Page 72 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

London Tide at the National Theatre (Photo: National Theatre)

PJ Harvey meets Charles Dickens in this retelling of the Dickens novel Our Mutual
Friend. Ben Power, the superlative adaptor of The Lehman Trilogy, supervises a script
that centres upon two young women and the River Thames. Early snippets of Harvey’s
powerful new songs suggest that romance and intrigue are swirling around. If this
“play with songs” comes off, it will be a delicious celebration of collaboration between
outstanding creative talents. FM

10 April – 22 June (nationaltheatre.org.uk, 020 3989 5455)

Visual arts

Matthew Krishanu: Hallowed Ground

Camden Art Centre, London

One of my absolute highlights (though that is a peculiar word, under the

circumstances) of 2023 was a small display of Krishanu’s paintings shown as part of
Whitechapel’s summer exhibition. Charting his relationship with his wife Uschi
Gatward, from romance, through time as a young family, to her illness and early
death, the paintings had me in tears. Krishanu’s first major survey show in London
will take a broader view, including his otherworldly paintings of young boys in
dreamlike landscapes, and reflections on the iconography and cultural impact of
religion. His apparently simple compositions gradually evanesce into hard planes of

flat colour and expanses of loose wash, all held together with the lightest of painterly
touches. HJ