2011: Anthemic Elbow, Iranian drama, and Fear and Loathing in Elsinore | reviews, news & interviews
2011: Anthemic Elbow, Iranian drama, and Fear and Loathing in Elsinore
2011: Anthemic Elbow, Iranian drama, and Fear and Loathing in Elsinore
A transgressive Shakespeare and big-hearted Mancunians were among the year's highlights
The Barbican has always led the way in London in international theatre programming. The year there ended on a high, with Thomas Ostermeier’s Hamlet from the Schaubühne laying down new markers for transgressive commitment. I was sceptical about it when I saw the Berlin première in 2008, and our own critic was not, commendably enough, in a mood to be fooled around with.
From the Bard to a big blast: Elbow had, until the 2008 Mercury for The Seldom Seen Kid, been a bit of an indie secret, cleverly matching over almost two decades lots of early 1970s progressive techniques with edgy millennial urban and personal concerns. Pretty mainstream now, the five-piece’s two nights at the Dome (I was at the second) were nonetheless sumptuous, funny and inspiring, honey-voiced front man Guy Garvey proving himself a master raconteur – Mancunian patter, to say nothing of those big-hearted songs, brilliantly demolishing even the most knowing of critical defences. From Build a Rocket, Boys! “The Birds” (opening both album and gig) is my most-played singalong track of the year.
At another end of the musical spectrum, the Polish-based I, Culture Orchestra, made up of young east European musicians (and from even further east: Armenia, Azerbaijan), is modelled on Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (Jews and Arabs). On 9 November at the RFH, they were only seven concerts old and I was charmed. Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite was played with immense gusto, ditto Szymanowski's Symphony No 4; seeing 89-year-old Neville Marriner then step briskly on to the podium for a zinging Tchaikovsky Symphony No 4 was one of the more refreshing high art experiences of the year.
2011’s most unexpected film was Iranian Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation (pictured above right) winner of the Berlinale’s Golden Bear. Predictably – can’t see ’em all – I missed it in Berlin, though there were some other pleasurable surprises both there and at its summer companion festival in Locarno. For some reason, Argentina is turning up trumps: El premio and Medianeras in Berlin, and the coolly complex El estudiante in Locarno, show in different ways, after a catastrophic thirty years, a compelling society trying to decipher itself. Farhadi’s marital drama, meanwhile (it came to London) – set in a society suffering its own catastrophe since 1979 – has a Shakespearian gravitas and intensity.
Still from overseas, the Group of Seven will have been heard of by few in Britain. They were turn-of-the-century Canadian painters, headed up by outdoorsman Tom Thomson (Joe Creek, 1914, pictured left) – he died before reaching 40. A fascinating hang of his and his peers’ paintings and drawings at the Dulwich Picture Gallery was an education, inevitably, but also a revelation. Rarer still are the El Lissitzky originals (amongst others) at the RA until mid-January in perhaps 2011’s most original exhibition, “Building the Revolution”, about Soviet art and architecture – but it's the early revolutionary art here, the Constructivists’, that really matters.
2011 highlight: A small-scale Electra at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill, was a study in precise, updated adaptation, passionate acting, and packed a punch with every line.
2011 letdown: Peter Brook’s Une flûte enchantée, his fileted version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, was dismayingly bad: a reductio ad absurdum too far.
2012 recommendation: Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye (Tate Modern, 28 June to 14 October) will try and take the Norwegian painter out of his clichéd late-19th century posting into post-Expressionism and towards photography and film.
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