Q-drops keep falling on my head.

Angela Merkel is the granddaughter of Adolf Hitler, Kim Jong-un is a puppet ruler installed in North Korea by the CIA, each and every American mass shooting of recent years is a 'false flag' operation, and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Soros are members of an international child sex trafficking ring that is even said to eat children.

None of these things are remotely true but that doesn't mean the sizeable minority of people who believe them to be true aren't a potential danger. Noel Rooney (the Fortean Times 'Conspirasphere' writer) was at The Bell in Whitechapel as guest of the London Fortean Society to take us on a journey down a rabbit hole into the world of the bizarre viral Internet phenomenon QAnon and those that observe it, those that follow it, and those that interpret it and what that might mean for our political future.

I knew nothing of QAnon before the LFS announced the evening but some brief Wikipedia browsing had thrown up the cranky ideas outlined in my opening paragraph so I was keen to hear Noel weave it all together into some kind of narrative sense. Which he certainly did. He's a knowledgeable, confident, and almost theatrical (but not too much - thankfully) speaker who wears his wisdom lightly but is firm and determined in getting his point across.

The rather gnomically titled 'Where we go one, we go all:the QAnon conspiracy' proved to be a great, and illuminating, evening and the story began on the very specific date of 28th October 2017 when a message appeared on 4chan announcing, with some presumed authority, that Hillary Clinton would be arrested in two days time. "Lock her up! Lock her up!".

 

It appeared to come from an insider in the Trump administration. Or, and this is key, it did if you wanted it to. The seemingly flimsy evidence for this was that the author of the post had used the tag 'Q'. To be accredited with Q clearance in the US government would mean one would have access to top secret information but that would not, necessarily, suggest a politician or member of the administration. A high ranking scientist would also receive Q level clearance.

Q started to post on 4chan on a much more regular basis. On average five times a day but the flow was hardly regular. Occasionally weeks would pass without a single post before, all of a sudden, he, she, or they would release an avalanche of cryptic messages to an ever expanding, ever more curious, band of followers.

When gaps in posting occurred, rumours circulated that Q had been killed by the Clintons (who we'll come back to later) and some even speculated that the QAnon phenomenon represented the end of civilisation! Phenomenon may be pushing it a bit (it's certainly less well known in the UK than it is in America) but Q's popularity spread to such a degree that merchandise appeared (t-shirts, trucker caps, and even baby grows) and it wasn't long before people started waving Q placards at Trump rallies.

Often these placards would refer to cryptic Q posts about the "coming storm", the "calm before the storm", or "where we go one, we go all" which were central to Q's mythology. A mythology which obscures a grand narrative that is never explicitly revealed but hinted at with catchphrases, shibboleths, and invitations to join the dots between the posts that soon started to be heavily populated with initials and numbers.

Things that could be interpreted in many different ways. When Hillary Clinton wasn't arrested it proved Q's predictions and inside knowledge to be demonstrably untrue. But that didn't matter. Telling the truth is not important any more (if it was Boris Johnson would be dead in a ditch today and Mark Francois would have exploded). Instead, the idea appears to be to tell so many lies, and spread so much confusion, that by the time one has been comprehensively disproved the story has long moved on.

Posts by Q (known as Q-drops) became ever more cryptic and arcane. Yet this didn't alienate people but drew them further in. They moved from 4chan to the more mainstream reddit, YouTubers started uploading videos discussing the meaning behind the Q-drops, and soon QAnon (Q is responsible for posting, QAnon seems to be the hazy collective that propagates, disseminates, and interprets Q) became "the biggest thing in the alt-right community". Even the right wing former comedian Roseanne Barr tweeted "who is Q?".

The theory that Q's followers, QAnon, began to put together was that Donald Trump, in collusion with some (but not all) of the US military, was involved in a secret war with a global deep state and they were planning to take down a paedophile, child eating, ring that had, at its very centre, Bill and Hillary Clinton. Trump may appear a bumbling and incompetent buffoon unworthy of respect but was, in fact, winning a vital war for the future of the entire planet.

Some of the far right came to believe that "reality is top secret" and the idea that we were living in the "calm before the storm" (a QAnon catchphrase) took hold. Q spread to Facebook and Twitter and Alex Jones of Infowars was an avid promoter of Q for a while. Jones, however, is so bonkers that he eventually decided that Q was shilling for a deep state to help cover up an even deeper conspiracy. It's amazing that with such a knowledge of how the world really works Jones managed to find time in his schedule to rant about chemicals in the water turning frogs gay.

While the Q-drops were being interpreted in ever more extreme ways, some turned their attention to Q's possible identity. Nobody has worked out who Q is yet but many theories have developed (as you might expect from people who devote their lives to such things). Predictably, those who've benefited from Q's 'work' have come under scrutiny as have those who have shared it, but there's also a school of thought that says that from 5th November 2018 onwards all Q-drops have come from an imposter who has hacked Q's account.

Some think Q is basic 4chan trolling (described by Noel as an alt-right take on Rickrolling) gone large, others believe an Italian group of Situationist pranksters called Wu Ming (a subset of the Luther Blissett community in Bologna) are behind it (though why a determinedly leftist group would so help the far right is hard to discern), and there's another theory that it's a live action role play (LARP) that's careered out of control!

 

The Internet puzzle group Cicada 3301 (who it's said post puzzles to recruit codebreakers to the CIA and MI6 from the public) have been insinuated. As has JFK Jr (the fact he died in a plane crash more than eighteen years before the first Q-drop doesn't seem to be a problem here) and even The Donald himself. Trump's tweeting about the 'coming storm' has turned the spotlight towards him. Just as he likes it.

Marginally more plausible is the belief that Dan Scavino is responsible - but on Trump's behalf. Scavino's career trajectory is of the kind that could only have been enabled under such a calamitous, and self-serving, egomaniac as Donald Trump. He rose from manager of the Trump National Golf Club Westchester to White House Director of Social Media as part of the Executive Office. One of Scavino's jobs is believed to be authoring some of Trump's tweets. It's not known if he's responsible for 'covfefe' but both Scavino and Trump (or Scavino posing as Trump) occasionally tweet "5:5", a QAnon slogan that has, of course, been given numerous interpretations but is widely held to be the QAnon community's way of saying 'loud and clear' or 'message understood'.

Many believe that Scavino is Q but there are still further theories. There's one that QAnon has been designed with the specific intention of putting pressure on the US government to stop 'harassing' Julian Assange and another proposes that the real deep state is actually running QAnon to fool people. Seemingly based on Mao's Hundred Flowers Campaign, the idea is that by getting these people to identify themselves the deep state will be able to arrest and imprison them!

The debate on the grand narrative behind the Q-drops seems less nebulous than that concerning Q's identity. The theory of Trump and assorted allies fighting a secret war against a deep state for America's future (which he is, of course, winning) only really takes traction if it has some identifiable baddies in it for him to fight against, and those identities are as obvious as the accusations about their behaviour is fantastical.

George Soros is suspected of funding revolutions worldwide in his attempt to try and destroy the white race while Hillary Clinton (brilliantly described by Noel as the 'leading coconut at the alt-right shy) is believed to be a Satanic paedophile who eats children! They believe in a sixteen year plan to destroy both the USA and Russia and even though the Q-drops never contain explicitly white supremacist content a Venn diagram where the two circles consisted of Q's followers and white supremacists would have a seriously bulging intersection.

The belief is that a civil war is coming. A war between patriots (a word whose meaning they have both hijacked and inverted) and everybody else. On 3rd August 2019, 21 year old Patrick Crusius walked into a Wal-Mart store in El Paso, Texas and shot dead twenty-two, mostly Latino, people with a semi-automatic rifle.

While Crusius did not mention QAnon (serial killers rarely leave footnotes) he did subscribe to a lot of their belief system. Like the shooter who murdered fifty-one in a Christchurch mosque, Crusius believed in The Great Replacement. An idea that there is a global plan to dilute, or even delete, the white race using mass immigration.

Dangerous conspiracy theories like these, that can and have resulted in mass murder, can often rest on the flimsiest of 'evidence'. Grass Valley Charter School in small town California was making plans to hold its annual fundraiser. Normally a very low key event of no interest to the national news or the authorities. But this time they received a series of phone calls to say that the event was under threat of a Jihadist attack.

Those phoning in were QAnon followers who believed they'd decoded a tweet from James Comey. Comey was the Director of the FBI from 2013 until 2017 when he was dismissed by Trump and was joining in a Twitter game aimed to make public figures seem more human, more in touch with ordinary folk, by posting about five jobs they've had in the past. Some of them, ideally, fairly humble.

His aesthetically displeasing tweet read:-

#FiveJobsIveHad

Grocery store clerk
2. Vocal soloist for church weddings
3. Chemist
4. Strike-replacement high school teacher
5. FBI Director, interrupted

Which seems innocent enough - and was innocent enough. Unless you're so obsessed with conspiracies that everything starts to look to you like a conspiracy. In which case you'll obviously read between the lines and see the message jihad GVCS (Grass Valley Charter School) and this will be enough to concern you about a forthcoming Islamist attack.

Eventually the police advised the school to cancel their fundraiser. Not because they were concerned about an imminent Jihadist attack, they weren't, but because they were worried that so many 'patriots' would come out to protect the school from the imagined attack that there could be violence. It's an event that has nothing to do with Q or Q-drops but has everything to do with the QAnon community that they have spawned.

If Q has disappeared, and there have been no 'drops' since August, that's no longer the important thing. The narrative is now in the hands of the Q-proofers (as they style themselves), the patrtiots, the truthers, and all the alt-right and if they're allowed to dictate the story then things will most definitely not be alright. It'll be alt-right on the night - and for many nights to come.

Part of the appeal of QAnon is that you can play it like a game (solving puzzles) but part of the danger is that its effects don't belong in the category of 'fun and games'. They can be deadly real even when a lot of the mythology that informs them is untrue or even openly fictional. The film The Matrix is taken very seriously in alt-right circles.

Almost as if it's a sacred text, as opposed to a reasonably decent and well made science fiction film. Everything about QAnon and alt-right belief is being wrapped up in a quasi-religious system of thought. To believe in white supremacy, to believe Hillary Clinton eats babies, and to believe in The Great Replacement is now an article of faith and the religion of this belief is at its crusading stage.

Normally conspiracy theorists don't like the government but with their man, Trump, in power, they're on the lookout for new enemies, new infidels to either convert or strike down. A Q t-shirt is worn in the same way as a hijab or a crucifix. A signal that you adhere to a certain belief system. It unites believers but, more dangerously, it draws a line between believers and non-believers. It others them, it dehumanises them, and that, history tells us, is just what you need for a coming war.

They believe we're in the 'calm before the storm' and the most worrying thing is that if that war doesn't come to them they're so enshrined in quasi-religious doctrine and bullshit that they'll start it themselves. Like an angry man in a pub punching somebody because of a perceived aggression on the part of the victim - but with semi-automatic rifles and the certainty of religious conviction.

In a country that's got way too many guns and way too much God already, resulting in a terrifyingly high murder rate, the idea of more of both mixed in with white supremacist conspiracy theories should be of immediate concern. QAnon's reach is not huge yet but it's growing and none of us would be best served by waiting to see what happens if and when it reaches tipping point.

Thanks, again, to the ever wonderful London Fortean Society and to Noel Rooney for a frightening but fascinating lecture. I never had time to even touch on Pizzagate, algebraic geometry, Cambridge Analytica, numerology, Kanye West, the Illuminati, the assassination of JFK, or the Qu'ran but they all cropped up in the talk too. The Q&A touched on Dick Cheney's sexual fetish having a startling similarity to the one urban myth suggests Cliff Richard has and some of the world's most famous paedophiles:- Hallowe'en birthday boy Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, and Jeffrey Epstein. That's a horrifying list of names but if people continue to believe anything that fits with their own confirmation bias it's only a matter of time before further names are added to that list of horrors. Happy Hallowe'en.

Schjerfbeck:Työ tekijäänsä neuvoo.

"Työ tekijäänsä neuvoo" - "Work teaches the worker", a Finnish saying.

I'll be honest. The name Helene Schjerfbeck meant little to me until the Royal Academy announced a retrospective exhibition of her work and I even doubted if I'd find it that interesting. Sometimes I'm not even sure how I decide to go and see what I see. There's some kind of internal protocol in place but occasionally it seems to defy logic.

Occasionally it takes me to see things that prove to be a complete waste of time. Occasionally it gets me out of my comfort zone and rewards me with an afternoon of emotion and culture I could hardly have imagined. More often than not it falls between two stools and Helene Schjerfbeck at the Royal Academy was one of those occcasions.

That's not to say her work is bad. I liked it a lot. It's just to say it didn't blow me away. Which is quite a lot to ask of a painting anyway I suppose. Schjerfbeck was born in Finland (strictly speaking the Russian Empire which Helsinki was then part of) in 1862 and died in 1946. It was a great era for European art but Helsinki was hardly the centre of either Europe or the art world.

Her career spanned Impressionism, Cubism, and Abstraction and though Schjerfbeck's work did change to reflect the times, it changed very slowly. A glacial pace which seems suitable considering her Nordic heritage. There are nods, here and there, to Munch, Cezanne, and even Toulouse-Lautrec but, for the most part, Schjerfbeck is resolutely her own artist. There's almost a reclusive, hermit like, feel to her work as if those cold Finnish winters forced her indoors to consider her art and herself for hours on end. There's a sense, essentially, of an artist who simply liked to work. To paint.

Portrait of a Girl (St Ives) (c.1889)

Which is reflected in the fact that during her seven decades as an artist she produced more than a thousand works. Work that is celebrated elsewhere in Europe but has, thus far, made little impression in the UK. In fact, the RA's show was her first in the country since she exhibited her own work back in 1890 and her first ever solo exhibition on these shores.

Schjerfbeck started early, entering the Finnish Art Society's drawing school aged eleven (as their youngest ever student) before going on to study Dutch 17c genre painting at a private academy. In her late teens she moved to Paris on a state travel grant and there she studied at the Academie Colarossi. She was influenced by Jules Bastien Lepage (another new name on me) who, on seeing her work, remarked "these paintings have fine things and fierce things" and she made two visits to Cornwall in 1887/8 at the invitation of Austrian painter Marianne Preindlsberger (no, her neither) which inspired her magnificent, and kind, portrait of a girl in St Ives.

Sometimes Schjerfbeck confirmed to the kind of Victorian tastes that we find twee, cloying, and chocolate boxy. On other occasions her art could be quietly daring, questioning assumptions of what makes for suitable subject matter and experimenting with spatial ideas. The RA have made no attempt to focus on one of these styles more than the other and it's to their credit that they've not done so. It gives a more rounded, truer, idea of the work that Schjerfbeck produced.

Two Profiles (1881)

Portrait of Helena Westermarck (1884)

Even if it does mean that some of it can be skimmed over at an almost disrespectful clip. For the most part I've chosen to show the more interesting (to me at least) works. Two Profiles shows Preindlsberger and another friend, possibly Danish artist Annie Anker, and Helena Westermarck was a Finnish writer, artist, and another friend. More important than who they are, is the clear intention of Schjerfbeck to paint them with both honesty and love.

It was a methodology she could even apply to inanimate objects. Drying clothes. Or even a door. 1884's The Door's subject is as much the light that seeps into the room beneath the titular portal as it is the door itself. The fact that the scene was observed in the Tremalo Chapel in Pont-Aven, Brittany (a chapel that also inspired Gauguin) is, I think, of less interest than the fact that Schjerfbeck took such a modest sight as inspiration. 

Clothes Drying (1883)

The Door (1884)

View of St Ives (1887)

It speaks of her confidence as an artist as well as her innate sense of aesthetic pleasure that a chapel door could provide as much inspiration, and produce equally exquisite results, as a very yellow, very sun dappled, view of St Ives with two young, well dressed, Victorian masters surveying the north Cornish coast and the intricate warren of cottages below.

Despite their surface differences each of these paintings has a sense of peace and that's something that comes through very strongly with repeated viewings of Schjerfbeck's work. There's no feeling of urgency. There's no haste. Instead there is, always, a calm and considered look at life. You can't help getting the impression (correctly or not) that, despite her quietude, Helene Schjerfbeck seemed to be very at ease with herself. 

Back in Helsinki in the 1890s, Schjerfbeck would be sent on trips to Vienna, Florence, and St Petersburg in order to copy works by Hobein, Frans Hals, and Velazquez. Finnish collections lacked Old Masters and it seemed replicas would suffice until that situation changed. While helping the galleries of Finland, she was also able to give herself a deeper understanding of chiaroscuro and fire up her artistic imagination further by spending long hours plonked in front of works by Hans Holbein, Giorgione, and Fra Angelico.

Tapestry (1914-17)

In 1902, Schjerfbeck moved with her mother to the middling sized town of Hyvinkaa, about thirty miles north of Helsinki. There, despite staying in touch with the international art scene by reading magazines and chatting with friends, she began to experiment further. She'd lost interest in trying to impress the salon owners of Paris and was even less concerned with catering for the kind of nationalistic imagery that the Finnish art scene was craving.

Her work, hardly shouting in the first place, became even quieter, even more introspective. Hazy contours, pared down subject matter, and large areas of flatness gave her work an almost monastic quality. Tapestry is the oneiric outlier, looking more like a Munch work than one of Schjerfbeck's, but elsewhere she focused on scenes on glamour free domestication, of housework, of quiet contemplation, and of maternal respect. There's an almost filial sense of duty underpinning pious paintings like The Seamstress and At Home (Mother Sewing) which sit quite at odds with the arrogant, selfish behaviour of the dandy James Abbott McNeill Whistler whose portrait of his own mother appears to be the work that Schjerfbeck's own owes the greatest debt too.

The Seamstress (The Working Woman) (1905)

At Home (Mother Sewing) (1903)

When Schjerfbeck wasn't observing her mother (whom she was caring for at the time) carrying out chores, she was looking at herself in the mirror. You get the impression of a life so secluded there wasn't really much else to look at. The section of the exhibition dedicated to Schjerfbeck's self-portraits is the most comprehensive of the show and on first impression it seems like there's too many. You can't help thinking her legacy would have been served better by a little variation.

But when you consider her life and career as an artist you begin to gently disabuse yourself of that notion (when I write you, remember I mean I, I'm not sure where or when this affectation began). A series of self-portraits, and these go from a twenty-two year old to an eighty-three year old, is a journal of the ageing process, almost a memento mori, and it's difficult to view such a thing with anything other than gloomy resignation.

Self-portrait (1884-5)

Self-portrait (1895)

Self-portrait (1912)

Self-portrait with Black Mouth (1939)

Self-portrait with Red Spot (1944)

If you've looked through an old pile of photographs you'll be familiar with the twin sensations of nostalgia and a sense of loss for a past that can never be retrieved. Often a feeling of regret, lost youth and, more painful still, lost opportunities. Most of us look back and can't believe how good we once looked. We begrudge we never did more with our lives and with our looks. With a span of six decades, which even I'm yet to reach - and probably never will, these feelings become even starker.

From rosy cheeked ingenue to assured and confident young artist and on through middle age until the ravages of time begin to show and Schjerfbeck starts to appear almost as if an apparition of her former self. This series charts the weakening of the flesh as surely as it does the evolution of Schjerfbeck as an artist and the way she responded to developments in the wider art world.

The darkened backgrounds suggest the likes of Rembrandt remained with her as she passed through more traditional portraiture into vaguely Fauvist tropes in the 1910s and on to paintings that, though surely not Cubist in intent or design, are keenly aware of the style that Picasso and Braque pioneered over a century ago. It's as if Schjerfbeck could clearly see the debt that Picasso owed to Cezanne and wanted to somehow illustrate it. While, at the same time, remaining resolutely her own artist.

The Skier (English Girl) (1909)

Circus Girl (1906)

While Schjerfbeck's self-portraits are, primarily, made up of browns, blacks, and dark reds (muted muddy colours that seemed to express a sense of diffidence) those she made of others are far more colourful. Her sitters can even end up looking like circus clowns!

In the case of The Skier (English Girl) a bit too much so. Her sitters were family, friends, and local models rather than anyone particularly famous so it seems unlikely she was intending to offend. It seems to be more the case that capturing an accurate likeness was never her intent. Instead people's faces were merely springboards for Schjerfbeck to launch her experiments in colour from. She subscribed to Marie Claire and was fashion conscious enough to want to include zeitgeist friendly motifs of flappers and people dressed in gender neutral attire.

She wasn't even fussed if the titles were misleading. Her nephew Mans Schjerfbeck was a school teacher and not only was he not some professional motorist or racing driver but he neither owned a car nor even a driving license. It's uncertain, too, if Mabel Ellis (the English Girl) could ski or if her bright red cheeks (Schjerfbeck's bold experiments with colour can sometimes look a bit silly) simply made her look as if she'd applied, or over applied, the kind of sun protection one associates with Alpine slopes.

Mans Schjerfbeck (The Motorist) (1933)

Girl from California I (1919)

Girl from Eydtkuhne II (1927)

Schjerfbeck's titles often refer to 'types' rather than individuals. Motorists and skiers are joined by nurses and teachers. These are the people who would have made up Schjerfbeck's world it seems, and as she became an octogenarian, nurses became particularly prevalent. She spent large amounts of time being cared for in hospitals and nursing homes and though her body was weakening, and soon to give out on her, her desire to paint remained strong.

Paintings of nurses like Kaija Lahtinen, despite the obvious disparity in styles, seemed to see Schjerfbeck looking back at youth vicariously through those that still had it. Californian girls rub shoulders with those from Eydtkuhne (now Chernyshevskoye in the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia) as Schjerfbeck's surveys of colour and female life (Mans is a rare example of a male sitter in this show) became more expansive.

Nurse I (Kaija Lahtinen) (1943)

Girl from the Islands (1929)

Madonna de la Charite after El Greco (1941)

Portrait of a Girl in Blue and Brown (Inez) (1944)

Alarm (1935)

Almost as if Schjerfbeck's own reduced circumstances (and it seems her world, from her thirties onwards anyway, was not that large in the first place) seems to have caused her to journey further into her imagination. At the same time as she gently inched her art forwards in her final decades, she remembered and paid homage to the greats. The title of 1941's Madonna de la Charitie after El Greco isn't lying.

You can see, quite clearly, what she's taken from the Greek painter who worked from Toledo in Spain. The colour, the spectral feel of the figure, and the mood of devout service all shine through. I was lucky enough to visit an El Greco exhibition at the National Gallery many years ago and I must add, however, that Schjerfbeck's homage lacks the quite startling, almost other worldly, feel of an actual El Greco. 

When it comes to colour, however, not many compare with El Greco (Matisse, Derain, Bonnard perhaps?) so we shouldn't hold that against Helene Schjerfbeck. Colour wasn't her main thing. Nor was still-life so the small selection in the final room proved an unexpected and pleasing coda to the whole experience. It also showed that Schjerfbeck was paying more attention to Cezanne than we may have at first assumed.

Still Life with Blackening Apples (1944)

Pumpkins (1935)

How'd you like them apples? What about those smashing pumpkins?  Like Cezanne, Schjerfbeck painted fruit because it provided a great way to focus on tone, colour, and spatial relationships. The fact that a lemon or an orange tends to fidget less than a person was probably no hindrance either.

But fruit, like people, rots, decays, and displays signs of mortality so, again, we're in memento mori territory. In 1939 there were plans for Schjerfbeck to display her work in the United States but the outbreak of World War II saw to that, and the war hadn't long ended when, seven years later, Schjerfbeck died in a hotel on the Baltic coast of Sweden. A lifetime spent perusing mortality gone in an instant.

Ten years after her death Schjerfbeck was chosen to represent Finland at the 1956 Venice Biennale (in a pavilion designed by Alvar Aalto) but her originality. the fact she never belonged to any major art movement, and, I think most of all, her remoteness in a small town north of Helsinki meant that her art has remained very much on the periphery for the last seventy years.  

I don't think this Royal Academy show will change much on that score (there were a decent amount of people there but certainly there was no need to book in advance) and, perhaps, that's the way Helene Schjerfbeck would have wanted it. After all, this is a woman who spent her seventieth birthday hiding in a cottage to avoid well-wishers. She doesn't need the money now so her art can speak for itself and it seems to me that it speaks softly and quietly but, at the same time, says something that's worth listening to. 

I said at the start of this review that the exhibition had been a lukewarm experience at best. I'd given you a bit of a bum steer. In writing about the exhibition and in spending more time with Schjerfbeck's paintings I discovered a depth that was not apparent on first sight. That's because spending time with quiet people and quiet paintings can often unearth stories and ideas you hadn't been prepared for. That's why investment in people and in art is always worthwhile. The still waters that Helene Schjefbeck seemingly inhabited did, indeed, run deep. Bertta!

Red Apples (1915)

Theatre night:Out of Sorts.

My ticket for my first ever visit to Theatre503, above The Latchmere pub near Battersea Park, cost me just 50p (it was pay what you like, and I'm not very flush right now). That was less than the price of the bottle of Evian I took in with me to drink during the play. It was more than value for money because Out of Sorts (written by Danusia Samal and directed by Tanuja Amarasuriya) was way better than other recent, more expensive plays, I'd seen. Better by far. It was, in fact, one of the most rewarding experiences I've ever had at the theatre.

Its basic premise is that Zara (Nalan Burgess), a young lawyer, has been walking a precarious tightrope between two very different lives. With her parents, she's a good Muslim daughter who prays, doesn't drink, and is preparing to marry childhood friend Jamil (spoken of, but never seen). In her own home, the one she shares with her friend Alice (Emma Denly), she certainly drinks and she definitely doesn't pray - or even believe. Regularly committing acts that Alice gleefully points out are haram.

Despite being attractive, friendly, clever, and kind it becomes clear that not all is well with Zara. At first it seems she's just stressed at having to live a lie and, once she's told Jamil the wedding won't be happening, keeping that from her family makes her even more worried. Soon, however, it becomes clear that there's more going in Zara's life than the surface allows us to see. Pleasing her parents while also living a hard drinking, partying, millennial lifestyle is difficult, sure, but Zara's character is drawn in much more humanistic turns than that.

She's got those problems - but she's got a lot of other stuff, all too human and all too recognisable, going on as well. The appurtenances of the play are all very much the milieu of millennials (veganism, smashed avo on toast, status anxiety, hipster cafes, and wokeness) but these are just the on-trend clothes that this well built body of work chooses to wear.

 

They're window dressing for a story about much more important, much deeper, things and it's to the credit of writer, director, and a superb cast that during a running length just shy of two hours they manage to tackle issues of race, belonging, cultural appropriation, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, friendship, and love without ever shoehorning anything in.

Nothing feels forced. Nothing feels perfunctory. There's a flow in the writing, and in the performances, that makes Out of Sorts as easy to watch as, but far better written than, a soap opera. None of the characters are 'types' or have been included to represent anything other than rounded out, fully formed, believable people that you could quite easily imagine yourself meeting. They all felt like, talked like, and spoke like people you probably know - and, because of that, you couldn't help but care what happened to them.

Zara's flatmate and friend Alice is the daughter of rich parents who's been given a lot of help in life and had a lot of advantages. She understands the concept of white privilege but can barely recognise she's benefited from it. She means well and she tries hard to be 'woke' but often veers into dubious territory. We forgive her, like we do Zara her indiscretions, because she is still young.

Alice justifies her overuse of the word 'haram' and doing Arabic accents to impersonate Zara's parents on the basis that her best friend is a Muslim and her boyfriend, Anthony (Claudius Peters), is black. Peters is superb as Anthony, a Brummie with Nigerian heritage who stands very much as the voice of reason in the play. Turning up at an ill advised 'white trash' party (one of Alice's ideas of course) in his suit from work, it's guessed he's come as Obama but he gets the last laugh by holding his red tie out and suggesting Trump to be far more suitable of the awful white trash moniker!

Anthony's seen racism all his life and even remarks that now, as an adult, and an adult in a suit no less, he's still accused by newsagents of being a thief. Zara's dad Hussein (Nayef Rashed) has also in the past been, and is still being, targeted by racists but, in one of those acts of cognitive dissonance we so easily see in others but often fail to see in ourselves, he too holds some racist views about black people.

Like many a dad of his generation, sadly! Other than that he's a loving father. A cab driver with an expanding waistband who loves, and is loved by, his family. Zara's mother Layla (Myriam Acharki) is a stoic, suffering, caring provider who always puts her family before herself and is quick to offer help and very slow to judge.

Sister Fatima (Oznur Cifci) has not gained that level of patience or wisdom yet. A hip-hop/R&B fan with pretensions towards poetry and a delightfully potty mouth, she speaks as if she grew up in Compton rather than the London Borough of Brent and has come to radical decisions about white British oppressors and supremacists.

Understandable decisions when you consider how much power white supremacists hold and how much of the narrative they dictate. But Fatima, too, is shown to have bought into an aggressive belief system. Her genuine acts of kindness towards her family indicate that she is simply a young person making her way in a world that's both confusing and one in which the odds are stacked against her from the start.

The odd Trump joke aside, the politics are delivered with a lower case p. There's not an overt political message, there's no hectoring, nobody learns an important life lesson. People just get on with their lives, they fall out, they make up, they make mistakes, they try to remedy those mistakes. It's funny in places (there was even a food fight) and, at other times, it's painfully sad. Tears came to me more than once.

With a small stage set representing Zara's front room on one side and that of her family on the other, all the expense has clearly gone into the story and finding the right people to flesh that story out. Which Samal and Amarasuriya have managed fantastically. Rashed, Denly, Cifci, and Peters are all superb and when Aharki is on stage she has a presence that mesmerises, but most credit must go to Nalan Burgess as Zara.

On stage almost constantly and yet able to, in less than one hundred and twenty minutes and in a story set over just one day, give her character depth, vulnerability, a complicated back story and so much more beside. When she was happy you were happy for her. When she wasn't you wanted to reach out and hug her.

Out of Sorts, while making salient points about big issues which all hit their targets, was ultimately a drama about the complicated bonds of family and friendship. It was ultimately about the healing power of love in all of its many guises. I was so gripped by this masterpiece that I didn't take one single sip from that bottle of Evian. This play deserves a much much larger stage and I'm happy to say that, if it gets that stage, I'd be willing to pay up to forty times as much to see it next time. I walked away inspired.

Różowy?

"A large, trapezoid-shaped white bed quilt has been spread on the floor. The sharpest corner has been pierced with a wooden signpost saying, in pink, przejscie (passage). Flat river stones form a passage across the quilt. They are arranged into a segment of the circle that has the signpost at its centre. At some distance from the installation have been heaped up soft parts of my sculptures:pillows, cushions, various quilted and stuffed objects, pink and white. Upon a moment's reflection, I pick up a pink 'author's flag' and an armful of the objects. I enter the quilt and try to keep my balance, walking from stone to stone. I try in my boots to walk on the stones without staining the white quilt. Losing balance, I throw the pillows, coverlets, and cushions away and the reach the far "shore" with the flag only. I sit down and stay like that. The rejected soft objects lie on the other side. Photographs documenting the performance and the flag itself are later displayed on the wall behind the installation" - Passage Beyond the Quilt (first performed at BWA Krakow, Poland, March 1979), Maria Pininska-Beres.

Fair play to Maria Pininska-Beres. She may have been dead for over twenty years but she's pretty much written my review of her Living Pink art exhibition at The approach (lower case affectation, the gallery's own) for me.

Which is just as well as it left me utterly baffled. That's not uncommon. I'm often baffled. Sometimes confused. Occasionally discombobulated. I don't necessarily mind that. It's good to try something new, break away from one's comfort zones, but I really couldn't get my head around what the curators were doing with her work in this small, above a rather pleasant pub, Bethnal Green gallery. Perhaps I'd have needed to witness the actual performance instead.

So I reached, as I so often do, for the pamphlet you can pick up on the door. I often think if art needs explaining then it's not really working as well as it should do. But, having said that, I'm a very conscientious art reviewer and wouldn't like to think I'd missed out on something.

I'm still not sure if I had or not. Taking its name from a 1981 performance (the year of the artist's fiftieth birthday) in Krakow, this modest collection was Pininska-Beres's first exhibition outside Poland but I'm not totally convinced that 2019 Britain, even in its Brexit addled state, compares with the political oppression of Poland in the early eighties.

Pininska (I'm feeling more familiar now) had planted a pink rose bush outside a Krakow gallery and asked, in three languages, "whether roses are going to bloom pink in Poland next spring?". It was her expression of hope at a time when there wasn't much around. Nothing bloomed in the spring. Not in the rose bush outside the gallery, nor in the wider Poland.

Pininska's use of pink is said to have "simultaneously and concisely encapsulated Pininska's defiance of an undemocratic and patriarchal political system whilst being a symbol of freedom that also celebrated the feminine and the erotic". Some of these works (with titles like End of the Feast and Smudged with the Sky) were made during a "period of extreme surveillance and oppression" within Poland. That's all well and good and I can see how it would have made perfect sense, even been quite shocking, in its original context.

But, now, and here, I'm not sure it really says anything. It's more of a history lesson than something that says anything to us about the times we're living in now. The cruel thing about history is that it doesn't repeat itself, at least not exactly, but keeps finding new variations. Bastards evolve their strategies and techniques just as surely as the rest of us do to serve their/our purpose and, therefore, art that gently revolted (for anything stronger would be too risky) against General Jaruzelski isn't necessarily a perfect fit to make sanguine comment about the evils of Boris Johnson, austerity, and Brexit.

Of course, not all art has to comment on current issues (though two of the very best exhibitions I've seen in recent years had very strong political messages) but, without that, Pininska's work is simply quilts, pillows, flags, cushions, and lots and lots (too much eventually) pink.

It's not unpleasant to look at (though it's not particularly exciting or aesthetically pleasing either). It's just a bit pointless now. Perhaps Polish expats will get a lot more out of it than I did. In a spirit of Solidarnosc with those Polish expats I went downstairs to the pub and drank two pints of Litovel. Which I then realised was a Czech lager and not a Polish one. What a total glupek!