Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow School of Art Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art April 12th-May 12th 4 stars A gaudily attired couple sit astride some scaffolding watching the debris-ridden legacy the best minds of their generation inspired. Or at least that’s the sense you get of Dutch artist Folkert De Jong’s site-specific sculptural intervention, which looks to the gallery’s namesake and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh, for inspiration. Looking for all the world like paint-spattered dayglo-punk charity-shop dandies, it’s as if the pair are occupying some building-site royal box while a cheap seat variety show plays out below. The effect is heightened by the figure of a woman sporting a hat which from a distance looks straight out of Cabaret holding on tight to two male figures, while beside the scaffolding a male figure holds on to a battered approximation of a wooden acoustic guitar. A solitary female figure stands astride a trestle table in the midst of some carefully choreographed dance of death. Positioned in the midst of more regularly classical statues, this is theatre as still life, captured for posterity and ready for their close-up. The List magazine, April 2012 ends
Edinburgh Playhouse Five stars A big National Coal Board sign looms large at the opening of Lee Hall and Elton John's decade-old musical stage version of Hall and director Stephen Daldry's hit turn of the century film. In a tale of one little boy's liberation as a dancer against the backdrop of the 1980s miners strike, however, the Durham Miners banner and the 'Save Our Community' sash held aloft matter more. It is this call to arms that forms the heart of Daldry's production, as Billy becomes a potty-mouthed beacon of hope in a situation where picket line, thin blue line and chorus line rub uneasily up against each other. Given such a context, there is bound to be some pretty grown-up stuff going on here, be it the institutionalised homophobia in Billy's village, the class war going on within it, or Billy's grieving for his dead mother that drives his every move. And, as so magnificently choreographed by Peter Darling, what moves they are. Watch...
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