To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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Visual virtuosity illuminates a Darwin for beginners
Eager: Bradley Foster as Charles Darwin
[Mark Douet]
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
The Wider Earth
Natural History Museum, London
SHREWSBURY is very proud if its most famous son, Charles Darwin.
A statue of the venerable scientist, replete with magnificent beard, dominates the entrance to the library, a shopping centre has been named in his honour — he'd have been touched, I’m sure — and Quantum Leap, a travesty of municipal sculpture was erected to celebrate the bicentenary of his birth. A lesson, as if one were needed, in the hubris of Tory-dominated local government
So as a native of the town I was quite at home in the opening scenes of David Morton’s play The Wider Earth. In it, Darwin – not the bearded, established naturalist but an eager and bright young graduate in Bradley Foster's characterisation – journeys through the Shropshire countryside in 1831.
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