Johnny's Midnight Goggles: Review

SharpWire are a combination of the writer and composer Pete M Wyer and the multi-talented performer Matthew Sharp. The show that they have currently at the Riverside studios opened the Tête á Tête opera festival and frankly was as inspired a piece of absurdist, sustained, artful whimsy as anybody is likely to see in long time.

At commencement the audience is each given a paper bag containing a boiled sweet, a pen, a small plastic pop out cake decoration stating 'congratulations', a smaller plastic fish and a balloon – un-expanded. You reviewer wondered momentarily if there was going to audience participation a la Rocky Horror Show, but thankfully the gifts were pointless.

The goggles of the title we learnt were a portal into Takrilakastan, a greenish dimension that co-exists in the space taken up in our world by the heat-sozzled backwater of La Lavandou in Southern France.

Bought from a turbaned lunatic in the weekly market they give access to a world of man-eating lizard dogs, turtle-headed guards, massive fortifications and a tiny resistance. Not to mention fleets of dwarves carrying large cartoon bombs that tick loudly.

Our unnamed cellist hero it transpires must descend into the chaos of Takrilakistan to rescue his neighbour Johnny who has been abducted by a black camel and is now toiling automaton-like on the infernal machine, which is threatening our world with a series of 50 satellites designed to crush individuality and spirit from the human race. And he must do it fast.

Matt Sharp gave a virtuoso performance as the narrator, French waiter (from central casting), transvestite cabaret artiste, Dulang Dulang the gimlet-eyed, turbaned store holder, murderous turtle men and other assorted characters. Oh yes and he played the cello, grimaced and sang his way through the performance with joyful élan. The writing of both music and libretto (can this be described as a libretto?) was light and dark in turns and created the aural soundscape that finger-fitted the performance.

As a one man show this was a revelation and enormously English, the images, goonish in their flights of fancy, burnt impressions on the minds eye as the tortuous story wended its way through the evening.

The show will no doubt travel. If it does so near where you live, screw up your courage and let SharpWire take you to the land of Takrilakistan.

British Vision: Observation and Imagination in British Art, MSK Ghent

How long would it take you to visit almost every provincial art gallery in Britain in order to see the cream of work from our Islands? About a fortnight. That is if you jump onto Eurostar and get yourselves to Ghent to see what must be the most complete and eye opening exhibition in recent years before it closes on the 13th January.

Robert Hoozee, the director of the Museum Voor Schone Kunsten has scoured 63 UK and 14 foreign galleries and museums in putting together what is, in the opinion of your correspondent the most complete and staggering collection of British works assembled in living memory.

The purpose of the exhibition is to show how the exceptionalism/individualism in the English character that created the industrial revolution had an echo in the art produced there. As Hoozee puts is his fine introduction to the lavish catalogue,

“At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Voltaire was already full of praise for the climate of freedom he encountered in England. With respect to religion, he wrote in 1726 that ‘England is properly the country of sectarists...An Englishman, as one to whom Liberty is natural may go to heaven his own way’. Until well into the ninetieth century, artists and critics were fascinated by the specific circumstances under which art in Great Britain was able to thrive. One of these, Théophile Thoré wrote in 1863,
“Self-Government is complete in English Art, just as it is in all the institutions and all the customs of this proud people, where individuality asserts itself. It is this that lacking in French artists, who almost always obey some higher authority, tradition or prejudice”.

He claims, with some justification that in Britain art followed a distinctive path from that on the Continent, charmingly he describes it as ‘marginal’, which has as its mainstay the empirical experience of reality and otherwise wild flights of fancy and the visionary.

As one wanders through the gallery, through the 14 rooms over 300 works in all media, barring conceptual and video (oh what a shame) dating between 17 and 1950 at every stage and around every corner lies the shock of recognition. Work after work that has lodged in the mind over the years lies there to see.

The empirical tradition is exemplified by Joseph Wright of Derby whose magnificent rationalist alterpiece ‘A philosopher lecturing on the Orrery’ takes the high drama of religious work and places it firmly in the world of a questing for scientific knowledge. It was painted in 1766 and has to be seen in the context of works by Fragonard to see what a radical departure had been taken in England.

Add this to Bill Brandt’s photography, Richard Dadd, that photograph of Brunel, Gainsborough, Turner, Constable, Stanley Spencer, Lowry, Freud, Stubbs, the original Alice in Wonderland, Mad Martin, Ruskin, Epstein... you get the picture.

If you live in Belgium you have no excuse, go now, today. If you live in the UK, well get a move on.