Features
Melissa Bubnic
In the opening scene of Boys Will Be Boys, the lead character, Astrid, talks about how there’s a boys’ world and a girls’ world. Boys’ world is where you want to be. That’s where power is, that’s where fun is. Boys get to be boys and that means holding all the cards, and doing whatever the fuck you want. How do women get into boys’ world when they’ve got a vagina?This play is about how women navigate life in a man’s world. The play is set in the macho world of fictional trading and broking firm, the very respectable Peterson Jones & Walker. Our characters embrace the work-hard-play-hard Read more ...
David Kettle
Even without any particular pomp or focus for celebration, the 70th Edinburgh International Film Festival has felt like a particularly strong and broad-ranging one, with a programme so big it was a struggle to take it all in.Opening golf drama Tommy’s Honour (reviewed by Demetrios Matheou last week) may have failed to thrill, but there’s been plenty more to entertain and provoke. And as the EIFF heads towards its closing gala – with the Gillies MacKinnon’s remake of Whisky Galore! on Sunday evening – it’s inevitably time for the festival to reveal its award winners.The Michael Powell Award Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Edinburgh film Festival’s signature prize, named after one of its most celebrated directors, is the Michael Powell Award for best British feature film. The dozen up for the award this year have included a Scottish love-triangle road movie, a dystopian drama, an adaptation of Macbeth, and a Welsh language thriller involving identical twins. Where once British film was a predictable affair, rooted in costume drama and social realism, it appears to be happily diverse at present.Two in particular took my fancy. And while neither is perfect, each fulfilled expectations – one for performance, Read more ...
Simon Bent
It’s a little over two years since I was approached to adapt The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson for Manchester Royal Exchange. I was living in Liverpool at the time and had recently seen That Day We Sang by Victoria Wood at the Exchange. It was terrific, wonderfully directed by Sarah Frankcom. I had never seen a musical in the round before, it was so dynamic. There’s nowhere to hide in the round, you can’t get away with anything, you’re totally exposed, and I remember thinking how great it would be to write for such a space.I read Walzer in one sitting and couldn’t put it down. It’s a Read more ...
james.woodall
The Holland Festival is one of the greats. It has a British director, the articulate Ruth Mackenzie, formerly of the Chichester Festival and the cultural Olympiad, now into her second year. It’s the same age as Edinburgh and Avignon – 70 in 2017 – but not as well known, though it should be. “We must,” Mackenzie says, “seriously punch above our weight. And we do.” The festival was founded after the Second World War on, comparable to the Scottish and French ones, principles of reconciliation and presenting the best productions of the human spirt.Every June many opulent, and some rather more Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
To anyone who says that you can’t make a great film about golf, a film which is funny, sexy, and rousing, I have just two words; sadly, for those who attended the opening night of the Edinburgh Film Festival this week, those words are Tin Cup.That film was made in 1996 and starred Kevin Costner – the king of sports movies, in his goofy prime. The one that kicked off Edinburgh on Wednesday, Tommy’s Honour, has plenty of integrity and good intentions, as it celebrates a Scotsman regarded as the grandfather of golf, and his son, who was one of its first stars; it also confirms the movie star Read more ...
Linda Esther Gray
When I sang Isolde to Alberto’s Tristan at English National Opera all those years ago, it was a joy to hear such wonderful tenor sounds in my ears, my heart and my soul. It was always difficult for him to memorise his work and up until the first night I wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen. Yet when we went into that other place of performing he became Tristan and we travelled, on the waves of his beautiful sounds, to places I have seldom been.He was a very experienced singer who had sung with many great sopranos but I always got the feeling he was enjoying his time with me as much as Read more ...
Graham Fuller
When folk rock’s demon fiddler Dave Swarbrick died at 75 on 3 June, it was barely noticed that Real Gone Music released Fairport Convention’s Live in Finland 1971 the same day. Featuring the lineup of Swarbrick, Dave Mattacks (drums), Simon Nicol (guitar), and Dave Pegg (bass), which performed at the annual Ruisrock festival that 22 August, the disc features seven songs played with such force and briskness you’d think they wanted to get the hell away from the Archipelago Sea.Either that or they wanted to show the Finns that they could rock as hard as fellow festival acts the Kinks, Canned Read more ...
David Nice
Flashback to 1981, when the Bolshoy Ballet danced Swan Lake Act Two to a tinny Melodiya recording in Istanbul's Open-Air Theatre (seats were cheap for Interrailing students). Turkey was friends with the Soviet Union then. It hadn't been in the 1950s, when Turkish pianist and citoyenne du monde İdil Biret was advised not to play a Prokofiev sonata in her motherland. And it isn't friendly with Russia now, which didn't stop the first world-class Turkish symphony orchestra, the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic, playing an all-Russian programme featuring controversial 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition Read more ...
Mark Hayhurst
Nothing quite prepares you for your first sight of Thiepval, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. I had read about the events it commemorated and, before that, been told about them as a young boy. I’d studied the war poets at school and as a teenager had been introduced to Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I knew about the vast numbers of war dead, of how they exceeded the populations of famous cities. But once there, in Picardy, gazing for the first time on Sir Edwin Lutyens’s gigantic monument, it was impossible not to gasp Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Life and art have generally had a troubled relationship. In the case of former hobo and punk-blues singer Seasick Steve, however, it all seemed so simple. When he sang "Dog House Boogie" on his extraordinary Hootenanny debut nearly a decade ago, it was his grit and authenticity, even more than his musical skills – though the two go hand-in-hand – that the audience fell in love with. Read any fan forum and it’s clear that Steve is loved because most audiences believe he’s experienced exactly what he sings.The official biography, documented repeatedly in the hundreds of press interviews Steve Read more ...
Simon Evans
Doctor Peter Raby (Emeritus Fellow at Cambridge University) was quick to pull me up on my first stab at A Midsummer Night's Dream – an indulgence-of-a-production played out in a university park to the sound of cucumber flirting with Pimm's. His grounds were that I had failed to acknowledge the mortal danger facing those errant elopers, Hermia and Lysander. He had, he said, expected better of me.Revisiting the play a decade on (I take criticism slowly) I see his point: in turning their backs on the ancient law of Athens and fleeing seven leagues, the pair openly defy the patriarchy of the Read more ...