Page 138 - ASMF Marriner 100 Coverage Book

Soufiane Ababri: Their Mouths were Full of Bumblebees But it was Me

Who was Pollinated, currently in the Barbican Curve, is another of these. A
gay Moroccan artist, Ababri draws on the world of the queer nightclub, and

the necessarily hidden relationships that evolve - or are stunted - in a context
where your fundamental self is loathed and criminalised by the society
around you.

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It’s a highly atmospheric installation of colourful, stylised/naif paintings,

often of beautiful naked men, and it’s stuffed with references: to famous club
raids, to Oscar Wilde, to the common Arabic slur against gay men in the
Maghreb and the uniquely insidious way it’s deployed, many of which went

way over my head until I talked to the curator (I reviewed it for the Standard,
which you can read here, and also might help a bit).

There is some insight available in the leaflet at the top of the show, and I
loved its strangeness, both before and after it was opened up to me, but other
people, in whose person certain types of minority experience intersect, will

get even more out of it. It’s on until June 30.

I probably am more or less the intended, or at least expected, audience for
Jeremy Herrin’s production of Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene

O’Neill’s 1912-set play about addiction, truth (or the lack of it) and
responsibility within a troubled Irish-American family. I even studied it at
university and retained, it turns out, not one iota of information about it,

including what happens (not much, in truth), and that it runs to three and a
half hours.

The London production, at Wyndham’s until June 8, is a starry one - Brian

Cox, whose defining role as another domineering patriarch will be the first
line of his every obituary, plays James Tyrone, a waning theatre star who

resents how closely he has become associated with a particular part. Huh.

He’s a judgemental, failing father to his underachieving sons, alcoholic actor
Jamie (Bad Sisters’ Daryl McCormack, who plays drunk very well indeed)

and consumptive poet Edmund (Laurie Kynaston). All three men