Prima Facie – National Theatre Click here for tickets For nearly all of last year, the one totally unavailable theatre ticket in London was for Prima Facie, the one-character play starring the extraordinary Jodie Comer. You simply couldn’t buy a ticket for love nor money and many of us missed it. The run was much too short and, almost before you knew it, it was over and the play, with Jodie Comer, had decamped to New York where it was equally sold-out. Bless the National Theatre for understanding that these remarkable and unique performaces need to be preserved and made available to a wider audience. Prima Facie is not an easy watch. It gives us an insight into the life of an accomplished young barrister, one who has worked her way up from working class origins to be at the top of her game, specialising in defending rape cases. In Prima Facie she, as well as the rest of us, begin to understand the yawning gap between intellectual understanding of sexual abuse and the lived experience of the abused. Comer plays every person her protagonist encounters in her quest for justice for the rape victim and gives each true weight of performance, accent, and attitude. This is a shape-shifting performance which, now that the National has given us the opportunity to watch it online, I wouldn’t have missed. Jodie Comer made her West End debut in this UK premiere of Suzie Miller’s award-winning play and what a debut it was. Prima Facie and Jodie Comer take us to the heart of where emotion and experience collide with the rules of the game. Directed by Justin Martin. Conserving the King Arthur tapestry – Met Museum Click here to watch The great museums of the world employ specialists who do jobs the rest of us know nothing about. I can’t imagine how one gets to be a conservator of medieval textiles and how much history, technology and patience one needs to work on these incredibly fragile cloths. Here is a chance to follow the conservation treatment of “King Arthur” from the Nine Heroes Tapestries series, among the oldest in The Met Museum’s collection. The Nine Heroes Tapestries, representing the Hebrew heroes: Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus, the Christian heroes: Charlemagne, Arthur, and Godfrey of Boullion, and the pagan heroes: Hector, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar, are thought to have been made around 1385 by Nicolas Bataille. It is not positive that Bataille is the artist; however, another set of tapestries, the Apocalypse Tapestries in Angers, France, made by Bataille shares the same characteristics as the Nine Heroes. The inspiration for the Nine Heroes Tapestries came from a poem written by Jacques de Longuyon in 1310. The poem's protagonist, Porus, is described as being more courageous than the nine great heroes of history. Eventually, the representation of these men soon appeared everywhere as the poem's story grew in popularity. This tapestry first came into The Met’s collection in 1949 and hasn’t been touched since then for fear of damange. Watch as these conservators - Kathrin Colburn, Kisook Suh, Anna Szalecki, Janina Poskrobko - clean, stabilize, and reweave fragile areas of the work, finally reinstalling it at The Cloisters in New York where it is now on view. The Magic Flute – Royal Opera Click here to subscribe Here’s one way to start the year off right. This is David McVicar’s 2017 staging of Mozart’s musical comedy which is a great starter opera for those not yet familiar with it. In a kingdom of monsters, temples and enchantments, Prince Tamino resolves to rescue Pamina, the daughter of the Queen of the Night. But no sooner does he find her, than he is ordered to undergo a series of trials to attain enlightenment. Meanwhile Papageno, his reluctant sidekick, just wants to find a girlfriend. This playful staging vividly depicts the forces of darkness and light, revealing the humanity at the heart of this timeless work. With Siobhan Stagg as Pamina, Mauro Peter as Tamino, Roderick Williams as Papageno and Sabine Devieilhe as Queen of the Night. La Pastorale – Malandain Ballet Click here for tickets Here’s a ballet with a difference made by a dance company in Biarritz. Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, also known as the Pastoral Symphony, is an emotional ode to nature. In this dance piece, choreographer Thierry Malandain transforms Beethoven’s musical ideas into evocative, tranquil, and fluid dance. Commissioned by the Bonn Opera for the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, Malandain’s La Pastorale is set to Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, The Ruins of Athens, and his Op. 112 cantata Meeresstille und Glückliche Fahrt (“Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage). The piece has a neoclassical feel and Malandain even includes references to George Balanchine’s Apollo. Despite its tranquility, there is also an element of fun woven throughout the piece. Keep your eye out for a visit from some giant snails! Pocket Review Kerry Jackson – Dorfman Theatre at the National I’m a fan of the playwright April De Angelis whose new comedy, Kerry Jackson, is currently at the Dorfman Theatre. Kerry is a working class woman who has achieved her dream, to open her own restaurant and to make it a success in a rapidly gentrifying area of London. She’s annoying, loud-mouthed and very funny, just as apt to infuriate the customers as charm them, with an Essex accent that is as much a part of her personality as her over-the-top blouses. Kerry Jackson, the play and the character, is as much about class as about her struggle with a faulty refridgerator, as she negotiates her romantic life between the up-market university professor, the down-to-earth former policeman, and the homeless man who are all vying for her attention. Kerry Jackson is very much a female endeavour. The director is Indhu Rabasingham and, in Fay Ripley, the production has found actors who can perfectly inhabit the feisty, proudly anti-intellectual Kerry, her much better educated chef, a splendid Madeline Appiah, and the professor’s teenage daughter, well played by Kitty Hawthorne. These women have strong individual characteristics as well as being symbols of their place in today's London. The play has some sharp edges which give it necessary heft. This is England, after all, and the upward-striving Kerry will always be coming up against the barriers of a class system that has allowed her to get this far but will continue to trip her up at every turn. Kerry Jackson is almost a soap opera in its formulaic need to cover all its options with a character displaying every viewpoint from Thatcherite to liberal. Its saving grace is that it is laugh-out-loud funny with a cracking central character who, in the performance of Fay Ripley, makes a thoroughly enjoyable evening in the theatre.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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