Hell is other critics and Barbican blues
I went to Paradise yesterday evening and was slightly disappointed to find Lyn Gardner and Benedict Nightingale there, too. As a sneak preview of the life hereafter, the installation at the Barbican was a severe let down, in fact.
Another lost soul, Susannah Clapp, confided that she almost had a Milton Shulman moment — he’ll huff, and he’ll puff, and he’ll blow that house down — while contemplating a naked man reaching out vainly towards some flowing water cascading into the black void.
And that was it: I’m certainly not going to mend my habits or recant my false dogmas on the off chance that I’ll find my way eventually to an avant-garde tableau notably deficient in choirs of angels, vestal virgins and heaps of harp music.
In the Barbican Theatre proper, Romeo Castellucci’s trip through Dante’s Inferno was more like it, a hell of a show, you might say, with massed ranks of mournful extras in cheap leisure wear, a flaming piano, a painted horse and a terrifying opening of wild dogs smelling the place out and attacking poor old Castellucci as if demanding their money back.
The audience seemed to comprise drama students and refugees from the British contingency of performance art activists — I even bumped into Hilary Westlake, one time co-director with David Gale of our challenging Lumiere and Son company — and it certainly made a nice change to see cosmologies created on the stage, even if Andy Warhol had replaced Virgil and Castellucci had cast himself as Dante. There’s a brilliant soundtrack and some startling choreography, like slowed down Pina Bausch.
Next week you can visit Purgatory, too. But, let’s face it, going to the Barbican is pretty purgatorial anyway. It never ceases to amaze me that anyone would actually choose to go there. Some people, can you believe it, actually choose to live there, and the most recent enthusiastic inhabitant is none other than cutting “Simon” Edge, job share theatre critic of the Daily Express.
When I worked at the Financial Times, they built the Barbican Centre so I’d have a theatre on my doorstep. Was I grateful? Was I, hell. I diligently followed the yellow brick line from St Paul’s to the inner fastness but still got lost every time. Rushing back to the office to file a notice I’d invariably end up nearer to Shoreditch than Ludgate Circus. Total nightmare.
And despite all the makeovers and new signage, the arts centre is still impenetrable and unpleasant, with its nobbly grey stucco interiors, orange carpets, incomprehensible geography, hideous cafes and somehow repellent clientele.
So don’t talk to me about Purgatory next week. It’s a daily phenomenon in Silk Street. Extricating myself from Paradise, I picked up a horrid sandwich and a bottle of pop and sat on the concrete terrace outside.
It’s like being in a concentration camp version of Butlin’s. Tables hadn’t been cleared and were being policed by fearless pigeons pecking at plates. A woman nearby waved her arms and screamed, sending beakers and cutlery flying. The pigeons flew round in a Dantean circle of hell and returned, redoubled in numbers, staring me out over my ham and tomato white bread punishment.
A visit to the disgracefully designed gents is no solace. The urinal is long and without partitions, so there’s no privacy. And you have to push through a door before you can wash your hands: imagine what kind of state that door is in. I always wait for somebody else to push through and catch their wake with my hands shoved firmly in my pockets.
I like the Barbican concert hall. I even quite like the theatre once you’re inside. But don’t ask me if I like the Barbican. I never have and I never will. Castellucci’s vision of the afterlife, depressing though it is, can’t begin to compete with the full horror of its physical context on earth in the City of London.