The avuncular English national treasure Stephen Fry and the radical Russian conceptual artist Vadim Zakharov may seem an unlikely combination. But after experiencing Zakharov’s flamboyant theatrical performance inspired by Fry’s book, Incomplete and Utter History of Classical Music at the Whitechapel Gallery last night (21 September), all present agreed that the marriage was an inspired one.
The piece, which is the second in the V-A-C Foundation’s live performance series, was called Tunguska Event: History Marches on a Table and marked the centenary of the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Zakharov is probably best known for showering visitors to the Russian pavilion with gold coins during the 2013 Venice Biennale. Now at the Whitechapel, assisted by Fry’s tome, he treated us to a slice of musical history between 1904-17. This was set against a backdrop of historical events enacted by a cast of characters including a ballerina en pointe, a dog, an accordionist, a naked tattooed “boylesque” performer and a pair of garbage collectors.
As per the work’s title, the action unfolded along a central table-cum-stage extending the length of the Whitechapel’s Gallery 2, at which audience members were invited to sit. According to Zakharov, “the eloquent analogies and British humour of Stephen Fry provided a unique way of witnessing history in a 3D format”.
And certainly from her ringside seat, your correspondent was treated to a sometimes rather too up-close and multidimensional view of the performers. Your dutiful correspondent was also invited to parade onstage with fellow audience members to pay homage to the coronation of Marcel Duchamp with a bottle-rack crown (artfully decorated with a couple of toilet rolls to flag up his Fountain urinal).
Gordon Beswick
All in all, a triumphant evening for everyone involved and most notably for the theatrically-inclined Whitechapel attendant Anthony Best, who heroically stepped in when one of the actors dropped out at the last minute. Best was one of the evening’s show stoppers as the personification of 1916, waxing lyrical about Maurice Ravel, jazz, James Joyce, the Battle of the Somme and the birth of the Russian violinist Yehudi Menuhin, before being ignominiously jettisoned into a giant wheelie bin.