Hi, reader. If you came here looking for a review of the Meadham Kirchhoff show you may want to reconsider. This is not a review. This is a love letter.
"Dear Edward Meadham and Benjamin Kirchhoff, there is a woman in my village in Greece whom you'd love. She lives on her own in a house that no one ever enters - bar a neighbour that brings her some home-cooked food now and then - perhaps because of the odd paraphernalia that surround it. The tableaux vivants you set up for your show yesterday reminded me of it and of her. The locals call her ?μορφη, meaning Beautiful, making light fun of her bright make-up and even more colourful clothes (she loves a good fringed shawl). And yet, she gets up every morning and dresses herself, powders her face and rubs in her pink rouge, and walks to the church, head held high, oblivious to the mundanity that surrounds her. I've never seen her speak to anyone but yesterday afternoon, while watching your show, I had a feeling she'd at least offer you a smile. Thank you for a wonderful show. K x"
How do you review what those two presented yesterday? What do you talk about? The setting; fruit and cakes and porcelain animals, fresh flowers and discarded hair brushes, seemingly abandoned among the painted silkscreens and French court chairs? The birds tweeting (and the audience tweeting about them) during the wait for the show to start? I guess you'd want to read about the clothes, right? But these weren't clothes, they were armour, to protect the delicate souls inhabiting them from the real world. Yes, there were shepherdesses and milk maids and courtesans and can-can girls and true, they wore exquisite looking things; embroidered and laced and corseted and ribboned and booted in spectacular fashion. And yes, one wore a Mickey Mouse tee. They languidly and aimlessly wandered about the set, picking flowers and biting on apples, one losing a clip-on earring in the process, another even had the audacity to munch on a cupcake at the end - let them eat cupcakes, some must have scribbled in their notebooks, desperate for a way to sum it all up. Sofia Coppola ought to remake her Marie Antoinette. But what did it all mean? Well, it was beauty that killed the beast, wasn't it?
