Capital pleasures

Capital pleasures: London 30^th September—2^nd October, 11^th October

Of all the cities we have visited and discussed in this ‘travel(b)logue’ London has been the most pleasurable—would that we could have spent more days imbibing its attractions. London might lack the excitement and brashness and vertical thrust of New York, but its capacity to thrill in a taciturn, almost underhand way is part of its allure. As with the other big cities we have visited, our experience of London was in large measure through the lens of museums and galleries, two in particular, Tate, Modern (TM) and Tate, Britain (TB). In the former a major retrospective of Paul Gauguin had just opened and which in our judgement was a model of curatorial excellence, which threw new light on Gauguin’s Polynesian adventures. Unlike his more famous contemporaries Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cezanne, Gauguin was more of a story teller than an imagist. His paintings, be they in Brittany or Tahiti, plumb deep existential themes. His paintings of women, especially Polynesian women, emanate an animal sexuality that few other painters have ever captured. Claire is now continuing an exploration of Gaugin’s psyche through a collection of his letters to his wife and friends (see further reading).

Tate Britain, across the Thames, was a far more sedate experience than TM. Our favourite rooms were those devoted to early British twentieth century art. Colin’s favourite British painter has been for some time now David Bomberg and those painters who have taken their cues from him such as Eric Auerbach and Felix Topolski. We also quite fancied the works of the Bloomsbury painter Duncan Grant.

On this world trip, we have not seen much in the way of “performance art”, something we remedied on our visit to London, which seems to have more music and more theatre than just about any other place on the planet. For the former we took ourselves off to the Barbican to hear the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andris Nelson in a mostly Russian programme: Prokofiev’s 2^nd Violin Concerto (with Viktoria Mullova as soloist, and who managed to cut through the Stalinist inspired clichés with aplomb) and Shostakovich 5^th Symphony, whose third movement Neilson managed to make sound like Vaughan Williams!

Our next performance treat was Michael Gambon and his tape-recorded voice in Krapp’s last tape. Gambon is being canvassed at the moment as the UK’s greatest living actor. Beckett’s play is a rather short one, and it is pity we did not hear more from him. Much of the action of the play takes place in the dark, and its subject matter is dark in hue and for us resonated with our experiences with old age as described in our post Family ties. It is a play about regret, about visiting past in the shape of Krapp’s voice on tape speaking to Krapp in the present. Gambon’s performance was a tour de force of melancholia, choreographed with precision and eloquence—a sonic chronicle of senility.

We were two nights in the Premier Hotel, in the former London County Hall, just close to Waterloo Station and the mighty London Eye, which, as Claire observed, is the biggest bicycle wheel in the world. Being spun around in one of its gondolas to see over London is not our idea of fun. Admittedly, judging by the number of tourists who descend on the site that would appear to be a minority view. That a Coney Island monstrosity can sit in the same viewfinder as Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament is a horrific prospect and one that a digital camera with enough intelligence (our Leica has) would surely censor.

Two and half days are really not enough to savour the pleasures of London, especially when you include some shopping in Regent Street and Bond Street—of necessity window shopping since much of any the things we would have liked would have tested the limits on our MasterCard. Since we felt rather short-changed by those two days, we decided to pay another visit to London, in part to have lunch with cousin Richard Barnett and his wife Cate and to take in the Diaghilev and Ballet Russes exhibition at the Victoria and Albert, in Knightsbridge. Having seen in Philadelphia the film Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, we were somewhat prepared for this exhibition, or at least those parts featuring the Rite of Spring. One would not think that an exhibition about a ballet company would be all that interesting but this one was, drawing together many fine artefacts, including an iconic curtain by Natalya Goncharova. After a first time visit Harrods (not much better than Sydney’s David Jones) it was back to a now quite familiar Waterloo Station on top of a red double- decked bus, moving at a glacial pace through inner London’s jammed traffic—an incomparable way to eye its capital pleasures.