Some of London's most public, but probably least noticed, art is under threat: part of Eduardo Paolozzi's technicolour mosaics throughout Tottenham Court Road Tube station may have to be removed because of the station's massive Crossrail-led expansion.
London’s literary world must be as small as it was in the 18th century. Or at least that’s the impression you get when you watch book programmes on the BBC, for it’s the same old characters that keep cropping up.
As star pianist Gwilym Simcock amusingly recalled during his solo set last night, German efficiency almost scuppered the making of his latest and universally acclaimed release, Good Days at Schloss Elmau. Recorded at the deluxe Alpine spa in just a single day last September, the pianist's Herculean keyboard feats were made against a subliminal backing track of meadows being mown and kitchen deliveries being made. The results, tractors and bratwurst notwithstanding, suggest that the crisp mountain air clearly agreed with him.
Radio interviewer: “Are you Royalists?” George: “Of course! We’re not weird.” Gilbert & George may have been accused in the past of being coprophiliac pederast fascists (owing to their love of turds, anuses, young men with cropped hair and bovver boots and the Union Jack), but this art duo can certainly make you smile. In fact, Gilbert & George can often be quite irrepressibly funny – definitely "ha ha" as well as peculiar. And since they and their art seem as one, one senses they’d make excellent after dinner speakers.
McCartney and Wonder. Jagger and Bowie. Mullard and Baker. Music history teaches us that the star collaboration doesn't always transmute into artistic gold. The Chairman of the Board himself, with a little help from Vandross, Streisand, Bono et al, had a spectacular misfire with Duets Vol 1. Mercilessly butchering many of Francis Albert's best-known songs, the results, artistically speaking, aren't so much a case of, “Yeah, I once recorded with Sinatra, you know,” as, “Number of copies: entire stock.
I suspect there is a different production waiting to be unveiled for Witold Gombrowicz’s 1938 black comedy Ivona, Princess of Burgundia. Under the arches at Waterloo, tucked beside the station down a dark and dank service road is the Network Theatre. Home for half the year to amateur theatre, it also now hosts professionals such as Sturdy Beggars, a fledgling group set up by post-grads from The Poor School drama training space at King’s Cross. A complete surprise to me, the Network Theatre boasts one of the finest pair of red velvet stage curtains you’re likely to see in London, suggesting a rich theatricality to come. And so in Ivona it proves in some aspects, if not in others.
The Donmar Warehouse's 2011 season listings take audiences, as so often, in unpredictable directions, from the farcical tensions of American competitive spelling to the high tragedy of 18th-century Schiller. Full season guide below.
Eileen Atkins (b 1934) acquired long-overdue fame with her performance in the BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. Her desiccated spinster was the indisputed star turn until death did us part. It’s taken a while. Aside from half a century’s commitment to the classics and new plays, unlike the other more celebrated DBEs she has had a parallel career as a writer. There have been two plays about Virginia Woolf, as well as a screenplay of Mrs Dalloway.
Oh dearie, dearie me. Modern Perspectives sounded like it had such promise. Running alongside the big Canaletto show in the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery, two finished works and one work in progress by Ben Johnson are on show in Room One. The idea is to look at a contemporary artist who, like Canaletto and his coevals, produces panoramic views of cities. Johnson, despite his quasi-illustrative, photo-realist style, says he produces not "topographical representations of a real place, but perhaps a manifestation of a dream... timeless and transcendent". Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?