A Dog's Heart

Hmmm. where to start when trying to describe the Complicite/ENO collaborative adaptation of Bulgakov's story, A Dog's Heart? Frankenstein meets War Horse meets Quentin Crisp's Gothic fantasy Chog? possibly. Frankenstein because it's a Gothic fable that sees the scientific creation of a monster symbolising the proletariat (more or less), War Horse because the eponymous dog is a puppet manually operated by 3-4 puppetmasters, and Chog because it's a seriously disturbing tale involving a weird dog/man hybrid. 

In short, it's a deliciously dark Soviet political polemic that sees a stray dog fall prey to the scientific experimentation of a bourgeois intellectual doctor who swaps the dog's testicles and pituitary gland for those of a recently deceased man. the experiment is the 'natural' continuation of the doctor's commercial practice involving human/animal transplants  - whereby he gives men dogs' genitals to make them virile, and women monkeys' uteri to repair the ravages of sexual promiscuity. After this latest transplant, however, the dog actually physically transforms into a man - and proves himself to be the worst combination of man and beast. But he is readily embraced by the soviet authorities, who award him a government post, despite his sexually rapacious tendencies, scatological nature, and permanent state of inebriation. havoc ensues. After he denounces the doctor to the authorities (amongst other things) the doctor forcibly restrains him and reverses the procedure - but the damage is done.

All that and it's an opera. But not any old opera, no, no; one whose foundations are dissonant chords, cacophonous clashes, and dog howling sopranos. no joke. set to the jarring, jagged score is contemporary dialogue - abrasive, course, witty - at times hilarious, even - poignant and curious.

It is, quite simply, brilliant. Shocking, arresting and thought-provoking obviously, but also so cleverly realised - from the delicate precision of the puppetry and the ingenious deployment of numerous projections which blast out messages in soviet font, to the use of silhouette, and gory, gory on-stage antics (blood, there's rivers of it). It's also funny, very funny (with a libretto which includes 'fuck you, motherfucker' you'd be hard pressed to remain po-faced).

After the MASSIVE disappointment that saw ENO collaborate with promenade theatre kings Punchdrunk, on The Duchess of Malfi, in a vast disused warehouse space somewhere at the end of the Dockland's Light Railway during the summer (completely non-sensical and a bizarre re-apportioning of dramatic focus to completely irrelevant themes) i was apprehensive, but this production brought all the experimentation, courage, chutzpah and energy of Complicite to opera without sacrificing its integrity. AMAZING.

Shutter Island

I was morbidly creeped out by Martin Scorsese's latest cinematic offering; a very stagey Gothic film noir thriller set on an inhospitably craggy island that's home to a mental correctional facility in the early 1950s. Leo di C plays a US Marshall, a war vet who has experienced the traumas of the liberation of the death camps in Germany, who is sent to investigate the escape of a patient, but who, in reality, has quite another investigative agenda - one with far reaching, and damaging, national and governmental implications.

Right from the get go the drama is terrifyingly intense; the deep, rumbling score sends reverberating tremors down the spine (even before you know anything whatsoever about the plot), the imposing, grey-green shadowy sweeping vistas as the camera circles the island set the scene for a drama of deeply sinister, suspenseful and disturbing substance - swooping over the unkempt graveyard, electric fences, waves crashing on the glistening black rocks and steely grey walls of the ominous lighthouse. there's almost a deliberate heavy-handedness to the direction - a certain revelling in the setting and stereotypes of the film noir genre - the German psychiatrist who sees to the core of Ted (LdiC), the slightly too charming English professor who heads the correctional programme (Ben Kingsley), the cheeky chappy police partner (Mark Ruffalo), the idealised wife presenting herself in visions to Ted at night (Michelle Williams) and the unhinged inmates running amok.

It all gets interesting (and i promise I'm not giving too much away) when Heller-esque notions of sanity and insanity begin to weasel their way into Ted's investigations. The paranoia and conspiracy theories make it viscerally claustrophobic - and almost unbearably tense to watch, so impatient are you for some clarity. it all comes together brilliantly in the end, and you're left thinking about the film's cunning plotting well after it is over. But as with so many films and books that truly come together in the finale, there's always that niggling fact that the bits which sits slightly uncomfortably are a bit annoying while you are watching them.

still, what the film does do is continually provoke you to unravel the evolving and increasingly complex mystery, which meant it worked for me, certainly.

Annette Messager

I walked into the groundfloor exhibition at the Hayward and one of the first things i read in the introductory note was... "I like working on the grotesque, on buffoonery, on the flip side, the nonsense of our life (does it have any sense, for that matter?), everything that runs counter to heroism." And so, right there and then, i began to fall in love with Annette Messager. even before i saw the wall filled with framed pieces of paper each with her signature on, signed in a different way, like the myriad versions of herself and how she both is and wants to be seen (and becomes disassociated from). even before i saw the fairytale princess dresses laid out in open caskets, like the morbidly entrancing deaths of favourite incarnations. even before i saw the stuffed cockerels, ferrets, and birds standing on mirrors suspended from the ceiling with their heads replaced with the heads of stuffed cartoon toys - a light diversion for popes in papal palaces, apparently. it's true, i do have a penchant for fairytale Gothic, but this was more than i could have hoped for; enchanted Gothic fairytale porn with a fabulously passionate feminist agenda... as she says, "I like to tell stories. i like cliches. children's stories are monstrous. psychoanalytically, our entire society if encapsulated in fairytales. i've always been interested in them and they are often one of my points of departure". Amen to that, i say. she goes on to say "for me it's a 'natural' gesture to rip bodies apart, cut them up... i always perceive the body in fragments". and so you have a whole room filled with giant body parts made from parachute-like material - cocks and kidneys and tongues and syphilitic diseases, which have air pumped into them and which inflate and collapse - almost breathing in a sinister, hypnotic way. next door a half-human, half bird hangs from the rafters. its remote body parts are attached by string and manipulated by an invisible puppeteer and made to dance terrifyingly. upstairs old clothes are used to create half cow-half half-child like forms that are penned in an insane asylum, their movements controlled by a machine that sets them on permanent repeat in a sickening, unbearable, claustrophobic mental cage. they are nightmarish, theatrical, monstrous and frightening, but completely mesmeric and incredibly powerful and often funny. they physically and mentally take you over and stop your breath. they shock, appall, but at the same time amaze. a grande dame of the french art world Messager was the first woman to represent France at the Venice Biennale, and the first woman to be awarded the Lion d'or. the feminine and feminism of the pieces come through strongly... roles as mother, lover etc play a huge part in the retrospective - shifting with politics from the 1960s through to today, but it all seems relevant. Catholicism, pornography, fantasty, torture, humour, death, disease, love are all woven together with the rough stitches of Frankenstein's monster, but it's a gloriously Gothic monster that i loved.