Manchester
philip radcliffe
Wagner was not averse to highlights being plucked from the mighty Ring, even though it is an all-encompassing drive-through drama. Perhaps it’s as well, since the bicentenary celebrations of his birth are getting up steam and concert planners are at pains to pull out a few plums. After all, we can’t wallow in the whole of the cycle all of the time.For the start of his second season as Chief Conductor of the BBC Phil, Juanjo Mena (pronounced Huanho Mayna, he being a proud Basque) chose favourite dramatic excerpts from Götterdämmerung. Not a choice for the fainthearted, featuring the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The uproarious success of Downton Abbey, now firmly established as one of Britain's great national pastimes, seems to have had the happy effect of persuading ITV1 that it must make more drama. Thus, the autumn of 2012 has been ushered in by new ITV dramas swirling about our ears like tumbling leaves, from The Last Weekend and The Scapegoat to the comeback of Downton itself.More interestingly, the channel has also served up a batch of conspicuously female-centric pieces, albeit with mixed results. The murdered-girl story A Mother's Son felt like a series brutally curtailed by chainsaw, losing Read more ...
theartsdesk
R.E.M.: Document 25th Anniversary EditionKieron TylerAlthough the band themselves have not lasted out the 25 years since the release of their fifth album Document, R.E.M. haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. The memory will live, fed by reissues. Document built on the more straightforward approach of its predecessor, Lifes Rich Pageant, and was issued in the wake of their breakthrough hit “The One I Love”. A re-promoted “It’s the End of the World as we Know it (and I Feel Fine)” gave them another hit in early 1988. Both singles were included on the album. At this point R.E.M. were Read more ...
Laura Silverman
When Hindle Wakes opened in 1912 in London, the script was burned in the street. Stanley Houghton, a member of the Manchester School of playwrights, had exposed one of society's double standards: that it was fine for a man to have a guiltless fling before marriage, but it was not acceptable for a woman. The problem with Bethan Dear's earnest revival is that the play no longer holds the same moral force. Today, the idea that Fanny Hawthorn, a mill girl, goes away for the weekend with Alan Jeffcote, the mill owner's son, and then refuses to marry him is hardly shocking.Solidly constructed, Read more ...
philip radcliffe
What’s in a name? Pinchwife, Fidget, Horner, Squeamish, Sparkish… William Wycherley labelled his characters blatantly. No one is hornier than Horner, the womaniser who puts it about (sorry) that he is impotent after surgery for the pox. Pinchwife’s wife gets pinched and no one is more cuckolded than he. Mind you, he takes the “if you can’t beat 'em, join ’em” approach in the end when he says “cuckolds, like lovers, should themselves deceive”. Lady Fidget has ants in her pants and her not-so-virtuous group of ladies can hardly move for sexual desire. They are the cougars of their day. Even the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Lee Hazlewood: A House Safe for TigersGraham RicksonLee Hazlewood’s voice can still invoke awe. It's gravelly, sonorous, rasping, but incredibly affecting – even when he’s scraping around in the depths it always sounds musical. A reissue of a hard-to-find 1975 LP, A House Safe for Tigers was originally the soundtrack to a Swedish TV movie directed by Hazlewood’s friend Torbjörn Axelman. Hazlewood had moved to Sweden in 1970, partly to ensure that his son wouldn’t be drafted to Vietnam. He continued to record and release new material, most of which slipped under the radar.A House Safe Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When Clarence “Big Man” Clemons, the E Street Band’s charismatic saxophone player, died of stroke-related complications this time last year, there were those among us who wondered if we’d ever see the band together again. His on-stage interplay with Bruce Springsteen seemed to have become even more central to the greatest rock'n'roll show on earth since the band reformed proper in 1999, even if the knees that supported that magnificent frame could no longer hold out the length of shows that regularly topped the three-hour mark. That this year’s Wrecking Ball tour proudly bore the E Street Read more ...
philip radcliffe
The exceptionally moving and heartwarming story of more than 10,000 mostly Jewish children being brought to the safe haven of these shores between December 1938 and September 1939 to rescue them from being victims of the Holocaust, Kindertransport, has oft been told. But now we hear it afresh through the voices of children in a dramatised re-telling. The coincidence of composer Carl Davis’s interest in this extraordinary experience and the Halle’s desire to commission new work for their children’s choir has resulted in Last Train to Tomorrow.“I wanted to focus on the journey before the Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Visualise a large lost property office, such as that for Transport for London at Baker Street, which inspired this production, its racks stuffed with thousands of items, from false teeth to umbrellas, prosthetic limbs to mobile phones. You name it, it’s been lost – and found. Why, only the other day, some loved one’s ashes were left on the tram between Manchester and Bury.Now, think what tales each of those items could tell about their owners and the circumstances of their loss on a journey, especially the journey of life itself. That is the trigger for Jackie Kay’s new play, Manchester Lines Read more ...
theartsdesk
There is film footage of those opening magical, transformative moments: of Brown intoning, “The time, the time is now. Do it now, do it now.” Film, however, could not capture the effect the band’s arrival had on the mood of the crowd; it was a jaw-dropping biblical reaction, of relief, amazement, worship and unadulterated joy. “It was like a massive pilgrimage to witness,” said Roddy McKenna, the man who had been instrumental in signing the band to Jive/Zomba. “It wasn’t a gig – it was a statement.” The resurrection of a day that for so long had threatened disaster began; the party was Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“You aren’t going to get another one of them, are you?” asks Alex Turner, rhetorically, with regard to John Cooper Clarke. He should know. The first explosion into the public eye by his band Arctic Monkeys, with their 2006 album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, owed a direct stylistic debt to the Mancunian poet. But it turns out that Turner’s far from the only one who wishes to announce their fealty to Clarke – from Bill Bailey to Pete Shelley (of Buzzcocks), poet Paul Farley to Steve Coogan, DJ Mark Radcliffe to actor Craig Charles, they all lined up to express admiration.As an Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It’s ironic that Oscar Wilde should escape to the Lake District in 1891 to write a play satirising London society, his first success in the theatre. He took such a shine to the region’s place names that he used them for some of the characters – Berwick, Carlisle, Darlington, Jedburgh. They do seem to lend themselves to titles - we could have had Lady Coniston or Lord Buttermere or Countess Rydal Water. But we got Lady Windermere, which has become part of the language, with that fan, a present from her husband on her 21st birthday, when the play opens.The four-act play is like a Carlton House Read more ...