old age
Salt, Root and Roe, Trafalgar StudiosTuesday, 15 November 2011Many dramatists have taken their turn putting faces to Thoreau’s lives of “quiet desperation”. But the challenge in what Thoreau goes on to conclude – that it is therefore a mark of wisdom and the wise to avoid acts of desperation – has been taken... Read more... |
Salt of LifeMonday, 08 August 2011Mid-August Lunch (2009) was the most purely enjoyable of the welcome new wave of Italian films. Watching its writer-director Gianni Di Gregorio, then 59, star as a failed Roman rogue with a lived-in face, swigging wine while failing to corral his... Read more... |
BeginnersTuesday, 19 July 2011The early gurglings of love, full of vulnerability and risk, thrill and discovery, are the very stuff of the movies. Romance is cinema’s basic currency. Whenever the familiar heroic faces of the big screen are not firing pump action weapons from the... Read more... |
Pulp, Hyde ParkSunday, 03 July 2011Well, it pains me to say it, but if there has to be a winner Morrissey edged it. Jarvis was Nadal to Mozza's Djokovic. Both match-fit after appearances at Glastonbury, both would have been invincible against anyone else. But Jarvis was still great,... Read more... |
MammuthThursday, 02 June 2011In Mammuth the immense Gérard Depardieu hits the road, on both a practical quest and spiritual journey, his enormous form testing the metal of a motorcycle. He is flanked on his travels by the glorious French countryside, wind whipping through his... Read more... |
Or You Could Kiss Me, National TheatreWednesday, 06 October 2010Theatrical conceits, much like London buses, seem these days to come in threes. Or so it is suggested by the Neil Bartlett/Handspring collaboration Or You Could Kiss Me, the third Cottesloe production this year to peer into the future, albeit only... Read more... |
Music for Life: where other therapies cannot reachThursday, 01 July 2010Last year I witnessed the miracle of music. Eight extremely old people, all of them suffering from dementia, sat in a circle, each with a percussion instrument in their lap. Among them were sprinkled three classical musicians - a violist, a... Read more... |
Willie Nelson & Family, The Playhouse, EdinburghThursday, 10 June 2010A few years ago I wrote a book about Willie Nelson. Keith Richards supplied the introduction – a Kafkaesque saga which deserves a book in itself - during which he opined that Willie had a severe case of “white line fever”. This (for once) had... Read more... |
Kontakthof, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Barbican TheatreSunday, 04 April 2010A house of contact, a place to make contact - this bare, evocative title sits on one of Pina Bausch’s most appealing works, and also its most elastic. Brought this week to the Barbican posthumously, staged by her company on two amateur casts,... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Meeting Pina BauschTuesday, 30 March 2010This week the world-renowned Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch arrives in London - for the first time, without its towering creator. Last summer the German choreographer died at the age of 68. The company intends to continue, despite the dodgy track... Read more... |
Really Old, Like Forty Five, National TheatreWednesday, 03 February 2010Okay, now that you’re a citizen of Dystopia, and you’ve reached the regulation old age, it’s time to check into an approved care home. Please enter the Ark, and take your allotted bed. A government official will be with you in due course. Yes, that’... Read more... |
Grumpy Old Women, Dorking HallsThursday, 22 October 2009Anyone looking for a novel way into their PhD on how the British like to be entertained would do well to sit in the audience of the live version of Grumpy Old Women, a successful spin-off from the BBC television series where celebby femmes d’un... Read more... |
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