"Escape The Scaffold" / Gillian Ayres

My most recent theatre reviewing assignment was Titas Halder’s “Escape The Scaffold”, at Cardiff’s The Other Room, fresh from a run at co-producing venue Theatre 503 in London. A slick three-hander set in a vaguely spooky house, it plays like a West End-style middle-class love triangle drama/thriller, but with clear political undertones, and is darkly entertaining.

"Escape The Scaffold" (pic: Aenne Pallasca)

Currently showing at the National Museum of Wales is an exhibition of work by Gillian Ayres, one of Britain’s most renowned abstract painters, and based around some of the work she did whilst resident in Wales in the 1980s. The large-scale canvasses are very striking, with refreshingly bold use of colour; some of the smaller drawings, however, do look off-puttingly childlike. I also took in the gallery full of Chinese bird and flower paintings dating from between the 16^th and 20^th centuries; fascinating to see how whilst working within a very standardised form, artists still manage to display stylistic quirks and express their individual obsessions.

"Cumuli" by Gillian Ayres