Precious is a new-style weepie but one that is much more bracing than depressing
Precious
Theatre
Ian McKellen is captivating throughout. He delights in the play’s gallows humour, yet is also maudlin and poignant
Waiting for Godot
Theatre
Slight quibbles notwithstanding, this will set the West End’s stock riding high
Enron
Utterly, utterly brilliant. You really are in for a treat
Though 'Trilogy' has won rave reviews, I personally found myself exasperated after about an hour
We went on a quiet sunday evening and the food was excellent, but the experience let down by the service and ambiance
London,




Phone: 0207749 6850
Website: www.ideageneration.co.uk
Email: katie.reynolds@ideageneration.co.uk
Trains: Tube: Old Street
Other-worldly but beautiful: Alice & Lily by Jenny Wicks
Jenny Wicks’s fascination with the unexpected appearance of two ginger-nuts in her brother’s family led to this magnetic, sometimes eerie collection of portraits of babies, children and adults possessing the mysterious ginger gene.
There is something other-worldly about red-headed children with staring blue eyes but also something irresistibly beautiful. This collection of portraits represents both, and also stretches to those strange mongrel beards adorning brown-headed men.
Ginger-haired young women have long been chosen subjects in art history, none more passionately than those hand-picked by the Pre-Raphaelites. Their combination of orange hair and porcelain white skin, epitomised today by Lily Cole, appears throughout the show, and Wicks exaggerates it in the plain white backgrounds.
Making a mockery of the term “redhead”, the palette forms a glorious autumnal swatch, while the distribution of pigment is fascinating: sometimes, a single tone appears to have leached from hair into skin and gathered in small puddles as freckles.
Walking among these portraits has the air of a scientific sampling, like a Victorian survey. And in some ways it is; Wicks’s fascination is as much with the journey of the ginger gene as with photography as art — and that element is just as striking as the show’s value as an exquisite portrait collection.
Until 8 March. Information: 020 7749 6853,
www.ideageneration.co.uk.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.