Studio Voltaire, London
Ben Whishaw guides us through a rich, beautifully filmed tour of two covert and overlapping worlds of Britain’s recent past
A drowned deckchair floats in a scum of dead algae and weed on the lake in St James’s Park. Young men punting on the river Cam, with King’s College Chapel basking in the sunshine, redolent of a world of continuity, whose fractures are invisible. It could be a scene a century old. Nightlife on the street in central London, on the edge of Soho and theatreland, seen from above. Perhaps this last is a view from a smeary window in John Le Carré’s fictional home of the intelligence service on Cambridge Circus. Who is looking out?
Windows and shadows, buildings we can’t enter and rooms whose purpose we can only guess at. Shadowy paths, a bosky dell hidden from prying eyes, the edge of a cornfield after harvest. We flip from place to place, following rumours and bedevilled by uncertainties.
