Reviews
Marianka Swain
The Forest of Arden takes many forms, but in Blanche McIntyre’s meticulously purist production, it’s strictly a state of mind – no leafy bowers in sight. Here, the unspoken can be voiced, the bounds of gender and class broken, and courtly conventions stripped away to reveal folksy values. McIntyre’s is a typically astute interpretation, but – other than a couple of well-deployed props – lacks the playfulness and invention that might help a languidly earthbound three hours take flight.Shakespeare’s comic take on pastoral romance begins with a flurry of banishments. Usurpring Duke Frederick Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Those expecting an evening at the circus tonight, such as L’Oublié(e)’s advertising hinted at, were in for a shock. I saw a few children in the foyer and would be intrigued to know what they made of it. There were moments of pure nightmare amidst its parade of striking imagery. The debut show of French dancer and contortionist Raphaëlle Boitel is an imagistic, allegorical hour, heavily dipped in circus techniques, yet mostly deserting that medium’s levity and comedy in favour of an abject hallucinatory quality. I was gobsmacked by its audacious visuals but occasionally turned off by its Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A skateboarding female vampire in a striped Brêton top. A James Dean look-alike with a junkie father. A prostitute as confessor. Spaghetti western-influenced music. The black-and-white A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a smorgasbord of attention-grabbing elements brought together in what is being promoted as the “first Iranian vampire Western”.The accuracy of the geographic tagging will be returned to in a few paragraphs, but one thing is clear about the self-consciously quirky A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night: it’s a unique proposition.The setting is Bad City, somewhere in Iran. Arash ( Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Frank Loesser seems to be known in Britain for one show and one show only, which seems a shame given that the composer-lyricist of Guys and Dolls has a CV that includes the ravishing The Most Happy Fella and his 1962 Pulitzer prize-winning How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which was last seen locally a decade ago at Chichester but remains unproduced in London since, well, whenever. And by way of partial recompense, along came a one-off concert version of the show and what a glory it remains, its defining mixture of satire and sweetness pretty well unmatched by any musical Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Flavia Coelho once told me her parents in the favelas of Rio put an aluminium bucket over her head as the only way to calm her down. It was also a useful echo chamber to practise her singing. Her parents were hairdressers for drag queens. She still comes over an overactive child on stage and is one of the most dynamic live acts you are likely to see: she’s like a Duracell bunny on stage. She performed as part of a trio with a keyboardist and drummer, playing low slung guitar and bashing drums sporadically during her set, but the lean line-up seemed expandable – give her the cash and she would Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Two-and-a-half hours? That’s one hell of a long puppet show,” said a friend. We had, however, read the Brighton Festival programme wrong. The pre-interval section of last night’s show was a screening of the BBC documentary Nina Conti – A Ventriloquist’s Story: Her Master’s Voice, which was on television a couple of years back and nominated for a BAFTA. It’s oddly moving, with Conti attending the world’s biggest ventriloquists’ convention in Kentucky, ostensibly saying goodbye to her career, and leaving a doll owned by her late mentor and lover, theatrical maverick Ken Campbell, at a spooky Read more ...
Florence Hallett
What strange things netsuke are. Tiny sculptures, usually made from wood or ivory and depicting anything from figures, to fruit to animals, they were first made in the 17th century as toggles to attach pockets and bags to the robes worn by Japanese men. For as long as they have existed they have been considered highly collectible, and perhaps it is this, and the rapturous appreciation they inspire in their devotees, that to me at least makes them seem hopelessly, unspeakably kitsch.Listening to the potter Edmund de Waal talking last night as part of the Brighton Festival, it struck me that Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
This was a very "concert" performance indeed. Across the stage music stands stood like sentinels lest any rash singer attempted to stand out and – surely not – act. Such fears were misplaced (or the stands did their job) in the end, as the music was what mattered and everyone stood and sang, with one outstanding exception, the Kundry of Mihoko Fujimura.It can be no coincidence that of all the singers on stage she knew her role most intimately, and had worked for some years with Stefan Herheim in his celebrated production at Bayreuth. That said, Burkhard Fritz (pictured below) has sung the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This penultimate night of the London (formally Lufthansa) Festival of Baroque Music brought beautiful, intelligent, superbly musical singing from two sopranos Julia Doyle and Grace Davidson, who sang early 18th century works by François Couperin: two exultatory motets, a Magnificat and the Leçons de Ténèbres.Their voices were ideally suited to these works, and particularly to the Leçons which filled the second half as an uninterrupted sequence. The three “Lessons” which have survived and were published – and only three out of what should be a complete sequence for Holy Week, of nine – Read more ...
fisun.guner
If it’s about magic, and features sanitised cobbled streets and dark gothic interiors, then Harry Potter comparisons will no doubt be inevitable.And so it has been with this seven-part adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s hefty 2004 novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, directed by Toby Haynes. The comparison seems fitting, for though this is a mini-series that has the sumptuous look and high production values of a typically lavish BBC costume drama, everything else about it says children’s drama. Surely the BBC schedulers are wrong to put it out after the watershed? Even more than Harry Read more ...
David Kettle
"The darkness deceived me," sings Leonora in Act I as she mistakenly rushes into the arms of the Count di Luna, rather than those of her beloved, the mysterious troubador Manrico who’s been serenading her for nights on end. Seeing Robert B Dickson’s sepulchral lighting in Scottish Opera’s semi-new production of Verdi’s melodramatic shocker Il trovatore – an updated version of the company’s 1992 staging – you can understand why. The production’s Caravaggio-esque gloomy depths and ominous, looming shadows (used to particularly grotesque and unsettling effect in the famous "Anvil Chorus") soon Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Free events at celebratory citywide occasions such as the Brighton Festival are a mixed blessing. Unfortunately, the fact they’re free means we’re supposed to be thankful even when they’re actually a bit ramshackle and rubbish. We are British, after all, and “putting up with” is a national characteristic. It’s great, then, to be able to report that the hour-long adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s famous dystopian 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, by local open air theatre crew Periplum, was a truly enjoyable success.Preston Barracks was originally set up to counter possible Napoleonic invasion then, Read more ...