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| | | Tom Karen's designs brought vim and vigour to 1970s Britain | | by Steve Rose Jan 3, 2023 | | The immigrant designer conjured futuristic delight with icons from the Raleigh Chopper to the Reliant Robin If you grew up in 1970s Britain, you lived in Tom Karen’s world. If you were a child, you may have played with Karen’s ingenious Marble Run toy, which is still in production today. If you weren’t cruising the streets on a Raleigh Chopper, you envied the kid who was. And you were waiting for the day they invented a levitating landspeeder like Luke Skywalker’s in Star Wars (and possibly still are). If you were slightly older, you might have driven in a sleek new Scimitar GTE, like Princess Anne did. Or, if you were a little harder up, maybe a three-wheeled Reliant Robin. Karen, who has died aged 96, had a hand in all of these and many more products. That so many of Karen’s designs speak of their era is no coincidence, but nor was Karen purely interested in style or novelty. Trained as an aeronautical engineer, he was also extremely practical, but he recognised that good design was not only a matter of form and function, but also fantasy. Continue reading... | | | | | A desire for Streetcar: the enduring allure of Tennessee Williams's tantalising classic | | by Michael Billington Jan 3, 2023 | | Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran battle it out in the Almeida’s new production of a poetic drama whose ambiguity is enthralling Tennessee Williams’s old bus keeps on running. The Almeida’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Patsy Ferran and directed by Rebecca Frecknall, is the play’s fifth major UK revival in the last 20 years. That’s not bad going for a work that at its 1947 New York premiere was described as the product of “an almost desperately morbid turn of mind” and two years later in London was dismissed by one critic as “a messy little anecdote”. So why has the play lasted so well? There are multiple reasons but the most fundamental is its air of tantalising ambiguity. When Blanche DuBois floats into New Orleans’s ironically named Elysian Fields and finds herself up against her Polish-American brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, it seems as if we are facing a primal conflict: Blanche, quoting Hawthorne, Whitman and Poe, seems to represent the poetic spirit while Stanley’s mentality, in the words of that fine critic Harold Clurman, “provides the soil for fascism viewed not as political movement but as a state of being”. That is Blanche’s own view of the situation when she urges her sister, Stella, “In this dark march towards whatever it is we’re approaching … Don’t – don’t hang back with the brutes.” Continue reading... | | | | | |
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