The Weight of Being. Review by Barbara Lewis. “Life is hard, that’s why no one survives” is the title of a work by Middlesborough-born artist Gordon Dalton.
Ultimately, even art is not a cure, but it can console, give meaning and even extend our lives. It’s true for us all to varying degrees.
Barbara Lewis
About Barbara Lewis
Posts by Barbara Lewis:
Jo The Little Woman Musical. Review by Barbara Lewis. Jo The Little Women Musical is about pursuing your passion no matter what. It’s a mantra the show’s three writers have lived by. They met as theatre school students in California three decades ago when they first began work on turning Louise May Alcott’s classic into a musical.
A Grain of Sand. Review by Barbara Lewis. We tell stories when reality becomes unbearable. We may also tell them to remember those who have not lived to tell the tale. Both statements pertain to the one-woman show created by Elias Matar that deftly combines fabulous Palestinian myths with the horrors experienced as children live and die through war in Gaza.
Safe Haven. Review by Barbara Lewis. “Oh enemy, the Kurdish people live on,” is how the Kurdish National Anthem defiantly begins. In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, the survival of many of them was helped by Operation Safe Haven, an initiative pushed through by then Prime Minister John Major.
Gerry & Sewell. Review by Barbara Lewis. Gerry and Sewell are two friends who have little beyond their loyalty to each other and to their team: Newcastle United. Their one dream is to have the money to buy a season ticket.
Unseen Photography from the 19th Century. Review by Barbara Lewis. Belgium, which declared independence in 1830, became a forerunner in photographic identification and is home to the oldest preserved mugshots, dating from 1843. As well as using photography to catch criminals, Belgium led the way in putting the technique to arguably criminal uses, including pornography and the wider abuse of power, which sadly finds an echo in today’s AI image manipulation.
Quarantaine. Review by Barbara Lewis. Flanders in its golden age produced the painters Van Eyck and Memling. Around six centuries on, the work of Belgian conceptual artist Honoré δ’O, at first sight bears no relation to his aesthetic forebears.
Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B. Review by Barbara Lewis. Popular wisdom maintains that the appeal of the traditional whodunnit is in its reassuring message that problems will be solved and justice will be done. But what if there are no easy answers, asks Tendai Humphrey Sitima.
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris. Review by Barbara Lewis. As curators and art historians work to redistribute glory that men historically monopolised, Pallant House Gallery’s latest major exhibition devotes itself to extracting Welsh-born artist Gwen John from beneath the shadow of her more worldly brother Augustus John.
Trouble in Tahiti. Review by Barbara Lewis. Opera typically is the medium for extraordinary emotion on a grand scale. The great straddler of genres Bernstein makes it the vehicle to explore the depressing ordinariness of the countless millions who can’t find their way back to the extraordinary emotion they once felt.
Pension Europa. Review by Barbara Lewis. Austrian-Italian director Martin Gruber and his aktionstheater ensemble have for decades helped audiences to explore what it is to be a human wrestling with the anxieties of the day.
Teatro Antica di Taormina. Review by Barbara Lewis. For more than two millennia, Taormina on Sicily’s eastern coast has laid claim to what you could say is the world’s most dramatic theatre in terms of its natural setting between Mount Etna and the sparkling Ionian Sea.
By Barbara Lewis • added recently on London Grip, architecture, history, theatre, travel • Tags: architecture, Barbara Lewis, history, theatre, travel