Every now and then, a tiny person dressed as a French maid pops up, her sole role apparently to sweep the floors – a truly sisyphean task. Jeff Koons?Įven the staff uniforms are artful: boys in matelot stripes straight from a Jean Paul Gaultier homoerotic ad, or wet-dream mechanics in boiler suits. Nominally, the legend that is Pierre Gagnaire is in charge of Sketch’s food, but I’ve no idea who’s actually cooking this stuff. The actual fish and chips arrive separately in a pail: breaded pollock like a midweek kids’ tea and fried abstracts of swirly potato tendril. Maddest of all is what’s described as fish and chips: a plate draped in a shroud of rice pancake, as though it conceals Naples’ Veiled Christ rather than some salad, peach – peach! – and blobs of tartare sauce. “It’s like a Yorkshire pudding,” says its recipient helpfully. There’s a dish featuring crab, tête de veau, a savoury profiterole and “cucumber and green apple water” that manages to taste of none of these things. And 27 quid, ta – and that’s for a starter. There’s bisque made from its shells and salty kelp, too. Who knew?) Two small, woolly langoustine tails are decanted on to thinly sliced brassicas from a bamboo steamer that hiccups copious amounts of smoke. (It turns out to be “red cabbage and Xeres”. Tuna sashimi, creamy avocado with Peruvian chilli and lime, melon and liqueur vinegar, black olive gelée and mozzarella foam.” On the evidence of this lysergic dish – blobs and pools of strident oddness, especially the mozzarella-topped gelée that tastes like the stuff left at the bottom of olive tins topped with organic foaming facewash – Shrigley’s better off sticking to the art.Ī bijou burger comes laced with foie gras and accessorised with a large cube of faintly farty blood-coloured jelly. Here’s one item verbatim: “Homage to David Shrigley. It’s a wanton holler of bollocks-to-austerity decadence. I’ve never wanted to filch restaurant fittings so badly. Place settings are designed by Shrigley, too, including a cruet set that looks like shrunken Moomins’ Hattifatteners announcing “dust”, “dirt” and “nothing”. More than 230 of Shrigley’s whimsical black-and-white drawings (we covet Cruiseship Vulgarity and Stick Your Synthetic Burger Up Your Arse) are soaked in reflected pinkness. Scalloped, pink velvet booths (impossible to shimmy into if you’re more than a size 6), metallic pink woodwork, a glittering copper bar-back. Designed by India Mahdavi, it’s pink: powdery, Turkish Delight pink. If Mae West and Barbara Cartland set up a restaurant consultancy, they couldn’t come up with anything more camply outre. Because here it is once more, ripped up and started again, this time in collaboration with David Shrigley. It was less restaurant and more art installation, a notion Momo is clearly taken with. Latterly, it was handed over to Turner prize-winning artist Martin Creed, who cooked up a setting of such dreamlike randomness, it was like taking a wrong turn at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. The Gallery is the most protean of the Sketch stable, initially an operating theatre-white backdrop to early millennial excess. But by rousing the blood and raising the stakes – and showing the possibilities of change – Graham and Goold “won me over”.Mazouz’s latest wheeze is not simply to open new restaurants, but to open new restaurants in his existing restaurant. As someone who doesn’t follow football, I came into Dear England feeling at a possible disadvantage. That Britain could be floundering as a result of a similar “sense of inherited privilege” is a point he does not need to batter home. Graham gives us a vivid sketch of the mess the team was in before Southgate took over: seldom winning, yet still considering itself a “top talent”. The play’s title, said Susannah Clapp in The Observer, alludes to an open letter Southgate wrote to fans in 2021, pleading for a “more generous” and “interesting view of what the country could be”. Some of the characterisation, however, is cartoonish: Harry Kane, Gary Lineker, Greg Dyke and many others appear in no more than amusing caricature. The staging is “thrilling”, and Joseph Fiennes gives a performance of “almost AI-grade exactness” as Southgate, said Quentin Letts in The Sunday Times. And with “Dear England” – a “wildly entertaining romp” given a pulsating staging by Rupert Goold – he has “hit the back of the net once again”. He has made “genuinely classic work” out of such unlikely subjects as “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”, and parliamentary whips’ offices in the 1970s. As a playwright, James Graham has long displayed the world-beating form that still eludes England on the biggest stages. Groundhog Day review: a simply sublime return to The Old Vicīut fear not.42nd Street review: new production has ‘energy and pizzazz’.
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