Tomorrow. Scenes from an unrealized film.

Häftad bok. Victoria and Albert Museum. 2013. 97 sidor.

Mycket gott skick. Språk: engelska/English. -- Scandinavian double act Michael Elmgreen (Danish) and Ingar Dragset (Norwegian) have a talent for composing intricate fictions that reimagine the anxieties of the art world as personal traumas. ‘Tomorrow’, their latest installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum boasts a plot thick with angst and failure, and with décor to match.

‘Tomorrow’ sees the Museum’s former Textile Galleries redecorated as the once-grand living quarters of retired architect Norman Swann. Swann is cynical, unsuccessful, homosexual, aristocratic and broke. An accompanying script’‘from an unrealised film’‘sets the scene: Daniel Wilder, Swann’s inept former pupil turned social climbing interior designer, has purchased the bankrupt architect’s family home in South Kensington. After a drunken night on the town, Wilder attempts to take possession of the apartment before the previous occupant has left. Crisis ensues.

As a human drama, ‘Tomorrow’ is trashy, theatrical, morbid and violent: a miniature British version of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’’ Swann cannot forgive Wilder for failing to emerge as his gifted protégé; Wilder cannot forgive Swann for placing such an oppressive hope upon him, and for other unspecified corrupting acts. Their dialogue is fragmented, acerbic and fraught with misunderstandings.