A modern inspiration: Turner’s “The Eruption of the Souffrier Mountains in the Island of St Vincent, at Midnight, on the 30th April 1812”
GALLERY
Turner Contemporary MargateOpening 16th April
Almost ten years after getting the green light, the Turner Contemporary in Margate opens in April. Commissioned when enthusiasm for the idea of cultural regeneration was at its height, this is one of the last of the Labour government’s big arts projects to come to fruition.
Construction has been beset by difficulties—not least the cancellation of the first architectural project, owing to escalating costs. But director Victoria Pomery has stayed true to a complicated brief: to create a public gallery for contemporary art that will draw the world’s attention; to serve the local community; and to remind people that Margate, now a byword for economic decline, was once a magnet for visitors, pre-eminently the artist JMW Turner, who was drawn by the dramatic light.
Architect David Chipperfield has built an elegant sequence of six interlocking spaces, clad in etched glass, on the spot where Turner used to stay, with views over the seafront. The first show, “Revealed,” takes its cue from a borrowed 1815 Turner painting (above). Six major artists, including 1996 Turner prize-winner Douglas Gordon and French veteran Daniel Buren, have been invited to show or create new work—photographic, installation, sculpture—inspired by Turner or reflecting his preoccupations. Whether such imaginative programming can be maintained, who will come and who will ultimately benefit from this first-class building, are larger questions, but this is a bold start for a gallery without a permanent collection.
Emma Crichton-Miller
THEATRE
Betty Blue EyesDir Richard Eyre, Novello Theatre, from 11th April, Tel: 0844 482 5170
Exactly two weeks before a royal wedding in a time of austerity, here comes a new musical about a royal wedding in a time of austerity. It’s 1947 and street parties are being thrown to celebrate the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. But with all the cutbacks and rationing, how do you find a candidate for the hog roast?
This promising comedy comes from the stable of producer Cameron Mackintosh. Betty Blue Eyes is written by Americans Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, with songs by our own George Stiles (music) and Anthony Drewe (lyrics). It’s based on A Private Function (1984), a hilarious Yorkshire-set film scripted by Alan Bennett, which starred Maggie Smith as a sort of Lady Macbeth of Ilkley and Michael Palin as her sheepish chiropodist spouse. Those roles are now taken by Sarah Lancashire (once of Coronation Street) and Reece Shearsmith (The League of Gentlemen); Betty, the eponymous pig, is animatronic.
Stiles and Drewe wrote the new songs for Mary Poppins and the delightful animal-centred shows Just So (1984) and Honk! (1993). The musical world of Betty Blue Eyes, Stiles suggests, is that of Pathé News and Eric Coates, and he’s aiming for a British pastoral fusion of the composers he most admires: Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Walton, Arthur Sullivan. Sounds like a hoot, or a honk, or at least an oink.
Michael Coveney
FILM
Essential KillingOn general release from 1st April
Jerzy Skolimowski was once the most-mourned missing person of European film; a genuinely great director with a 17-year blank on his resumé and a back catalogue that was notoriously hard to see. Fans circulated samizdat copies of his Deep End, in which Diana Dors brings herself to orgasm by invoking the footwork of George Best: “Dribble, dribble, dribble!” she exclaims.
Essential Killing, the first Skolimowski picture to receive British distribution since 1989, has no such outbursts of weirdness. It barely has any dialogue at all. Vincent Gallo—the wild man of American indie cinema—is the gasping, whimpering, wordless focus of every scene. He’s an Afghan prisoner being sent to a Guantánamo-style facility in snowbound eastern Europe. When his prison van collides with a pig, Gallo goes on the lam, and becomes the quarry in one of the purest manhunt movies you’ll ever see; a figure in a landscape of pitiless white.
This fugitive kills, maims and uses a gun to force a breastfeeding mother to supplement his diet of ants and tree bark—but his desperation never dehumanises him. Some critics have been troubled by the casting of Italian-American Gallo as an Afghan member of the Taliban, but Skolimowski makes no statement on the Afghan war or the world through which his leading man runs. Despite the Humvees and the helicopters, it may as well be Dostoevsky’s Siberia and that seems appropriate—this film is a lost director’s triumphant return from exile.
Matthew Sweet
EXHIBITION
Dirt: the Filthy Reality of Everyday LifeWellcome Collection, 24th March-31st August, Tel: 0207 611 2222
For anthropologist Mary Douglas, dirt was simply “matter out of place”; for public health pioneers, it was an enemy to be defeated by science; for the religious, it is a reminder, as a ceramic dish in this show has it, that “You and I are earth.” A new season by the Wellcome Trust explores what dirt is, how our ancestors abhorred or revelled in it and how our future may lie between the Scylla of mounting urban detritus and the Charybdis of debilitating hygiene.
The season’s main focus is an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection. Over 200 objects—visual art, photography, cultural ephemera, scientific artefacts, film and literature—lead us on a trail from 17th-century Holland through Victorian London and the cholera-defying John Snow to Dresden’s dance with ethnic cleansing in the Nazi era. Santiago Sierra’s sculptures, made from human excrement scavenged by New Delhi’s untouchables, expose the shadowy side of urban expansion; the 30-year effort to turn New York’s Fresh Kills landfill into a public park offers only partial redemption. The season has spawned events across the country—but here you will find the exposition unfolded with customary Wellcome aplomb.
Emma Crichton-Miller
ALBUM
Cat’s EyesCat’s Eyes, Polydor
Publicity stunts are by nature disruptive, but when pop duo Cat’s Eyes recently performed in St Peter’s Basilica during afternoon Mass, their offering sounded so appropriate that not even the Vatican’s cardinals noticed. Footage of the performance, surreptitiously filmed for YouTube, shows singer Faris Badwan and young Canadian soprano Rachel Zeffira intoning their dreamy lament “I Knew It Was Over” with immaculately-presented female choristers, while architectural blasts from the Basilica’s organ bellow out from on high.
Badwan is better known as the noisy frontman of goth-punk band The Horrors, whose 2009 album Primary Colours narrowly missed a Mercury prize. Zeffira and he formed Cat’s Eyes two years ago after meeting and discovering a mutual passion for 1960s girl groups. This self-titled debut album is a swooning collection of disturbed love songs, whose characters swirl despairingly about a vintage soundscape. Zeffira, who dominates the singing, is classically trained (her connections got them into the Vatican) and the self-conscious naivety of her voice adds a delicious irony to the ghostly arrangements.
Nick Crowe
TELEVISION
Game of Thrones, begins 18th April
The internet has been buzzing about this show for almost two years, and in April, Game of Thrones finally premieres on HBO and Sky Atlantic. HBO is calling its new fantasy series “the Sopranos in Middle Earth.” Epic in scope and with a huge cast, Game of Thrones tells interlinked stories of intrigue and betrayal as noble clans battle for the “Iron Throne.”
British actors Sean Bean and Lena Headey star, with newcomer Emilia Clarke as the wife of a barbarian warlord. It could be silly, but the writers are determined to make the characters three-dimensional. It is set in a world where “summers span decades and winters can last a lifetime” and there are swords and castles and dragon eggs, but the series has a complexity and moral ambiguity rare in the genre. HBO have pulled out all the stops, creating a language for the barbarian tribe and setting scenes in luxurious brothels, deserts and frozen wastelands. With ten episodes, airing weekly through the spring, this is the show we’ll be talking about.
Tom Streithorst
GALLERY
Turner Contemporary MargateOpening 16th April
Almost ten years after getting the green light, the Turner Contemporary in Margate opens in April. Commissioned when enthusiasm for the idea of cultural regeneration was at its height, this is one of the last of the Labour government’s big arts projects to come to fruition.
Construction has been beset by difficulties—not least the cancellation of the first architectural project, owing to escalating costs. But director Victoria Pomery has stayed true to a complicated brief: to create a public gallery for contemporary art that will draw the world’s attention; to serve the local community; and to remind people that Margate, now a byword for economic decline, was once a magnet for visitors, pre-eminently the artist JMW Turner, who was drawn by the dramatic light.
Architect David Chipperfield has built an elegant sequence of six interlocking spaces, clad in etched glass, on the spot where Turner used to stay, with views over the seafront. The first show, “Revealed,” takes its cue from a borrowed 1815 Turner painting (above). Six major artists, including 1996 Turner prize-winner Douglas Gordon and French veteran Daniel Buren, have been invited to show or create new work—photographic, installation, sculpture—inspired by Turner or reflecting his preoccupations. Whether such imaginative programming can be maintained, who will come and who will ultimately benefit from this first-class building, are larger questions, but this is a bold start for a gallery without a permanent collection.
Emma Crichton-Miller
THEATRE
Betty Blue EyesDir Richard Eyre, Novello Theatre, from 11th April, Tel: 0844 482 5170
Exactly two weeks before a royal wedding in a time of austerity, here comes a new musical about a royal wedding in a time of austerity. It’s 1947 and street parties are being thrown to celebrate the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. But with all the cutbacks and rationing, how do you find a candidate for the hog roast?
This promising comedy comes from the stable of producer Cameron Mackintosh. Betty Blue Eyes is written by Americans Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, with songs by our own George Stiles (music) and Anthony Drewe (lyrics). It’s based on A Private Function (1984), a hilarious Yorkshire-set film scripted by Alan Bennett, which starred Maggie Smith as a sort of Lady Macbeth of Ilkley and Michael Palin as her sheepish chiropodist spouse. Those roles are now taken by Sarah Lancashire (once of Coronation Street) and Reece Shearsmith (The League of Gentlemen); Betty, the eponymous pig, is animatronic.
Stiles and Drewe wrote the new songs for Mary Poppins and the delightful animal-centred shows Just So (1984) and Honk! (1993). The musical world of Betty Blue Eyes, Stiles suggests, is that of Pathé News and Eric Coates, and he’s aiming for a British pastoral fusion of the composers he most admires: Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Walton, Arthur Sullivan. Sounds like a hoot, or a honk, or at least an oink.
Michael Coveney
FILM
Essential KillingOn general release from 1st April
Jerzy Skolimowski was once the most-mourned missing person of European film; a genuinely great director with a 17-year blank on his resumé and a back catalogue that was notoriously hard to see. Fans circulated samizdat copies of his Deep End, in which Diana Dors brings herself to orgasm by invoking the footwork of George Best: “Dribble, dribble, dribble!” she exclaims.
Essential Killing, the first Skolimowski picture to receive British distribution since 1989, has no such outbursts of weirdness. It barely has any dialogue at all. Vincent Gallo—the wild man of American indie cinema—is the gasping, whimpering, wordless focus of every scene. He’s an Afghan prisoner being sent to a Guantánamo-style facility in snowbound eastern Europe. When his prison van collides with a pig, Gallo goes on the lam, and becomes the quarry in one of the purest manhunt movies you’ll ever see; a figure in a landscape of pitiless white.
This fugitive kills, maims and uses a gun to force a breastfeeding mother to supplement his diet of ants and tree bark—but his desperation never dehumanises him. Some critics have been troubled by the casting of Italian-American Gallo as an Afghan member of the Taliban, but Skolimowski makes no statement on the Afghan war or the world through which his leading man runs. Despite the Humvees and the helicopters, it may as well be Dostoevsky’s Siberia and that seems appropriate—this film is a lost director’s triumphant return from exile.
Matthew Sweet
EXHIBITION
Dirt: the Filthy Reality of Everyday LifeWellcome Collection, 24th March-31st August, Tel: 0207 611 2222
For anthropologist Mary Douglas, dirt was simply “matter out of place”; for public health pioneers, it was an enemy to be defeated by science; for the religious, it is a reminder, as a ceramic dish in this show has it, that “You and I are earth.” A new season by the Wellcome Trust explores what dirt is, how our ancestors abhorred or revelled in it and how our future may lie between the Scylla of mounting urban detritus and the Charybdis of debilitating hygiene.
The season’s main focus is an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection. Over 200 objects—visual art, photography, cultural ephemera, scientific artefacts, film and literature—lead us on a trail from 17th-century Holland through Victorian London and the cholera-defying John Snow to Dresden’s dance with ethnic cleansing in the Nazi era. Santiago Sierra’s sculptures, made from human excrement scavenged by New Delhi’s untouchables, expose the shadowy side of urban expansion; the 30-year effort to turn New York’s Fresh Kills landfill into a public park offers only partial redemption. The season has spawned events across the country—but here you will find the exposition unfolded with customary Wellcome aplomb.
Emma Crichton-Miller
ALBUM
Cat’s EyesCat’s Eyes, Polydor
Publicity stunts are by nature disruptive, but when pop duo Cat’s Eyes recently performed in St Peter’s Basilica during afternoon Mass, their offering sounded so appropriate that not even the Vatican’s cardinals noticed. Footage of the performance, surreptitiously filmed for YouTube, shows singer Faris Badwan and young Canadian soprano Rachel Zeffira intoning their dreamy lament “I Knew It Was Over” with immaculately-presented female choristers, while architectural blasts from the Basilica’s organ bellow out from on high.
Badwan is better known as the noisy frontman of goth-punk band The Horrors, whose 2009 album Primary Colours narrowly missed a Mercury prize. Zeffira and he formed Cat’s Eyes two years ago after meeting and discovering a mutual passion for 1960s girl groups. This self-titled debut album is a swooning collection of disturbed love songs, whose characters swirl despairingly about a vintage soundscape. Zeffira, who dominates the singing, is classically trained (her connections got them into the Vatican) and the self-conscious naivety of her voice adds a delicious irony to the ghostly arrangements.
Nick Crowe
TELEVISION
Game of Thrones, begins 18th April
The internet has been buzzing about this show for almost two years, and in April, Game of Thrones finally premieres on HBO and Sky Atlantic. HBO is calling its new fantasy series “the Sopranos in Middle Earth.” Epic in scope and with a huge cast, Game of Thrones tells interlinked stories of intrigue and betrayal as noble clans battle for the “Iron Throne.”
British actors Sean Bean and Lena Headey star, with newcomer Emilia Clarke as the wife of a barbarian warlord. It could be silly, but the writers are determined to make the characters three-dimensional. It is set in a world where “summers span decades and winters can last a lifetime” and there are swords and castles and dragon eggs, but the series has a complexity and moral ambiguity rare in the genre. HBO have pulled out all the stops, creating a language for the barbarian tribe and setting scenes in luxurious brothels, deserts and frozen wastelands. With ten episodes, airing weekly through the spring, this is the show we’ll be talking about.
Tom Streithorst
