- The Observer,
- Sunday September 1 2002
26 PEEPSHOW Dance
The inventive young company Frantic Assembly use movement to express the parts of their plays that words don't reach. Their shows interweave dialogue with frenetic bursts of activity (the actors undertaking gravity-defying leaps) and languorous, concerted gestures that make characters look like synchronised swimmers. They've produced gothic terror in Underworld and a peek at a better place in Heavenly but Peepshow is their most ambitious creation to date. Set in four tower-block bedrooms, the show projects seven fractured lives and is designed as an urban peepshow, with scenes and people often only partially glimpsed. Its artistic target is the mostly stodgy musical theatre. Inspired by the pop video, Frantic aim to bring MTV energy to the stage. A complete score of songs by Lamb will be performed live.
Peepshow opens at The Drum, Plymouth on 24 Sept, then tours
28 MIES VAN DER ROHE Architecture
Under its recently appointed director Iwona Blazwick, the Whitechapel Gallery is opening its first major exhibition on twentieth-century architecture, devoting all its gallery space to a show on Mies van der Rohe. The exhibition, devoted to Mies's early work in Europe before he left Berlin shortly after the Nazis closed down the Bauhaus, was first seen at New York's Museum of Modern Art last year, but since MoMA owns the bulk of the Van der Rohe archive, it's virtually impossible to do a serious show on the architect without the museum's help.
Mies van der Rohe 1905-1938 , Whitechapel Gallery, London E1; 10 Dec-2 Mar 2003
29 GARAGE ROCK Pop
By now you should have heard of The Strokes and The White Stripes; it's been hard to ignore them over the past 12 months. But there's a new wave of raw-edged garage bands heading for the charts, and they're not British. The Vines (Australia), The Datsuns (New Zealand), Yeah Yeah Yeahs (New York) and The Hives (Sweden) have been exciting festival crowds with stripped-down rock'n'roll that will have pop's more discerning fans reaching for their air guitars this autumn.
30 THE PROJECT Television
Billed by programme-makers as a ' This Life for the world of Westminster', this is one of those dramas that hit the headlines long before critics had the chance to judge it - in fact, long before the cameras had even stopped filming on location in London. The Project is the BBC's creative response to the New Labour phenomenon; a little late in coming along, perhaps, but still expected to be scathing in its depiction of the lives of three fictional political activists and the way they manage to climb up the greasy pole - and the opinion polls - by helping to reinvent the Labour Party. The two-part story is the brainchild of director Peter Kosminsky and writer Leigh Jackson, the duo behind the highly successful Warriors , and stars Matthew McFadyen as Paul, a former Manchester University student who becomes a political power broker.
The Project starts later this year
31 CALIXTO BIEITO Classical
It was Welsh National Opera whose Cosi Fan Tutte first introduced UK audiences to Calixto Bieito, the Catalan director whose productions of Don Giovanni and A Masked Ball have since caused such furores in London.
Later this month, Bieito returns to Cardiff with his own unique take on Die Fledermaus , Johann Strauss's comedy of social climbers, confused identities and too much champagne, with Claude Schnitzler conducting, Paul Nilon as the unscrupulous Eisenstein, Wynne Evans as Alfred, Natalie Christie as Adele and Geraldine McGreevy as Rosalinde.
Die Fledermaus opens in Cardiff on 14 Sept, then tours Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham, Oxford, Belfast, Southampton and Swansea
32 SALMAN RUSHDIE, MARTIN AMIS, V.S.NAIPAUL Books
Three of our weightiest novelists publishing collections of their non-fiction - not quite enough to make a trend, but perhaps suggestive of a sense that present times demand that a writer sometimes address the big questions directly, rather than through the more oblique medium of the novel. Both Amis and Rushdie tackle international politics - Amis attacking the legacy of Stalin, and Rushdie exploring the theme of frontiers, taking in the legacy of 11 September. Naipaul's book is a collection of pieces of reportage and reflection garnered from 40 years of travel, many of them unavailable until now.
Step Across This Line by Salman Rushdie is published on 28 Nov, Martin Amis's Koba the Dread on 5 Sept, and The Writer and the World by V.S. Naipaul on 16 Sept
33 HORROR Film
The wave of ironic teen-horror films inspired by the success of Scream is over. The new crop of slasher movies is intelligent and owes more to Hitchcock than John Hughes. My Little Eye , directed by Welshman Marc Evans, takes place in a remote house in which five young inhabitants have to spend six months in order to win $1 million. All goes well until the final week when the housemates begin dying. In The Eye, a blind girl has a cornea transplant and starts seeing ghosts which haunted the previous owner. Both films are disturbing rather than playful, with a handful of scenes guaranteed to make you drop your popcorn.
The Eye opens 27 Sept; My Little Eye opens 4 Oct
34 DAVID ADJAYE Architecture
David Adjaye , whose dramatic windowless house for Electra in London's East End drew an unprecedented barrage of complaints from the more pedestrian of his fellow architects, is set to become one of the more familiar new faces presenting architecture on television. He's on BBC's digital arts channel later this month with a half-hour one-off on new architecture, and is making a six-part series, Dream Spaces, starting on BBC2 in October. It's a magazine format which sees him visiting Bucharest and Brazilia, enthusing about tower blocks and Alvar Aalto. Adjaye's architectural career shows no signs of slackening either. Next month he completes a makeover of Folkestone's library, museum and art gallery in collaboration with the artist Chris Ofili.
35 TEETH'N'SMILES Theatre
When is a musical not a musical? When it's Teeth'n'Smiles. Long before the rickety Rent or the dreaded We Will Rock You tried to put rock into theatre, David Hare wrote his loud, down and dirty play about performers at a rock gig in Cambridge. Written in 1976, set in 1969 but still strikingly timely, the play focuses on Maggie, the raunchy and largely hungover lead singer first played by a slightly too young Helen Mirren. For Anna Mackmin's intriguing revival at Britain's most exhilarating regional theatre, the role goes to gutsy guitarist Amanda Donohoe. Yes, that's the same Amanda Donohoe who starred in LA Law and Castaway.
Crucible, Sheffield, 30 Oct-23 Nov
36 GAINSBOROUGH Art
High time for the Gainsborough revival that this event should ensure - the biggest and most comprehensive exhibition of his work ever mounted. Gainsborough was not just the main competition to Reynolds among the top-notch portraits painters of Regency London. An autodidact, born in Suffolk, he recorded the conditions of the rural poor, produced some of England's greatest landscape art and became a radical fantasist in his later years. This show should foreground Gainsborough's originality and his innovative techniques - the 6ft-long brushes and experimental colours; the tiny landscape models he made and then copied by the light of flickering candles.
Tate Britain, London SW1; 24 Oct-19 Jan 2003
37 RICHARD ASHCROFT Pop
The forthcoming single 'Check the Meaning' sets the tone for the 10 songs on Richard Ashcroft's new album, Human Conditions. Slow strings give it the anthemic quality so familiar from The Verve's Urban Hymns and the solo debut Alone With Everybody as the singer delivers his trademark incantatory, structured rant. Ashcroft seems to be progressing as a songwriter and has kept his ear for a decent tune. Other standout tracks include the portentous 'God In The Numbers' and 'Nature Is The Law'; on the latter, our Richard sounds just like Johnny Cash, while guest genius Brian Wilson provides quirky harmonies.
Human Conditions is released on 21 Oct
38 UMBERTO ECO Books
No one anticipated the extraordinary international success of Eco's dense and at times mind-bogglingly erudite medieval thriller The Name of the Rose, later made into a film starring Sean Connery, with slightly more sex and slightly fewer disquisitions on the Great Schism than the original. Eco's follow-up novels, Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before, became increasingly obscure and never quite repeated that success, but with Baudolino he has returned to the early medieval world to tell the story of the eponymous hero amid the sacking of Constantinople by the knights of the Fourth Crusade.
Baudolino is published by Secker & Warburg on 15 Oct
39 LOOK AROUND YOU Television
Nostalgia for children's television programmes of the 1970s and 80s is a seam that has been well-mined by comedians in recent years, but this eight-part series is a brilliantly original pastiche of a whole genre of Schools and Colleges science programmes that will be instantly familiar to anyone in their twenties or thirties. Writers and producers Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz have created a splendidly absurd and surreal series based on their award-winning short film Calcium, featuring the voice of Nigel Lambert, the original narrator of You and Me, and such deadpan experiments as dehydrating water, observing the effects of sulphur on champagne and monitoring ants building an igloo. Look Around You already has a cult cachet among comedians; it's unlike anything else around at the moment and is sure to garner many more fans when the series starts.
Look Around You is at 9.50pm on BBC2 from 10 Oct
40 GRAPHIC NOVELS Books
With Chris Ware making history by winning the 2001 Guardian First Book Award for his 380-page cartoon strip, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, publisher Jonathan Cape has injected more money and interest into the genre. Look out for a new title from Daniel Clowes, author of Ghost World.
David Boring by Daniel Clowes is published on 7 November
41 LA CASA AZUL Dance
The wonder-spinner Robert Lepage - director, designer, actor and inventor - has directed this show in Europe, and he now touches down in Hammersmith to oversee its British incarnation. Sophie Faucher, a Quebecois playwright, has imagined the inner life of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, celebrated for her gloriously coloured paintings, her moustache and for her marriage to Diego Rivera (under whose name she has been filed in art reference books). Kahlo is pictured on her deathbed in a blue room conjuring up the images that have been important to her in life. The Lyric's artistic director Neil Bartlett has translated the play from French and his translation is given its world premiere in this production which opens what promises to be an oustanding Lyric season. La Casa Azul runs at the Lyric Hammersmith, London W6 from 11 Oct
42 SUE TOWNSEND Books
Townsend has already aimed her satirical eye glancingly at New Labour in Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years, in which the obnoxious Pandora Braithwaite becomes a Blair Babe. Now, in Number Ten, she gives it her full focus, with the story of a policeman who goes undercover with the Prime Minister to tour the country and find out what The People really think. It's being labelled as the political equivalent of The Queen and I, her 1996 novel being reissued to coincide with this publication, in which the royal family are deposed and sent to live on a Midlands housing estate.
Number Ten is published by Michael Joseph on 31 Oct
44 TRACEY EMIN Art
As you might expect from this artist - so last-minute with her shows - nobody is yet certain what will appear in this one. MoMA in Oxford has announced a big installation inspired by Emin's recent trips to Northern Cyprus and there will be videos, neon signs, her trademark appliqu¿d blankets and awkward spindly drawings. Emin's last British show was something of a tear-jerker, poignant if still reliably egocentric. The scale was intimate, the sentiments sincere. This time the self-presentation may be altogether grander, for she is reported to be working on a new bed, a four-poster with elaborately embroidered covers, bearing a pseudo death-mask in gold - what else? - of her own famous features.
Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; 10 Nov-19 Jan 2003
45 KONTAKTHOF, TANZTHEATER, WUPPERTHAL
Pedro Almodvar's masterly Talk to Her is bookended by shiveringly beautiful sequences from two dance works by the grande dame of the avant-garde, Pina Bausch. Now comes the chance to catch her vision made flesh. Bausch long ago redrew the map of twentieth-century dance by ditching 'pure' choreography in favour of drama, nowhere more clearly than in Kontakthof which abandons all notions of dancers as impossibly athletic, perfectly built superhumans. This legendary piece caused a sensation when it first played here in 1982, and for its long-awaited return Bausch has spent more than a year rehearsing a new company of men and women over the age of 65 for her mesmerising meditation on experience versus innocence. Is it dance? Is it theatre? Most definitely, yes.
Barbican, London EC2, 28-30 Nov
46 BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE Film
Michael Moore has been a thorn in the side of the American establishment since his first feature-length documentary, Roger & Me, which exposed how General Motors devastated the town of Flint, Michigan when they closed down their huge car plant there. The film's intended subject, General Motors' CEO Roger Smith, made only a brief appearance, but Moore emerged as the real star - an everyman armed with a camera and a liberal conscience. He describes his latest film, Bowling for Columbine, as the 'most provocative thing I have ever done'.
Appalled by the shootings at Columbine high school in 1999, when 12 students and one teacher were shot dead, Moore decided to make a film that examined why the right to bear arms has remained such a defining issue. Although the film has a distributor in the States, Moore is worried it won't get a cinema release, especially in the post-11 September climate. 'I think the film is going to make a lot of people angry. That is not my intention. I do not relish the hassle I am in for,' he says.
In the film, Moore travels across the country interviewing academics and bar-room philosophers, gun victims and militia groups. 'Ultimately this film isn't about Columbine or even about guns. It's about our culture of fear and how that fear leads us to acts of violence, domestically and internationally,' he says. Curiously, Moore is a member of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and was a champion marksman as a teenager. At the end of the film there's an interview with NRA vice president Charlton Heston, during which the worryingly frail Hollywood star suggests that gun crime and race are fundamentally linked.
Bowling for Columbine opens 15 Nov
47 THE ART SHOW
Channel 4 redeems itself for Big Brother with these 10 half-hour programmes to be shown on Saturday evening. Highlights of the series include portraits of black British writer Courttia Newland and Stuckist muso Billy Childish; Dazed & Confused editor Rachel Newsome's A-Z of Now; and Triumph and Disaster, an exploration of the contemporary resonances of Rudyard Kipling's 'If'. The series kicks off with a photography weekend featuring a film by Ben Lewis about his hero Andreas Gursky; a profile of the American war photographer James Nachtwey; and writer (and series producer) Jacques Peretti's collaboration with Daniel Stier, Stepford Lives - a funny/ paranoid narrative sound collage over still photographs telling the story of three intertwining lives in a nightmare new town of the not-too-distant future. Don't miss it: it's brilliant.
The Art Show starts on C4 on 28 Sept
48 ROAD TO PERDITION
How do you follow American Beauty? Sam Mendes's second film is very different, a Depression-era gangster movie starring Tom Hanks against type as a vengeful hitman, and Paul Newman as his boss/father figure. Praised by some US critics as a masterpiece, Mendes's dark, uncompromising film examines 'not the violence, but the effect that violence has on people; what emotional effect it has on people watching and perpetrating it'. Based on a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner, the film is more ambitious than Mendes's debut and should cement his place among the top tier of Hollywood directors.
Road to Perdition opens on 20 Sept
49 DONNA TARTT AND ZADIE SMITH
Both these young women have a lot to live up to with the publication of their second novels. In fact, Tartt's follow-up to the extraordinary success of her debut, The Secret History (the New York Times likened it to a combination of Dostoevsky, Euripedes, Waugh and Easton Ellis) has been 10 years in the writing, and at 550 pages it's easy to see why. The Little Friend is the tale of a child's murder; like its predecessor, it's an exploration of the darkness present beneath the surface.
Smith's first novel, White Teeth, was also an international bestseller, but she has produced her considerably more compact follow-up in under two years. The Autograph Man is, in her own words, much funnier than White Teeth. It's the story of a Chinese-Jewish autograph dealer in pursuit of a film star's rare signature. Expectations for both books are high, but reputation and past success will guarantee that these are the two most talked-about novels of the autumn.
The Little Friend is published by Bloomsbury on 28 Oct, The Autograph Man by Hamish Hamilton on 15 Sept
50 THE FAST SHOW
We knew they wouldn't be able to let it go. It seems that The Fast Show team have missed their characters as much as the fans, since Paul Whitehouse, Charlie Higson, Simon Day, Mark Williams and Arabella Weir are taking the show on the road for the first stage performance since their sellout London run in 1998. Quite how they'll do it is something of an enigma, since that tear-jerking final episode of the television series consisted of valedictory sketches from many of the favourite characters (remember Ted and Ralph tentatively declaring their affection? It was as moving as Remains of the Day). But with guaranteed appearances from the likes of Swiss Tony, Competitive Dad, the 13th Duke of Wymbourne and all the rest, audiences will be bowled over by nostalgia.
The Fast Show tour starts in Portsmouth on 1 Oct
Contributions by Tim Adams, Sue Arnold, David Benedict, Tamsin Blanchard, Kirsty Buttfield, Susannah Clapp, Rachel Cooke, Laura Cumming, Louise France, Anthony Holden, Stephanie Merritt, Sean O'Hagan, Akin Ojumu, Deyan Sudjic, Vanessa Thorpe, Molloy Woodcraft
