Serpent's Tooth

This was my first "promenade performance". Unlike normal theatre where the audience settles down in their plush seats and the set changes each act, here the audience moves around and each scene is in a new room. In this case the rooms were in the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall. An unlikely and unpromising sounding venue I admit. But you have to give new things a go. It could have been effectively sinister, being directed around the bare walls of these basements. A great setting for a prison drama, as indeed this was a drama set in prison. The prison contains one prisoner, a mad King Edmund as this was meant to be a sequel to King Lear - hard as almost everyone dies in Lear. So did it work?

No. The best I can say about it is that it only ran for 55 minutes. The faux Shakespearean dialogue was irritating, the drama desperately lacking. This was experimental theatre, and an experiment that went horribly wrong in the test tube. Embarrassingly bad really. A good play well-acted in the same venue could have worked well. But this wasn't it.

Maximo Park

I hadn't seen Maximo Park in ages, and indeed when I mentioned it to a couple of people they expressed surprise that they were still going. Well, their Shepherds Bush gig proved they were indeed still energetically performing. And one of the nice things about such a mature band is that the audience actually consisted of adults. Now don't get me wrong, I love youngsters, but they can get, well, a bit over-excited.

Maximo Park are, of course, named after the park in Miami where Cubans hang out. Well what else would a band from Newcastle be called? Paul Smith is as frenetic a front man as ever, in his trademark bowler hat. Genial, visually arresting with a fine strong voice, he is well worth seeing live. And yes he does sing in a Geordie accent.

Exhibitions

Had a mooch around the V & A and the British Museum today.

The V & A has an exhibition on Hollywood costumes. Amazingly, even on a Monday it was teeming with people. One was reduced to a low shuffle around. Not sure what the great attraction was, just seeing costumes. From Indiana Jones to Gone with the Wind.

There is also an exhibition of ballgowns on, and as I am a member and can get in free, I went. But in the end, its just a lot of glamorous frocks and frankly they look best on glamorous people, not mannequins.

But I had a potter about some of the other exhibits.

Then moved on to the British Museum, of which I am also a member. and it is on my way home. Here went to the exhibition of Spanish prints. Good but a little specialist.

And then went for another mooch around the main exhibits, taking the odd snap for the blog.

Queens Gallery

One way Her Majesty helps makes end meet is charging the public to see bits of the colossal Royal Collection. So today I decided to see the latest offering - the Northern Renaissance.

The Queens Gallery isn't right on a tube station (you can't really imagine her on the Tube can you?), so its a pleasant little walk through Piccadilly and Green Park.

St James's Church



Prince's Arcade, duly bedecked for xmas.



Piccadilly Arcade



Oscar Wilde on Jermyn Street



The Duck, an amphibious vehicle - popular for party trips with middle-class youngsters



Blue Ball Yard - you have to know its there to find it



St James's Palace



Another obscure little spot - Angel Court





Green Park





Spencer House

 A bit of a grey day for taking photos of Buck House - it had only just stopped raining. But it does have some of the world's best railings, and the traffic island out front beats anything Milton Keynes has to offer.

The Gallery is nice enough, even though quite small, in a little annex behind the Palace.

The exhibition is an interesting one. Main entrants are Durer and Holbein. Durer is mostly represented by engravings, which I find a little dull but were the major commercial art form of their day. And I am afraid there are several dull Madonnas which were of course the bread and butter of painters at the time since the church (and pious royalty) were the wealthiest patrons. The exhibition does show how this spreads out in the late Renaissance in Europe to the secular with marriage paintings.

The religious paintings do give an idea of the medieval mind, heavy on the terror side - the apocalypse etc. A religious reign of terror (and some of the Royal collection derives from the confiscations of religious martyrs). And of course some wondeful balderdash - lots of saints now long forgotten, but gaining sanctity from ridiculous feats which presumably someone once beleved. It does make you realise that all those American Creationistare just a the end of a long line of gullible twerps. (One painting is of St Conrad (new to you?) who apparently showed his faith by drinking a cup of wine containing a poisonous spider. Now we have I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here to replace this, but I doubt the contestants will make it to the ever growing list of saints!)

A pity that the Durer section didn't have more of his meticulous animal drawings - eg this one of a dog.

There were more Holbeins than I have ever seen at one time, and this does show you that he got his position as Royal painter to to King Henry VII entirely on merit. Really fine penetrating portraits. This one is of a young German merchant resident in London.

The Bruegel was fascinating. Its the massacre of the Innocents, translated from biblical Holy Land to Breughel's native Holland in winter, with the soldiers being the oppressive Spanish army at the time subjugating the Dutch. But the picture doesn't have any Innocents being massacred. That's because a later owner, probably the Holy Roman Emperor, had them painted over, replaced by animals or bundles. Therefore a lady in the middle, instead of grieving over her dead baby, is now grieving over a parcel. An interesting bit of censorship.

The Northern Renaissance seems much more austere, less exuberant than the Southern. Although with the odd bit of porn (sorry, religious painting of Adam and Eve, for devotional reasons only you understand).

 But there are some fine character paintings like the Misers.

On the way back I went through Trafalgar Square. The new occupant of the spare plinth is this rather nice sculpture - a good choice for Christmas.