fairytales
Mangan, Royal Academy Opera Students, BBCSO, Denève, Barbican HallSaturday, 27 April 2013
Highly sexed cockerels and cats, a lovesick lion and a ballet of frogs might not seem like a recipe, or rather a menagerie, for profundity. Yet in two ravishing French man (or child)-meets-beast fables for the stage, Poulenc and Ravel are quite... Read more... |
Jack the Giant SlayerThursday, 21 March 2013
This is a fairy tale which may send children to sleep before the good bits, then wake them up screaming at the first glimpse of loping, bestial giants. Splicing Jack the Giant-Killer (subject of a 1962 kids’ monster movie which gave me nightmares)... Read more... |
Mare Rider, Arcola TheatreMonday, 28 January 2013
It’s like waiting for a number 19 bus. You hang around for half an hour then two come along at once. So it is just now with plays either written by women or featuring women’s lives. While Amelia Bullimore’s sparky three-hander Di and Viv and Rose is... Read more... |
Midnight's Pumpkin, Battersea Arts CentreFriday, 21 December 2012
If you have any young siblings, friends or relatives in need of burning off a little energy, send them directly to BAC. With their open-hearted style of rough, circusy-type theatre, Kneehigh are ideally suited to this circular barn of a room. Taking... Read more... |
Hansel and Gretel, National TheatreFriday, 14 December 2012
’Tis the season to be jolly. ’Tis also the season to dust off the stories of the Grimms and Perrault and present them as drama, sometimes transmogrified into panto. There are sometimes attempts to go back to source and eschew the tawdry delights of... Read more... |
Rats' Tales, Royal Exchange, ManchesterTuesday, 04 December 2012
Having 30 “rats” running around hardly seems the stuff of festive fare, but since the begetter of the show is Carol Ann Duffy, known in her children’s writing for dark fairy tales, we might expect something different. And, after all, these rodents... Read more... |
Cinderella, Royal Lyceum, EdinburghMonday, 03 December 2012
The idea of making the princely hero of Cinderella a preening, vacuous lead character from some BBC Three-style reality show is a good one. These days the notion of a smart, self-respecting young woman limiting her horizons by playing accessory to a... Read more... |
The Composer and the Water-Nymph: Hans Werner Henze's OndineWednesday, 31 October 2012
Hans Werner Henze, the composer who died on Saturday aged 86, wrote the music for one of Margot Fonteyn's signature ballets, Ondine, a ballet about an inhuman spirit who longs to be joined to a man - but when she does, he must die. It might almost... Read more... |
Holy MotorsWednesday, 26 September 2012
Stop me if you know this one. What do you get if you combine Gallic absurdity with a pristine, pouting Eva Mendes and Kylie as a suicidal chanteuse? The answer, it turns out, is gloriously unpredictable entertainment – by turns satirical, melancholy... Read more... |
Angela Carter: Inside the Bloody ChamberFriday, 24 August 2012
Eighteen months before her death from lung cancer at the age of 51, Angela Carter talked to Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour. She had just edited The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990), a rich stew of stories – Eskimo, Swahili, Armenian – which she had... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Berlioz, Humperdinck, L'OlimpiadeSaturday, 18 August 2012
Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique, Overture ‘Béatrice et Bénédict' Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Robin Ticciati (Linn)Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique needs to sound sweaty and vulgar in all the right places. Over-manicured accounts rarely cohere;... Read more... |
The GiantsFriday, 13 July 2012
It’s hardly incredible for a film to focus on teenagers running wild, not least because teens are such reliably enthusiastic cinema-goers. US cinema in particular is riddled with youthful misbehaviour, with suburban kids coming of age whilst living... Read more... |
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