct, not a head-on collision.
Set in a beauty parlour in Southall, west London, Satinder Chohan’s play has so many snarled threads that you need patience and a teasing comb to untangle it. It raises themes of immigrant experience, generational tension, gender, religion, abuse and mental health crisis. But it never settles on a decisive tone, oscillating so disorientatingly between sitcom, soap and harrowing tragedy that none of its ideas gets the necessary focus. That’s a pity, because Pooja Ghai’s production is atmospheric and vivaciously acted.
Reita (Kiran Landa) is the ambitious Sikh owner of Lotus Beauty, a sanctuary where British Asian clientele come to be pampered and groomed. Reita helps them maintain an illusion of Western-approved faux femininity – waxing away unwanted hair, bleaching their skin – but here, hidden from the male gaze, they can also exchange confidences. Sick of the plaster dust that showers from the ceiling whenever Tube trains thunder past, Reita has her eye on bigger, smarter premises and a new house in a more affluent postcode – but she needs the co-operation of her elderly mother-in-law, Big Dhadhi (an enthralling Souad Faress). Nor is Reita’s rebellious teenage daughter Pinky (Anshula Bain), in the throes of first love and lust, keen to move. Meanwhile, Reita’s assistant, Tanwant (Zainab Hasan) is desperate to find a candidate for a quick passport marriage; and cleaner Kamal (Ulrika Krishnamurti) is quietly suffering such torments at home that she’s on the brink of an act of desperation.
The lotus flower is referenced as a symbol of belonging, struggle and hope, and hair – traditionally uncut in Sikhism – also carries a complex significance, from Pinky’s longing for a Brazilian to the beard that Big Dhadhi proudly refuses to remove.
But there’s so much that feels underdeveloped, not least allusions to the egregiously little-known scandal of the violation of Indian and Pakistani women like Big Dhadhi, who in the 1970s were virginity-tested at British airports to determine their marital status , and to the high numbers of British Asian women who die by suicide.
The cast delivers Chohan’s choppy dialogue with energy and conviction, even if its whiplash inconsistencies are a distraction, and Faress is magnificent.
There’s a plethora of potentially fascinating stories here but they need much more air and nourishment to blossom.
Britannicus, Lyric Hammersmith
Psychotic emperor Nero infamously fiddled while Rome burned – and this staging of Racine’s 1669 take on Roman tragedy climaxes with the manchild-monster lifting a violin to his chin as he prepares to drag his empire into hell.
Atri Banerjee’s production, in which the French classical dramatist’s austere Alexandrine verse is briskly adapted by Timberlake Wertenbaker, is strong on imagery. Earth-quaking shudders of deafening noise set the actors twitching and juddering like helpless puppets. There’s a vast portrait of Romulus and Remus, the twin babies suckled by a wolf, whose story of rivalry and bloody betrayal is part of Rome’s creation myth. Showers of jet-black cinders presage destruction to come. What’s in between, however, is less arresting. There are overheated face-offs, and flashes of topicality, but it all feels rather forced: a study of lust and ambition with the antiseptic air of a museum vitrine.
Helena Lymbery and Nigel Barrett make decent work of a pair of slippery advisors operating in opposite camps, and Lymbery’s lines about the abhorrence of lying by those in authority raise wry chuckles. We don’t have to look further than our current egregious leadership for an example of how catastrophe follows when selfish appetite triumphs over statesmanship. But too often Banerjee resorts to ramping up the volume and the posturing in a bid to raise the stakes: actors yell or crawl among the furniture, yet it feels like so much mechanical display, and we remain detached. It’s not without interest; but it’s emotionally arid.
Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s Globe
★ ★ ★
In 1613, a spark from a cannon in a staging of Henry VIII famously set fire to the Globe, burning it to the ground. No cannons this time – but we do get a ginormous gold inflatable cock and balls. Writer Hannah Khalil’s reworking of Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s little-loved collaborative drama puts the sexual politics centre stage. It may not be quite full frontal, or indeed incendiary. Yet Khalil sprinkles a little mischievous gunpowder, and Amy Hodge’s eye-catching, inventive production has an exuberantly gaudy sense of fun.
In Emilia, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Globe hit, Shakespeare’s mysterious muse the Dark Lady was given agency and a thrilling, feminist voice of her own. Khalil attempts something similar, disrupting the drama and refocusing it on the women, and drawing on Shakespeare’s other plays and sonnets for additional dialogue.
Bea Segura’s firebrand Queen Katharine (of Aragon) and Janet Etuk’s strong-minded Anne Bullen (Boleyn) are predictably to the forefront, but we also get Natasha Cottriall as Katharine and Henry’s daughter Princess Mary, later Mary I or Bloody Mary – who doesn’t appear at all in the original. A pair of working-class women, vigorously played by Debbie Korley and Anna Savva, offer commentary on the action, and pop up as overlooked historical witnesses in various guises, from midwives to nurses and servants; in a pleasing twist, Korley is finally transformed into a vision of the future monarch, a bejewelled Elizabeth I.
Khalil’s interventions are conspicuously the liveliest moments: when Cottriall’s Mary swears vengeance for her mother’s humiliation in lines nicked from King Lear, for example, the poetry abruptly soars.
Elsewhere, the court powerplayers, led by Jamie Ballard’s duplicitous Cardinal Wolsey, are moved about like chess pieces – but to keep us interested, Hodge and designer Georgia Lowe fling lots of lurid spectacle at us. That huge golden phallus features at a party for Adam Gillen’s infantile Henry, who strops and sulks in a Christmas cracker crown; his throne transforms into a toilet, complete with gilded bogroll.
Anne’s pregnancy is announced with a shower of pink and blue balloons, and she gives birth, noisily, onstage, a gaggle of churchmen gawping up her skirts. Katharine is groped and harassed by pervy prelates in scarlet and purple, and tormented by a dreamlike parade of Henry’s white-veiled brides.
The gleeful vulgarity is arresting, and a cheeky riposte to the current Jubilee hoohah, yet there’s intensity too, often accompanied by Maimuna Memon’s lovely Laura Marling-ish songs: Ballard’s Wolsey is poignantly stripped of his robes and his office to a tune with lyrics from Richard II. Sometimes it all gets a bit garbled, and I couldn’t help wishing Khalil had gone for a total rewrite. But its buoyant irreverence is undeniably entertaining.
Robert Jones’s handsome design serves up a twinkling blue ocean and spotless ship’s deck, where Shearsmith’s uptight Peter fumes over the daily news on his laptop. He is, as Barber’s blowsy Denver widow Elsa Krakowski drawls, so anal that he “could snap a proctologist off at the knuckle”; his more equable wife Debbie (Abbington) indulges Elsa’s long-winded, far-fetched anecdotes, and both roll their eyes at her airily offensive pronouncements (she disapproves of fat people and not only voted for Trump, but would “do him”).
When they invite her to visit if she’s ever in the UK, it’s a nicety they don’t expect her to take them up on. Her arrival at their family home (Jones’s set gracefully transforming into a leafy two-storey semi) becomes more than an inconvenience when a quick Google reveals she’s implicated in a string of fatal poisonings. Debbie and Peter plot to get rid of her politely – but are stymied by her surprisingly transformative effect on their two warring teens (Gabriel Howell and Maddie Holliday, both terrifically stroppy). “She’s Murder Poppins!” cries an exasperated Debbie.
Further hilarious complications ensue in the form of Michael Simkins as a patronising, terminally boring neighbour, and Marcus Onilude as a perplexed copper whom Elsa plies with potentially lethal sandwiches.
Ideas around parenting, authority, internet fake news, the rage with the world we all suppress, and our obsession with true crime docs bubble beneath the farce and wordplay. And the performances are a riotous pleasure, Shearsmith’s mobile face and taut physicality registering every cringe and flinch, and Barber irresistibly ghastly. It’s a bourgeois nightmare with a wicked wit and a tangy streak of the surreal: delicious.
Anne of Green Gables, Sadler’s Wells, London
A plucky red-headed orphan takes centre stage in this luminous new production from London Children’s Ballet. No, not Annie, but Anne, the heroine of LM Montgomery’s novels. The imaginative 11-year-old is sent, by mistake, to middle-aged siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert – they actually wanted a boy to help on the farm.
It’s an inspired choice for the company, which gives 50 dancers aged nine to 16 a full West End production (the six-month process is, crucially, free), aimed at audiences aged five to 14. Given catastrophic arts cuts in schools, this isn’t just pleasurable work, but absolutely vital.
Mind, Jenna Lee’s slick staging, set to Gus Nicholson’s jaunty original score, is also highly professional. Many choreographers of “grown-up” work could learn from the clarity of her storytelling. There’s nothing extraneous here: a lyrical dream sequence in which the dancers embody blossoms is also efficient character-building, showing how Matthew is won over by Anne’s romantic world view.
Like the recent Netflix adaptation, Lee also deals sensitively with Anne’s traumatic back story. A stirring flashback, led by a powerful Sophia Johnson, is vivid without being unduly alarming. Otherwise, the small-scale incidents of Montgomery’s tale are brilliantly relatable: making friends, dealing with bullies, studying for exams. Anne also has a child’s strong sense of injustice, as when she’s forced to apologise to a rude neighbour.
In the lead role, an incredibly impressive Annalise Wainwright-Jones proves that dance is the perfect way to demonstrate Anne’s irrepressible spirit and flair for the dramatic. She also has a gorgeous arabesque – surely a classical star in the making.
Also excellent are Freddie Lovell as the kind-hearted Matthew, Lily Routledge as the gentle Diana, and Fyfe Skinner as the charismatic Gilbert, while Luca Mollica and Amelia Magni supply elegant pas de deux work. Anne is transfixed by the latter’s ruffled sleeves – as was I. Sabia Smith’s period costumes are a feast of gingham, frills and ribbons.