Features
Graham Fuller
In Clive Donner’s 1968 Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, which was released on DVD earlier this year, Barry Evans plays Jamie, a Stevenage sixth-former whose rush to lose his virginity leads him into a series of muted misadventures with girls. They are played by the likes of Adrienne Posta, Judy Geeson, Sheila White and Vanessa Howard. Jamie is randy but sweet, scarcely a rake, and Donner’s jocular film transcends its Swinging Sixties sex comedy label by getting under the skin of teenage doubt and desire. Geeson, playing the luscious blonde Jamie idealises, is the nominal female lead, but Read more ...
theartsdesk
The King James Bible, that great monument in the biography of the English language, is 400 years old this year. To use its own wording, it is as old as the hills, as old as Methuselah. Contemporaneous with Shakespeare, it has given us as many of the richly colourful phrases by which we still live: a nest of vipers, a thorn in the flesh, a fly in the ointment, a lamb to the slaughter, the skin of your teeth, in the twinkling of an eye. And so on and on. It was created, to quote it again, as a labour of love. To celebrate its anniversary, and as Easter approaches, theartsdesk considers some of Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Do you realise we’re talking about a rental apartment building? It’s unheard of,” says a friend. We’re standing on a street corner discussing the new Frank Gehry building in lower Manhattan. Most new apartment buildings here are concrete and glass, flat and dull, every apartment the same white box, not worth a conversation (I’ve lived in two). Gehry’s building is different. New-York-by-Gehry, as it’s grandiosely monikered, is at 8 Spruce Street near the Brooklyn Bridge, bordering the financial district. When you come out of the subway at City Hall, it shimmers above you. It’s big: 76 Read more ...
rona.munro
My latest play, Little Eagles, marks the 50th anniversary of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit around the Earth. Gagarin’s place in history is, quite rightly, assured but little is known about Sergei Korolyov, a brilliant engineer and the chief designer of the Soviet space programme. Koroloyov may not have won the race to put a man on the moon, but he was responsible for a series of extraordinary firsts in the space race, including the first human in space. Little Eagles is his story.In 2007 the Royal Shakespeare Company told me they were looking for contemporary writers to write big Read more ...
alice.vincent
In a play about drugs for a secondary-school audience there is always the potential for cringing. My own experience of theatre for a young audience involved PSHE lessons, overtly moral drama from hammy actors and dated street names for drugs. It was The Magic Roundabout, only more awkward and less entertaining. The Almeida Theatre and its solid Young Friends scheme is working hard to give youth theatre a better image through Crawling in the Dark, a new play which deals with young people and, yes, drugs, but without an embarrassing reference in sight.Natalie Mitchell has managed the Read more ...
howard.male
Although the phrase “world music” was first coined by American ethnomusicologist Robert Brown in the 1960s, it didn’t become a brand, as it were, until 1987, when a bunch of London-based DJs, musicians and record company folk (including the late Charlie Gillett) met in an Islington pub and landed on the idea of putting all this foreign music under one commercially viable umbrella. So you could say that world music was spawned so that record shops would know where to put world music records.The name almost immediately became both a blessing and a curse. But today, I would argue, it’s mostly a Read more ...
facebike
They are hardly the ideal conditions in which to create. Danger is a constant menace, and it comes in multiple guises. Industrial injury is the main threat, as is the risk of arrest. Other hazards include deafness, breathing polluted air and the looming shadow of public discontent. The tools and materials used in this form of installation - power drill, tarmac and steamroller - are expensive. And the work cannot be sold. But despite these powerful deterrents, there are clandestine groups of vagabond practitioners who will stop at nothing to get their work into the public sphere. You Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s an important year for Estonia. The Baltic nation celebrates 20 years of independence from Russia. Capital city Tallinn is European Capital of Culture for 2011. It’s also 10 years since their Eurovision win. theartsdesk is here for Tallinn Music Week, the third annual celebration of the country’s music. Integral to the national fabric, music was fundamental to the independence movement: the move to split from Russia was dubbed “The Singing Revolution”. Tallinn Music Week is more than bands playing and DJs DJing – this festival is laden with meaning.There’s no doubt that Estonia’s music – Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
We all know people who listen to their music from iTunes, aren’t fussed with CDs and use their computer as the sole source for their listening. They’re listening to MP3s, the file format developed for portable players. But MP3s are compressed files with less data than those on a CD. Why listen to this fast-food version of music at home? Do so and it’s a nail in the coffin of sound quality.This isn’t about the pros and cons of downloading or any of the surrounding issues. It’s not about streaming via Spotify – that’s just an advanced form of radio. This is about the creep which is leading to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“What’s the story?” It’s a question you’ll hear again and again in the streets and pubs of Dublin. You can tell a lot about a nation from their greeting; the traditional salutation of northern China, born of decades of famine and physical hardship, translates to “Have you eaten?”, and a psychologist could extrapolate much from our English fondness for impersonal, weather-related pleasantries. So it’s surely no coincidence then that Ireland, and Dublin in particular, should favour this conversational opener. A city home to some 50 publishing houses, that has produced four Nobel Laureates, Read more ...
natalie.wheen
Kenneth MacMillan’s dramatic ballet Manon was premiered in 1974 to a chorus of attacks on its tale of a “nasty little diamond-digger”, as one critic had it. Since then the slut who can’t help herself has risen to become one of the most coveted roles in the world for major classical ballerinas (as another critic at the time foresaw), and the ballet is now in the repertoire of some 18 companies around the world.But one problem has remained constantly noticed - a sense that its orchestral score, a medley of Massenet arranged by Leighton Lucas, could do better justice to the story. Last weekend a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
I can tell you the year (1983). I can tell you the theatre (the newly opened Barbican), the actors (Gambon, Sher), and the speech (“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!”). Hell, I can all but tell you the seat number. Lear and the Fool in the storm stood on a platform mounted on a high pole. It was an arresting way of establishing their elemental isolation. Or it would have been if the gantry gaining the actors access to the platform had been withdrawn. “That’s not meant to be there,” said the person next door to me. And then louder, “They’ve got it wrong.” My father. I still remember someone Read more ...