Art Review: Anthony Frost and Terry Frosts at The Brook Gallery Budleigh Salterton

Budleigh Salterton, one of Devon's more genteel seaside towns, is an unlikely setting for a gallery specialising in contemporary, quality and usually abstract prints, but The Brook Gallery has been operating for over a decade now, and has built up a clentele of collectors onsite and online.

The late Sir Terry Frost should need no introduction, being one of our country's most celebrated painters and printmakers. His son Anthony has made his own reputation, sharing his father's talent for form and colour, but finding his own palette and motifs. A third generation of Frosts has taken up the family trade, with Anthony's son Danny recently having a room to himself at Tate St Ives.

This back-to-back show of the elder Frosts' work gives us a chance to compare and contrast two innovative printmakers who between them mastered just about every technique available to post-war artists working in the medium. I missed Anthony's show, being in Morocco, but am familiar with his work and its evolution, with the chevrons and slashes in intense blues and oranges beginning to breakup to reflect the development of his work on canvas. He paints to music - The Fall, who he's created cover art for, Captain Beefheart, Dinosaur Junior, PJ Harvey - and the key to what he does is rhythm and vibration. I prefer his paintings on a scale, benefitting from the textures of stitched cloth and netting he applies the paint on, but some of his more recent prints are leaping off the paper with new vigour.

Terry Frost worked mainly in primary colours with distinctive forms - the abstracted semi-circles of rocking boats, an always pulsing sun, stripes of colour that reverberate in each other's company. I particularly like his pieces in red, black and white and have reproductions of several on my wall. Beginning his career as an artist as a prisoner of war working with wood and lino from the huts he was imprisoned in. He ended back in the West Penwith landscape he loved, remarkably productive in his later years, with a joie de vivre that is remembered by all who knew him and more than evident in his last creations.

I was fortunate enough that my visit that coincided with the launch of Dominic Kemp's 'Terry Frost Prints - A Catalogue Raisonne' that compiles Sir Terry's work in the medium chronologically and is both definitive and beautifully produced with an illuminating series of essays. He delivered two talks, the first on the techniques of the printmaker, using examples from the exhibition as illustrations. The second majored on the images he created to accompany a book of eleven poems by Federico Garcia Lorca, the great Andalusian poet and playwright who was executed in the Spanish Civil War.These are darker and more mysterious than his usual images, and as great a set of illustrations as have graced any work of poetry.

Film Review - Cemetery Junction written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant

Typical first novels are coming of age tales set where the author grew up with a version of himself taking the lead. Most should never have been written, or else left in the drawer. But given Ricky Gervais has already created 'The Office', one of the greatest comedies ever, together with 'Extras', a clever take on how his life might have played out if the comedy of embarrassment in his masterpiece had been replaced by catchphrases and canned laughter, I had high hopes for his first venture onto celluloid as an auteur rather than bit-part Hollywood player. I've no problem with 'Cemetery Junction' being occasionally comic drama, rather than occasionally dramatic comedy. But I was expecting more than a mediocre Brit-flick buddy movie that is formula without the bang.

It starts with 'Saturday Night, Sunday Morning' and ends with 'The Graduate' and in between quotes from classic cinema but never really breaks out of the small screen it might have been made for. Sure, the seventies decor has the volume turned up and the soundtrack is well chosen, ending with a sequence choreographed to Led Zeppelin's 'The Rain Song' that almost makes you sit up and notice, but never matches the grandeur of the music, but it lacks characters you care about going on a journey that matters - the essence of drama.

The only truly affecting performances are played by the two most experienced actors on set: Ralph Fiennes as the boss of an insurance company who might have made it out of the terraces but still treats his spouse like a char lady and Emily Watson as that much put upon wife who finally faces up to him and enjoys a moment of quiet triumph that reverberates loudly because of all they have put into the portrayal of a marriage. Some of the other 'grown-up' roles are creditable but it's the roles of the three mates grow up together fighting and farting that the movie and I just didn't care about them individually or collectively. Only Felicity Jones as the sweetheart impressed, but although she had screen time, the characterisation gave her little more than a series of cameos to work with.

Meanwhile, Gervais is another version of himself with added grime and stubble while Merchant looms into shot for a couple of gags that are peripheral to the plot. It's not that this pair don't have a film in them, it's that 'Cemetery Junction' isn't it. It'll get no audience outside of these shores but is worth a Saturday night on the sofa with popcorn if you're nostalgic for 1973 and want an easy night in with tunes you can hum along to. 

Theatre review: 'Still' by Steve Lambert at The Bike Shed Theatre by the Particular Theatre Company 13th April - 1st May 2010

We make it one of our missions on The Blah Blah Blah Show to  support local theatre, especially where it is promoting new writing and/or innovative productions. The Express and Echo has featured several missives in its letter pages the last few days from theatre goers complaining that 'popular' theatre (by which they mean West End musicals, and established but 'safe' classics) is increasingly unavailable in the city, leading them to travel to Torbay, Plymouth or further afield. I put it to them that anyone who is a genuine lover of drama should make an effort to support the more interesting, innovative and intimate productions that are put on in the city, in the Bike Shed and elsewhere. They won't enjoy every aspect of what they find played out to them on stage - I don't either - but there is nothing like a professional show in a small space to provoke as well as entertain and their patronage may be supporting the future writer of a classic or an emerging major actor to develop their talent.

'Still' really is an intimate production, the stage shrunk to a corner of the pop-up auditorium, but designed by Phil Wyatt as a kind of Forest of Arden, the place of midsummer dreams and nightmares. The two acts are separated by a decade but otherwise involve the same couple, if a pair of characters who've only just met when we meet them can be so described. They are also separated by the mystery at the heart of the play - what happened here before, what happened here after, what is happening here now.

The dynamic of the production is wholly dependent on the projected personality of Jo, played by Rose Romain, another product of the E15 Acting School, whose female graduates seem to embody zestful energy. Her humour was a constant provocation. It is her presence that carries what might otherwise be a difficult piece, full of uncertainties I didn't find successfully resolved. It's been a week since I was in the audience and I still find myself thinking out the play which is a good sign. I'm still unsure whether my failure to work it through to resolution is a bad sign, or the its reason for being.

Mark Shorto as David has the more difficult role of an altogether more diffident man - his portrayal of awkwardness might come across as awkward acting. With just two actors on stage for the duration, a degree of empathy is required for both characters and even before the truths of who he is, what he is doing, what he has done are revealed I just couldn't understand what the two were doing together; why he had taken her to his secret place was obvious enough, why she had chosen him and gone along with it less so.

In the end, I'm not sure if there was enough on the page or the stage to deliver a fully satisfying night at the theatre. I left wondering if I'd seen a one-act play over-extended, which isn't to say that serious themes weren't being considered in Steve Lambert's writing or David Lockwood's direction.
Is it better to tell a lie or to live one? Is life about moments of magic or the passages of the ordinary that link them? Is life given away or taken? Why does a story begin and when does it end? I'm not sure if this play has found its way through those questions yet, but at least it is asking them. More rewarding than a night of songs from the West End musicals? I think so.

Cinema Review: 'The Ghost' directed by Roman Polanski

With its script based on a Robert Harris novel, I wasn't expecting any more than a join-the-dots political thriller plot, and that's what I got, although hoped for more nous in its construction and characterisation. But with Roman Polanski directing what may turn out to be his last movie, I was at least expecting a piece of quality film making, and that wasn't delivered either. True, Polanski hasn't consistently maintained the quality of his early films since his exile from America, but for every mundane production ('Oliver Twist', say) there has been a work as compelling as 'The Pianist'.

We know why Harris chose to create an alternative reality in which Tony Blair (or Adam Lang, if you must) gets his comeuppance - he was one of those who bankrolled the New Labour project in its early years until the disenchantment of the second Gulf War. But I'm unsure why Polanski decided to commit it to celluloid. Perhaps after taking up the challenge of recreating Victorian London and World War Two Warsaw, the appeal of a script ostensibly taking on big contemporary events (to say 'ideas' would be pushing it) able to be recreated on relatively small scale sets (most of the action is set in and around the former prime minister's Martha's Vineyard hideaway) was too much for him to resist, or perhaps he had his own Iraq War revenge fantasy to play out. Probably, it was a way of compensating for the collapse of his and Harris's 'Pompeii' project, once projected to have been the most expensive European film ever made, now likely to never cast light onto screen.

'The Ghost' might have worked, but is let down by both its central performances and direction. Pierce Brosnan plays Lang, but you can't shake off the suggestion this is really James Bondd oing a bad Tony Blair impression. He does his usual unshaken and rarely stirred brand of smooth but contaminates the cocktail with the acting equivalent of an unnecessary olive and mini umbrella. He's trying to channel a hollow but charming politician; what gets in the way is a charming but hollow actor. Ewan McGregor as the unnamed ghostwriter is little better. As Polanski's substitute for Nicolas Cage, he perhaps had little time to prepare. Or maybe he was told to do his worst take on Jude Law, which he throws the whole barrow boy act at. At least he gets to bed Cherie, played by Olivia Williams, who brings some complexity to her part as the power behind the ultimate throne. Kim Cattarall, meanwhile, plays a capable Miss Moneypenny and Tom Wilkinson brings the dark menace of the academic-military-industrial complex to a more sophisticated part than the average Bond.

In the end, its Polanski's failure to engage with the camera that transforms what might have been an intelligent romp into such a dull affair. The windswept island lair of Lang/Blair is too small a stage somehow to summon up the forces of global darkness. London is played by Berlin, and has a very minor role. Until the last two minutes, there's not a shot worth remembering. Then come two in a row before the curtain comes down that might just have had the little maestro leaping out of bed in the middle of the night. But by then, you'll probably have vacated the auditorium.

Art Preview: Anthony Frost and Sir Terry Frost at the Brook Gallery, Budleigh Salterton

We're hoping to feature dynastic artist, zig-zag wanderer and rag meat raconteur Anthony Frost as guest on our May 2nd show.

Many Exeter residents will have seen Anthony's of paintings and prints at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum just before it closed for refurbishment. Anthony is based in Zennor near St Ives and his work features around town with three paintings at the Salthouse Gallery, an annual exhibition at the Porthminster, and Frost family allsorts at the Tate. Visitors to London might have seen his major shows of paintings at Beaux Arts - where the Frosts have the distinction of being shown across three generations - and prints at Advanced Graphics, shortly to travel to the Armoury in New York.

Closer to our Devon HQ, Anthony has a father-son double-header coming up at the Brook Gallery, Budleigh Salterton: his own work will be shown from 27th March to 15th April immediately followed by the work of the late Sir Terry Frost from 16th April to 7th May. 

The exhibition coincides with the launch of the long awaited catalogue raisonne of the prints of Sir Terry Frost. Please contact the gallery for details of the standard edition and deluxe edition of only 100 which includes a print by the artist.

Anthony has involvements across the arts. He's painted album covers and back drops for The Fall and survived the odd night on the sauce with Mark E. Smith. He occasionally acts in the play 'Art' with Bob Devereux and Phil Bowen and is the brother of comedian Stephen Frost. And poet and novelist Simon Armitage is a friend who has contributed to his last several exhibition catalogues.

We're looking forward to some great music - Anthony works to music and is a devotee of Dinosaur Jr, Captain Beefheart and P.J.Harvey among others - to accompany the repartee as Anthony looks back over his life and career and tells us where Fast 'n' Bulbous are taking him next.