It’s an odd phenomenon that sketches that rely so crucially on the surreal and the unexpected are now some of the most recited and referenced in the world, somewhat defeating the element of surprise that is key to much of the Pythons’s humour. Even people who have never seen a single sketch, let alone a movie, may be aware that Brian’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy, or that nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. The wheel turns on, and the avant-garde becomes the mainstream, counter-culture becomes culture.

The news, then, that the five remaining members of Monty Python were reuniting for a live show was met with mixed responses. Would the Pythons still be on form? Was it all just a cynical money-making scheme? Would we be treated to The World’s Funniest Jokes, or would the whole thing be as dead as a lately demised Norwegian Blue?

The answers to these questions are, respectively, “yes,” “maybe,” and “the hilarity’s certainly not dead yet.” If you’re in the position of trying to convince a friend or a loved one of the genius of the Pythons, this show won’t change their opinion – it’s firmly rooted in the classics of the repertoire, with very little new material. Nonetheless, for confirmed fans, the show is a real treat. There’s enough of a shake-up in the sketches to keep the audience on their toes, whilst essentially giving the fans what they want: the old favourites, performed well. There’s also the welcome inclusion of Carol Cleveland – appearing in a great many Flying Circus episodes she was a large part of what made the show what it is, and she’s as amusing and glamorous as ever.

Video footage of old sketches is shown during scene and costume changes. Whilst this might seem like a bit of a cop-out, it actually provides the opportunity both to showcase classic sketches not easily replicated onstage and to pay tribute to the talents of Graham Chapman, touchingly acknowledging his absence from the line-up without letting it detract from the overall hilarity.

This is not to say that the show is perfect; some questionable choices have been made. For example, I’d be interested to know how it was decided that “I Like Chinese” (from a Monty Python album, not Flying Circus or any of the films) should be made into a full musical number backed by dancers in what was essentially yellowface. There’s a fine line between irreverent irony and perpetuating stereotypes, and I feel that on this occasion the Pythons came down on the wrong side of it. This incident had the unfortunate effect of highlighting all the areas of the show where the Pythons’ comedy has not aged well. There’s a few bits which come over as homophobic, transphobic or sexist when looked at with a contemporary eye as they now must be, forming part of an act performed in the present day rather than a television show broadcast forty years ago.

Don’t expect too much Life of Brian or Holy Grail – this is a very Flying Circus and Meaning of Life intensive selection (possibly because they can be broken down into their composite sketches and reformed more readily than the former two works). While not all aspects of the Pythons’ comedy have aged well, they are nonetheless the once and future masters of sketch comedy, and even all these years later could give the vast majority of younger performers a run for their money.

Kyra Hollis, an overworked teacher from a rougher than average state school comes home to her flat with a stack of books to mark. Over the course of a freezing night in her tiny flat, she will be visited by not one, but two, figures from her past – Tom, a wealthy self-made man and her former lover, and Edward, his teenage son. This elegantly simple set-up becomes, in the hands of writer David Hare and director Stephen Daldry, increasingly complex and compelling, and manages to challenge the pre-conceptions of its audience as well as the choices of its characters.

Leading man Bill Nighy has played the role of Tom Sergeant before, in a 1997 West End production, and it seems that if anything, he has grown into the role, his lined features and long limbs contrasting with the petite and doll-like figure of Mulligan. He represents Tom’s emotional repression perfectly –bluff arrogance breaking down just enough to earn the audience’s sympathy before the façade is hastily re-erected. A character who could have been deeply unlikeable is, in Nighy’s hands, made far less easy to categorise. The audience might not agree with Tom about much – or anything – but he charms us, and it is easy to understand why Kyra was – and is – so drawn to him.

In contrast to the experience of Nighy, Skylight is Carey Mulligan’s West End debut. From the outset she portrays Kyra with delicacy and capability, but it is in the play’s second act, when Kyra’s restraint is stripped away to reveal the tougher and less compromising emotions beneath that we see Mulligan’s undeniable talent really shine through.

Nighy and Mulligan may be the big-ticket names, but there’s also a winning performance from Matthew Beard as Tom’s son, which perfectly captures the lanky awkwardness characteristic of boys in their late teens. His anxious pretention plays perfectly against Mulligan’s amused fondness, and his manner and mannerisms echo Nighy’s in a realistically familial way.

Skylight is a love story, but like all really compelling love stories, it is so much more besides. It is an examination of the relative merits of vocation and self-interest, slumming it and social-climbing, liberalism and conservatism. The play was first performed in 1995, but, were it not for some telling details – Edward’s Walkman, the flat’s tiny gas heater – it could just as easily be taking place in the present day. It is a sign of Hare’s consummate skill as a playwright that he has penned a work which not only continues to be of immediate interest, but perhaps has become even more relevant in the seventeen years since it was last on the West End.

Performance art owes a great deal to Marine Abramović. The self-proclaimed ‘grandmother of performance art’ is both one of its inventors and most influential proponents. The Serbian 60-something began her experimentation with the medium in the 70s, with her series of ‘Rhythms’. The most famous of these was ‘Rhythm 0’ during which she laid out 72 different objects, including a feather, honey, a scalpel and a gun in the gallery and allowed the public to do anything they wished to her with the eclectic array of objects. She remained completely passive for six hours, even when members of the public undressed her, cut her hair and held the loaded gun to her neck.  It was a powerful comment on the ease with which social inhibitions and civility break down.

More recently, during the retrospective of her work in New York’s MOMA, she performed the piece ‘The Artist Is Present’. Sitting in the museum’s atrium for eight hours a day for three months, she invited the spectators to sit opposite her for a short time silently holding eye contact. Many of the museum-goers, among whom appeared James Franco, Alan Rickman and Lady Gaga, were moved to tears, to the extent that a special website was dedicated to their welling up: marinaabramovicmademecry.com. Now the matriarch of performance art has pitched up camp in London’s Serpentine Gallery, displaying her latest piece, ‘512 Hours’, specially conceived for the intimate space.   

‘512 Hours’ is completely unlike normal exhibitions. There is no admission fee and no booking, meaning you could end up at the back of a queue slinking all the way through Kensington Gardens or gain immediate entry, as I was lucky enough to. One hundred and sixty visitors are allowed in at any one time and are encouraged to spend as long as they wish in the exhibition. The public are told, rather pretentiously, to ‘leave their baggage both literally and metaphorically in order to enter the exhibition’. The public’s worldly clobber is stowed in a row of metallic lockers before they proceed into the exhibition. Not only material, but also auditory distractions are removed when one of Marina’s team of forty-five black-clad helpers hands you a pair of soundproof headphones. The only sound is that of one’s own thoughts. 

The first room, overwhelmingly white, contained nothing but an low platform upon which stood a few of Marina’s helpers, facing one another seemingly in a trance-like state. One of them cam away from the group and led me by the hand into the next room where there were row after row of chairs and desks, on each of which was a piece of paper, a pencil and a little heap of jumbled rice grains and lentils. She sat me down at one of the desks and whispered to me in soothing tones: ‘separate the lentils and rice and count them, use the paper if you need to’.

This was a Sisyphean task – I knew that as soon as I left my seat, one of the helpers would undo my laborious work and re-arrange the jumble. However, the point of this exercise was not its completion but its undertaking.  The fact that there were 823 lentils (I gave up counting the rice grains) was far less meaningful than the process of counting them. Some people, who hadn’t been led and instructed by the helper wandered through the room of people absorbed in their rice and lentil separating, trying to gage what they were doing and join in. Why do people feel such a need to be the same as everyone else, even when it means performing such a fruitless task?

When I wandered back into the centre room, a helper immediately grabbed my hand and led me onto the platform, instructing me by example to close my eyes. Holding hands with a stranger went entirely against what social conventions had ever taught me. And yet, it was liberating. In the room on the left people were pacing up and down with exaggeratedly slow steps, either by themselves or with helper-guides. Marina Abramović herself wove her way through the statue-like members of the public, placing a gentle hand on their backs, stroking their eyes shut and exchanging a jovial word.

The guides had a faint air of pretention about them, but there was nothing artificial about Marina Abramović’s movements. Her life and art co-exist in complete harmony and this is evident from her poise and gravitas. In performing her art she is merely living. Like John Cage’s ‘4.33’ or Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ (currently being exhibited at the Tate Modern), this piece is the reduction of art to its bare form, the end to art. Like its musical and visual counterparts, the performance piece’s title bears little comment on its meaning, being a mere description of its duration. By expressing so little, it expresses everything.  In most of Marina Abramović’s pieces she uses her body as both subject and object, they are physical and mental tests of her endurance. The one hour I spent in this exhibition felt like an age and it is a veritable feat of stamina that Marina Abramović will be doing it for 512. 

★★★☆☆
Three Stars

Like the apes of the title, first impressions of this big-budget blockbuster suggest an exercise in simplicity, yet on closer inspection it reveals high minded concerns lurking just beneath the surface. Arriving midway through the summer blockbuster season, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, a sequel to 2011’s surprise smash Rise of the Planet of the Apes, departs from the traditional action movie formula by featuring a large ensemble cast and non-human protagonists. The subtlety of the film’s examination of the precarious co-existence of differing groups of people is refreshing, and though this is supported by great work from its director, motion capture cast and effects team, the film ends up an uneasy marriage of social commentary and blockbuster bravado thanks to its undercooked narrative.

The plot concerns itself with two societies living side by side after an outbreak of “simian flu” has wiped out untold millions of people. Surviving in a San Francisco mall is a depleted human community led by Gary Oldman’s Dreyfus, whilst in the mountains to the north of the city, Caesar, played by Andy Serkis, leads a fledgling tribe of apes who have developed primitive language, weapons and organisation. The film follows both groups as tensions mount and internal conflicts threaten the balance of power as the humans attempt to restore a hydroelectric dam deep in ape territory, whilst fears amongst the apes regarding human motivations give rise to an opportunist coup.

That the film can be enjoyed as a populist blockbuster or as an allegory of the tensions of colonialism and Western foreign policy is a testament to an ambitious script. However, director Matt Reeve’s interest in the social commentary occasionally threatens to derail the film’s pace, particularly in the second act, when the internal power struggles that lead to the inevitable Simian coup mire the plot in repetitive confrontations between Caesar and his rival, Koba. Furthermore, the human cast are saddled with embarrassingly transparent scenes which attempt to add depth to their characters by spelling out motivations and backstories which do little but thematically underline the more interesting simian sub-plots, whilst characters are introduced who serve no purpose but to antagonise the apes and thus unnecessarily complicate the plot. Moreover, the disappearance of two central human characters midway through the third act serves to further negate the presence of these vaguely drawn human stories. Ultimately however, the time invested in establishing the precariousness of Caesar’s power pays off in a satisfying, though, by blockbuster standards, surprisingly intimate finale where the majority of the human and simian story strands combine to deliver a poignant and violent resolution, even if the ending feels more like an attempt to artificially extend the franchise than to conclude the story sincerely.

From the opening close-up of Caesar’s determined gaze to the climactic crowd scenes of hundreds of charging apes, the success of the film is inseparable from the convincingness of its effects, and thankfully they’re mostly successful. The opening 15 minutes, amongst the film’s most compelling, are carried entirely and effortlessly by motion captured characters, and the combination of jaw-droppingly real CGI and great performances gradually reveal the relationships, personalities and emotions of the well differentiated primates, who are never less than entirely convincing on screen. That Reeves allows the film’s emotional climax to play almost entirely in close ups of two motion captured characters speaks to the strengths of both the actors and the effects team; that it works is even more surprising. Devoting so much time to the intelligent and complex internal struggles of these characters brings out their emerging humanity, allowing the climactic showdown featuring hordes of machine gun totting chimps to never seem too ridiculous. 

Regarding the performances, Serkis leads an incredible motion capture cast who ground the apes with a human expressiveness that never seems incongruous. Every glance and facial twitch registers on Caesar’s face, perfectly expressing his conflicting desires. Elsewhere Nick Thurston delivers a soulful performance as Blue Eyes, Caesar’s son, bringing life to a stock coming-of-age arc by imbuing his character with palpable anger and indecision. Toby Kebbel also shines as Koba, creating a formidable and fearsome villain that is nevertheless grounded in understandable frustration. It’s unfortunate then that such strong simian performances are not matched by the uninspiring human cast. The greatest weakness is Jason Clarke’s bland performance as the human lead, which feels ineffectual and often seems lost amongst the special effects. Elsewhere, Gary Oldman cashes a cheque in a throwaway role that feels unnecessarily expanded to justify his presence, whilst Keri Russell is hampered by a part that allows her to do little else than express concern, in a film that values its female characters solely by their nurturing instincts. Of the humans, only Kodi Smit-McPhee delivers a credible turn in a supporting role as a sweet-natured teen who crosses the man-ape divide.

Like most blockbusters then, the human drama of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes does little to engage audiences, but instead it differentiates itself from the pack by offering up fascinating insights and a complex, biblical family drama that unfolds amongst a cast of faultlessly realised non-human characters. Disappointingly however, the film’s quietly pacifistic message seems at odds with the sheer joy it knowingly engineers in such scenes, like a rampaging monkey driving a tank through the centre of San Francisco. Ultimately though, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes succeeds on its sheer dedication to subverting expectations, engaging the mind and heart even as it capitulates to the bombastic conventions of more generic summer fare.