Rocket to the Moon

At last, a play at the National Theatre that I've actually enjoyed this year. Huzzah. Clifford Odette's play, set in New York, in the sweltering summer of 1938, in a dentist's waiting room to be precise, is a hothouse of anaesthetised emotion... trapped in a stuffy, humid, small, soulless room the atmosphere is claustrophobic, constrained, stale, uncomfortable - much like the life of dentist Ben Stark, a man pushed one way by his haranguing wife (Keeley Hawes), and pulled another by her exuberant father, with whom she is at loggerheads.It's tiring to watch, let alone experience.

Everyone is bursting with opinions and passion but Stark himself. In sweeps the beautiful Cleo Singer, a pert, zingy, smiling breath of fresh air oozing energetic, excited youthfulness. The men go crazy, the women - ach, less so. The waiting room is the perfect setting for the waiting game that subsequently unfolds - what we're waiting for is less certain... is this an office romance or something altogether bigger, grander, more interesting...? They both must escape the claustrophobia, but what's the best way? with each other? or through some kind of self revelation?

It's cleverly played out - sinewy with emotion and  beautifully acted - Jessica Raine as Cleo is all  fidgety nubile sexuality,Joseph Millson Stark all twisted, manipulated confusion, Keely Hawes as his wife, strident, pose striking, looking-down-her-nose posturing while her father is a bouncing ball of rebellion and wit. I also especially loved the rather down-on-his-luck second dentist played by Peter Sullivan (so excellent in the Donmar's the Late Middle Classes with Helen McRory last year), who brought out the tragi-comic direness of his lacklustre life with glorious brio.

A tad long, but otherwise A1.

NYC: I saw, I loved, I snapped

 Kara Walker, Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Negress and her Heart, 1994.

MoMA

What a title. what a image to cover an entire wall.

Hannah Hoch, Rome, 1925, Guggenheim (Chaos and Classicism exhibition)

Mussolini gets the Dada treatment

 

Marcel Gromaire, The Banks of the Marne, 1925, Guggenheim (Chaos and Classicism exhibition)

I love the sexiness of the strong lines, the muscular female rower - industry and angularity meet sex and sumptuous curves.

 Attrib Leni Riefenstahl, untitled, 1936. MoMA 

Makes me think of Busby Berkeley. shame about this German film maker's crazy Nazi connections.

 The New Photography 2010 exhibition at MoMA included work by Alex Prager - Desiree, 2008 (above) and a short film with Bryce Dallas Howard (still below). The latter was a shot in almost luridly bright Technicolor, but was a  desperately dark fairytale where a 1950s Hitchcock style heroine kills herself. Sort of Alice in Wonderland meets The Wizard of Oz meets Vertigo.

 Also in The New Photography exhibition  was work by Elad Lassry (above). More than the film itself, i loved its projection on the wall with the sight of the suspended red legs jiggling about. When you watched the reel run round the projector, you could occasionally see the individual stills whizz past.

 On a bookseller's stall in Williamsburg. Uppity women are the best.

 "Hell, Yes!" Outside the New Museum in the East Village, near hidden-away-down-an-alley, Taxidermy-adorned restaurant Freeman's.  

 de Chirico's ballet costume for Diaghilev's Ballet Russes... the classical and Grecian fashion craze goes a bit literal... love it. Guggenheim (Chaos and Classicism exhibition)

Whistler: Harmony in Pink and Grey (1881). The Frick

 I completely fell in love with The Frick collection. especially the Whistlers. complete emotional symphonies, i agree.

Whistler: Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs Frances Leyland, The Frick.