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New Indian Express
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Canvas Called Home: Where Art, Craft, and Conscious Living Converge
The idea was to create a cohesive atmosphere that helps people make better decisions and buy better, more conscious products, said Pallavi. All the brands on display followed ethical practices and used natural materials. The products were fairly priced and the brands worked with artisans and clusters that specialise in traditional crafts. 'That's how they align with our larger sustainability and conscious living message,' Pallavi pointed out. 'This collaboration with Our Better Planet is rooted in a shared belief that design is not just seen, it's felt,' said Preeyaa Jain, vice president of Orange Tree, adding, ''Memories of Home' is a tribute to the enduring intimacy between memory, craftsmanship, and space.' In addition, there were a few interesting art pieces on display, brought together by Jim Tharakan, founder of Arteflick. He stated, 'In partnership with Pallavi from Our Better Planet, we curated a workshop titled 'Memories on Canvas.' I showcased about 10 artists' works, offering a good variety: oil on canvas, acrylic on canvas, etching, charcoal on paper, a couple of watercolours, and even pen on canvas. I intentionally brought in many different mediums to show the diversity of how art can be created. What added depth to this curation was that I personally know these artists, their influences, their creative processes, and what drives them.' There were about 25 different works from these 10 artists — two are from Hyderabad, including Maredu Ramu, and others from across India — Lucknow, Maharashtra, Chennai, Kerala, Bengaluru, and so on. Jim explained, 'I come from a place where I believe artists should be celebrated while they're alive, not after they're gone. Take MF Hussain, for instance — he's passed on, but his works are being sold for Rs 4 crore, Rs 10 crore, and so on. My focus is: how do we support and celebrate living artists?' The art collector also wants to build the awareness that art can be an asset, just like land. He believes it shouldn't be valued only for aesthetics, something that 'looks good in the house'. It should also carry meaning, identity, and intention. 'And in a space like this (Orange Tree), where art blends with home décor, viewers — whether they're buyers, collectors, or just art lovers — can actually see how a piece might look in a home setting. That's different from viewing it in a stark, white gallery. Here, it becomes more real and relatable,' he added. Alongside that, he also offered an art appreciation space to help people understand how to look at art. The session was designed to help people see and understand art differently and maybe even start viewing it as an asset worth collecting. Jim said that the idea is to go beyond just, 'Oh, that looks nice', and dive deeper into what the artwork communicates. 'Ideally, I would have loved for participants to draw, express, and share visually, but this time it was a conversational setup. We spoke about how they experience art and how they can deepen that experience. It's about shifting the way we see and engage with art,' he expressed.
Fashion Value Chain
19-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- Fashion Value Chain
Orange Tree's ‘Lunora': Chandeliers Inspired by the Moon
Orange Tree, the Jodhpur-based lifestyle brand known for sustainable craftsmanship, introduces 'Lunora', its first chandelier collection inspired by the moon's mystique. The five-piece collection reimagines ambient lighting as sculptural art, combining wood, metal, and glass with celestial design sensibilities. Each chandelier mimics the moon's glow through asymmetrically arranged orbs, merging kinetic form with functional beauty. The Noir Chandelier Smoked stands out with its smoky, cratered glass textures, while Kellan evokes the moon's fluid movement and romantic essence. The Cici Chandelier strikes a minimalistic note, with entwined arcs and frosted globes casting a warm glow. Billow expresses nature's poetry through a constellation-like design, while Asher floats geometrically, radiating calm moonlight. With 'Lunora,' Orange Tree blends design innovation and artisanal depth to create lighting that transforms both residential and commercial spaces into serene, moonlit sanctuaries.
The Guardian
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Playhouse Creatures review – backstage banter with the pioneering first women of theatre
April De Angelis's 1993 play is more a snapshot than a coloured-in portrait of the first cohort of women to be permitted on to the stage. Still, it is an entertaining and enlightening ensemble work that captures the delicate moment in 17th-century stage history when these pioneering women straddled empowerment and economic independence with sexual objectification and hostile moral judgement. Nell Gwyn, played spiritedly by Zoe Brough, is famously known to be among these early female actors, but De Angelis draws out several others stories and plaits five lives together, on and off stage. There is Mrs Betterton (Anna Chancellor, giving a glinting performance), something of an elder who brims with stage wisdom and technique; Mrs Marshall (Katherine Kingsley), a steely type whose former affair with an earl has left her vulnerable to heckling and attack; Mrs Farley (Nicole Sawyerr), who starts off as a soapbox Christian before taking to the stage; and finally Doll (Doña Croll), who assists them. Michael Oakley's production brings them to live with charm and economy as they talk about their jobs, loves and dreams, as well as the work being staged by the King's Company: the Scottish play, Othello the Moor and 'Hamlet the Ditherer'. They perform snatches of shows in front of invisible 1660s audiences, and it is a mixed bag from Cleopatra to Amazonians, sometimes leaning into sexualised stereotypes with archness. It is in the backstage drama that they come most to life – although their interpersonal stories are drawn with rather too light a touch. There is camaraderie, confidences and competition – the competition being mostly between Gwyn and Farley, who first catches the eye of the king before he turns his attentions to Gwyn. A host of issues are covered, from ageism in the theatre company and among the actors themselves, to the accidental pregnancies that can force these women off stage. The stories are always compelling but only slight, and the characterisation is broad-brush. But the actors elevate it, bringing warm, lively comedy. There is a limber, light touch to Fotini Dimou's stage design too, and it works well in this space, with candle-light lowering or rising to signify when the women are on or off stage, and a sense of glitter and glamour conjured through costumes and confetti. This is a play that exudes a love of the trade, from sawdust to the stars, as well as serving as a reminder of a turning point in theatre history, when these women were regarded simultaneously as trailblazers, renegades and oddities akin to dancing bears. At Orange Tree theatre, London, until 12 April
The Guardian
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in theatre: Unicorn; Churchill in Moscow
What a relief. After a splurge of jetted-in celebrity casting, here are two new plays buoyed up by on-the-spot, on-the-button stage actors. Every Mike Bartlett drama requires a particular dexterity from its performers. Think of Ben Whishaw's intricacy in the first production of Cock (2009), or Tim Pigott-Smith's satiric skill with iambic pentameter in King Charles III (2014). In Unicorn, a terrific trio of actors – Erin Doherty, Stephen Mangan and Nicola Walker – are required to hover between lightness and pain. They have to make an explosive proposition seem not only plausible but promising. They need to register, with minimal action, considerable change in the course of two and a half hours. They rise to the challenge. Despite the twinkling title, there is nothing fey about this drama. Bartlett invites the audience to dismantle the traditional idea of marriage. Unicorn here refers to a person (a rare one) who wants to have sex and perhaps love with an established couple. Doherty, the actor formerly known as Princess Anne in The Crown, is that person: a gleaming, inquisitive, casually knowing young woman who is invited to join, in and out of bed, a comfortably married duo staring at their middle years: 'We call it age but really it's the early symptoms of dying.' Mangan and Walker reunite after The Split: he plays an unsettled ENT doctor, with concertina limbs and lopsided smile; she is a poet and teacher who rushes at everything in a flurry of words and excitable hands. I have rarely seen actors change from within so subtly and definitively. Doherty becomes harder though still hopeful; Walker stops whirring and settles into stillness; Mangan stops lounging and consolidates. Together they humanise what at first appears as a mechanical arrangement – an updated swingers notion. They are also at ease with Bartlett's humane but tacked-on expansion of his theme into future hope. The action is clear and witty. James Macdonald – Caryl Churchill's director of choice – excels in making an event from shard-like scenes. There is no hiding place in Miriam Buether's sleek design: a hemisphere, like a glamper's tent or a half-open parachute, ringed by neon – smart but provisional. Between scenes, versions of the old song Daisy Bell – folksy, jazzy, punky – are sung. To ironic effect. No third person was invited on that bicycle built for two. Churchill in Moscow is the fastest-selling show in the history of the snug but not smug Orange Tree theatre. It is the latest smart move by artistic director Tom Littler, who stages Howard Brenton's new play with panache, combining two sure-fire box-office draws – the name of Churchill and the person of Roger Allam. Brenton is forever haloed by the notorious lawsuit brought in 1982 against his 'obscene' Romans in Britain by Mary Whitehouse. Yet his new play is unlikely to frighten the horses, or even the Tories. The pivot is piquant: a meeting between Stalin and Churchill in 1942, occasioned by the PM's wish to break in person the news that, with the Nazis at the gates of Stalingrad, the allies planned to open a second front not in Europe but north Africa. The production is trenchant: Cat Fuller's design sets the action, gusted along with blasts of martial brass, on a red sunburst floor with a black centre. The performances are the real pull. As Stalin, Peter Forbes swaggers persuasively in big boots and a Devonian accent (the equivalent of Georgian), his eyes narrow and swivelling. Magnificent Allam has the Churchillian pipe, siren suit, bald pate and jutting lower lip but does not imitate the barking, stumping or pauses. As an actor who can make modesty, such as Fred Thursday's in Endeavour, seem commanding, and always suggests subterranean schisms, he spills over with entitlement, anger and petulance; every phrase a rumble. For all its historical fascination, psychologically Brenton's is a broad-brush account: mighty men behaving like giant toddlers, rolling around together as if in a sandpit with drink and sucking-pig; it is striking that Churchill calling Uncle Joe a Georgian peasant is thought to be a witticism. An approximate feminism frames the action. Two translators – both actually secret service agents, played with sardonic aplomb by Jo Herbert and Elisabeth Snegir – are encouraged to offer free versions of what they hear, in the interests of keeping the talks going: they are the wise ones, aware that what is not said is as important as any utterance. The last word also goes to a woman: Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, who defected to the US in 1967. She has patrolled the action as a young girl, cutely asking Churchill to sign her copy of David Copperfield. Is Brenton implying a hidden subversive message? The nickname of Dickens's hero was Trot. Star ratings (out of five) Unicorn ★★★★ Churchill in Moscow ★★★ Unicorn is at the Garrick, London, until 26 April Churchill in Moscow is at the Orange Tree theatre, Richmond, Surrey until 8 March
The Guardian
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Churchill in Moscow review – the British bulldog's gripping meeting with Stalin
In the 1970s, Howard Brenton wrote The Churchill Play, provoking furious newspaper pieces and a testy TV encounter with Melvyn Bragg. In a future (1984) totalitarian Britain, internees at the Churchill internment camp staged a play in which the second world war leader rose from lying in state to endure insults including: 'People won the war. He just got pissed with Stalin.' That reference was to peace conferences from 1943-45, also including President Roosevelt. But, five decades on, Brenton has written about a lesser-known, frequently inebriated August 1942 encounter between the British and Russian leaders at a time when, as Churchill in Moscow presents it, each ally feared the other was about to lose to Hitler. Brenton's talents for spikily poetic dialogue and laugh-aloud gags remain remarkably intact. But, whereas The Churchill Play was the work of an ideologically driven 'political dramatist', Churchill in Moscow comes – like his Harold Macmillan drama Never So Good (2008) and partition play Drawing the Line (2013) – from a dramatist of politics. Such are the knotty historical details and quiet wider resonances – such as diplomacy not necessarily involving conversation with who you would choose – that any Bragg standoff over this one would be on In Our Time. And, fittingly, as Brenton has added to a very small group of major plays written by octogenarians that includes Leopoldstadt, the play feels Stoppardian in its concern with the comedy of communication. Aural perspective keeps ingeniously changing. As Roger Allam's Churchill directly addresses Peter Forbes's Stalin, or conversely, nonsensical syllables emerge, representing linguistic incomprehension. At other times, translators Sally and Olga (Jo Herbert and Elisabeth Snegir, both superb) interpret for us, sometimes misleadingly (both leaders are prone to eccentric metaphor) and later mischievously. Dispensing with aides, as leaders seeking entente are prone to do, the men conduct an astonishing final negotiation through grunts, mimes and toasts. With a nuance typical of later Brenton, the millions Stalin murdered are invoked but also, though without equivalence, Churchill's lethal decisions over Coventry and India. Forbes speaks English with a West Country accent, suggesting Stalin's strong rural dialect. Allam is properly posh, although, as he plays various Churchills (private/public/as heard by Russians) sensibly plays down the slushy booming of standard impersonations. As the British ambassador, Alan Cox amusingly agonises behind English manners about his boss's recklessness. Some modern diplomats may empathise. Newcomer Tamara Greatrex is affecting as Stalin's daughter Svetlana but her not entirely necessary scenes sometimes weaken the ferocious focus of Tom Littler's staging of an important play by a great theatrical survivor. At the Orange Tree theatre, London, until 8 March. Available online, 11-14 March.
