THIS WEEK: A SELECTIVE GUIDE

KENNETH, LAURA, DANCE AND STREETS | September 16th 2008
Our guide to what's on around the world, compiled by Ariel Ramchandani

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

RETURN OF THE COMET

Was there ever an actor of more promise, and less delivery, than Kenneth Branagh? In 1982, RADA’s doors had barely shut behind him before he was bagging awards for the astute outsider Judd in “Another Country”. At 23, he was Henry V at the RSC. By 26, he’d founded his own company—with Derek Jacobi in it. He was not so much a star as a comet. It’s depressing to log what happened next. Yes, he played Hamlet three times, beautifully, and won Oscar nominations for “Henry V”. But then the man his teacher called an “acting animal” left the stage for ten years, instead directing dismal films: the smuggery of “Peter’s Friends”, the butchery of “Frankenstein”, the pointless “Sleuth”. Perhaps the media dented his self-belief, or Terry Hands was right to warn that starting a company would ruin his acting. Branagh was saved by a boy wizard and two comedians. He guested, shyly but to roars of acclaim, in “The Play What I Wrote”, his own homage to Morecambe and Wise. He lit up the dull “Chamber of Secrets” with the self-spoofing Gilderoy Lockhart. Now, after a good Richard III and a fine Mamet, he takes the lead in Stoppard’s new translation of “Ivanov”, and plays Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallander for the BBC. Maturity has honed that puddingy face—a process Denholm Elliott described as “falling onto the bones”. Branagh is less polished, more vulnerable, less comical, more truly funny, less needy, more likeable. His voice, always wise, now has a Stradivarian range. Ivanov—stuck, inactive, self-aware—is Chekhov’s Hamlet, while Wallander could be a new Morse. Is that the faint glow of a comet? ~ ISABEL LLOYD

"IVANOF", through November 29th, Donmar at Wyndham's

BLOCK PARTY

A new show at the Bronx Museum of the Arts takes it to the streets, or rather, from the streets. "Street Art, Street Life" From the 1950s to Now" captures the dynamism of urban streets, and examines the way they are the "pervasive and cohesive thread binding today’s vanguard artists and photographers to those of preceding generations", according to the show's curator, Lydia Yee. Expect a wide range of media--documentary, photography, performance, etc--and artists such as Amy Arbus, Jamel Shabazz, Vito Acconci, Yoko Ono, Robert Frank, William Klein, Jacques de la Villeglé and Nikki S. Lee. Much of the work involves the photo-documentation of street life, the artist as archivist "recording the fact of it", writes Holland Cotter in the New York Times. For example Vito Acconci's "The following Place", which involves the artist following people down streets to private places, documenting everything along the way. These streets are always changing and always compelling. ~ A.R.

"STREET ART, STREET LIFE: FROM THE 1950S TO NOW", through January 25th, New York

TRUE LIFE: I MARRIED THE PRESIDENT

Curtis Sittenfeld admires Laura Bush. In an essay on Salon in 2004 ("Why I Love Laura Bush") she called the first lady "smart and nice but just flawed enough"--a worthy subject for a "great novel". Author of the fiction bestseller "Prep", Sittenfeld is skilled at sketching the plight of the observant outsider ("Prep" was about a young mid-western girl who tries valiantly to fit in at a prestigious East Coast boarding school). So perhaps it was only a matter of time before she took it upon herself to write the story of "Alice", a woman who enters the impressive Blackwell family by marrying Charlie Blackwell, a recovering alcoholic, religious man-child who becomes president of the United States. Sittenfeld does a fine job of imagining Alice's inner turmoil and rounding out her character, creating what Michiko Kakutani calls in the New York Times a "memorable and sympathetic heroine" (albeit one that perhaps only vaguely resembles Laura). This is a novel about a woman who loves her husband very much, despite her disagreement with his policy and his extremely terrible presidency. Indeed, "'American Wife' might be deconstructed as a parable of America in the years of the second Bush presidency", writes Joyce Carol Oates, but "the 'American wife' is in fact the American people, or at least those millions of Americans who voted for a less-than-qualified president in two elections." ~ A.R.

"AMERICAN WIFE", Random House, September 2nd

THE HOMECOMING

This Friday Jenny Backhaus comes home. Backhaus's dance company Backhausdance will be performing three works at the Ford Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. A dance professor at Chapman University and Orange County local, Backhaus founded her company in 2003 with Chapman dance students. She has gone on to produce 17 works, founded her own dance school and garnered accolades. "She is constantly reinventing her movement vocabulary, and I’ve never seen a work of hers I didn’t like”, exclaimed Jamie Nichols, executive producer of “Celebrate Dance", in an article in the LA Times. Backhaus began as a gymnast and has applied this athleticism to her choreography; the San Diego Union-Tribune has praised her dancers for their “sense of shared purpose and soaring physicality". Works performed this Friday include "Shift" a piece in four sections (with lighting expert Ben Tusher), and the award-winning "Sitting in January", an audience favourite, featuring music by Bela Fleck. The show will also feature a new work, "The Woeful Maladies of Ennui Manor". ~ A.R.

BACKHAUSDANCE, Ford Amphitheatre

Picture credit: EYEVINE (Kenneth Branagh, above); George Maciunas, poster for “Street Events” at Fluxhall, New York City, 1964