The light and shade of memory lane...
I’m sorry that it’s been a while since I last posted on this site. With the new session of Parliament now well and truly underway, it seems a good moment to catch up.
The Human Cost at The Young Vic earlier this month was a memorial to victims of genocide from the Holocaust last century to more recent atrocities in Darfur and Rwanda. A mixed media event that combined music, poetry, songs, film and simple story telling, it also included the accounts of two London schoolgirls who had visited Auschwitz last year as part of a Holocaust Education Trust project. It was not an ‘artistic’ tour-de-force by any means, but it did show once again the power that live performance exerts in getting a message across, especially when the subject is as harrowing and bleak as the horrors of genocide.
And it was in my mind when I met a delegation, led by my old friend Lord Janner, from various Jewish groups who have campaigned with enormous success to get justice for those who had works of art looted during the Nazi era. The shock waves from that awful period in our history still shudder through public life, and rightly so.
A much happier trip back down the years came in the form of a visit to Pop Art Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. Andy Warhol may have carried on working for a further 20 or so years but for those of us of a certain age, Pop Art is strictly 1960s. I well remember how Robert Rauschenberg made me see the world in a new way when I came out of an exhibition of his work at the Whitechapel in the 1960s. And this show is a gem. Whether it’s Peter Black, Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein or Warhol himself, to see them again is to be transported back to an era of really good pop music, bold and head-turning fashions, and the simple p’zazz of a culture born out of economic success: an era where we really believed we could change the world. And, yes, I’m only too aware that my grandchildren will say exactly the same about art, music and clothes from the first decade of this century.
I’ve also been to the Barbican to see Michael Clark’s setting for three early ballet pieces by Stravinsky. Clark’s work is described as a ‘unique fusion of classicism and post punk modernity’ which sounds about right to me. A stark and brittle performance brought to life by quite superb musicianship. Carmen at The Coliseum is similarly challenging, and has taken a beating from the critics to the point where its director, the film maker Sally Potter, must have wondered why she bothered. For my part I enjoyed it, and congratulate Sally for taking an operatic warhorse and breathing new life into its production. A valiant effort.
I’d better stop now as it’s getting late. So no time to talk about the Shakespeare Schools Festival at the National Theatre, or Rafta Rafta at the same place. And my thoughts on The Serpentine Gallery, The Royal Naval College and a speaking engagement at The Natural History Museum will have to be put on hold as well. I will be back in touch again soon, I promise.