"Mr Turner" / Project Fio

It’s not often that I’m the youngest person in a cinema, but if the audience for the screening of Mike Leigh’s latest offering was anything to go by (lunchtime on a Cineworld Bargain Tuesday), “Mr Turner” looks like being a big hit with the third-ager audience. I’ve reviewed the film more fully elsewhere, but suffice to say that Timothy Spall gives the performance of a lifetime in this grittily picturesque depiction of the last 25 years or so in the life of painter J. M. W. Turner, arguably the principal progenitor of Impressionism. Earthy both tonally and visually, this is a major achievement which really needs to be experienced on the big screen.

Sunday evening saw the culmination of the 2014 incarnation of Project Fio, the youth theatre project on which I did some work experience during the summer; a multi-cultural group of young Cardiff residents putting together a piece under the leadership of Abdul Shayek of Youth Of Creative Arts. Performed in the Weston Studio at the Wales Millennium Centre, and entitled “Life Support”, its aim was to dramatise our use of social media via vignettes, movement and poetry, exploring the question of whether our addiction to mobile technology enhances or impedes connection with the real world. There were inevitable technical issues given the time constraints involved in putting it together, but the show was cleverly conceived, and very confidently performed.