The 20th century is a cruel farce performed by puppets in a cardboard museum in South African artist William Kentridge’s grotesquely funny, constantly disconcerting film interpretation of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony. Lenin and Stalin, their faces’ photographs fixed on jerky figures made from scraps, transforming sporadically into living dancers hidden under collaged costumes, monstrously dominate a puppet cast that also includes the bullish-looking but revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky along with Trotsky and Shostakovich himself.
It would be stirring in an art gallery with recorded music, but on a big screen in the Royal Festival Hall above Marin Alsop conducting a gripping performance by the Philharmonia Orchestra as part of the Southbank’s Centre’s multidisciplinary Multitudes festival, it became a magic key to both the music and the age of betrayal and mass murder it witnesses.
