religion
David Kettle
With its throbbing crowds and its performers baying for attention (and for audiences), the Edinburgh Fringe can be a hectic, raucous place. But for anyone who needs a break from the crammed-full, in-your-face stand-up gigs, thankfully three shows provide far calmer, more intimate experiences – involving just you and one other.At Summerhall, Without Sin (★★★★, until 27 August), created by Dublin-based Unqualified Design Studio, takes the explicit form of a confessional – quite literally, with a specially constructed, two-alcove wooden box nestling on one side of the venue’s courtyard. Enter it Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Whatever your opinion of Vaughan Williams, it’s unlikely that you think of him as an essentially theatrical composer. Yet he did write at least three important (as well as several less important) works for the stage: a ballet (not so-called), Job, a one-act opera (also not so-called), Riders to the Sea, and a full-length music drama, The Pilgrim’s Progress, based of course on Bunyan’s famous but probably no longer much read allegory of that name.Since its none too successful first performance at Covent Garden in 1951, VW’s Pilgrim’s Progress has suffered much the same fate as its source. One Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ latest combines his apparently effortless immediacy at acoustic guitar songwriting with an orchestrated opulence that sometimes pushes the sound towards the realms of musical theatre. Lyrically, he’s in fine form too, but what will likely define many listeners’ response to the album is how they feel about his repeated and passionate belief in God, which permeates everything.This review is not the place to unpack Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ complex 50+ year journey from spiritual Sixties/Seventies troubadour to hardcore Islamic devotee to relaxed-Muslim-who’s-rediscovered-his-inner- Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’ve had 75 years to get used to Scrooge McDuck, so we can hardly complain if the Americans indulge in a little cultural appropriation and send Charles Dickens’ misanthrope to Depression-era Tennessee for another whirl on the catharsis-redemption ride. And, even if we Brits may feel a bit sniffy about Scrooge’s reinvention, he’s been kidnapped by Dolly Parton, the patron saint of country songs, for a holiday run on the South Bank - so listen y’all, there’ll be no rootin’ tootin’ about that round these parts.Expanded from a 40-minute "park presentation" at Dollywood into a full-fledged Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Pain is, at one and the same time, something to avoid, and also something you can use. Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese-American mystical author of the 1923 best-seller The Prophet, concludes that, despite suffering, “all is well”, but how true is that? In his award-winning play, which premiered in Boston in 2011, American playwright Stephen Karam examines the issues in a thoroughly original, brilliantly constructed and thematically compelling way.Now getting its belated European premiere at the Hampstead Theatre, Sons of the Prophet is an enthralling experience, both intellectually and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The kitchen sink drama has been a standby of English theatre for 70 years or more, but not always with an actual sink on stage. But there it is, in an everyday home that harbours a secret or two in Clive Judd’s debut play, the winner of the 2022 Papatango New Writing Prize. Matt, distracted and not wholly at ease, pitches up unannounced at the house in which he grew up, just outside Kidderminister, one of the more faceless towns in one of the more faceless regions of England. His cousin, Jess, seems listless, neither pleased nor displeased to see him some two years after last he was in Read more ...
Gary Naylor
I’ll confess to a certain schadenfreude when the American televangelists who seemed so foreign to us Brits were led away to be papped on their perp walks, ministers in manacles: One big name after another skewered on their own hubris, gulling the gullible out of their savings and shoe-horning right-wing ideologues into political and judicial office. Thank God (ironically) that we’re too smart for that kind of nonsense in Europe. How’s that turning out then? Perhaps it was the lockdown; perhaps it was the recent excellent film, The Eyes Of Tammy Faye; or perhaps it was just getting Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Witch Fever are a seething punk outfit from Manchester whose debut album rampages at the patriarchy with unbridled fury. The tone throughout is summed up in “Sour”, wherein grimy, gloomy riffin’ is accompanied by oblique references to Christianity, before the whole slams into a chorus of shrieked outrage, “They won’t take no for an answer/As if they ever fucking ask/Yeah, we incite this violence/Nothing ever changed in silence.”Frontperson Amy Walpole draws from her past, growing up in a family that was part of an evangelical sect (the Charismatic Church). Her lyrics take God as the ultimate Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It can’t have been an easy pitch. “Popes. Both foreign, yes. German and Argentinian – sorry, can’t change either. Eighty-something and the other’s a decade younger. Mainly just talking about their pasts and their different approaches to Roman Catholic theology. No chorus of angels, no. Can't cross-promote with Sister Act, no. We thought we’d open in Northampton…”Anthony McCarten’s play, The Two Popes, did open in Northampton, at the Royal & Derngate in 2019, and went on to be adapted into a feature film that won nominations for Academy Awards, BAFTAs and Golden Globes. Now it comes to the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A semi-staged concert performance of a musical is a little like a third trimester ultrasound scan. You should see the anatomy in development, the shape of what is to come and, most importantly, discern a heart beating at its centre. But you can’t tell if what will arrive some time later will be a bouncing baby or a sickly child. So it is with this iteration of a new British musical, Treason. We’re in a divided kingdom whose leader, Queen Elizabeth I, is about to die and whose successor is unclear – the audience did not need too much prompting to catch the contemporary parallels. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If jukebox shows occupy one end of the musical theatre spectrum and Stephen Sondheim's masterpieces the other, Sister Act The Musical is somewhere in-between.We get songs we know (Alan Menken's score, heard first on the West End and then, in 2011, on Broadway, includes many staples of talent shows and daytime radio), stunt casting for name recognition and, best of all for a production delayed for two years by Covid, a confident showmanship that screams "entertainment"! If you can afford to be sniffy about such blatant commerciality in these straitened times, then good for you!The director Read more ...
Harriet Mercer
The word “shrine” somersaults me back to the path of the Camino de Santiago. I have lost count of the faces that smiled up from photos positioned in the hollow of trees, some with little plastic figurines for company, others set in stone next to a sculptural pile of pebbles. Some of the shrines also sheltered a handwritten prayer or a crucifix; most had burnt-out tea-candles.Phoebe Powers imagined her debut poetry collection, Shrines of Upper Austria, “as a shrine: a gathering of objects, words and images important to someone, both as discrete objects and as a composition”. Her second poetry Read more ...