circus
Edinburgh Fringe 2014: Circa, BeyondThursday, 28 August 2014
Once, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe was all about penniless students presenting avant-garde plays to audiences of three in church halls. These people still come, but now they compete for attention with professional production companies who, it’s to... Read more... |
What Graeae did nextSunday, 13 April 2014
As an 11-year-old, I used to love writing my address as My Bedroom, 50 Ridsdale Rd, Sherwood Rise, Nottingham, England, Great Britain, The World, The Universe. We belong to ourselves, but our sense of belonging is also about people and places... Read more... |
Limbo, Southbank CentreTuesday, 21 May 2013
Circus is a broad church these days. It can be housed on the street, a grand proscenium stage and all points in between. For this latest incendiary reinvention of the form, it makes its way back into an intimate big top where the residual DNA of... Read more... |
DVD: Santa SangreFriday, 09 November 2012
Possessed by the spirit of his dead mother, a young man is driven to murder women who excite him sexually. Sound familiar? Director Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo) acknowledges his debt to Hitchcock by placing the mother in a rocking chair; there’s... Read more... |
Finnish oddball circus tours in JuneMonday, 19 March 2012Finland’s Race Horse Company returns to the UK with a circus spectacular Petit Mal, a success on its first visit here two years ago. The tour starts at Stratford Circus, London on 1 & 2 June, then visits Oxford's Playhouse and Poole Lighthouse,... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Latitude Festival: Smorgasbord in SuffolkTuesday, 19 July 2011
Latitude: this four-day event in the attractive environs of Henham Park, near Southwold, is, as its slogan says, “more than just a music festival”. Quite so. But how to review such a groaning cultural smorgasbord? This year, rather than... Read more... |
War and Peace at the Circus, Giffords CircusMonday, 04 July 2011
A village green, a little big top - and War and Peace. Sometimes large ambitions come in the smallest packages, and one can only take one’s hat off to the ambitious, pocket-sized Giffords Circus for setting out to squish Tolstoy’s four-volume epic... Read more... |
Chouf Ouchouf, Queen Elizabeth HallSunday, 24 April 2011
If you’re looking for a surprising and off-the-wall show this school holidays, I’ve no hesitation in hugely recommending Chouf Ouchouf, a brilliantly and theatrically inventive acrobat theatre show performed by the Groupe Acrobatique de Tangier, a... Read more... |
Du Goudron et Des Plumes, Barbican/ Flogging a Dead Horse, Roundhouse StudioFriday, 28 January 2011
Five people stand in the dark. A bleak gantry descends with a rumble onto their heads. They scuttle under it and flatten themselves to escape a crushing, but then they get up and start building. The platform is stripped of planks, rebuilt at crazy... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Belfast: Scenes from the 48th Belfast FestivalSunday, 31 October 2010
In National Anthem, the debut play by bestselling novelist Colin Bateman, a composer lies prostrate on the floor. Half hungover, half waiting for inspiration, he has been commissioned to co-write an anthem for Northern Ireland with a poet and has... Read more... |
Art Gallery: The Museum of EverythingWednesday, 20 October 2010
Whether you think the weird world of Walter Potter is cute or creepy, there’s little doubt that the Victorian taxidermist, and creator of humorous tableaux in which fluffy creatures enact human scenarios, has acquired some standing in the art... Read more... |
Faust, Young Vic TheatreSaturday, 02 October 2010
It's hard to overestimate the importance of Goethe's Faust to the German soul, though I did once have a German friend who valued George Eliot's Middlemarch more highly. If there's a real English competitor to Goethe in the literary stakes, it is of... Read more... |
