Film
All Is Lost
On release from 26th December
Our Man (as he’s called in the credits) is played by Robert Redford. He opens the film in weary voice-over, a last message to loved ones. Then it’s 105 minutes of flashback to a well-equipped sailing boat in the Indian Ocean and what should be a retiree’s dream, until the yacht runs into trouble. Writer/director JC Chandor demonstrated in his debut, the financial crisis drama Margin Call, that he could build dramatic tension from 24 hours in one office. That script was all verbal wrangling; All Is Lost, though, has minimal dialogue as Our Man struggles with ropes, storms and all the hazards of open water except Life of Pi’s tiger. Redford, who’s now 77, makes a plausible nautical loner. If his performances have sometimes seemed distant, here he throws himself headlong into the struggle for survival. Another example of (literally) immersive cinema, this is a meditation on the present; every action recorded in methodical detail is a defence against annihilation.
Francine Stock
Dance
Mark Morris Dance Group
Sadler’s Wells, 27th November to 1st December
There is no doubt that Mark Morris is one of America’s greatest living choreographers,. But trying to define why is rather difficult. He is no better a dancemaker than Merce Cunningham, nor more radically experimental than William Forsythe. Yet Morris can hold his own against either of them. Morris distinguishes himself through his insistence on live music for every performance, however wide-ranging and unexpected, played by the exemplary Mark Morris Dance Group Music Ensemble. He was also the first American choreographer to use people with real bodies; many of his dancers appear to have been pulled straight from the streets of Brooklyn, where his company is based. His dancers can be fat, thin, short, tall, young, old, male, female and transgender. The seven pieces on show across two mixed bills are especially tantalising as none of them have ever been seen in the UK before. From the exhilarating Festival Dance to the three part drama of Socrates, the Morris men and women are umbilically connected to the music. Where else are you likely to encounter Scottish folk dances arranged by Beethoven, the austere minimalism of Eric Satie or the romantic lushness of Samuel Barber on the same bill?
Neil Norman
Art
Edmund de Waal: On White— Porcelain Stories
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, from 29th November
Thirty years ago, as a student in Cambridge, potter Edmund de Waal spent whole days in the Fitzwilliam Museum, becoming intimately familiar with its outstanding collections of Chinese porcelain. Throughout his career, with pale celadon glazed porcelain his primary material, the history and legacy of this great Chinese invention has been a fundamental inspiration. Now de Waal returns to source, taking on the role of curator-provocateur within the three ceramics galleries, redisplaying the pots according to the stories he wishes to tell, pulling them out onto tables, inserting letters and historical texts into drawers and vitrines to illuminate the fierce passions that lie behind their creation and distribution and juxtaposing Chinese porcelain with the many other ceramic traditions it inspired or absorbed. The show will be framed by three works by de Waal—his magisterial “1000 Hours” from 2012 and two new installations. The museum’s porcelain will be displayed on beautiful long porcelain tiles commissioned by de Waal from Jingdezhen, the origin and centre of Chinese porcelain manufacture, which he visited last year. They will create, as he describes it, “a river of white.”
Emma Crichton-Miller
Theatre
American Psycho
Almeida Theatre, from 3rd December
One reason Rupert Goold ducked out of running the National Theatre (he was an obvious contender) was the chance to develop projects such as this new musical in the intimate but high-profile environment of the Almeida, where he recently became artistic director. His analysis of American capitalism, which began with the hit play Enron, continues with a no doubt controversial version of the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel that introduced the yuppie killer Patrick Bateman to the world. Bateman is a killer with a taste for designer labels, disquisitions on Whitney Houston, and secret after-hours clubbing (and maiming) activities. Matt Smith, the last television Doctor Who, is playing Bateman, which means that tickets will be hard to come by; like his predecessor in the role, David Tennant, he has acquired a huge fan base. But, also like Tennant, he’s a really fine stage actor (his breakthrough was in Polly Stenham’s Royal Court game-changer, That Face) and I can already imagine his creepy insouciance in the role. The show is written by the American duo of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, best known for his work on the TV show Glee, and composer Duncan Sheik, who co-wrote the wonderful musical version of Wedekind’s Spring Awakening. Sounds like a tantalising prospect.
Michael Coveney
Classical
In Vain
Queen Elizabeth Hall, 6th December
Hailed by Simon Rattle as “one of the first great masterpieces of the 21st century,” Georg Friedrich Haas’s In Vain is that rarest of things—a classic in its own time. Part composition, part cult experience, the work demands that both audience and performers submit to a gradual immersion into complete darkness. Players must memorise large sections of their scores; listeners must surrender to a concert-experience unlike any other. Although composed in response to the rise of right-wing extremism in contemporary Austria, In Vain is not overtly political. Haas himself likens the piece to an Escher staircase—leading the viewer ever upward, but always returning them to the same spot in a sonic illusion. If that sounds baffling, Rattle instead likens the work to a Rothko painting, emitting more energy and gaining greater intensity the longer you stare at it. Haas’s soundworld is one of primal, primordial strangeness. The logic of conventional harmony gives way to the instinctive shiftings and stirrings of microtones. All this is achieved by just 24 instruments—a modest chamber band compared to the vast orchestras of Ligeti or Stockhausen.
Alexandra Coghlan
