surrealism
Nina Conti: Whose Face Is It Anyway?, Brighton Dome review - a melee of jubilant spontaneityMonday, 10 February 2025
“I really am the repository for all your shit,” Nina Conti’s famous Monkey hand puppet tells her. Monkey may have a point.The brilliance of Conti’s ventriloquism is that it seems to burst, unedited, from her id. Filth, surrealism and lightning-fast... Read more... |
Album: Tunng - Love You All Over AgainWednesday, 22 January 2025
This is Tunng’s ninth album, their first in five years, and marks their 20th anniversary by consciously going full circle to the gentle sound sculpture and folk melody of their earliest work. It is also thrown into fascinating relief by... Read more... |
Lie Low, Royal Court review - short sharp sliver of painFriday, 31 May 2024
Faye is okay. Or, at least she says she’s okay. But is she really? And, if she really is, like really okay, why is she seeking help for her insomnia?As Irish playwright Ciara Elizabeth Smyth brings her ward-winning Fringe Festival play, Lie Low, to... Read more... |
The Beast review - AI takes over the job centreFriday, 31 May 2024
Adaptations of Henry James have often failed to click over the years. The author’s private, introspective works – sightseeing trips around people’s souls – seem hard to transpose into a crowded gathering where someone keeps yelling “Action!”.So it’s... Read more... |
Nachtland, Young Vic review - German black comedy brings uneasy humour and discomfiting relevanceThursday, 29 February 2024
If Mark Twain thought that a German joke was no laughing matter, what would he make of a German comedy? That quote came to mind more than once during Patrick Marber’s production of Marius von Mayenburg’s 2022 play, Nachtland. I know it’s... Read more... |
All of It/Hope Has a Happy Meal, Royal Court review - surreal pleasuresMonday, 12 June 2023
The summer season at the Royal Court, London’s premiere new writing venue, features two plays which imaginatively explore the human condition using elements of the surreal and the dystopic as well as the real. Or, to put it more accurately, both... Read more... |
The Good Person of Szechwan, Lyric Hammersmith review - wild ride in hyperreality slides byMonday, 24 April 2023
As the UK undergoes yet another political convulsion, this time concerning the threshold for ministers being shitty to fellow workers, it is apt that Bertolt Brecht’s parable about the challenges of being good in a dysfunctional society hits London... Read more... |
Album: Aksak Maboul - Une aventure de VV (Songspiel)Thursday, 02 March 2023
One of the greatest things a musical artist can achieve is world building. That is, creating a distinctive type of environment, language and coordinates for everything they do such that the listener is forced to come into the musical world, and to... Read more... |
Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel review - intriguing portrait of the end of an eraSaturday, 21 January 2023
The documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel has captured a particular moment in time. A few long-term residents of the legendary building at 222 West 23rd Street in Manhattan are still hanging in there after several years of... Read more... |
Earwig review - Little Miss Saliva TeethSunday, 12 June 2022
Like her first two features, Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Earwig is an oneiric coming-of-age drama that uses body horror imagery as a metaphor for the daunting unknowns – sexual and emotional – to be encountered in adulthood.Eschewing narrative logic,... Read more... |
Venice Biennale 2022 review - The Milk of Dreams Part 1: The GiardiniWednesday, 08 June 2022
Cecelia Alemani's vision for The Milk of Dreams, the International Exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2022 had me excited – and perplexed – from the moment I heard about it.Never mind the national pavilions which tend to dominate... Read more... |
Doctor Strange in The Multiverse Of Madness – not strange, not madFriday, 06 May 2022
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is at its most radical and corporate here; maybe decadent is the word. We start with surgeon turned sorcerer Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) threatened then slaughtered in a cosmic chase sequence. It’s just a... Read more... |
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