surrealism
aleks.sierz
Imaginative plays that explore the expanses of inner space are all the rage at the Soho Theatre this summer. First there was a superb revival of Anthony Neilson’s Realism, which puts on stage the thoughts of one man during a solitary Saturday, then there was Lou Ramsden’s Hundreds and Thousands, which used a horror-film aesthetic to explore female longing. Now Mongrel Island, which opened last night, looks at the thoughts and emotions of one woman who has a boring office job.Using the same cast as Neilson's Realism, Ed Harris's 90-minute play focuses on Marie, a young woman who is on Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The musical identity of Midlands town Stourbridge is largely defined by Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Pop Will Eat Itself and The Wonder Stuff, a trio that charted with varying degrees of wackiness in the late Eighties to mid-Nineties. The Voluntary Butler Scheme, the recording identity of fellow Stourbridgian Rob Jones, shares their leaning towards wackiness, but it’s more surreal, less surface. He’s also way more interesting musically. Second album The Grandad Galaxy is a musical rummage through a jumble-sale mind.Jones is closer to Davyhulme absurdist Jim Noir than any of his local predecessors. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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 internally logical narratives we visit in our sleep. Their enacted tales of ghouls and freaks, nutters and natterers made only a perfunctionary effort to cohere, but audiences collapsed with laughter and the Pajama Men have now twice taken up residence at the Soho Theatre in London. They’re back again and this time everything has changed – Read more ...
fisun.guner
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 Jan Švankmajer’s Surrealist Alice is full of cruel and violent incident.Paring the story down and dispensing with many of its most memorable characters – the Duchess, the Mock Turtle and the Cheshire Cat among them – the story becomes a disturbing duel between Alice and the White Rabbit. We first encounter the creature not hurrying across the lawn, Read more ...
howard.male
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-inhabitants. And it’s hard not to when you see them relentlessly picking over the corpse of a bird, mugging a mouse, or scrapping with a hornet, their tiny skeletal forms so industriously yet somehow amusingly destructive.Working more as a mischievous Dr Frankenstein or Surrealist taxidermist than as a sculptor, Farmer (pictured right) assembles her Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
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 the impressionistic to the surging. Her voice can be disquietingly detached, narrating, as she puts it, “a partly uncomfortable listen”.Jenny Hval was a highlight of February’s by:Larm festival. Live in Oslo, the interplay between her, Håvard Volden and Kyrre Lastad – both of whom have backgrounds in improvisational music – brought to mind Lorca- Read more ...
fisun.guner
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 unsuspecting corner of leafy west-London suburbia. It’s an uncanny impression heightened by the pristine condition of its squat, many-windowed façade.Housebound is the name of this punningly titled "intervention" by Alice Anderson, a 35-year-old French-English artist who now lives in London; and the proffered themes of constraint, imprisonment and Read more ...
fisun.guner
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 colours. But I used to love all that in the way that I loved Millais’s Ophelia floating in her deathbed weedy pond, or in the same way that I was taken in by Dalí's “disturbing” melting clocks. You see, it was just one big teenage crush, and, like all heady teenage crushes, I got over it. And when the infatuation faded, I realised there just wasn’t Read more ...
Ismene Brown
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 to see Wonderland.” The kind of new audience that any company should kill for.And my friend said, sadly, yes, that’s what we’d also supposed it would be. "So shall I go?" she said. We said, um, you’re right. Ballet is the one place where you really can hope to see Wonderland, the unsayable, the merely imaginable. But there is always the danger Read more ...
Ismene Brown
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 governing mad scientist of Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes, was my most-looked-for event. The unhinged strangeness of Armature of the Absolute and of Shellachrymellaecum still rattles discomfitingly around in the darker corners of my memory from time to time, scratchy, dusty flutterings of skeletal critters, tiny fairy babies sobbing in jars of Read more ...
fisun.guner
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 sculptures, cast in prodigious numbers both during his lifetime and after his death in 1989, it seems only right and proper to raise a sceptical eyebrow: what more, indeed, is there to discover? And not just this. There’s a further thorny question of authenticity. The posthumous sculptures still manage to fetch a price, of course, because Dalí gave Read more ...
howard.male
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 themselves in the mould of the posh twits they played in Blackadder, and – for extra comic frisson – H and W would play it straight while appearing (as the story goes) naturally funnier than their professional Oxbridge comedy-writing superiors.If the old wags themselves didn’t have the time or inclination to knock up six episodes, The IT Crowd Read more ...