Cover art from Russell Hoban's Rosie's Magic Horse by Quentin Blake
Art Quentin Blake: Drawn by Hand Fitzwilliam Museum, from 12th February
It is impossible not to have your day improved by looking at a drawing by Quentin Blake. It is that bounding anarchic line, which with a quick twist and a turn summons characters as unpredictable and delightful as Mr Magnolia, or Mrs Armitage and her faithful hound, Breakspear. There is joy, but never sentimentality; gleeful cruelty but no meanness.
Blake—best known for his alliance with Roald Dahl, for whom he brought to life an exotic cast of characters animal, human and vegetable—is now 80. Amongst other celebratory exhibitions, this show in Cambridge looks at the work he has produced over the past decade: book illustrations, etchings, lithographs and drawings, and also the increasing number of works done for buildings and outdoor spaces, including hospitals, the sides of buses and on scaffolding, perhaps most extensively across the front of King’s College Cambridge in 2009. Blake was a student of English at Downing College, Cambridge, before studying life-drawing at Chelsea School of Art, so this is the university’s chance to cheer their famous alumnus. Emma Crichton-Miller
Theatre Paper Dolls Tricycle, Kilburn, from 28th February
The new artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre, Indhu Rubasingham, got off to a flying start with Red Velvet, an award-winning play about black American acting legend Ira Aldridge that is already slated for Broadway. The world premiere this month of Paper Dolls, adapted by Philip Himberg from an award-winning documentary film, could be just as significant. It tells the story of a real-life group of Filipino immigrants in Tel Aviv who work in a care home for Orthodox Jewish men; by night, they become a musical drag act—the Paper Dolls.
For 20 years, the Tricycle has forged a reputation for its verbatim documentary shows about Stephen Lawrence, the Hutton enquiry, Bloody Sunday and Afghanistan. Now it looks to change direction and flesh out political analysis with a more vivid use of theatrical metaphor. Rubasingham believes that this story of unexpected cultural collisions is just right for a theatre aiming to reflect the mixed and vibrant society on her own north London doorstep. Michael Coveney
Film I Wish On release from 22nd February
Like the boys in Truffaut’s 400 Blows and Ken Loach’s Kes, the Japanese siblings in Hirokazu Koreeda’s I Wish are often on the move through city streets. Yet they’re also juvenile technocrats, wielding mobile phones like an extra digit. Koichi and younger brother Ryuunosuke each live with a parent—but marital separation has put them many miles apart. Koichi yearns for all four to live together again. Maybe, when the bullet train links their two cities, the miracle will happen.
The brothers are played by real siblings; their encounters have the authentic offbeat rhythm of intimates. Koreeda neither fetishises nor sentimentalises childhood. His young protagonists have dignity and depth; when disappointment comes, they deal with it. Yet I Wish also takes you suddenly, magically, into the wonder of a child’s contemplation or excitement.
Koreeda’s films often deal with loss. His finest, After Life (1998), is set in a kind of municipal limbo, where the newly dead await transition to Heaven, preparing their own celestial happiness by recreating their most blissful memory for eternity. It’s a lovely metaphor for film and it’s what he does here, too, capturing the moment. Francine Stock
Exhibition Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind British Museum, from 7th February
What is the oldest art in the world like? Not “primitive,” is the answer that emerges from the skilful sculptures and drawings in this new exhibition. Looking at a sculpture of a bison, found in Russia, you register just how old it is only when you read that it is carved from the tusk of a mammoth, extinct for 10,000 years.
The exhibition tells two stories. The first begins 40,000 years ago when humans began to make art. As well as an installation showing the cave paintings of Chauvet and Lascaux (recently stars of Werner Herzog’s film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams), there are examples of abstract art: a half-man, half-lion figure from paleolithic Germany, and fertility symbolised by a woman with emphatic hips. Picasso owned two replicas of this “Venus” and drew on it for his 1933 sculpture Femme au Vase. This is where the exhibition’s second thread picks up, including works by Henry Moore, Matisse and Mondrian among others, and showing how much the modern masters had in common with the very earliest art. Laura Marsh
Ballet Marguerite and Armand Royal Opera House, 12th, 15th and 21st February
A quintuple bill at the Royal Ballet is a rare occurrence. And the latest come-all-ye at Covent Garden has one major wow factor: the dream team of Tamara Rojo and Sergei Polunin. Having danced in Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand to great acclaim in October 2011, they return for three farewell performances. Now that Rojo has defected to the rival English National Ballet and Polunin has walked out of the Royal Ballet to pursue his own—so far unchartable—course, this will be the last opportunity to see two stars of different generations dancing in their natural home, the stage at Covent Garden.
The ballet was originally choreographed by Frederick Ashton for Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in 1963 as a vehicle for their unique partnership. Based on the novel La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas, fils—which also inspired Verdi’s La Traviata—the tragic essence is distilled in some of Ashton’s most intensely dramatic choreography. Set to Lizst’s Piano Sonata in B Minor and just over 30 minutes long, it is a demanding work for both dancers, especially the role of Marguerite. One of the greatest dancers of her generation, Rojo can convey all the elements required of the role, from realisation of mortality through romantic hesitancy to abandoned passion. Polunin, at 22 the youngest dancer to have tackled the role, provides the perfect foil for her in his youthful arrogance and new-minted emotional maturity. Neil Norman
