8 Monday February 21 2022 | the timesfirst night
Trupa Trupa
The Lexington, N1
{{{{(pop
C
oming to the capital after the
worst storm in 30 years,
Trupa Trupa appeared to take
the challenges of being on
tour in the midst of such
meteorological mayhem in their stride.
“So good to be in London after two
years of hell,” said Grzegorz
Kwiatkowski, the singer of the band,
from Gdansk in Poland, which took
elements of progressive rock, punk and
the avant-garde and infused them with
a sense of humour.
“Thank you Francis Bacon, William
Blake... and Trupa Trupa,” said
Kwiatkowski, honouring Britain’s
artistic heritage while slotting his own
band into the canon. After building up
the tension by coming on one by one,
with drummer Tomek Pawluczuk
holding down a beat before being joined
by the bassist Wojtek Juchniewicz, then
Rafal Wojczal on keyboards and a guitar
made out of an old oil can, and finally
Kwiatkowski, Trupa Trupa made a
sound that was as melodic as it was
intense, a collision between the
sweetness of the Beatles and the surge
of Public Image Limited. And
Kwiatkowski, with his short hair and
pressed shirt, came across as a jollier
version of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis,
jerking about in excitement.
Trupa Trupa are using their music to
confront some of the darkest aspects of
Polish life. Uniforms, from their new
album, B Flat A, addresses the country’s
lurch towards authoritarianism, while a
song called Never Forget takes on the
realities of Poland under Nazism, when
Kwiatkowski’s grandfather was a
prisoner in Gdansk’s Stutthof
concentration camp. In 2015
Kwiatkowski was walking with a friend
in a forest outside Gdansk when they
uncovered some abandoned shoes; it
turned out that half a million shoes
from concentration camps across
Europe had been collected at Stutthof
to be converted into leather goods.
Not that any of this stopped the band’s
concert from being anything less than
great fun. The whole thing sounded,
while referencing styles from the West,
totally original. “London is a bit
different because of Brexit, sorry to say,”
Kwiatkowski concluded, “but the spirit
of London is bigger than politics.” The
music of Trupa Trupa, a danceable
confrontation of humanity’s most brutal
tendencies, was bigger than politics too.
Will Hodgkinson
Green Door, Brighton, tonighttypical of Duke’s ingenuity, as is the
use of live camera footage projected
on to two differently sized screens. But
unless you are familiar with Dickens’s
narrative and have a pretty sure grasp
of who’s who within its twists and
turns, Lost Dog’s 100-minute, interval-
free production may well prove to be a
bewilderingly convoluted and
frustrating experience.
The show was co-devised with a
five-strong cast who are adept at
handling text and movement. At
the very start Nina-Morgane
Madelaine, playing the film-maker,
introduces herself and encourages
the audience to take notes —a cute,
tongue-in-cheek suggestion. But
knowing that problems may arise
during a performance isn’t the same
as solving them.The show does have felicitous
moments. When our film-maker trains
her lens on her parents and brother
the awkwardness of their reactions is
funny and revealing. Valentina
Formenti is especially nuanced as her
tight-lipped yet tender mother,
burdened with the secret pains that
mark her marriage to Hannes
Langolf’s even shiftier husband/father.
But there is far too much talk here;
sometimes you want the performers to
shut up and dance. Set to tracks from
classical to alternative pop, their juicy
movement is a release for them and
us. But it isn’t enough: I was confused
and detached.
Donald Hutera
At the Place, London WC1, February
23 to March 5, then touring to April
6, lostdogdance.co.ukB
en Duke is no stranger to
literary adaptations. Among
his biggest successes since he
formed his award-winning
dance-theatre company Lost
Dog in 2004 are a one-man Paradise
Lost, in 2015, and, more recently, Juliet
& Romeo, which imagined what might
have happened if the young lovers
hadn’t perished.
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles
Dickens’s classic, is Lost Dog’s most
ambitious adaptation to date. The
show’s core, time-stretching conceit is
that the child of two of Dickens’s key
characters is now making a
documentary about her family,
interviewing them to shed light on the
murkier truths and troubling
ambiguities of the long-ago past.
This smart, promising premise is John Kendall, Temitope Ajose-CuttingA Tale of Two
Cities
Warwick Arts Centre,
Coventry
{{(((dance
ANTONIO OLMOSI
gor Stravinsky conducted dry
performances of his own music,
almost robotic at times. If you
wanted to hear the other extreme
— his great dance scores delivered
in performances bursting with
character, colour and charm — you
would have been mad to have missed
the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s visit
to London.
Under its founder, Ivan Fischer,
Hungary’s leading orchestra has
always had an extrovert and
libertarian personality: the opposite of
the people running their country at
present. The pandemic has done
nothing to tame this maverick spirit.
I caught the first of two Stravinsky
programmes and was dazzled by
Petrushka and captivated by Jeu de
cartes, his 1937 ballet score for
Balanchine — which is surprising,
because the latter is not one of his
most gripping excursions into
neoclassical whimsy.
Yes, there were blips in the brass as
fatigue set in, and not always perfect
rapport between the back and front of
the strings, but I would gladly trade
odd imprecisions for interpretations
that brought the ballets so vividly to
life in the theatre of the mind. And the
sound of this orchestra — wiry strings
and equally fierce winds — somehow
added a rumbustious edge to the
music too.
Any soloist standing in front of this
orchestra needs a megawatt musical
personality, and Patricia
Kopatchinskaja sounded as if she had
been plugged into the national grid as
she played Stravinsky’s Violin
Concerto in D. The only thing likely to
upstage the Moldovan fiddler was her
magnificent frock: she looked as if she
had brought her own Technicolor
dreamcoat to an audition for Joseph.
And why not? It matched her
exhilarating playing. Piling on vibrato,
bending notes, making playful light
work out of fiendish passagework, she
transfigured this concerto into
something fantastical. And the
orchestra played its part too, with the
brass bizarrely but effectively
positioned right at the front, like a jazz
big band. Kopatchinskaja’s encores
were riveting as well: two Bartok duets,
which she played with the orchestra’s
co-leader, both of them attacking the
music with folkish spontaneity.
Richard MorrisonBudapest Festival
Orchestra/ Fischer
Royal Festival Hall
{{{{(classical
Tim Key:
Mulberry
Soho Theatre, W1
{{{{{Comedy
Tim Key on stage at the Soho Theatre during an evening of music, poetry and a lot of laughterThe Key to Covid comedy
The Perrier
winner and
Alan Partridge
sidekick was
a knockout,
says Dominic
Maxwell
I
hesitate to make grand
statements about a show
performed by a man in a
tracksuit, affecting to read poems
off playing cards. Nonetheless,
here goes: this return to the
stage of Tim Key, Perrier-winner,
author and Alan Partridge
sidekick, turns our experiences of
lockdown into a work of great art. He
makes the observational dance with
the unconscious in a way that is gentle,
tangential and almost always funny
throughout his 70 minutes on stage.
“Who here did lockdown?” he says
mock-chummily, his front door and
fridge standing on stage alongside him.
He works the crowd with a finesse
that is commanding, unsettling and
welcoming. And although he is taking
us deep into his solitary world, he
connects throughout with the present-
tense skill of a well-honed club comic.
“What a great contribution,” he says
after one woman has chipped in
amusingly. “This is how we be an
audience member.”
Key’s lockdowns were, he tells us, a
tragedy that came just as he had “the
world at my feet, career-wise”. A
planned appearance on Pointless
Celebrities cancelled, he finds his fame
falling off him “like slow-cooked lamb
falling off a shank”. The spirit of thetruth is always there, even when the
details are ludicrous: the poem about
the man who socially distances by
walking on stilts, say, or the poem
about two separated lovers that ends
with a big fat punchline.
This is like the sort of arthouse
comedy night nobody knew existed,
with exquisitely chosen music
underlying each joke-rich flight of
fancy. And his poems, which are
amusing when you read them in his
new book, Here We Go Round the
Mulberry Bush, are laugh-out-loud
funny when Key adds his performative
wallop. His eye for an absurd detail is
a joy. The rest of us got slobbish. Key
ate icing sugar out of a mug.
I’ve seen comics address the
pandemic era rationally, satirically,
sharply, and it was hard to care: been
there, done that. Given a right-brain
shake-up by a performer who makes
himself half-everyman, half-absurdist,
the oddness of the past two years
comes into new focus. The final sense
of relief as he changes out of his
tracksuit, ready to re-engage with the
world, is oddly moving. And along
with Bo Burnham’s Netflix special
Inside, it’s the greatest comical
response to Covid to date.
To February 26 (returns only), then
March 29 to April 2. sohotheatre.com