The question of a baby is answered severally as the play unfolds. It’s an answer concerning life, the universe and everything, rather than being about The Right Thing to Do at this time in a relationship. ‘Lungs’ takes us right through life’s trajectory, and it’s agonisingly relatable, whatever your age.
It’s a work sophisticated in its thinking, crude in its extrapolation. It speaks from the belly. While you’re guffawing with embarrassed recognition, the goosebumps on your skin rise; you feel feverish at the narrative underlying the words which subverts the dry face of statistics and shouts the ugly hypocritical truths.
‘So Long, Marianne’, a tribute to Marianne Faithfull is not only about the 1960s peaceniks or the proliferation of drug-users of the 1970s, it’s a piece threaded through with Shakespeare to make you weep, taking the voice of an angel to the depths of the demonic, with cigarettes and time.
Their limbs work like entities with autonomous opinions, and their muscles seem filled with mercury, yet the flow of dance is tight, from the core, and performed in satisfying unison. It’s dance that gives everything from Amapiano to House and beyond, gestural apostrophe and wit in all the right places.
Terry’s writing is replete with beauty and malice. It’s juicy with sex and sodden with Schadenfreude and self-flagellation. As a novelist, Terry has the temerity to turn his focus on things that you rarely find dealt with as side issues in novels, from late-middle aged carnal joy to colostomy bags.
Featuring a gorgeous understanding of light, the work feels effortlessly elegant and sexy. It enables you to gratuitously indulge in the sheer beauty of Italian aesthetics of the 1980s. This is a slice of life from Italian literary great, Giolardo Sapienza, luminously directed by Mario Martone and featuring Valeria Golina.
‘Unicorns’ thoughtfully presents an understanding of love that reaches beyond the expected and in doing so, pencils in a wise reflection on what a relationship can be, if gender, hatred, bias and taboo were not an essential part of the mix. The electricity between Luke and Aysha is very real.
Here we see a family stripped of a backstory to go home to; we get a glance at how an idyllic place can turn hostile, in its landscape and in the elements which hours before seemed perfect. Strangers’ laughter feels antagonistic. The time delay until you get home seems cruel.
From the outset, ‘Great Yarmouth: Provisional Figures’ directed by Marco Martins is an intense, astounding and difficult film to watch. It is beautifully edited and supremely well cast and performed, but the underlying moral degradation central to the grand narrative here is punishing to stomach. And even harder to watch.
The film is Beckettian and biblical in its representation of being in the world. It focuses on beauty that is so big and terrifying that we as mere mortals really haven’t the wherewithal to grasp very much of it at all, hungry though we may be, to conquer it all.
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