Glasgow Green Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art April 20th-May 7th 5 stars If you’re feeling down in the dumps, there are few things more rejuvenating than jumping up and down like an idiot for a few minutes. If you can do so without bursting out laughing like an even bigger loon, chances are you’re dead. As a child of the Rave age, Jeremy Deller is in a perfect position to tap into such variations on a natural high, repetitive beats and all. By reimagining Stonehenge as a bouncy castle type structure that will later be inflated in London during the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Deller is also making an explicitly political point, both about the right to assemble and how religious and artistic totems have become untouchable. With the real Stonehenge once a Mecca of the free festival movement and now cordoned off to all but the hardiest of revellers, to witness big daft kids of all ages hurling themselves around and about the structures with touchy-feely abandon on a sunny Sunday afternoon is a subversive delight. Taking your shoes off and joining in is even better in a work that might well be descended from theatre director Joan Littlewood’s original idea to create a fun palace on London’s South Bank where Deller’s magnificent retrospective, ‘Joy in People’, is currently in residence at the Hayward Gallery. Just as rave culture democratised the dance-floor, Sacrilege is a spectacle of people power in action that has the mass appeal of Billy Smart’s Circus and the political and conceptual sophistication of Bakunin. Ultimately, Deller is both enabling and revelling in the creative power of play, and that, rather than fear or stifle that that power as authoritarian regimes tend to do, it should be celebrated in excelsis. If such a living monument was in permanent residence, similarly-minded children of the stones in the park could be jumping for joy forevermore. The List magazine, April 2012 ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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