Ben Wilson's load-carrying "Donky Bicycle" (sic) has been nominated for a Designs of the Year award © John Selby
ArtMoore Rodin The Henry Moore Foundation, Hertfordshire, from 29th March
When Rodin died in 1917, Henry Moore was 19, fighting in the trenches in France. They had never met. But when Moore took up an ex-serviceman’s grant to study sculpture at Leeds, Rodin was an inescapable influence. As he matured, Moore grew increasingly to respect Rodin’s achievement, “especially his wonderful sense of the human figure,” as he once said.
This is the first exhibition within the house, studio, gallery and sculpture-filled 70-acre grounds of Moore’s home at Perry Green to place works of another sculptor alongside his. Including many drawings and photographs, this is also the first show in Britain to exhibit outside in the landscape a substantial group of Rodin’s monumental works, lent by the Musée Rodin, the V&A and other institutions. Besides drawing attention to the sculptors’ shared obsession with the architecture of the human body and to their fascination with natural objects, antiquities and primitive artefacts, the exhibition will bring to the fore the sculptors’ primary interest in the relationship between the figure and its environment. Emma Crichton-Miller
Theatre Dirty Great Love Story Soho Theatre, London, 12th—30th March
Given that almost everyone has, at some point, had a dodgy one-night stand they regret, there’s a case for saying that Dirty Great Love Story has near universal appeal. And judging by the rhapsodic reviews this “achingly funny romantic catastrophe” received at last year’s Edinburgh fringe, that’s less an opinion than a statement of fact.
Written, rhymed (it began life as a 10-minute poetry duet) and performed by Richard Marsh and Katie Bonna, the runaway hit is directed by rising talent Pia Furtado, currently rehearsing another love story, Massenet’s Werther at Scottish Opera. She developed the show over two years and 37 drafts into its current shape, which follows two people who go to bed together at exactly the wrong moment and then struggle with the delicious and disastrous consequences. The linguistically fizzy, sparkily acted show asks if you can turn a bad moment into a good one. Judging by the gaggle of hot-shot producers muscling in on this tart but refreshingly warm-hearted gem, the answer appears to be “yes.” David Benedict
Film Robot & Frank On release from 8th March
Sometime in the near future: Frank, a former jewel thief, lives by himself in rural retirement. Since he rejects residential care, his family buys him a humanoid robot companion, a dinky 1970s retro-future design.
Frank Langella plays his namesake with all the craft, charm and cunning of earlier roles from Dracula to Nixon, while Susan Sarandon is the lovely overseer of the local library. It’s a “grey pound” caper that smuggles through insights about age, memory and relationships, not just with family but technology. Could a programmed “friend” be a more benign influence than a solipsistic child? If so, it’s a neat subversion of the bleak image at the end of Douglas Sirk’s famous 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows, in which widow Jane Wyman is condemned prematurely by her children to decorous old age, imprisoned before the new TV set. Robot & Frank is not perfect (the final act threatens to be syrupy) but its lingering mood and ideas are as subtle as Peter Sarsgaard’s silky-voiced android. Francine Stock
Design Designs of the Year 2013 Design Museum, London, 20th March—7th July
The architecture category of the 2013 Designs of the Year prize harbours not one but two curious literary entries. The first is a small boat that popped up last year on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Southbank Centre. The vessel housed a number of “writers in residence” including Jeanette Winterson and Colm Tóibín. The second is even odder: in 2008 Orhan Pamuk wrote a novel called The Museum of Innocence, and then in 2012 he built the museum that he described in the book. Both are smaller, more personal projects, among contenders that include big corporate designs (the Shard) and public works (New York’s Four Freedoms Park).
That diversity is in the spirit of this exhibition, whose categories encompass 3D printing, fashion, web design, transport and furniture. Nominees include a mobile phone designed by Microsoft and a “non-stick” version of a classic glass ketchup bottle which allows the contents to flow out easily (it took MIT’s Varanasi Group to solve that problem). Also featured is a perfect example of anti-design: deliberately unattractive, olive green cigarette packaging, now required by law in Australia. Laura Marsh
Ballet The Metamorphosis The Linbury Studio Theatre, Covent Garden,16th—23rd March
What is the link between Steven Berkoff, Tim Roth, Roman Polanski and Mikhail Baryshnikov?
Answer: they have all played the role of Gregor Samsa, Franz Kafka’s man-turned-insect, in stage adaptations of The Metamorphosis. But few have achieved the synthesis of horror and humanity that Edward Watson brings to his portrayal of Samsa in Arthur Pita’s ballet/theatre production. Premiered in 2012, it was a revelation, not just because of Watson’s extraordinary facility for contorting himself into alien, bug-like shapes (for which he won an Olivier Award) but also for its coolly inventive depiction of Kafka’s story.
On a stage divided into two halves—Samsa’s bedroom and the family kitchen—Pita creates a mundane domestic world that slides slowly into the kind of grotesque scenario usually associated with the director David Cronenberg. Walls and floors tilt at alarming angles, leaking a black, oily substance, while Watson’s skin takes on an irradiated pallor as he curls and scuttles and twists his limbs and torso into shapes that are far from natural, gradually covering himself in the oozing slime. It is not easy to watch but Pita’s control over his material is exemplary. Neil Norman
