Page 90 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

Theatre

Waiting for Godot

Theatre Royal Haymarket, London

Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati form a double act to be reckoned with as those
lovable existential urchins Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece
about hopes, dreams and the enduring futility of life itself. This is a play that offers

fresh riches on each new telling and it was apparently seeing this drama as a teenager
that persuaded Whishaw to study acting. FB

From September (waitingforgodotplay.com)

Visual arts

Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit

Tate Modern, London

A punk, a trickster, a kid who never grew up – Kelley was an irreverent shapeshifter,
whose art blended performance, sculpture, music and the ongoing excavation of his
own imperfect memory. His influence has been enormous – on the work of the British
artists Jeremy Deller and Mark Leckey, among others. At the time of his early death in
2012, Kelley left a vast unfinished project, Extracurricular Activity Projective

Reconstructions which was imagined as a 24-hour loop of 365 videos creating imagined
scenarios based on photos from high school and college yearbooks. Those he
completed are daffy, rambling and uncanny, raising questions about social control
and sanctioned forms of rebellion in the everyday. HJ

3 October – 9 March 2025 (tate.org.uk)

Visual arts

Barbara Walker

Whitworth, Manchester

A major solo outing for the beloved Birmingham-born artist nominated for last year’s
Turner Prize. Walker is a draw-er and a paint-er, best known for her monumental,
ephemeral site-specific charcoal drawings of Black subjects. Her Turner Prize-

nominated display featured portraits of individuals affected by the Windrush scandal
drawn against the backdrop of documents requested to prove their British residency.
In other series she has studied the interiors of barber shops, or drawn focus to the
marginal Black figures in historic paintings. HJ