Sarah says: Book this, read this, visit that

BUY SEATS FOR:

Can’t make it to London’s National Theatre for your usual fix? A friend recently alerted me to the live screenings that Cinema Nouveau is hosting of its productions. And I do mean live. Pop to your local movie house and watch a streamed performance as it happens on the stage, over the pond.

They’ve recently shown mega-author Margaret Atwood in conversation about her new Booker nominee, The Testaments, and I’ve got tickets for the October screenings of Fleabag. The stage version, written and starring the genius Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is what the cult-hit TV series is based on. The reprisal of the play is sold out in London — but not at Nouveau. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is on in November. Book at Ster Kinekor.

READ:

I’ve just finished The Overstory by Richard Powers (Penguin Random House) and I’m not sure I’ll ever be the same. Over 600 pages of narrative about trees might not sound like fun, but this didn’t win last year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction for nothing. It’s an epic, meandering, and hypnotic story of elms, chestnuts, firs, ginko biloba trees, people, and history. It’s also a damning commentary on how we’ve treated our world and just what trouble we’re in as a result.

Then, lunch at St John in London is always a good idea. Especially for the marrow bones on toast. It’s founders Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver have just announced they’re opening a restaurant in LA and, in the same breath, have released a new food bible — aptly called The Book of St John (Penguin Random House). It is a thing of beauty: smoked cod’s roe with egg and potato cake, salted chocolate caramel tart, confit suckling pig shoulder and dandelion, for example. We should all be fervent disciples of their zero-waste and heavenly cooking style.

VISIT:

New York’s Museum of Modern Art (Moma) is reopening on 21 October after an extensive refurb. Two architectural firms, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (who also worked on The High Line) and Gensler, have collaborated to add more than 3 700m² of gallery space to the building. Of course, this means more space for art in new and interdisciplinary ways.

One of the big reopening shows I’m keen on is Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction — The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift. It will feature work donated to the museum by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros — arguably the most important collection of abstract and concrete art from Latin America. Moma has dedicated a series of galleries to display these pieces from Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, and Uruguay. They include art by Lygia Clark, Gego, Raúl Lozza, Hélio Oiticica, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Rhod Rothfuss. 

• From the October edition of Wanted 2019.