A caricature of a Briton in Paris in 1814, from "Peace Breaks Out" © Courtesy of the trustees of Sir John Soane's museum
Art
Peace Breaks Out! London and Paris in the summer of 1814Sir John Soane’s Museum, from 20th June
In contrast to the procession of events marking the centenary of the start of the First World War, the Soane Museum celebrates the glorious summer a hundred years earlier, when Napoleon was defeated and what was hoped to be a lasting peace broke out all over Europe. As architect and surveyor of the Bank of England, John Soane had been on standby to lead the evacuation of the building, in the event of a Napoleonic invasion. Instead, after the Treaty of Paris, he gave Britain’s ally Tsar Alexander I a private tour of this masterpiece before leaving for Paris to marvel at the deposed Emperor’s architectural innovations. On view will be prints and paintings documenting the festivities of summer 1814, some from the museum, some on loan. There will be drawings by Soane of Napoleon’s Paris and a number of satirical prints by French cartoonists mocking the oafish British, who surged across the English Channel to inspect the defeated enemy. Like many in Britain, Soane nursed a secret admiration for the upstart Emperor. Amongst items of Soane’s Napleonica on display will be portrait busts, a rare early painting of Napoleon aged just 27, and an ornate gold ring containing a lock of Napoleon’s hair.
Emma Crichton-Miller
Film
The Return to Homs On release from 27th June
As a documentary, The Return to Homs is not balanced journalism. It is a partisan glimpse inside Syria’s third largest city, sometimes called the “capital of the revolution.” In the spring of 2011 when the Syrian government launched its attack on Homs, 19-year-old Basset was the charismatic goalkeeper for the Syrian national football team; Ossama was quieter, an intellectual interested in media, a pacifist with a camera. Over the next three years, as their youth evaporated, they became rebel insurgents.
Director Talal Derki used found footage, as well as specially shot footage, for his film, which won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance this January. Unsparing in bloody detail, intimate in moments of extreme suffering, it can also be poetic. One memorable tracking shot follows a “safe” corridor inside a ravaged building targeted by snipers. Makeshift doorways hacked between apartments, marked by felt-tip arrows on the wall, link one abandoned domestic space to another—newspaper still on the coffee table, dressing-gown by the bed. The film depicts a ghost town populated by armed young men like Basset and Ossama, whose ambitions were not for war.
Francine Stock
Dance
Russell Maliphant Company: Still CurrentSadler’s Wells, 5th to 7th June
Russell Maliphant’s collection of works showcased in Still Current is a distillation of his choreographic philosophy. The synthesis of expressive dance and martial arts is seamless, knitted together by the extraordinary lighting designs of Michael Hulls. In a series of solos, duets and trios—including the legendary “Two”—Maliphant and Hulls, together with musical collaborator Andy Cowton, create a dance universe like no other. The mechanics of the body have never seemed more sensuous, the interplay of skin and light positively cinematic and the cumulative effect of Cowton’s dripfeed electronica mesmerising. With additional music from Erik Satie and Armand Amar, Maliphant extends his singular dance language to embrace human/mythical elements that can express beauty as easily as violence. The powerful physique of Dickson Mbi, lit by what looks like a barcode, or the accelerated grace of Thomasin Gulgec in the Nijinksy homage “Afterlight (Part One),” are just two reasons to watch. The return to the stage of Maliphant himself is another.
Neil Norman
Opera
Vert-Vert Garsington Opera Festival, 7th June to 27th July
If you thought there was only one dead parrot in the history of popular culture then think again. Years before Monty Python, Jacques Offenbach was writing Vert-Vert for Paris’s Opéra Comique—a giddy, whimsical fable about the death of a beloved parrot.
During a prolific career, Offenbach composed some 100 operettas, few of which make it into the regular repertoire of contemporary opera houses. The appeal of seeing a fully-staged production of Vert-Vert—written in 1869, at the composer’s peak of wit and invention—is not only its rarity but its endlessly attractive melodies and Gilbert & Sullivan-esque lightness of touch. In typical operetta style, the plot is very silly indeed. When their pet parrot Vert-Vert dies, the girls at the convent school of Saint-Rémy opt to replace him with hunky-but-dim Valentin, the gardener’s apprentice. Cue much suggestive comedy and corrupting of innocence.
A recent move to Wormsley Park from the Garsington Opera’s original Buckinghamshire home has given the festival the loveliest of natural settings. Framed in the gorgeous folly that is Garsington Opera’s glass pavilion, this frothy operetta should come into its own.
Alexandra Coghlan
Theatre
The Valley of Astonishment Young Vic, 20th June to 12th July
The great director Peter Brook, 89 years old and still working out of Paris, continues his association with the Young Vic with this international co-production, which also involves theatres in New York, Luxembourg, Marseilles, Athens, Bremen, Geneva and Amsterdam.
This new work, co-directed with Brook’s longstanding collaborator and translator, Marie-Hélène Estienne, is billed as a kaleidoscopic journey into the workings of the human brain (based on neurological research and true stories of linguistic and visual synaesthesia) with reference to the ancient Persian poem The Conference of the Birds.
So Brook is revisiting two key periods of his creative life: his work in the 1990s with the neurologist Oliver Sacks which resulted in The Man Who, one of his masterpieces; and a great adventure of the 1970s, when he decamped to Africa with a hand-picked ensemble (including Helen Mirren) and used the text of The Conference of the Birds as a dramatic allegory on a symbolic pilgrimage. Brook never looks back, so this won’t be a re-hash of old productions but a distillation of a lifetime’s work.
Michael Coveney
