If you can embrace it, lockdown’s shift from the real to the virtual is a liberation that makes anything possible.
Barbara Lewis
Grange Park Opera Interim Season. Simon Keenlyside: An Autumn Walk in Wales (available online). Review by Barbara Lewis: Context is all, says Simon Keenlyside, as for the second time this year he delivers a musical tour of his own personal context – the woods around his Welsh home.
![Susannah De Wrixon and Kwaku Fortune crop[4837]](https://londongrip.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Susannah-De-Wrixon-and-Kwaku-Fortune-crop4837-180x125.jpg "Susannah De Wrixon and Kwaku Fortune crop[4837]")
Before lockdown, Bewley’s Café Theatre in the bustling heart of Dublin was the place to grab a short lunch-time play, a bowl of soup – and maybe even chat up a stranger. For now, those days are gone, but Bewley’s has joined forces with online events company The Lock Inn to open the tiny venue to a potentially limitless audience.
The Dirty 30 II: Electric pay-per-view. Review by Barbara Lewis. Instead of loud applause and cheers, “you were spectacularly fabulous,” pops up on the side of the screen from an online viewer, as the imaginary curtain goes down on the Degenerate Fox theatre’s online adaptation to the times we’re in.
A Feast in The Time of Plague, Grange Park Opera online. Review by Barbara Lewis.
#FinboroughForFree. Adding Machine: A Musical. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Farleys House and Gallery, Home of the Surrealists, Muddles Green. Review by Barbara Lewis. In pandemic times Farleys House visits have slowed to a trickle, throwing the economics into jeopardy.
Fetishism Psychoanalysis Anthropology & Crazy Love. Review by Barbara Lewis. Psychotherapist Patricia Morris undertakes a brave, elegantly-argued and learned analysis, enriched by her years of professional experience, to pin down the meaning of one very particular word – fetishism – and explore its distortion by anthropologists.
Hastings Contemporary. Quentin Blake: We Live in Worrying Times. Victor Pasmore: Line and Space. Review by Barbara Lewis. The short history of Hastings Contemporary art gallery has so far been troubled. Before it was built, it divided opinion.
Pallant House Gallery. Barnett Freedman: Designs for Modern Britain. Review by Barbara Lewis. Painter and teacher Paul Nash referred to the group of artists he taught in the early 1920s as “an outbreak of talent”.
Towner, Eastbourne. Alan Davie and David Hockney: Early Works – plus other exhibitions. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Even more than an outpouring of passionate pacifism, Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave is a universal exploration of the heroic strength of character required to reject decades of blind allegiance to an unholy cause.
By Barbara Lewis • music, opera, performance, theatre, year 2020 • Tags: Barbara Lewis, music, opera, performance, theatre