Theatre night:Wish You Were Here.

"How I wish, how I wish you were here. We're just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year. Running over the same old ground, what have we found? The same old fears, wish you were here" - Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

I have no idea if playwright Sanaz Toosi or director Sepy Baghaei are familiar with Pink Floyd's (very famous) 1975 meditation on absence, loss, and friendship but I do know that their play, which shared a title - Wish You Were Here - with that song, touched on very similar themes indeed. I went to see it at The Gate Theatre near Mornington Crescent yesterday evening and it was a very worthwhile and, eventually, quite emotional experience.

Nazanin (Afsaneh Dehrouyen), Zari (Maryam Grace), Rana (Juliette Motamed), Shideh (Isabella Nefar), and Salme (Emily Renee) are five young friends who have grown up together in pre-revolutionary Iran and like to play backgammon, smoke cigarettes, drink chai and sharbat together, and, most of all it seems, make rude jokes. A 'pussy audit' crops up pretty early on and yeast infections and discussions about the penis veins are not far behind.

They are, despite all they share, very different characters. Salme, soon to be wed, is quiet and obedient and though she laughs at the bawdy jokes she tends not to make them, Shideh is studious and dreams of moving to America, Zari is a ball of fun who doesn't take life too seriously, Nazanin is a thornier character with a tendency to roll her eyes when the others don't meet her exacting standards, and Rana is as fun-loving as the rest of them, maybe more, but she's a Jew. Which isn't a big deal to begin with.

They have the kind of friendship that people often form at that stage in their lives. They spend more time together than they seem to with anyone else and they've grown up together. They know each other, it seems, in and out and though events will take some of them away from the group for long periods of time they will remain in each other's thoughts and feelings even where they're not in their presence.

It's a rites of passage play but it's set in a period that spans the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, and the First Gulf War. Both Jimmy Carter and Saddam Hussein get a mention and a television in the corner of the sparse set (a couch, a rug, a mannequin, some cushions, and said television) reminds us of which year we're in as we see the young women discuss upcoming weddings, emigration, studies, war, and death.

Each of the five women feel both very real and multi-faceted and it feels as if we witness them growing up in real time. I couldn't help feel moved as their separate journeys drove them apart and back together again and not just their own individual journeys but the emotional journeys they join their friends on and the complicated one they have with their homeland at a time of great strife.

There's one particularly poignant moment, painfully timely right now, when a young Muslim woman and a young Jewish woman talk about how they will not let circumstances, or religion, pull them apart (it was also instructive to witness an audience that was about 80% female and had a very strong ethnic mix) but, ultimately, the story was about friendship and the great strain that world events, as well as personal events, can put on friendships. You certainly come away from Wish You Were Here wanting to stay closer than ever to your friends. There were plenty of mine I wished were there. 

Fleapit revisited:All About Eve.

"If there's nothing else, there's applause. I've listened backstage to people applaud. It's like - like waves of love coming over the footlights and wrapping you up. Imagine, to know every night that different hundreds of people love you. They smile, their eyes shine, you've pleased them. They want you. You belong. Just that alone is worth anything" - Eve

I've watched the 1950 film All About Eve (directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, based on a story by Mary Orr, and shown recently on BBC2 and the iPlayer) a couple of times before and it's long been one of my favourite films. Black and white, dialogue heavy (very clever and witty dialogue too), and over two hours long, it's probably not for everyone but I love it.

Margo Channing (Bette Davis) is a huge Broadway star and she's been a star since she was four years old. But now she's forty years old (that's not even that old but these were different times) she's starting to feel insecure about ageing, her career, and her relationship with director Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill) who's a mere slip of a lad at 32.

Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) is one of Margo's biggest fans - she watches her play every single night - but she's ambitious herself and soon she uses Margo's friend Karen Richards (Celeste Holm) to ingratiate herself into Margo's social circle which includes Karen's husband Lloyd (Hugh Marlowe) - a successful playwright, producer Max Fabian (Gregory Ratoff), and Birdie Coonan (Thelma Ritter).

Slightly removed from this group, but in the same business, is the "venomous fishwife" of a theatre critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) and there's also a small appearance from a young Marilyn Monroe who hadn't become anything like world famous yet. Addison DeWitt and Karen Richards take turns narrating events while also being key players in a story with some very smart plot twists.

Despite her fame and wealth, Margo is forever moaning and never grateful. She calls her fans "juvenile delinquets" and "mental defectives" yet Eve wins her over with a sad back story and Margo starts to feel protective towards a younger woman whom she sees, initially, as a "lamb loose" in the "big stone jungle" of New York.

Margo's lover, Bill, wants to go to Hollywood and make films and Margo worries that once there he'll find a younger woman. Birdie, though, is suspicious of Eve's intentions and it's no spoiler to say that she is not wrong in that suspicion. Soon, Margo herself begins to turn against Eve but is Eve playing her, is Margo jealous or even paranoid, and how will it play out for both Eve and Margo?

Margo is self-destructive enough as it is but how deep does Eve's ambition go? How far would she go to advance her own prospects? This we will find out via a story that takes in a virtuoso understudy performance, a car mysteriously (or not) running out of gas, a spurned advance, a vitriolic newspaper review, the Sarah Siddons award ceremony (which wasn't a real thing back then but now, inspired by this film, is), some dramatic scallion chomping, and some good old fashioned blackmail.

It's an ensemble piece but it's headed up by at least four very good female performances (all four leading actresses were nominated for an Oscar) and it's a joy to revisit from time to time. An enjoyable satire on the cut throat world of show business and though the clothes and the interior decor may have dated, some of the attitudes on display and the harsh realities of that world sadly haven't. In seventy-four years!

Fleapit revisited:Heretic.

"I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here" - Creep, Radiohead

In Radiohead's Creep, the young Thom Yorke thinks he's a creep and a weirdo because he feels insecure around the object of his affection and thinks people are laughing at him. In Scott Beck and Bryan Woods' new film Heretic, Hugh Grant's Mr Reed doesn't think he's a creep and a weirdo. He IS a creep and a weirdo and anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves in his company would certainly be wondering what the hell they're doing there.

When two Mormon missionaries, Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher - who also contributes a version of Bob Dylan's Knockin' On Heaven's Door to the soundtrack), knock on Mr Reed's door for a chat about the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints they get more than they bargained for. Pseudo-intellectual Mr Reed decides to take mansplaining to an Olympic level by setting the sisters a series of trick questions that seem designed to take them out of their comfort zones and give him some kind of sense of superiority.

 

His house is festooned with floral wallpaper, there are scented candles and more doors than a Dorothea Tanning retrospective - including the ones that Bob Dylan might knock on, and to describe the plumbing as rudimentary would be generous. Splitting the difference between a straight horror (there are power cuts, jump scares - that don't quite come off, and even the 'final girl' trope of horror lore) and a psychological thriller, the film takes the viewer on a journey from room to room and from moral quandary to moral quandary.

It's full of philosophical and theosophical debating points which are clever but never quite as clever as the film makers', and Mr Reed, seem to think they are (there's even an explanation of the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam which comes across as a Dummy's Guide to the Abrahamic Faiths). It's an interesting and original story but it's not quite as groundbreaking as you feel it would like to be and it's not a scary as it ought to be either.

It's good but it's not brilliant but I have to give credit to any horror film that manages to reference Lana Del Rey, Jar Jar Binks, Monopoly, magic underwear, The Hollies, and somebody so innocent they call pornography 'pornonography'. What could come across as anti-atheist propaganda ultimately ends up in the same place most religion does - in a bloodbath. It's more fun than most religious bloodbaths but, as with Mr Reed's sophisticated sophistry, it feels like a film that, though highly watchable, falls just short of fulfilling its potential.

Slava Ukraini:In the Eye of the Storm.

With last week's election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, the future for Ukraine (as well as the future for the left, for progressives, for women, for minorities, for Gazans, for the climate, and for America and the planet) looks pretty bleak but Donald Trump was not on the forefront of my mind when me and my friend Vicki visited the Royal Academy just over a month ago to see the excellent In the Eye of the Storm:Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s.

Anatol Petryskyi - At the Table (1926)

There will be time enough to worry about Trump and to worry about the future but on the day I'm writing about here my focus was on catching up with Vicki, going for a long walk, enjoying tasty moussaka in Shepherd Market's Sofra (washed down with a few beers) and checking out the rather brilliant Ukrainian art.

Ukraine isn't (like, for example, France or Italy) a country that springs to mind when you think about art and much of the art that was on display at the RA is normally on show at Kyiv's National Art Museum of Ukraine. With Ukrainian culture, and Ukrainian lives, under threat from Putin's Russia, it seemed an apt time to celebrate that culture and the exhibition did feel more like a celebration than a wake. Let's hope that, somehow, it stays like that.

The art, the modern art at least, of Ukraine is a fusion of Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, and Jewish communities and it's an art that grew up against the chaotic backdrop of the First World War, the collapse of the Russian empire, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the 1917 revolutions, Ukrainian independence, and Ukraine being absorbed into the USSR. There's no shortage of inspiration for Ukrainian artists to get their paintbrushes into.

Plus there was everything that was happening in the wider art world at the time. Alexandra Exter had studied at the Kyiv Art School before moving to Paris and making friends with some of the pioneers of Cubism and Futurism which she fused with native influences to create her own unique style before paying it back by training the next generation of Kyiv artists.

Alexandra Exter - Three Female Figures (1909-10)

Oleksandr Bohomazov - Landscape, Caucasus (1915)

Alexandra Exter - Bridge (Seures) (c.1912)

Oleksandr Bohomazov - Landscape, Locomotive (1914-15)

I particularly like her cubist-adjacent Bridge which has an uneasy sense of paranoia about it. Oleksandr Bohomazov (another who claims Kyiv Art School as his alma mater) veers more towards abstract sensibilities. Fascinated by human progress, Bohomazov seems to me to be a fellow traveller of Russian artists like Kandinsky and Malevich (who was actually born in Kyiv and hence earns his place in this show with a sketch - and a brilliant painting - you'll see if you continue to read on) and even the American abstract expressionists whom he predated by several decades.

One abstract artist I didn't realise was Ukrainian was Sonia Delaunay, probably because she took her French husband Robert Delaunay's surname. Sonia was born Sara Stern in Odesa (or, possibly, Hradzyk) in 1884 but grew up in St Petersburg before relocating to Germany to study at Karlsruhe and, then, to Paris. Quite the international.

Her 'bright and dynamic' palette explores rhythm and movement within a two dimensional artwork and is as joyous as many of the works on show at this exhibition. Ukrainian artists, it seems to me, are masters of colour and the curators of this show have lit and displayed the works to get the very best out of that colour.

Davyd Burliuk - Carousel (1921)

 

Alexandra Exter - Composition (Genova) (1912)

 

 Sonia Delaunay - Simultaneous Contrasts (1913)

Vadym Meller - Composition (1919-20)

 

Volodymyr Burliuk - Ukrainian Peasant Woman (1910-11)

 

The more figuratively inclined Volodymyr Burliuk was also a bit of a gadabout, spending time in Paris, Munich, and Moscow as well as Kyiv. His work was more inspired by the Pointillism of Seurat and Signac and the Post-Impressionism of Henri Rousseau and Camille Pissarro but, like others, he incorporated more traditional elements of Ukrainian culture (in the above work, a traditional dress and an Orthodox cross) to create something that blends the modern and the archaic and makes something new. Burliuk died in his early thirties, a victim of World War I and very few of his paintings survive today.

Theatre, and costume, design was big in Ukraine back in the 1910s and the exhibition devotes a small space to that discipline. During that time, Ukraine was fighting against invading Russians (plus ca change) and Alexandra Exter (her again) and Les Kurbas were the leading lights when it came to bringing modernist art principles into scenography and theatrical design. Anatol Petrytskyi, Vadym Meller, and Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov were among Exter's students.

 

Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov - Costume design for the Soldier in the opera 'Love for Three Oranges' (1926)

 

Vadym Meller - Costume design for the Friar in the play 'Mazepa' at the First Taras Shevchenko State Theatre, Kyiv (1920)

 

Vadym Meller - Sketch of the 'Masks' choreography for Branislava Nijinska's School of Movement, Kyiv (1919)

 

Alexandra Exter - Costume designs for the Greeks in the play 'Famira Kifared' at the Chamber Theatre, Moscow (1916)

 

Anatol Petrytskyi - Costume designs for the ballet 'Eccentric Dancers' at the Moscow Chamber Ballet (1922)

 

Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov - Stage drop design for the ballet 'Red Poppy' at the Theatre of Opera and Ballet, Kyiv (1928)

 

Anatol Petrytskyi - Costume design for Khiuria in the play 'The Fair at Sorochyntsi' at the State Opera Theatre, Kharkiv (1925)

 

Anatol Petyrtskyi - Costume design for Minister Pinh in the opera 'Turandot' at the State Opera Theatre, Kharkiv (1928)

 

Geometric shapes and Constructivist principles abound although I was reminded of New Order's True Faith video on more than one occasion. I'm particularly taken with Petrytskyi's 'Cry of the Captives, designed for a theatre in a small town in northern Ukraine. As ever, it's the colour but, here, it's also the harmony of the composition.

Something that also comes across in the works of Kultur Lige artists like El Lissitzky (another one I'd heard of before) and Issakhar Ber Ryback. Kultur Lige was founded in Kyiv in 1918 to promote the development of then contemporary Jewish-Yiddish culture, at that time the short lived Ukrainian People's Republic was led by the Central Rada who recognised and celebrated the multicultural and multilingual nature of the country. Even while, at the same time, multiple violent pogroms were being carried out against Ukraine's Jewish population. By the mid-1920s the Kultur Lige was over. The Soviets weren't fans.

 

Anatol Petrytskyi - 'Cry of the Captives'. Sketch for the interior decor for the Kozelets Theatre (1920)

 

Issakhar Ber Ryback - City (Shtetl) (1917)

 

El Lissitzky - Composition (c.1918-1920s)

 

Sarah Shor - Sunrise (late 1910s)

 

Bad move by the Soviets. Some of these paintings are great. El Lissitzky and Issakhbar Bey Ryback joined ethnographic expeditions around Ukrainian Jewish towns and the architecture, the street life, and the people spilled out into their art. In Ber Ryback's case, more literally than in El Lissitzky's. Sarah Shor experienced what it was like to be a Jew in Ukraine at the time of the pogroms in a far more frightening way. She actually survived a pogrom and having been through such trauma was determined to make positive art. 

 

It seems, to Sarah Shor, there had to be a better ways of doing things. There will always be negativity out there if you look for it but there will always be positivity too. I know someone who had to walk up a small hill and acted like they'd been in the Third Battle of Ypres. While at the same time the cyclist Chris Hoy has terminal cancer and has been overwhelmingly positive in his outlook. I know which instance I find the most inspiring.

 

Marko Epshtein - The Tailor's Family (c.1920)

Marko Epshtein - Cellist (c.1920)

 

When the Soviets finally defeated the Ukrainian forces in 1921, Kharkiv became the capital of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (hardly anybody seems to use the word 'socialist' in its correct context) and a policy of 'ukrainizatsii', or Ukrainisation was introduced which sounds good in theory. In actuality, it was an ideological concession, a sop, to appease the defeated locals.

It did, at least, allow for a level of cultural autonomy and, under this, Mykhailo Boichuk's studio of monumental art emerged to become the USSR's leading artistic group and were commissioned to create murals for public spaces and buildings. Again, it sounds good. But soon the group were dismissed as 'Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists' and Boichuk and some of his associates were executed during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s (and most of the art publicly destroyed). Wandering around this exhibition it's instructive to note just how many artists died during that grim decade. A decade the world seems to be sleepwalking into reliving.

 

Anatoly Petrytskyi - Portrait of Mykhail Semenko (1929)

 

Vasyl Yermilov - Journal cover design for 'Avanhard' ('Avant-garde') (1929)

 

 

Vasyl Yermilov - Journal cover design for 'Nove Mystetstvo' ('New Art') (c.1927)

 

Kyrylo Hvozdyk - Shepherds (1927)

 

Anatol Petrytskyi - Construvist Composition (1923)

 

Mykhailo Boichuk - Dairy Maid (1922-23)

 

To look at Boichuk's dairy maid you wouldn't necessarily come to the conclusion that he was particularly bourgeois, less so you would consider him to be worthy of execution. Like so many of the artists on show here, Boichuk had travelled a bit. He'd studied in Vienna, Munich, Paris, and Krakow and he believed that art should be 'a national treasure' rather than a commodity which, again, doesn't exactly reek of the bourgeoisie.

If anything his fusion of European modernism, Ukrainian folk traditions, and even Pre-Renaissance frescoes sounds unifying and inclusive. Not, it seems, to Stalin and his murderous goons. Dictators never tend to be particularly good at understanding art. Imagine how terrible Putin or Trump's taste in art is.

 

Mykola Kasperovych - Ducks (1920s)

 

Mykola Kasperovych - Head of a Young Girl (c.1920)

 

Some of the art made during that time was, it seems intentionally, naive. Almost outsider art. Ducks in a pond and a self-portrait, both by Mykola Kasperovych, which I joked to Vicki was a painting of her when she was a little girl. Vasyl Yermilov, however, was anything but naive. He made propaganda art that combined agitational imagery with Ukrainian decorative traditions as well as working on typefaces for local publications and utilising the industrial aesthetic for his own self-portrait (below).

 

It juxtaposes well with Viktor Palmov's Hallowe'enish Group Portrait and Vasyl Sedliar's more traditional portrait of Oksana Pavlenko. It was shown at 1930's Venice Biennale along with Manuil Shekhtmn's far more political Jewish Pogrom,

 

Vasyl Yermilov - Self-Portrait (1922)

 

Viktor Palmov - Group Portrait (1920-21)

 

Vasyl Sedliar - Portrait of Oksana Pavlenko (1926-27)

 

Manuil Shekhtman - Jewish Pogrom (1926)

 

Anatol Pertytskyi - The Invalids (1924)

 

Kazymyr Malevich - Sketch of the painting for the conference hall of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kyiv (1930)

 

Viktor Balmov - The 1st of May (1929)

 

Oleksndr Bohomazov - Experimental Still-Life (1927-28)

 

Ukrainian artists had earned their place on an international stage but it was the final room of the exhibition which was, perhaps, the greatest revelation of all and, once again, it was down to the incredible colour. Bohomaoz's Experimental Still-Life looks like Morandi through the looking glass, Viktor Balmov's 1st of May is a haunting meditation on a part of the world that seems to find peace hard to come by (for some reason, hmm), and Malevych's winter landscape is just sublime.

 

It's like a song, or a dream, in painted form. Wikpedia has Malevych down as Russian but he was born in Kyiv to a Polish family and it was the Ukrainian folk traditions he grew up around that influenced him. The landscape below differs from his more famous Suprematist style but what it lacks in revolutionary power it makes up for in grace.

 

Kazimir Malevich - Winter (Landscape) (1909)

 

Oleksandr Bohomazov - Sharpening the Saws (1927)

 

Works like Bohomazov's Sharpening the Saws and Semen Yoffe's Shooting Gallery are just as joyous but though the art at the RA show is, indeed, full of light and full of love there is, of course, a dark side too. Soviet power resulted in a radical change in both the political, and artist, climate and Socialist Realism forced out the era of modernist experimentation.

That was not the worst of it. Hundreds of writers, theatre directors, and artists (including many whose works are in this show) were sent to labour camps, imprisoned, and/or executed and their works destroyed. Slowly, the artists have been regaining the reputation they earned and deserved but mostly they have been placed under the umbrella of Russian art. As you can probably imagine, and bearing in mind history and present events, it's important that this is corrected and the Royal Academy have done a great job of doing just that. Thanks to Vicki for joining me. Slava Ukraini.

 

Semen Yoffe - In the Shooting Gallery (1932)

Oleksandr Syrotenko - Rest (1927) 

 

Kostiantyn Yeleva - Portrait (late 1920s)