Yohji Yamamoto became internationally renowned as an avant-garde fashion designer with his minimalism in the 1980s and since then has collaborated with everyone from Adidas to Hermès, from Sir Elton John to German dramatist Heiner Müller. This month, the V&A in London opens its retrospective on Yamamoto\’s work, which will be open until mid-July.

The curators of this exhibition have clearly aimed for the deceptive simplicity of Yamamoto\’s own minimalist designs: they are housed in one room only, a large area with grey walls, a bright white floor and steel fittings. The whole space can be walked through in under three minutes and there is not much to read in the way of captions and blurbs. This can, at first, make the exhibition seem rather underwhelming, but there is more to it than initially meets the eye.

You can spend a sizeable amount of time swotting up on the finer details of Yamamoto\’s career if you follow the multimedia timeline of headphones and plasma screens around the edge of the room. Watching his designs on the small screen does not, however, seem all that exciting when confronted with the real pieces themselves, scattered across the centre of the exhibition space. These are modelled by free-standing busts so you can get right up close to them and examine the fabric, the stitching and every other detail, tempting visitors to touch the pieces. The effect is that the exhibition feels more like a high fashion boutique than a museum and the designs seem all the more exciting and modern. This is an imaginative and unobtrusive way of presenting Yamamoto\’s retrospective which leaves it to the designs themselves to make an impression.

Yamamoto\’s pieces have been selected carefully to exhibit his full breadth of vision: therefore, although he is often associated with black which he is said to believe is the only genuine colour, you would not guess this from the exhibition alone. Some of the most striking pieces are a man\’s floral suit and a bright red dress with an ingeniously engineered and almost gravity-defying skirt. However, the black pieces which do make the cut are some of the most notable designs in the exhibition: a stunningly simplistic evening dress with a glittering purse built into the back, and a trouser suit featuring an enormous plait of fabric over the torso. Even with the black pieces, minimalism may not be the first word that springs to mind when you see this selection of Yamamoto\’s work. Above all else, his designs smack of imagination and innovation. Yamamoto is as important for the influence he has had upon the fashion world as he is for the actual pieces he has designed and this exhibition allows you to take a very close look at the careful engineering and the creative detail of his work which has so inspired contemporary design.

It was perhaps inevitable that The Adjustment Bureau would end up being compared, by some reviewers, to last year’s Inception. Both films are big-budget thrillers with elements of the supernatural, starring rugged men with tragic pasts who willingly struggle against impossible odds for the sake of their children/the woman they met in the public loo (delete where appropriate). It doesn’t help that The Adjustment Bureau is also based on a short story by sci-fi legend Philip K. Dick whose work inspired the peerless Blade Runner among others. All told, then, The Adjustment Bureau has a hard task ahead of it in living up to such expectations. Perhaps wisely, it doesn’t even try.

The film follows an oxymoronically honest politician, David Norris (Matt Damon), who is well on his way to becoming the youngest senator in history. After losing his early lead in the polls, he retreats to the men’s toilet, where he meets the enigmatic Elise (Emily Blunt) and promptly falls in love. However, the mysterious forces of fate, personified by a group of men in shady suits and hats, are out to stop him from ever seeing her again. What ensues is the action-packed, Bourne-esque struggle of one man against a vast conspiracy, interwoven with a burgeoning romance.

It’s not a film with any of the intellectual rigour and cinematic bravery of Inception, and it doesn’t raise the complex questions which Blade Runner does. Nevertheless, it works for two reasons. Firstly, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. This isn’t to say it’s a barrel of laughs, but it’s brash, colourful and clearly aware, though unashamed, of the fact that it’s telling a somewhat hokey story. From the pleasingly satiric take on bureaucracy to the stricken cries of ‘Hat! Hat!’ as one of David Norris’s supernatural pursuers drops his headwear and panics, the tongue-in-cheek element saves a film which could have been insufferable if it had pretended to be deep and thought-provoking. Secondly, the main characters’ developing relationship is actually handled very well indeed, with enough on-screen chemistry to overcome the slight whiff of cheese around the ‘love at first sight’ cliché.

Damon and Blunt are more than capable of injecting an ever-so-slightly suspect script with enough genuine warmth and charm to support the film’s premise – you can really believe that Damon would be willing to fight for this woman who he’s only just met. Not only that, but the most interesting questions raised by the film come from this relationship, not from the over-emphasised ‘fate vs. free will’ theme. Is David Norris willing to sacrifice his potential love’s career for the sake of her being with him? Is he really that egotistical? It’s a question which can easily be seen applying to real-world situations, but here is given an interestingly fateful edge. Ultimately, then, it is this love affair which is the fundamental core of the film – not the supernatural men in hats – and it works very well.

Don’t rush out to see The Adjustment Bureau if you want to see a film as complex and daring as Inception. Inception may have proven certain Hollywood executives wrong and shown that mainstream films can pander to an intelligent audience and still be successful – The Adjustment Bureau, by contrast, has a vaguely original premise, but still feels like something we’ve seen before. However, The Adjustment Bureau is certainly worth a watch if you want something light and entertaining which nevertheless doesn’t assume that its audience is stupid.

From the moment I stepped into ‘The Vault’ – the studio theatre of the Southwark Playhouse where Theatre Uncut‘s flagship performances were taking place- I knew that the production had no desire to put the audience at ease. The traditional divide between performers and audience was warped by the disintegration of the seating nearest to the stage into small clusters around tables lit by small candles which cast shadows on the cavernous arches over which the trains rattle into and out of London Bridge Station. The sound of these trains was for me a key part of the performance, a clear and constant reminder that the issues raised by the eight short plays written and performed by volunteers were greater than the plays themselves and as integral a part of contemporary society as the walls preventing the trains from landing on our heads.

Theatre Uncut is a reaction against the coalition\’s budget cuts urging people to not accept whatever situation they find themselves in and to not defer to authority instinctively. There is an outside authority controlling the events of each play such as the unseen medical professionals in Laura Lomas\’ Open Heart Surgery who prevent Lisa from even touching her fiance as he lies in a medically induced coma as a result of the titular operation. In others, these sinister presences are given a voice whether they use it for temptation as in Housekeeping by Lucy Kirkwood, where an accountant striving to balance the books tells a woman to sell her grandmother, or to simply command acceptance. Such unquestioning allegiance is expected from the ‘bottled water salesperson\’ in Dennis Kelly\’s Things That Make No Sense when he is questioned by two smiling interrogators who ignore his responses and write his confession to a murder he didn\’t commit before asking him to sign it with his only consolation being that others are far worse off and everyone must do their best to wipe the record clean.

The audience\’s own complicity with unfeeling and impersonal acts is ensured in perhaps the most inventive of the plays – Fragile by David Greig. This dialogue is between Jack and his support worker Caroline who is played collectively by the audience. The audience voice the extent and reasons for the cuts and so are forced to internalise their reality and consider their own attitudes towards disability benefit and the place given to those who need it in society. Should society aid those in need? The middle class couple of Jack Thorne\’s Whiff Whaff think not and refuse to accept help with their lame cat, their son, whose legs were amputated, or their own Alzheimers. The extreme level of self-sufficiency demanded by them is an excellent use of exaggeration and humour to emphasise how such a policy can go too far and to warn that if it is applied without perspective – the result is both savage and ridiculous.

That society cannot be anything other than dehumanising and monstrous if it acts without empathy and perspective is the overwhelming message of Hi Vis by Clara Brennan, a moving monologue by a mother forced to abandon her disabled daughter at a care home and dress as a clown in order to gain access to her. She hopes the doctors won\’t forget that her daughter is human too, that she could explain to ‘the coalition boys\’ how neuroscience has explained that we learn behaviour by mirroring others, and that without bees we too would become extinct.

However, with such a focus on politics and the brief length of each play there is a danger that the hostility and bitter disappointments of the characters presented could alienate the audience.  At times I felt the stance presented was so uncompromisingly negative and condemnatory that it was difficult to engage with the characters. Of course we should question our roles in society as well as that of government and theatre but is not one of the joys of theatre that messages can be delivered subtly for the audience to observe and ponder. One offering was particularly blunt, namely The Fat Man by Anders Lustgarten, and seemed more suitable for Speakers\’ Corner than as a piece of drama. Capitalism was explored through a comparison with an affable but swindling Fat Man but the relentless condemnation of the system

without any consideration of the other point of view made the monologue rather flat overall.

Theatre Uncut gave the ‘political voice of theatre\’ and there has been widespread participation throughout the UK and performances staged even as far away as Chicago. Many of these were arranged by students whose recent call to activism was celebrated in Mark Ravenhill\’s A Bigger Banner, students who will be the leaders of the future. However, despite its constant presence it was not the political message which touched me so much as the repeated call for active involvement in life in any capacity and an empathetic respect for others fostered by the theatre. All lives are valuable and each individual has a right to challenge the status quo through words and discussion, a right and a duty to challenge the complacency of a society and realise that it is never too late. Leaving the rattle of the trains behind and emerging into the bustle of London, I am left wondering for how much I would have sold my grandmother.