One Star Reviews

Exhibition Review- The Geometry of Screaming: Angles of Agony in 14 Movements

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Exhibition Review- The Geometry of Screaming: Angles of Agony in 14 Movements

Artist: Isolde Grack

Gallery: The Gallery of Radical Completion, Notting Hill

This is a hard sentence to write, but I have rarely experienced an art exhibition as terrible as Isolde Grack’s The Geometry of Screaming. The Gallery of Radical Completion on Portobello is well-known as an experimental space, but this goes too far.

Grack, whose résumé lists her as “multidisciplinary void-conjurer, trapeze instructor and multi-media artist,” has put together an exhibition that insists on its own brilliance so loudly that you can’t hear anything else. Except your own internal monologue begging you to leave.

The show is arranged in fourteen “movements,” each meant to represent “a geometric form translated into psychic anguish.” What it really translates into is a series of rooms filled with trash arranged in polygons. I made brief notes in each room. Here are the highlights; read them and be grateful you don’t have to visit.

Movement I: Circle of Woe

A hula hoop wrapped in black duct tape, suspended from the ceiling. Every thirty seconds it moves slightly. I am told that after twelve hours it will have rotated once. That’s it. That’s the whole piece.

Movement III: The Quadrilateral of Silence

Four folding chairs duct-taped together in a square. Visitors are instructed to sit inside “to feel contained by the crushing walls of capitalism.” I did. I felt more like a raccoon in a recycling bin.

Movement VI: Triangle of the Father

Three broken megaphones arranged in a triangle. A nearby placard explains that “patriarchy is the truest hypotenuse.” I cannot emphasize enough how much I wish I was joking.

Movement IX: Hexagon of Flesh

Six slabs of mortadella nailed to the wall in the shape of a hexagon. By the time I reached this piece, the room smelled like a wet deli counter. A man in a scarf leaned towards me and whispered, “Powerful.” I worry for his sanity.

The supposed “climax” is Movement XIV: The Infinite Polygon of Screaming, an immersive chamber where visitors are encouraged to howl at a mirrored wall while the lights go on and off as though there is a power cut. I declined, though a group of students who all looked high participated enthusiastically. One even screamed “This is praxis!” and immediately burst into tears.

Throughout the show, gallery attendants in lab coats wandered around carrying clipboards, occasionally jotting down notes whenever someone frowned. I asked one what they were writing. He replied, “We’re tracking the audience’s resistance to Euclidean violence. Do you have issues with Euclidean violence?” I told him I’d never considered it before, but yes, I rather thought I did. He wrote several notes and noticeably stepped away from me.

The gift shop sold tote bags with the slogan “Acute Pain > Obtuse Joy,” scented candles named after shapes (“Pentagon of Regret”- smelled like mouldy lemons), and a £900 “limited-edition ruler” that had no measurements on it.

One star,generously awarded only because the bathrooms were clean and free of duct tape.

One Star Review: Salted Wounds – An Inquiry into the Ache of Preservation

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One Star Review: Salted Wounds – An Inquiry into the Ache of Preservation

“An Exhibition of Badly-Lit Self-Adoration,” by conceptualist Marius Klein-Cho at the Colchester Museum for Experiential De-Obfuscation

It is no small thing to walk into an art show and feel,within seconds,that you have stepped into a crime scene in which the biggest casualty is good taste. Marius Klein-Cho’s Salted Wounds claims to explore “the tension between cure and decay, the ache of preservation, the erotics of crystallization.” What it actually delivers is three rooms’ worth of pretentious garbage sprinkled with enough sodium chloride to trigger a hypertension warning.

Before you even see the work, you’re required to “cleanse your palate” by licking a Himalayan salt block mounted to the wall next to the entry door. The gallery attendant, dressed as a Victorian dockworker, watches to make sure you do it. I considered asking for a fresh block, but given the state of the rest of the show, I suspect hygiene was not part of the conceptual framework.

Room One: The Pickle of Memory

You are greeted by a suspended chandelier made entirely of dill pickles, each one slowly dripping brine into a paddling pool filled with marshmallows. Signs say you can eat the marshmallows; nobody does. A faint audio track plays something I couldn’t hear – the sound may have been seeping in to the room from a different gallery. The nearby information panel claims this piece “dismantles the binary between fresh and preserved selfhood.” Hmmm, does it? And what does that even mean?

Room Two: Tears of the Brackish Moon

This is essentially a dimly lit corridor lined with large salt licks, each carved into crude busts of historical figures. Mine appeared to be a pitted and eroded version of Virginia Woolf. Visitors are encouraged to lick them “to taste the erosion of legacy.” I did not. A man ahead of me licked Napoleon and muttered, “Too much cumin.”

Room Three: Cure Me, Daddy

The “centrepiece” is a raw ham covered in glitter, rotating slowly on a mirrored turntable, surrounded by taxidermied pigeons wearing wedding veils. Every so often, a hidden misting system sprays a fine saltwater fog into the room. This, we are told, represents “the nuptial brine of desire.” I saw three people coughing uncontrollably and one woman collapse to the floor. She was soon moved on by gallery security.

The final “gesture” of the show is Vous êtes the Salt Mine, an “immersive identity excavation” in which you lie on a heated slab while an intern pours table salt onto your chest and whispers compliments sourced from Craigslist personal ads, in French. I lasted 15 seconds before I rolled off the slab and made for the exit.

The gift shop sells £45 jars of “artist-harvested salt”, salted liquorice shaped like crying babies, and a T-shirt that reads “I Am the Brine.” I left without purchasing anything.

One star,because, in fairness, the fog machine worked. Everything else? An over-seasoned monument to the dangers of letting a concept go unchecked. Salted Wounds is less an exhibition than a marathon of conceptual seasoning for an audience that did not consent to be marinated.

Review: Furniture Has Feelings Too

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Review: Furniture Has Feelings Too

by radical domesticist and self-taught “empath-carpenter” Dendra Flume at The Velvet Spoon Centre for Applied Sentiment

Is this the world’s most elaborate prank staged for a single, unwilling audience member? Furniture Has Feelings Too feels like it might be, as you walk amongst items reminiscent of a Lidl clearance aisle. Dendra Flume describes her practice as “emotional joinery,” which she defines as “building psychic bridges between the domestically oppressed and the ergonomically repressed.” In plainer English: she glues googly eyes to chairs and tells you they’re sad. She insists her work “challenges the tyranny of sitting,” but what it really challenges is your ability to keep a straight face in public.

The exhibition unfolds in a series of “living rooms” arranged across the gallery, each one dimly lit and smelling faintly of various oils. The first installation, Chaise Longing, features a Victorian fainting couch covered in wet velvet, onto which Flume has sewn dozens of tiny mouths. Every few seconds, one opens to murmur, “stay.” A laminated statement nearby explains that the piece “explores the clinginess of memory.”

Section Two: Recliner’s Lament is just a La-Z-Boy submerged in a shallow kiddie pool, slowly absorbing water. The sign says this is about “the drowning of leisure in the capitalist tide”.

At the centre of the show stands Table for None, a massive dining table with every leg replaced by a mannequin leg in a fishnet stocking. The table surface is covered in handwritten break-up letters, all signed “Yours, Ottoman.” Visitors are encouraged to take a seat, but the chairs, each with a speaker hidden inside, start whispering passive-aggressive comments as soon as you sit down. Mine told me, “You never notice me unless you spill something.”

The pièce de résistance is The Credenza Will See You Now, a therapy session with a credenza wearing a tweed blazer. You’re invited to sit across from it and “share a suppressed domestic truth.” I said, “I don’t think this should be in a museum,” and a hidden printer spat out a slip reading, “Projection acknowledged.”

The sound design throughout is unrelentingly earnest: creaking wood, sighing cushions, and, occasionally, sobbing. Every corner is staffed by a gallery assistant in beige overalls who offers you a drink “in solidarity.” One told me they were “in emotional residency here” and refused to elaborate.

The show closes with Exit Wound, a narrow hallway lined with broken IKEA parts suspended from the ceiling by yarn. As you pass through, a motion sensor triggers the sound of a coffee table scraping across the floor.

I’m sorry, but this is less art than it is a trip to the dump narrated by someone who once took an improv class. The gift shop sells tote bags that read “My Furniture Has Boundaries” and a $120 “empathy hammer” described as “non-violent carpentry equipment for consensual assembly.” I left empty-handed, unless you count the dull ache in my soul.

One star. This wasn’t an art show, it was a cry for help. I hope the artist gets the assistance she needs.

One Star Reviews: A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Fitzrovia Theatre

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One Star Reviews: A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Fitzrovia Theatre

I Woke Up and It Was Still Happening

There’s a fine line between “visionary reinterpretation” and “group therapy session gone off the rails,” and the Fitzrovia Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream pole-vaulted over that line and landed in a steaming puddle of theatrical delusion.

Let’s be clear: I did not attend this play so much as I survived it.

This production,directed by Cedric Vineshadow, who insists on being credited as a “story alchemist”,transports Shakespeare’s whimsical romp from a magical Athenian forest to a trendy café in Shoreditch. The fairies are “freelance branding consultants,” Oberon is a shirtless life coach with a ring light, and Titania enters to the sound of Tibetan throat singing followed by a live goat on a leash. That’s not a joke. There was a goat. It defecated during Act III, which, in hindsight, was the most honest reaction to the show.

Puck, usually a mischievous sprite, was played here by three people in morph suits who communicated rather too much by twerking. Their “mischief” included spraying audience members with essential oils and stealing people’s bags and other items. I had slipped off my shoes; at the end it took 20 minutes to locate them – Puck had hidden them in a prop bin. Not funny.

The lovers,Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius,were each portrayed as emotionally repressed investment bankers trapped in a never-ending escape room. Their romantic confusion was acted out through a complex system of traffic cones and blindfolds. Few lines were delivered without being followed by a beatbox solo or an inexplicable slow-motion interpretive gesture. The play became less about love and more about my desperate yearning for a fire alarm to go off.

Bottom, traditionally a lovable oaf, was reimagined as a YouTube prankster with a man bun and a vape. His transformation into an ass was, apparently, too literal for this bold new vision, so instead he became a “walking metaphor for performative masculinity,” which is to say, he wore a giant phallic foam hat and screamed every line like he was trying to order a kebab from across the street.

The Mechanicals’ play within the play,usually a charming comedic highlight,was replaced with a live Zoom call to a confused man in Cincinnati who had clearly been tricked into participating. He valiantly attempted to play “Pyramus” while someone in the audience held a laptop up to the stage like it was a hostage negotiation. It was avant-garde in the same way a gas leak is avant-garde.

Costumes appeared to have been sourced from the bins behind a failed Burning Man pop-up store. Lighting was “experimental,” meaning most scenes were lit only by handheld flashlights operated by unpaid interns. The sound design consisted almost entirely of didgeridoos.

At the end, the cast all gathered in a circle, held hands with the front row, and chanted “We are the dream” twelve times while staring into the middle distance. Then the curtain fell, right on one lady’s head.

One star. And that’s solely because the goat tried its best.

One Star Reviews: Gristle of the Spirit: Towards a Meat-Based Aesthetic

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One Star Reviews: Gristle of the Spirit: Towards a Meat-Based Aesthetic

An Operatic Farce in Twelve Tiresome Acts

It takes a certain kind of genius,or perhaps sadistic persistence,to make a gallery-goer question not only the validity of art, but the very function of their own senses. Clarc Dendrite’s Gristle of the Spirit achieves this rare feat. Not since Sacha Hohn created his armpit works have I so profoundly regretted leaving the house and visiting the gallery.

Clarc Dendrite, for those lucky enough to be unfamiliar, is known for his confrontational installations and his deep, personal commitment to being completely insufferable. His previous show, Skin is a Lie, involved dehydrated banana peels and fortune cookie threats. This time, he claims to be “dismantling the Cartesian mind/meat binary.” What that actually entails is anyone’s guess, but the result looks like a charcuterie board designed by a war criminal with a minor in semiotics.

The gallery is divided into twelve “acts,” each more baffling than the last, beginning with Act I: Pre-Linguistic Sausage. It consists of a single rotating plinth upon which rests a translucent, wrinkled object that may or may not have once been edible. Hovering above it is a microphone dangling from the ceiling, catching every whisper, sigh, and stomach gurgle in the room and amplifying them through a delay pedal.

Act III, Hamlet’s Ham, presents us with a disembodied hand cast in pork gelatin, gently spinning inside a refrigerated display case. The hand holds a single, laminated quote from Judith Butler, smudged beyond legibility, possibly due to the condensation. On the wall beside it, the word “FLESHUAL” is painted in viscous red paint,or possibly jam. I asked a nearby docent what it all meant, which was obviously the wrong thing to do. She responded – I don’t remember her words exactly but it was something like, “This is an uncurated space. Meaning is an act of audience aggression.”

In the centre of the exhibition is a towering sculpture entitled The Meat of Man Is Memory, a tangled mass of vacuum-sealed tofu, rubber tubing, and what I suspect is a disassembled IKEA bookshelf. Dendrite’s process video, playing nearby, shows him grunting while dragging this monstrosity through a muddy field, pausing only to weep and eat a grape.

Perhaps the lowest point comes in Act VIII, The Tectonics of Tenderness, an interactive installation in which visitors are encouraged to “knead” a raw chicken breast while reciting memories of their childhood. A sign says this is meant to “reconcile the violence of adult becoming with the softness of childhood loss.” I left that room and never looked back.

Sound design throughout the show is credited to someone named “Fëath,” and features samples of chewing, gurgling, mooing, and what may have been a recording of someone blowing raspberries into a sink. This cacophony bleeds from room to room like a relentless gastrointestinal opera. At one point, I genuinely thought I was going to be sick,not because of the art, but because of the overwhelming sound of digestion wafting through the air.

The grand finale, Act XII: Rapture in the Ribcage, is a pitch-black chamber where guests are invited to lie on a heated floor and listen to Clarc Dendrite softly muttering “chew me” in sixteen languages while strobe lights flicker in sync with a slowed-down heartbeat. I can’t tell you how it ends because I left halfway through with a migraine, mild nausea, and a permanent grudge.

To sum up: Gristle of the Spirit is less a show and more a form of low-level sensory warfare. Clarc Dendrite has succeeded in creating the rare work that offends sight, smell, hearing, and logic all at once. It’s not that it’s bad art,it’s that it’s barely art. It isn’t even anti-art. It is un-art. It is the sound of the modern gallery system quietly rolling its Rs into a velvet cushion and pretending it’s the national anthem.

One star, and that’s only because the gallery’s toilet was mercifully clean and far enough away from the exhibit to serve as a safe space. I advise giving this show a miss.

One Star Reviews: An Assault on Eyes, Ears, and Dignity: Mucosal Rapture at The Lamp Gallery

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One Star Reviews: An Assault on Eyes, Ears, and Dignity: Mucosal Rapture at The Lamp Gallery

Review of Mucosal Rapture: A Multimedia Excavation of Internal Landscapes

Let me begin by saying I have experienced a lot of art in my time: the sublime, the confounding, the moving, and the outright fraudulent. Rarely, though, does a show actively fight back. Torbin von Eel’s latest atrocity, Mucosal Rapture, doesn’t just blur the line between art and nonsense,it punches you on the nose whilst whispering “you’re complicit.”

This “immersive, bio-reactive experience” opens with an interactive piece called “Intestinal Cathedral,” in which guests are invited to crawl through a low tunnel lined with latex, raw cauliflower, and warm, wet towels while ambient throat-clearing plays at full volume. If that sounds disgusting,it is. But according to the provided pamphlet (a ten-page stapled manifesto printed in Comic Sans), it represents “the return to pre-digestive space, where shame is born and purged simultaneously.” Really? What it actually feels like is contracting a mould allergy in a tiny car wash run by lunatics.

Emerging from the tunnel you arrive in a room where you’re greeted by the words The Sacrum of Language painted in large letters on the wall. Suspended above you is a rotating door covered in used toothbrushes and Post-it notes bearing phrases like “My mouth is a graveyard of consent” and “Text me back ASAP.” Next to this is a flickering television playing a low-fi video of the artist shaving a kiwi fruit while sobbing.

The walls are smeared,intentionally, one hopes,with what von Eel refers to as “emotionally-charged pigment applications.” These are, in layman’s terms, paints applied to the wall without brushes. Tor claims this palette “rebels against Western retinal imperialism.” I am not convinced.

In the centre of the gallery is the show’s signature piece: “Mother, I Have Become Moisture,” a glass chamber filled with humidifiers and two mannequins in leather harnesses slowly inflating and deflating like neglected pool toys. Every fifteen minutes, a foghorn blasts while a recording of von Eel murmuring “I forgive you, or do I” plays from inside a tapestried lung suspended one metre from the floor. Two people around me burst out laughing, at which point a gallery assistant scolded them and had them removed – von Eel is clear that laughter is not a suitable response to his work.

One room of the show is dedicated to the artist’s “live performance pod,” where von Eel himself appears hourly to crawl on all fours in a flesh-coloured morphsuit while eating kale off the floor and muttering “I am me, I am need.”

I asked a gallery assistant what medium the artist trained in. She scoffed and replied, “He rejects the tyranny of medium.”

To call Mucosal Rapture pretentious would be an insult to every wine drinker who’s ever said the word “terroir.” It’s not that the emperor has no clothes,he doesn’t even have a body.

I left with a headache, a mild rash and a lingering sense that I’d just witnessed an extremely elaborate dare.

One star,generously awarded because I did briefly enjoy the absurdity of watching three art students take notes about a work composed of damp gauze as if it contained secrets from the universe.

Avoid this show unless you’ve recently lost a bet or wish to fully surrender your faith in the contemporary art world

One Star Reviews: The Calcium of Dreams – Toward an Invertebrate Consciousness

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“A Stunning Exploration of Absolutely Nothing”

An exhibition by the visionary choreo-sculpturalist Glinté Pavlova at The Wilhelm Centre for Emergent Visualities

I came to The Calcium of Dreams with an open heart, a functioning brain, and a decent pair of shoes. I left it emotionally concussed, intellectually bludgeoned, and deeply suspicious of mollusks. This show, which bills itself as “a radical unraveling of exoskeletal trauma and the pain of becoming,” manages to combine the sensory thrill of standing in a flooded basement with the intellectual rigour of a dolphin quoting Derrida.

Curated across three floors of The Wilhelm Centre,an institution already infamous for hosting last year’s Sneeze as Praxis,this show is the latest offering from Glinté Pavlova, a Lithuanian-born “articulationist” known for once glueing a taxidermied chihuahua to a Xerox machine. Here, she has turned her sights on “the ancient tensions between softness and structure, organism and architecture, bone and metaphor.”

The moment you enter, you’re greeted by Cephalopod Requiem I, a 12-foot-tall canvas mollusk shell coated in what looks like glitter, Nutella, and hair. Inside, an animatronic mannequin dressed as a Victorian funeral director periodically belches the word “legacy” in five languages. One elderly woman who entered the room when I did simply said, “No,” and walked out.

Not a good start. Unfortunately things only deteriorate from there.

On the second floor, the section labeled The Cartilage Suite offers viewers a chance to walk barefoot across a bed of discarded socks while a projector flashes MRI scans of knees onto a series of melting ice sculptures shaped like reclining nudes. A gallery attendant stood nearby ringing a Tibetan singing bowl every time someone looked confused, which meant the room sounded like an insufferable wind chime shop during an earthquake.

A video installation titled Mollusk as Mind: A Liquid Allegory features Pavlova submerged in a giant bowl of lukewarm almond milk, rotating slowly while reciting a list of 19th-century shipwrecks in reverse chronological order. It runs for six hours. I lasted 40 seconds before I began rooting for the concept of drowning.

Then there’s Calcium Interlude IV: The Oyster Screams, an audio installation played exclusively through floor speakers so you experience it with your feet. It’s described as “a sonification of ancestral pressure points”,what that seems to mean is that it’s 45 minutes of low-frequency moaning and what sounded like someone chewing wetly on rubber gloves. A nearby plaque quoted Pavlova saying, “Sound is texture without the burden of form.”

And then there was the “participatory piece.”

Entitled You Are the Exoskeleton, it involves donning a transparent PVC bodysuit and crawling through a maze of egg cartons while blindfolded, led only by the sound of a recorded Pavlova whispering just too quietly to be understood. I declined to participate, citing dignity. Still, I watched as two grad students took part; both were weeping softly by the end. One sat on the floor muttering whilst the other just rocked back and forth, whispering.

The obligatory gift shop at the end offered merchandise including “boneless memory sachets” (small bags of damp sand with handwritten haikus inside), calcium-themed posters, and a $360 “emotional clam knife” carved from recycled acrylic nails. I bought a pencil just to remind myself that functional objects still exist in the world.

To be perfectly clear: I’m not opposed to challenging art. I’m not a philistine. I once spent three hours watching an artist eat a bicycle whilst riding it, in Berlin. But The Calcium of Dreams is not challenging,it’s exhausting, directionless, and deeply enamored with the sound of its own nonsense.

It is the art-world equivalent of being stuck at a dinner party next to someone who won’t stop talking about their favourite kombucha – yes, I speak from experience.

One star. And that star is shaped like a mollusk, dying slowly in the sun.

One Star Reviews: Rumination in Mixed Media

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A Carnival of Ego and Glue

Review of Rumination in Mixed Media by Rex Caltrop at the Alabama Museum of Objects

There are bad art shows. There are pretentious art shows. And then there is Rumination in Mixed Media, which exists in a rarefied airless void all its own,a vacuum-sealed package of unchecked ego, performance-grade nonsense, and glue gun abuse. It is less a gallery exhibition and more an endurance test conducted under the slow, suffocating weight of someone else’s mushroom-induced epiphany.

Rex Caltrop, who describes himself as a “meta-sculptural dramaturge of the Third Axis,” has produced a body of work so utterly divorced from reality that one begins to suspect he may, in fact, not exist and just be an elaborate prank by rival conceptualists. He claims the show was inspired by “a moment of deep grief during an ayahuasca vision.” I would argue the true inspiration was a burning desire to waste the time of the unsuspecting gallery-going public.

Upon entering the exhibition, you are handed a pair of broken opera glasses and a wooden egg. You are told these are “tools for your encounter.” What they are, in practice, is litter.

The first installation, Sadness Engine #17, features a decommissioned fog machine draped in yoga mats and surrounded by half-melted clown shoes, arranged in a perfect spiral. A placard informs you that this piece “interrogates the skeletal architecture of performance grief.” I stood there for ten minutes, wondering how it did this and hoping the fog machine might turn on and add some interest to the ensemble. It did not.

Across the hall is a video piece titled Mimehole, projected onto a wall of carefully crushed cola cans. It’s a 37-minute film of the artist, nude except for a single roller skate trying to climb a mountain that looked like Ben Nevis. I’m not exaggerating when I say someone in the room whispered “He’s so brave”. I strongly and quietly disagreed.

The largest room in the gallery contains Clownbone: The Reckoning, a “sculptural anti-form” made from deflated pool toys and one enlarged rejection letter from Yale. A lone red balloon sits atop the mess, bouncing around as viewers walk around. I asked a gallery assistant,dressed in full Aston Villa kit, including boots ,what it meant. She said they were forbidden to discuss it.

The final room is an “immersive space” titled Bonezone: A Participatory Collapse. Guests are invited to lie on a vibrating floor mat while attempting to peel an onion with a tuning fork. The room smelt dangerously of used fireworks. The onion made me cry heavily.

To say this show is pretentious is to insult the fine tradition of pretense. This is not even faux-intellectualism. This is meta-pretentiousness,pretentiousness about pretentiousness, a feedback loop of pure, radiant nonsense curated under flickering lights.

I award Rumination in Mixed Media one star, solely because I’m legally unable to give it zero without the risk of a libel suit. The only thing more unhinged than this show is the certainty with which Caltrop speaks about it. He says his work “dismantles the hegemony of punchlines.” I say it’s a clown funeral organised by someone who’s never met the clown.

Avoid at all costs,unless you need a powerful reminder of why Dadaism was a phase, not a blueprint.

One Star Reviews: Henry V at the Mayfair Theatre

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There are moments in the theatre when time seems to stop,when you’re so enraptured by the performances that you forget to breathe. This was not one of those moments. Time not only didn’t stop,it seemed to drag itself across the floor of the Mayfair Theatre like a wounded French horseman begging for the sweet release of death.

Let’s begin with the titular role. Henry V, our valiant king, was played by local TikTok “sensation” Bradly Mews, who delivered Shakespeare’s immortal lines with the emotional range of a dial tone. His “Once more unto the breach” speech was less a rallying cry and more a sleep aid. At one point, a man in the audience audibly yawned, and it received more applause than anything Bradly did all evening. His idea of commanding presence seemed to be squinting dramatically into the middle distance, like he was trying to read a traffic sign without his glasses.

The staging was somehow both minimalist and cluttered. The director, Juniper Wren-Moon (whose last credit was a gender-neutral mime retelling of Cats), decided the entire Battle of Agincourt should be represented using sock puppets and cigarette lighters. I spent ten minutes thinking the theatre was actually on fire, which almost would have been a mercy.

Let’s not forget the chorus,traditionally a unifying narrative force. Here, it was played by a rotating cast of local influencers reading lines off their phones. One of them paused mid-monologue to plug her oat milk brand.

Costuming? Oh, dear. If “medieval raver caught in a Halloween clearance bin” was the goal, then full marks. There was one poor extra whose armor was made entirely out of painted egg cartons. He looked like a budget Dalek, and honestly, I respected him more than Henry.

The French characters were inexplicably performed in exaggerated Pepe Le Pew accents, which might have been funny if it weren’t so lazy. The Dauphin entered on a Segway wearing what I can only describe as a chainmail crop top. He also dabbed after delivering every line.

In the final scene, Katherine of France was wooed not with poetry, but with an acoustic guitar serenade of “Wonderwall.” I can’t say it worked in the context of the play, but it did cause someone in the back to involuntarily shout “NOOOO”.

If I had one positive takeaway, it’s that this production has an end.

In summary: this Henry V was not a band of brothers, but a tragic parade of theatrical crimes. I award it one star, and that star is for the egg carton knight, who, though made of refuse, had more soul than the rest of the cast combined.

One Star Reviews: A Fertile Collapse in Nine Petals by avant-garde legend Bravely M. Jorb

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at The Notting Hill Centre for Artistry

It is rare to attend an art exhibition and leave feeling like you’ve been mugged,not physically, but conceptually. Emotionally. Spiritually. Robbed of time, patience, and your basic understanding of what constitutes “art” versus, say, laundry nailed to a wall. And yet, here we are. Turgid Bloom: A Fertile Collapse in Nine Petals is the latest offering from Bravely M. Jorb, and it is, without question, the most sanctimonious arrangement of floral detritus and art-school word salad I have ever had to witness.

Jorb describes the show as “an odyssey through post-floric semiotics and the latent fertility of failure.” What does that mean? Come with me into the exhibition…

The exhibition is divided into “petals”,nine individual rooms, each allegedly representing a stage in the life cycle of a fictional plant called the Myxoliva spasmata, invented by Jorb “as a rejection of botanical imperialism.” There is a diagram. It includes several question marks, the word “blossom” written backward, and a drawing that suspiciously resembles a giraffe in repose.

Petal I: Germination of Grief is a pile of shredded calendars under a heat lamp. Every five minutes, a fog machine puffs out the scent of mildew while a speaker hidden in the wall emits the sound of someone inhaling deeply, then sighing as if disappointed in you personally. I made eye contact with a stranger across the room and saw myself reflected in their haunted stare: it was unnerving.

In Petal IV: Chlorophyll Envy, visitors are invited to walk across a floor covered in dried wasabi peas while a performer in an over-sized bee costume reads Rilke aloud through a kazoo. A large sign above the doorway warns: “EXPECT TO FEEL POLLINATED.” I did not. I felt irritated and slightly dehydrated, but some of that was my fault for forgetting my water bottle.

The so-called “centerpiece” of the show is Petal VI: Wilt Ritual, a towering sculpture of rotting carnations zip-tied to a metal coat rack, slowly rising and falling according to the weather forecast whilst a slowed-down MIDI version of “The Girl from Ipanema” played on a nearby iPod Nano. I cannot explain to you how viscerally wrong this felt. There are certain things the brain is not built to process, and this is one of them. A child walked in, looked at it for five seconds, and burst into tears. The mother just said, “I know,” and they left without another word.

By the time I arrived at Petal IX: Compost of the Self, I was so broken down I barely flinched when asked to write my “emotional pH level” on a piece of organic rice paper and bury it in a trough of blueberries. I have no idea what the artist was trying to achieve.

The gallery assistants,all dressed in burlap sacks and wearing “scent halos” (necklaces soaked in fermented rosewater),hovered nearby, ready to explain that “each work destabilizes the flower as symbol and repositions it as a wound.” At no point did anyone explain why I had to watch endless CDs of Beethoven’s Fifth falling from the ceiling into a washing-up bowl of green paint.

Let me be clear: Turgid Bloom is not a conversation with nature. It is not a deconstruction. It is not even a critique. It is a profoundly tedious episode of self-worship dressed up in florid metaphors and bad lighting. It is a PowerPoint presentation with delusions of grandeur. It is Bravely M. Jorb holding a bouquet of rotting symbolism and slapping you in the face with it while whispering, “How do you like these apples?”

One star. Everything in the show deserves to be pruned, mulched, and never spoken of again.