Preview
Veronica Lee
The Glasgow International Comedy Festival was launched last night (the day after Burns Night) at the Leicester Square Theatre in London, with Stewart Lee, Rob Deering, Simon Munnery, Janey Godley and others giving a taster of what's to come in Scotland's second city 12-29 March.The festival – the biggest of its kind in Europe – is now in its 13th year and goes from strength to strength; this year there are 400 shows in 46 venues over 18 days. The strong line-up features both big names in comedy as well as those starting out in their careers; of the former, Jimmy Carr, Dylan Moran, Frankie Read more ...
Matthew Wright
John Coltrane’s album A Love Supreme, recorded 50 years ago next week, is second only to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue as a revered document of jazz recording. Inspired by Coltrane’s spiritual awakening on overcoming his addiction to heroin and alcohol in the late 1950s, it has (by his standards, at least) a relatively simple structure, following a four-note motif through four movements with the quasi-religious titles "Acknowledgement", "Resolution", "Pursuance", and "Psalm."The spiritual intensity of Coltrane’s tone, and the aspects of the prodigious technical accomplishments of the final years Read more ...
Simon Munk
Welcome to the future; welcome to the ever-present now. Sci-fi is evergreen – perhaps because, unlike other fictional forms, its primary focus is not one style or historic period. It is constantly holding a slightly warped mirror up to our present concerns and extrapolating, asking "is this what you want?", or "could we go here?" or even "this is what you really are."So while Westerns or crime thrillers can speak of universal human themes, or pose weighty questions, they are always anchored in a specific time. Sci-fi, on the other hand, is barely even a "genre" – it's what happens "next Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Acclaimed British jazz singer Georgia Mancio celebrates five years of ReVoice!, her festival of jazz song, with an expanded event – now twice its original length – beginning next week. Mancio’s programming combines some of the most charismatic and original performers worldwide to create ten concerts (some with several performances) that display the art of jazz singing at its cosmopolitan best.In some quarters, vocal jazz can still be too closely associated with restaurant crooners to be widely recognised as a serious musical form. While all of these performers are highly entertaining, and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A pair of Oscar hopefuls that take wildly divergent perspectives on World War II were confirmed today as the opening and closing night films of the 58th annual BFI London Film Festival, running 8-19 October at a range of venues across the capital.Proceedings will kick off with the European premiere of The Imitation Game, starring recent Emmy winner Benedict Cumberbatch as the gay code-breaker Alan Turing, and will close 11 days later with a second European premiere – this one of Fury, with the film’s executive producer Brad Pitt doubling as star in his role as a battle-hardened army sergeant Read more ...
Jo Verrent
The audience comment I most want to hear during next week's Unlimited Festival is: this show has transformed my perception of disability. We got that over and over and over during the first Unlimited Festival, which ran as part of the Cultural Olympiad in 2012. And I want that again. It’s all about making people understand that disability isn’t a negative, awful experience, just a facet of life that can give you as much as it apparently appears to take away. In fact, it just gives you more.I’m senior producer for the Unlimited commissions programme, which has worked with nine disabled Read more ...
Matthew Sharp
Shakespeare's ubiquitous “planetary influence” is well-documented. As Stephen Marche points out in How Shakespeare Changed Everything, not much from our sex lives to the assassination of Lincoln remains untouched. And, of course, there's the language. You may think that what you are reading has more rhyme than reason, be madness (though there is method in it) or amount to nothing more than a wild goose chase. It may be Greek to you, make your hair stand on end or set your teeth on edge. It goes without saying that brevity is the soul of wit and that comparisons are odious, so why does he lay Read more ...
Jenny Sealey
As an 11-year-old, I used to love writing my address as My Bedroom, 50 Ridsdale Rd, Sherwood Rise, Nottingham, England, Great Britain, The World, The Universe. We belong to ourselves, but our sense of belonging is also about people and places and our sense of who we are in the world. It became our starting point for the collaboration with Circo Crescer e Viver. Graeae's Reasons to be Cheerful was part of Unlimited Festival in Rio and I was also there to share the experience of co-directing the London 2012 Paralympic Games Opening Ceremony. I had the opportunity to meet Junior Perim and Read more ...
Bridget Keehan
The idea for Day to Go – the show takes its name from a bus ticket – sprang from my own bus journeys around Barry and from a desire to make a piece of theatre specific and relevant to the town. I persuaded a local company to lend me a bus for a few days so I could start to plan the route and, at the same time, I began a series of conversations with bus drivers, bus users, café owners, choir leaders, librarians, hairdressers and even the local undertakers in a bid to find out what matters most to people in Barry.The common theme that emerged from these conversations was a sense of loss for Read more ...
mark.kidel
On Sunday night, you can hear Martin Amis sound off about Englishness. An advance selection of extracts from the interview were published in the Radio Times on Tuesday. The reaction from the press was instantaneous: Amis is always good copy. The writer’s reflections – out of the context of the film, which none of the journalists appeared to have seen – excited a series of predictable responses, constrained by the ideological straightjacket of both right and left – and, no doubt, the patriotic sensitivities of this island nation. The surprising thing is that, although the film will be Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When a book is published, there are broadly speaking three alternative fates which lie in wait. It goes global, it sinks without trace, or it sells modestly and steadily to the readership for whom it was intended. There is, however, another potential option, which is that it catches a thermal and veers off in an unforeseen direction.In 2008 my book I Found My Horn was published. It told of my fractured association with a musical instrument I learned for seven years in my youth, which I then resumed on the brink of my forties. I gave myself a target: at the end of the year I had to stand up in Read more ...
Simon Munk
Immersive theatre is a wonderful thing. It has closed up the cosy distancing of actors appearing on stage, the silent, passive audience below in the darkness; it has shaken up the way classic stories can be told – rebooting time-worn plays; and it has delivered some truly magical, mysterious experiences. But there's a problem. At the heart of most of the larger immersive theatre experiences such as Punchdrunk's The Drowned Man there's a passivity – the audience is still just an audience.Witness the frenzied scramble of attendees to The Drowned Man feverishly racing after actors, tweeting Read more ...