festivals
David Kettle
Orpheus ★★★★ This unashamedly sentimental storytelling show got its premiere a couple of years back in the back garden of a cheese shop in Cromarty, before touring the Scottish Highlands, we’re told. With its lo-fi, minimalist aesthetic, which strips theatre right back to its essentials of story and song, Orpheus could pitch up anywhere and charm with its captivating collision of present-day beery nights out and ancient Greek myth.Dave is nearing 30, and only sees the world in shades of grey, until he encounters Eurydice and his life magically transforms to vivid colour Read more ...
David Kettle
It was Simon Rattle’s first visit to the Edinburgh International Festival for – well, really quite a few years. And the first of his two concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra drew, perhaps predictably, a capacity crowd in the Usher Hall, for what was in fact quite an odd, uncompromising programme – if one that ultimately delivered magnificently.The fizzing chemistry that Rattle and the LSO players have clearly built up over their first season together was blazingly evident – not least in the concert’s gargantuan opener, Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety. Rattle was Read more ...
David Kettle
Underground Railroad Game ★★★★★ The game of the show’s title is a fun educational exercise on the US Civil War devised by Teacher Caroline and Teacher Stuart at Hanover Middle School, with the aim of bringing alive the flight of slaves from the south to the north. Can the kids playing Unionist soliders move the slave dolls between the school’s safe-house boxes, without the fugitives being captured by the Confederates?The title also refers, perhaps, the far more adult games taking place between the two teachers as they play out their (or, perhaps more correctly, Teacher Stuart’ Read more ...
David Kettle
Coriolanus Vanishes ★★★★ Writer and director David Leddy was himself the original solo performer in his Coriolanus Vanishes when it premiered in Glasgow in 2017. But in this powerful, visually stunning outing as part of the Traverse’s very strong festival programme this year, its actor is Irene Allan. It’s a change of gender that casts the work in an entirely new light (and in fact, you can’t help but imagine Leddy’s fragmented monologue from a male perspective), but one that simultaneously changes nothing.As with so much of his work, Leddy’s Coriolanus Vanishes dovetails the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Twinned with the legendary Newport Folk Festival, founded on Rhode Island in 1959 as a counterpart to the celebrated jazz festival, the Cambridge Folk Festival this year celebrated its 54th birthday under blue skies. The sun shone relentlessly throughout its four days, which meant that performers squinted out at a sea of semi-clad and often tattooed bodies, many sheltering under beaded parasols. Keeping everything in tune with the high levels of humidity can’t have been easy though most everyone managed it – even though, as Janis Ian joked, tuning has sometimes been antithetical to folkies. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of the banes of music culture is over-categorisation. It always has been. The statement that there are only two types of music, good and bad, has been apocryphally attributed to a wide range of figureheads – most especially Louis Armstrong – but whoever said it first, the reason it keeps popping back up is there’s a truth to it. The music nominees for this year’s Hospital Club h 100 Awards reflect a satisfying public swerve away from niche listening, away from those who would isolate via genre and background, a move towards opening all out to all, which can only be a healthy development. Read more ...
David Kettle
Ulster American ★★★★★ David Ireland’s brand new, brutally incendiary black comedy gleefully tosses a grenade into any lazy liberal sensibilities at the festival (and, let’s face it, there are plenty of those). Race, gender, rape, prejudice, all and more are mercilessly prodded, provoked and picked apart in this viciously hilarious farce of ideas.Timid director Leigh (a wonderfully nervy, squirming Robert Jack) has miraculously enrolled obnoxious, swaggering Hollywood A-lister Jay (Darrell D’Silva) to star in the West End premiere of a shocking new play on the Troubles. But its Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
In the days around WOMAD there have been plenty of media about how the “hostile environment” towards migrants has created all sorts of problems for artists attempting to get here from around the world. Certainly, we are being denied some of the hottest new acts - like the wild blue-haired Moonchild Sanelly from South Africa or the hottest new act from Nigeria, Chicoco Sounds. WOMAD have just signed a new 12-year deal at Charlton Park, however - and if you wanted to find the spiritual centre for the liberal, tolerant, positive globalism currently under threat, WOMAD would be a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gusting. It’s not a word I’ve ever given much thought. You hear it on weather forecasts but I’m not a farmer of a fisherman so when they say it’ll be windy “with possible gusting speeds of up to 45 miles per hour” my brain doesn’t really register what that means on the ground. Until now. Camp Bestival 2018 was eventually defined by gusting (that and, apparently, Mary “Irrelevant” Berry). It was the unstoppable gusting that finally cancelled the festival a day early, a sad development but I could understand why. And I could feel it too, for by the time we left all my senses deeply knew exactly Read more ...
David Nice
"They incessantly break down, destroy and fragment the mistrust that exists among people," wrote a Latvian journalist of a folklore group during the start of the Baltic countries' "singing revolution" against Soviet rule in 1988. This is the recent reality, a nonviolent uprising unique in history, behind the daunting facts and figures of Latvia's latest "Song and Dance Celebration". In 65 events over a week in Riga, having rehearsed for five years, 16,500 singers from 427 choirs and 18,174 dancers from 739 groups - including those in the post-war Latvian diaspora around the world - perform to Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Cornbury Festival holds a very special place in my heart. When the babies were young, we realised that if we were going to be up all night without sleep we might as well be sat in a field listening to music rather than staring out of the window at a dreary North London street. Luckily for us, we accidentally picked one of the most family-friendly festivals out there.Over the years Cornbury has gone from strength to strength, headlining musicians from Bryan Adams, Kaiser Chiefs and Seal to Tom Jones, Razorlight, Jools Holland, and Van Morrison. Thank abso-goodness then, that rather than Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Much as I love Strauss’s Ariadne in its final form, I have a sneaking nostalgia for the original version (attached to Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme), which had Zerbinetta and her companions popping up after the final love duet and gently letting out some of its gas. Even in Alan Privett’s sparkling new production for Longborough, the too protracted revised ending threatens to die on its feet, and is kept alive only by the fine singing of the two principals, Helena Dix and Jonathan Stoughton, neither of them exactly sprightly actors, and by superb orchestral Read more ...