Fare play in black cab drama
THE KNOWLEDGE Charing Cross, WC2
old I-beams, bits of junk from the ordinary world. The baroque intricacy of Richard Dadd’s famous little oil painting of violent fairies, done in an insane asylum after he murdered his father with an axe, has a flowing connection to a sculpture by Barry Flanagan, from the Sixties that consists only of a rope laid out on the gallery floor in wriggling lines. Dadd was a Victorian; Flanagan and Caro died only recently.
Whiteread points up death and loss, here and throughout her retrospective. She shows us how we love the ordinary but don’t know we do. And homely surfaces remain as archetypes in our minds but we rarely see those exact surfaces any more. We read what we do see as if it were those old lost things.
Rachel Whiteread is at Tate Britain, SW1 (020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk) until January 21 JACK Rosenthal’s The Knowledge, a TV classic from the late Seventies, is an affectionate portrait of aspiring black-cab drivers. More than a decade on from its creator’s death, it’s now adapted for the stage by Simon Block, and in a solid production by Maureen Lipman, who was married to Rosenthal for 30 years, its humour and easy charm are largely intact.
A vision of the challenge of memorising every street within six miles of Charing Cross, it’s also a study of the sacrifices involved in relationships. While hapless
Chris has to be spurred on by resourceful girlfriend Janet (a nicely caustic Alice Felgate), Ben Caplan’s Ted is eagerly maintaining a family tradition and, for James Alexandrou’s Gordon, slogging around town on a scooter is the perfect cover for philandering.
But the central figure is sadistic examiner Burgess, who delights in pedantic rituals and embarrassing the hopefuls. In the skilful hands of Steven Pacey, he’s an eccentric whose bizarre mannerisms mask genuine humanity.
Block’s adaptation avoids any temptation to update the story for the age of Uber and satnav. Faithful to the Seventies setting, it’s less successful as a hymn to London — we miss a sense of the city’s complex geography, which was one of the true pleasures of Rosenthal’s original drama.
Until Nov 11 (08444 930 650, charingcrosstheatre.co.uk)