Imprints, Summerhall ★★★★
It’s unusual to leave an exhibition liking an artist’s work less than when you went in, but Tate Britain’s retrospective of Edward Burra manages to achieve just this. I’ve always loved Burra’s limpid late landscapes. Layers of filmy watercolour create sweeping vistas of rolling hills and valleys whose suggestive curves create a sexual frisson.
Tate Britain is currently offering two exhibitions for the price of one. Other than being on the same bill, Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun having nothing in common other than being born a year apart and being oddballs – in very different ways. And since both reward focused attention, this makes for a rather exhausting outing – I’m reviewing them separately – so gird your loins.
“I can’t move my arms or legs, but apart from that I’m good to go.” Moth (Jason Isaacs) has to be pulled out of the tent in his sleeping bag by his wife Ray (Gillian Anderson). And this is only the second day of their 630-mile walk, split into two summers, along the south-west coastal path from Minehead to South Haven Point.
Penelope Skinner’s new play is one of the most eccentric things I’ve seen in a long time. It’s undoubtedly entertaining, with an engagingly bonkers attempt by Kristin Scott Thomas to navigate an almost impossible role, perched between victim, diva and madwoman, equally reminsicent of Norma Desmond and one of the posh recluses from Grey Gardens.
A shot of a dead field mouse sets the tone for this sobering “slow cinema” documentary, narrator-director Christopher Morris’s response, simultaneously aghast and philosophical, to the looming environmental catastrophe.
Ruarri Joseph is not a household name but in a Sliding Doors scenario, he might have been. Scottish, raised in New Zealand, and based in Cornwall, he signed to Atlantic in 2007, and had the same management as Damien Rice and David Gray.
In Mark Jenkin’s haunted Cornwall, time warps and bends. He is a child of Nic Roeg’s Seventies masterworks (Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth), whose kaleidoscopic slivering of time expressed an elliptical, sensual mind. Jenkin too has built his own time and space with self-described “seemingly crazy” antique techniques, limiting him to clockwork, 16mm film and post-synch sound.
Unlike the black and white Bait, Mark Jenkin’s highly acclaimed previous film, Enys Men (stone island in Cornish) is full of colour. Strange, saturated colour that doesn’t look quite real: a deep blue sea, a bright red raincoat, yellow gorse against brown bracken. And the flowers around which this abstract plot revolves don’t look real either. Such elongated stems and waxy white petals look like they come from outer space, not a windy Cornish coastline.
In 10 series stretching over the last 18 years, ITV's Doc Martin unobtrusively became an enduringly popular household name, but it finally reached the end of the road with this Christmas one-off. Unless, of course, there’s a prequel, a sequel, an origin story or a transformed internationalised version from Netflix.