surrealism
The Pajama Men, Soho TheatreTuesday, 21 June 2011
The 2009 Edinburgh Fringe featured a likeable comic duo in pajamas with imaginations as elastic as their faces. The titular garment – spelt the American way after their nationality – suggested both excitable role-play after lights out and those... Read more... |
DVD: Jan Švankmajer's AliceTuesday, 31 May 2011
This remarkable 1988 adaptation of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland opens with Alice addressing the audience. “This is a story for children,” she tells us, before adding a teasing note: “Perhaps.” And that “perhaps” is worth noting, for... Read more... |
Tessa Farmer, Danielle Arnaud Art Gallery/Crypt GallerySaturday, 28 May 2011
The world of artist and entomologist Tessa Farmer really is a world, wholly self-contained and free of human kind – unless you see her tiny warring fairies as symbolic of mankind’s conscience-free decimation of our planet’s environment and co-... Read more... |
Jenny Hval – When Viscera takes controlMonday, 02 May 2011
Viscera, the new album by Norway’s Jenny Hval, is a striking, often disturbing, surreal examination of how the body can take control, winning out over thought. Hval enfolds her explicit, literature-inspired lyrics in music that suddenly shifts from... Read more... |
Alice Anderson's Childhood Rituals, Freud MuseumSunday, 24 April 2011
Freud’s West Hampstead house is tied up in a cat’s cradle of thick rope. The rope is the same colour as the brick, a deep orange but with a sheeny lustre. It makes the house look not quite real, a Brobdingnagian doll’s house transplanted to this... Read more... |
Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, Tate ModernTuesday, 19 April 2011
I used to love Joan Miró. Those cute biomorphic forms; those elegantly elusive doodles; those engagingly befuddled, cartoonish faces, each staring forlornly out of the cosmic soup of Miró’s playful imagination; and, of course, those bright, jazzy... Read more... |
Alice, Scottish Ballet, Glasgow Theatre RoyalWednesday, 13 April 2011
As the young waitress said in the restaurant where we ate after last night’s world premiere of Ashley Page’s Alice in Glasgow, she hadn’t ever been to ballet, but she was tempted to go for this - “It’s Alice after all, isn’t it? Wonderland. I’d love... Read more... |
Les Antliaclastes, Institute of Contemporary Arts/ A Guide to PuppetryMonday, 24 January 2011
The puppets appearing in LIMF this year are by no means all child-friendly - after the mild kiddy-horror of Teatro Corsario and their hand-manipulated Bunraku creatures, the return of the much more disturbing imagination of Patrick Sims, founder and... Read more... |
Art Gallery: Unseen Salvador DalíFriday, 03 December 2010
The unseen Dalí? Surely not. Anyone who ever popped into Dalí Universe, the now defunct gallery on the South Bank which was devoted to the flamboyant Surrealist's work, might well ask. Since there have been so many editions of his well-known... Read more... |
Fry and Laurie Reunited, GoldWednesday, 24 November 2010
There’s a surreal sitcom waiting to be written about the often-told story of when Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse were Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s plasterers for a while in the early 1980s. Here’s the pitch: F and L would play caricatures of... Read more... |
Bill Bailey, Wyndham's TheatreWednesday, 10 November 2010
By chance, two comics with a penchant for rock‘n’roll have been strutting their stuff at opposite ends of the capital in the same week. First, Bolton funnyman Peter Kay was giving it his all on stage at the O2 on the Greenwich peninsula, and now... Read more... |
Ross Noble, Edinburgh PlayhouseThursday, 07 October 2010
Call a comic surreal and you hand him or her a licence to be as self-indulgent as they desire. Think of Vic Reeves, who long ago started believing that the mere proximity to one another of words like "bacon", "kazoo" and "Manama" was sufficiently... Read more... |
