Rubbing shoulders with royalty

24th May 2002, 1:00am

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Rubbing shoulders with royalty

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/rubbing-shoulders-royalty

Royal Collection
The new Queen’s Galleryat Buckingham Palace is architecturally splendid: traditional style but up-to-date spaces. Royal Treasures displays stunning pieces, from the glitter of the diamond diadem, originally made for George IV but recognisable from current stamps, to the new Lucien Freud portrait, in which the Queen wears it above an expression described as “unsentimental”. The exquisite Faberg items almost upstage the fine paintings, including a Vermeer, a Rembrandt and a Van Dyck. Don’t miss the Leonardo drawing of a foetus. Tickets: 020 7321 2233. Education information: www.royal.gov.uk .

Musical
Ben Elton’s script for We Will Rock You wittily satirises globalisation and the blandness of manufactured pop 300 years hence in a police state planet. Little has changed except that musical instruments are banned. The human voice struggles against conformity, with Elton aware of the irony of contributing to a commercial show in which musicians fictionally play for free. The music is as ever - don’t leave before “Bohemian Rhapsody” after the curtain calls - but, despite some excellent singing, nothing can make up for the absence of Freddie Mercury. Dominion Theatre, London. Tickets: 0870 607 7400.

Film
Banned for 50 years, Asylrecht is a 1949 documentary which shows the conditions in which refugees lived after the Second World War. It’s on show as part of the exhibition Asylrecht - the Right to Asylum at the Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal, until July 14. Also on show is a 7.5 tonne section of the Berlin Wall from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The exhibition is by Another Space, an artists’ organisation that specialises in combining real archive material with constructed environments. Tickets: 01539 725133.

Bollywood
Indian film icons are in Brentford, west London. Part of ImagineAsia, the British Film Institute’s nationwide celebration of South Asian film, Bollywood in Love is an exhibition of posters from the BFI collection. The exhibits show the crafty ways film-makers avoided the no public kissing rule, the popular fantasy song and dance sequence and some of the stars who have become famous since the Forties. The exhibition travels to Bradford, Bristol and Birmingham between September and January. ImagineAsia information: 020 7957 4836.

Fashion
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s next Fashion in Motion display will be by Tata-Naka, a label created by identical Georgian twins Tamara and Natasha Surguladze. Models will walk around the galleries wearing their latest pieces on May 31 at 1pm, and 8 pm, and the twins will hold a forum about their work at 2.30pm in the lecture theatre. Tel: 020 7942 2666.

Theatre
Gwyneth Paltrow shines as an emotionally unbalanced woman who may be a maths genius. Proof is of less interest to mathematicians than students of acting, however. Donmar, London. Tickets: 0207 240 4882.nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;

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