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A Man For All Seasons: Seagull True Story - Marylebone Theatre

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It's not often that you see a play that tells you not so much a story but gives you a sense of how it feels to be in a situation, how it feels to be silenced, how it feels to be marginalised, how the dead hand of consensus stifles your creativity. However, in Seagull True Story, created and directed by Alexander Molochnikov and based on his own experiences fleeing Russia and trying to establish himself in New York, we have a chance to look beyond the headlines and understand how the war in Ukraine impacted a a group of ordinary creatives in Russia. And how the gradual smothering of freedom and freedom of expression becomes impossible to resist, except for the brave or the suicidal. Against the backdrop of Chekhov's The Seagull, which explores love and other forms of disappointment, it presents a gripping and enthralling depiction of freedom of expression in the face of adversity. After playing earlier this year in New York, it plays a limited run at the Marylebone Theatre . Fro...

Exhibitions: Diane Arbus

Yesterday I caught the Diane Arbus photography retrospective at the V&A. It was quite an amazing and fairly extensive exhibition of her work. Arbus was famous for her photographs mostly shot in New York from the sixties up until her suicide in 1971. The exhibition originated in San Francisco MOMA and at the moment you can't go anywhere on the tube without the V&A's ad for the show featuring an Arbus photo of a drag queen holding a cigarette, mouth partly open and hair in rollers. Don't know if that sort of imagery will bring the punters in but it certainly grabs your attention underground…

At the exhibition there were quite a lot of photographs to get through in the hour I set aside to see it. The exhibition also included letters, proofs and other paraphernalia relating to her life and gave some insight into the inspiration for her photographs of eccentric yet everyday scenes. You don't get much of a sense of why she may have killed herself at the age of 48 (although her living conditions around the 1970s looked a bit dire) but you do get a great sense of her perspective.

And it became apparent to me that her iconic photographs from this period were recognisable even before realising who the hell she was. Fortunately there is a Nicole Kidman film in the works based on an unauthorised biography. The film is tentatively titled Fur so no doubt with a title like that rampant lesbianism will feature (which was something that wasn't touched upon in the exhibition either)…

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