On Christmas Day my niece told me how much she enjoyed Conor McPherson’s play The Veil at the National Theatre. One of the blogs that has been floating through my head was how much I did not enjoy it, and why. I stayed silent on Christmas Day so might as well do so now. If a play works that well for someone it clearly works. My theatre-going has been valiant of late. I head for the good times I once had. It seldom works. Comedy gives me my best strike rate. I’ve always noted how willing audiences are to have a good time whatever you put before them, managing to laugh against the odds.
Good theatre for me was on Hungerford Bridge on the way back across the Thames, a full moon in a clear sky over St Paul’s. Visitors from all over the world lined the bridge, turning it into a moon-viewing platform.
The same weekend we headed for the Dulwich Picture Gallery, invited by friends for ‘Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven’. I expected vast canvases with tiny figures and bold mountains. What I found was revelatory. Tom Thomson’s work (above) built like a mosaic of stripes into a peerless vision. The show had a glorious finale in the works of Lawren Harris, whose paintings (one below) shifted me into that sacred space of mountains. I had seen something related to this style of mountains as visionary art in some paintings of Rudoph Sauter, but nothing akin to this capture of Arctic light. It was encouraging, to spend time with works pulled from great artists responding to wilderness.
