An expedition through the Canadian wilds: Tom Thomson, The West Wind (1917)
THEATRE
The VeilNational Theatre, 27th September-11th December, Tel: 020 7452 3000
Theatrical ghost stories tend to come in two categories. The first, like Susan Hill’s The Woman In Black, now in its 23rd year in the west end, delivers chills and thrills. The second, like The Weir and other Conor McPherson plays, uses the undead to explore the ache of living, with echoes of loss and fractured hope. In his beautifully spare, touching Shining City, McPherson combined both metaphorical and literal presentations of ghosts, a theme he is revisiting in The Veil.
Set in the crumbling glory of a grand house in rural Ireland during 1822, the plot is sparked by the arrival of defrocked Reverend Berkeley. He is to accompany 17-year-old Hannah to England, where she will marry a marquis to resolve the debts of her mother’s estate. But compelled by voices haunting his charge and a psychic current pervading the house, Berkeley proposes a séance, with catastrophic consequences.
One of the few playwrights with enough objectivity to direct his own work successfully, McPherson is again collaborating with designer Rae Smith (of War Horse fame). Further armed with lighting designer Neil Austin, one of Britain’s most expressive theatre artists, the production is set to deliver visually on the play’s thematic promise.
David Benedict
ALBUM
Metalsby Feist (Polydor, 3rd October)
Leslie Feist hit the big time in 2007 when her gospel-infused song “1,2,3,4” appeared on an advert for the iPod nano. (It was later adapted for a delightful Sesame Street appearance in which she taught the characters to count.) The Nova Scotia-born baroque pop singer was smart to let her music be used on lucrative TV and film soundtracks—it helped her float a career that remains wilfully independent.
Metals is Feist’s darkest record yet, a subtle work that gets better with every listen. Filled with hand-claps, shuffling beats and tambourines, the atmosphere is strangely antique. There are turbulent tales of relationship breakdown in “The Bad In Each Other” and “Comfort Me” (“when you comfort me, it doesn’t bring me comfort actually”), full of rich guitars and her signature multi-tracked choruses. Feist’s easy delivery conceals the complexity of her songs, most notably “The Circle Married The Line” where layers of voices build on one another.
There may not be a track here to advertise the iPad 3 but there is an innate understanding of the magical, golden combinations that make up a good tune. Feist says the album was inspired by an article she read in National Geographic on the importance of soil regeneration. With that in mind, Metals is her tough new crop.
Kate Mossman
FILM
We Need to Talk About KevinOn release from 21st October
The Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay made an electrifying debut with 1999’s Ratcatcher, followed it up with the soulful Morvern Callar in 2001 and was then bounced into an enforced layoff (the result, in part, of a doomed attempt to adapt The Lovely Bones). Happily she shows no signs of rust on We Need to Talk About Kevin, neatly filleted from the bestselling novel by Lionel Shriver. Tilda Swinton is ideally cast as Eva, a one-time travel writer marooned in Connecticut, toiling to connect with her bad seed of a son (Ezra Miller, positively sulphurous). We know near the start that Kevin will commit a Columbine-style massacre at his high school but the deed itself is almost by the by. Instead, we dip in and out of Eva’s memories, diving for answers, explanations, some clue to culpability.
Even if it’s not perfect—John C Reilly (below, with Swinton) is underused as the ineffectual father, while Kevin is painted as too exultantly evil—this is an elegant, confident, profoundly unsettling drama. No one plays flayed and haunted as well as Swinton and she rustles up a tour de force here; hiding out by the soup cans at the supermarket and steering her car through an eerie suburban Halloween, where pint-sized ghouls and skeletons flit across the headlights’ beam like emissaries of the damned.
Xan Brooks
DANCE
Lucinda Childs: DANCEBarbican Centre, 18th-22nd October, Tel: 020 7638 8891
Lucinda Childs established herself as a dancer and choreographer in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Her minimalist approach distills mundane gestures—walking, turning, waving—into trance-like patterns of repeated movement with infinitesimal alterations of rhythm. The dance equivalent of composer Steve Reich, Childs has been enormously influential on successive generations of abstract choreographers.
Since the late 1970s, Childs has specialised in large-scale productions. The first of these, DANCE, receives a rare revival at the Barbican this October. It features a group of 11 dancers in solos, duets and ensembles to a score by Philip Glass. The dancers on stage interact with projections of dancers performing the same moves. As the work progresses, the repetition dissolves as small adjustments build to a complex pattern.
Constructed of three 20-minute sequences, DANCE plays with the nature of perspective as the performers are sometimes dwarfed, sometimes distanced yet constantly immersed in the projected world, as if they were in the company of ghosts. The result is a fusion of dance, film and music that is both disorientating and beguiling.
Neil Norman
ART
Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of SevenDulwich Picture Gallery, 19th October-8th January, Tel: 020 8693 5254
When Tom Thomson’s canoe was found empty, floating in Algonquin Park in 1917, it bore witness to his artistic philosophy in a way that no painting ever could. His mysterious death testified to the savage, ungovernable force of the wilderness—one harnessed by his works and those of Canada’s iconic landscape artists, the Group of Seven.
A new show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery takes an expedition through the wilds with Thomson and his followers. The first truly Canadian school of painting, creators of a national aesthetic, these artists have been as neglected abroad as they have been celebrated at home. Returning to Britain for the first time in almost a century, they offer an essential supplement to the Eurocentric narrative of 20th-century art.
Before Thomson, generations of artists had rejected the dramatic beauty of the North American wilderness as both unworthy of artistic representation and impossible to capture. Inspired by the Impressionists, Thomson and his followers gave Modernism a Canadian accent, adding to its stylistic rebellion a quest for national identity. Their vigorous, rough-edged aesthetic finds expression in images of the Rocky Mountains, Atlantic seascapes and even the earliest western paintings of the Arctic.
Thomson’s arresting The Jack Pine is the centrepiece of a show that balances full-scale canvasses with little-known sketches—a rare opportunity to trace the development and scope of this undervalued movement.
Alexandra Coghlan
CLASSICAL MUSIC
New BabylonCity Halls, Glasgow, 28th October, Tel: 0141 353 8000; Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 29th October, Tel: 0131 668 2019
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra takes a break from Schumann, Beethoven and Berlioz to explore two rarely-heard film scores. A sharper contrast to the BBC Concert Orchestra’s sell-out performances of Hollywood blockbusters would be hard to find.
Camille Saint-Saëns’s elegant music for the historical melodrama L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (1908) is one of the first film scores to have been commissioned. At just over 15 minutes long, it was an epic by the standards of its time. To its septuagenarian composer it was probably a mere trifle: something to be filed away with the Uruguayan national anthem, “Hail California!” and other arcane commissions from his dotage. Yet the work’s belle époque soundworld of strings, piano and harmonium has immense charm.
Musicians and cinéastes may be more taken with Suite from New Babylon, Dmitri Shostakovich’s score for a 1929 satire on the Paris Commune. Shostakovich weaves together numerous musical styles with skill. Ironic detachment and bitter dismay collide in the juxtaposition of an Offenbachian gallop with the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” Quickly denounced as bourgeois by the Soviet authorities, it was the first of 36 film scores written by the former cinema pianist. A world removed from the illustrative “Mickey-Mousing” of Hollywood’s silent-movie composers, New Babylon still dazzles and shocks.
Anna Picard
THEATRE
The VeilNational Theatre, 27th September-11th December, Tel: 020 7452 3000
Theatrical ghost stories tend to come in two categories. The first, like Susan Hill’s The Woman In Black, now in its 23rd year in the west end, delivers chills and thrills. The second, like The Weir and other Conor McPherson plays, uses the undead to explore the ache of living, with echoes of loss and fractured hope. In his beautifully spare, touching Shining City, McPherson combined both metaphorical and literal presentations of ghosts, a theme he is revisiting in The Veil.
Set in the crumbling glory of a grand house in rural Ireland during 1822, the plot is sparked by the arrival of defrocked Reverend Berkeley. He is to accompany 17-year-old Hannah to England, where she will marry a marquis to resolve the debts of her mother’s estate. But compelled by voices haunting his charge and a psychic current pervading the house, Berkeley proposes a séance, with catastrophic consequences.
One of the few playwrights with enough objectivity to direct his own work successfully, McPherson is again collaborating with designer Rae Smith (of War Horse fame). Further armed with lighting designer Neil Austin, one of Britain’s most expressive theatre artists, the production is set to deliver visually on the play’s thematic promise.
David Benedict
ALBUM
Metalsby Feist (Polydor, 3rd October)
Leslie Feist hit the big time in 2007 when her gospel-infused song “1,2,3,4” appeared on an advert for the iPod nano. (It was later adapted for a delightful Sesame Street appearance in which she taught the characters to count.) The Nova Scotia-born baroque pop singer was smart to let her music be used on lucrative TV and film soundtracks—it helped her float a career that remains wilfully independent.
Metals is Feist’s darkest record yet, a subtle work that gets better with every listen. Filled with hand-claps, shuffling beats and tambourines, the atmosphere is strangely antique. There are turbulent tales of relationship breakdown in “The Bad In Each Other” and “Comfort Me” (“when you comfort me, it doesn’t bring me comfort actually”), full of rich guitars and her signature multi-tracked choruses. Feist’s easy delivery conceals the complexity of her songs, most notably “The Circle Married The Line” where layers of voices build on one another.
There may not be a track here to advertise the iPad 3 but there is an innate understanding of the magical, golden combinations that make up a good tune. Feist says the album was inspired by an article she read in National Geographic on the importance of soil regeneration. With that in mind, Metals is her tough new crop.
Kate Mossman
FILM
We Need to Talk About KevinOn release from 21st October
The Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay made an electrifying debut with 1999’s Ratcatcher, followed it up with the soulful Morvern Callar in 2001 and was then bounced into an enforced layoff (the result, in part, of a doomed attempt to adapt The Lovely Bones). Happily she shows no signs of rust on We Need to Talk About Kevin, neatly filleted from the bestselling novel by Lionel Shriver. Tilda Swinton is ideally cast as Eva, a one-time travel writer marooned in Connecticut, toiling to connect with her bad seed of a son (Ezra Miller, positively sulphurous). We know near the start that Kevin will commit a Columbine-style massacre at his high school but the deed itself is almost by the by. Instead, we dip in and out of Eva’s memories, diving for answers, explanations, some clue to culpability.
Even if it’s not perfect—John C Reilly (below, with Swinton) is underused as the ineffectual father, while Kevin is painted as too exultantly evil—this is an elegant, confident, profoundly unsettling drama. No one plays flayed and haunted as well as Swinton and she rustles up a tour de force here; hiding out by the soup cans at the supermarket and steering her car through an eerie suburban Halloween, where pint-sized ghouls and skeletons flit across the headlights’ beam like emissaries of the damned.
Xan Brooks
DANCE
Lucinda Childs: DANCEBarbican Centre, 18th-22nd October, Tel: 020 7638 8891
Lucinda Childs established herself as a dancer and choreographer in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Her minimalist approach distills mundane gestures—walking, turning, waving—into trance-like patterns of repeated movement with infinitesimal alterations of rhythm. The dance equivalent of composer Steve Reich, Childs has been enormously influential on successive generations of abstract choreographers.
Since the late 1970s, Childs has specialised in large-scale productions. The first of these, DANCE, receives a rare revival at the Barbican this October. It features a group of 11 dancers in solos, duets and ensembles to a score by Philip Glass. The dancers on stage interact with projections of dancers performing the same moves. As the work progresses, the repetition dissolves as small adjustments build to a complex pattern.
Constructed of three 20-minute sequences, DANCE plays with the nature of perspective as the performers are sometimes dwarfed, sometimes distanced yet constantly immersed in the projected world, as if they were in the company of ghosts. The result is a fusion of dance, film and music that is both disorientating and beguiling.
Neil Norman
ART
Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of SevenDulwich Picture Gallery, 19th October-8th January, Tel: 020 8693 5254
When Tom Thomson’s canoe was found empty, floating in Algonquin Park in 1917, it bore witness to his artistic philosophy in a way that no painting ever could. His mysterious death testified to the savage, ungovernable force of the wilderness—one harnessed by his works and those of Canada’s iconic landscape artists, the Group of Seven.
A new show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery takes an expedition through the wilds with Thomson and his followers. The first truly Canadian school of painting, creators of a national aesthetic, these artists have been as neglected abroad as they have been celebrated at home. Returning to Britain for the first time in almost a century, they offer an essential supplement to the Eurocentric narrative of 20th-century art.
Before Thomson, generations of artists had rejected the dramatic beauty of the North American wilderness as both unworthy of artistic representation and impossible to capture. Inspired by the Impressionists, Thomson and his followers gave Modernism a Canadian accent, adding to its stylistic rebellion a quest for national identity. Their vigorous, rough-edged aesthetic finds expression in images of the Rocky Mountains, Atlantic seascapes and even the earliest western paintings of the Arctic.
Thomson’s arresting The Jack Pine is the centrepiece of a show that balances full-scale canvasses with little-known sketches—a rare opportunity to trace the development and scope of this undervalued movement.
Alexandra Coghlan
CLASSICAL MUSIC
New BabylonCity Halls, Glasgow, 28th October, Tel: 0141 353 8000; Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 29th October, Tel: 0131 668 2019
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra takes a break from Schumann, Beethoven and Berlioz to explore two rarely-heard film scores. A sharper contrast to the BBC Concert Orchestra’s sell-out performances of Hollywood blockbusters would be hard to find.
Camille Saint-Saëns’s elegant music for the historical melodrama L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (1908) is one of the first film scores to have been commissioned. At just over 15 minutes long, it was an epic by the standards of its time. To its septuagenarian composer it was probably a mere trifle: something to be filed away with the Uruguayan national anthem, “Hail California!” and other arcane commissions from his dotage. Yet the work’s belle époque soundworld of strings, piano and harmonium has immense charm.
Musicians and cinéastes may be more taken with Suite from New Babylon, Dmitri Shostakovich’s score for a 1929 satire on the Paris Commune. Shostakovich weaves together numerous musical styles with skill. Ironic detachment and bitter dismay collide in the juxtaposition of an Offenbachian gallop with the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” Quickly denounced as bourgeois by the Soviet authorities, it was the first of 36 film scores written by the former cinema pianist. A world removed from the illustrative “Mickey-Mousing” of Hollywood’s silent-movie composers, New Babylon still dazzles and shocks.
Anna Picard
