Bristol
Jasper Rees
In 2016 the Bristol Old Vic turned 250. To blow out the candles, England’s oldest continually running theatre summoned home one of its most splendid alumni. Jeremy Irons – Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, an Oscar winner as Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune, not forgetting the lordly larynx of Scar in The Lion King – arrived at the theatre’s drama school in 1969 and in due course joined the company. The role that called him back was just about the biggest one going: James Tyrone in A Long Day’s Journey into Night.Eugene O’Neill’s monster play tells of a titanic family implosion in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“I’m black – I need to find out how black people live.” So reasoned Kiri, sitting in the back seat of the car driven by her social services case worker. She was on the way from her prospective adopters, a white middle-class couple who already had a teenage son, to pay a first unsupervised visit to her Nigerian-born grandparents. Kiri (Felicia Mukasa, pictured below) was mature beyond her years, open-minded and well-spoken, while her case worker Miriam (Sarah Lancashire) brimmed with mumsy good cheer and sensible advice. The mood was Pollyannishly optimistic – the only dark cloud was the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
One of the more interesting developments of this decade is a blurring around the edges of modern soul music: almost a complete dissolution, in fact, of the boundaries of R&B. From the hyper-mainstream – Drake, The Weeknd, Future – via Solange, Frank Ocean, Blood Orange and Sampha, to fringe experimentalists like Atlanta's Awful Records, international Afro-diasporic collective NON and UK one-off Dean Blunt, R&B is being remade as dark, unpredictable and unsettling.It's into the weirder, gloomier end of this territory that Bristol trio Jabu fit with discomfiting comfort. They come out Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Greek tragedy provides an unending source of material for the stage: in no other theatrical form have the labyrinths of human nature been so deeply explored: the rich tapestry of archetypal family conflicts, driven by instincts that force helpless characters into inescapable constellations of behavior that have resonated through several millennia.The Greeks understood, perhaps better than anyone, the perpetual ambiguity of human character. The divinities they imagined were never one thing or another, good or evil. Christianity and other religions of the book brought us a more rigid set of Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Whatever musicologists may tell us about the patchy authenticity of Monteverdi’s last two operas, they unquestionably make a pair. Il ritorno di Ulisse is all about fidelity and ends with a love duet between the reunited husband and wife. L’Incoronazione di Poppea is almost entirely dedicated to infidelity and ends with a disturbingly beautiful love duet between the adulterous couple, Nero and Poppea, after he has exiled his wife, Ottavia, and ordered his moralising tutor, Seneca, to kill himself, among other equally vicious, if slightly less murderous, diktats.Happily Monteverdi’s only other Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Birdcage Walk in Bristol really exists. It runs under an arched canopy of branches though a long-disused graveyard in Clifton. At this eerie spot, all that remains of the blitzed church of St Andrew’s, rosebay willowherb grows waist-high but “no one lays flowers here; no one mourns”.Throughout her career as novelist and poet, Helen Dunmore has woven garlands for the forgotten dead. Her consistently fine fiction – and, over 15 novels, her standards have never lapsed – happens in the margin or hinterland of great events. Angles of vision shift so that war, revolution and upheaval thunder in the Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Intimacy is a mixed blessing: Richard Twyman’s close-up exploration of sex and violence in his production of Othello for Bristol’s Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory takes the audience on a gripping emotional journey, but one that is at times almost beyond close for comfort.This is theatre in the round with a vengeance: the low-ceilinged space, with the audience seated within feet of the stage, in a 360-degree embrace, leaves no room for escape. Twyman has accentuated the sense of claustrophobia – because yes, intimacy can feel stifling – with a mixture of one-directional vertical top Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In one of Tessa Hadley’s piercingly smart and subtle tales, a woman whose upwardly-mobile path has taken her from Leeds to Philadelphia works for a firm that manufactures instruments to test the “tensile strength” of materials. You can treat the Hadley short story as that sort of device in itself. Precision engineered and finely calibrated, it stress-tests not only marriages and affairs but memories, desires, even identities, with episodes of crisis and discovery that reveal each fault-line or fracture. The reader marvels at the almost scary exactitude – but relishes the steel-edged finesse. Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Andrew Hilton’s new production of All’s Well That Ends Well makes the most of the complexities of a "problem play", neither comedy nor tragedy, and navigates this startling mix of emotional depth and light farce with great deftness. This is Shakespeare as master trickster, playing with narrative genres, the tricks of his characters matching the sleight of hand and suspension of disbelief displayed in a story that combines the simple manicheism and magic of fairy tale with the realities of gender politics, reflections on the inconstancy of human nature and the inifinite and sometimes Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Lesley Manville’s performance as Mary, the tortured morphine addict, wife and mother in Eugene O’Neill’s dark masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night, directed by Richard Eyre, is breathtaking, from the moment she first steps on stage until her last sombre soliloquy. The role of a woman prone to hysteria and self-deception invites over-acting, not least when the author has given her torrents of dope-driven lines, as well as placed her in desperately solipsistic isolation. But Manville manages to play the excess of a woman who is hanging onto life through a kind of pretense, without falling Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Alan Mahon’s Hamlet in Andrew Hilton’s production for Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory bristles with teen spirit and this is no bad thing. The Prince of Denmark, even before his father dies, is beset with the angst that goes with the territory of late adolescence. The production presents, on one level, a tragic coming of age drama, one in which the young heroes are consumed by madness and caught in the political and sexual machinations of their elders.This is production that builds, from a slightly underpowered first half to an emotionally overwhelming dénouement. During the first Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Mark Bruce did very well with his last dance theatre production Dracula, but this time around he has reached a little too far. The Odyssey is a great text, but with the twists and turns of Ulysses’ return to Ithaca, burdened with the karmic debt of multiple crimes against the gods committed during the Trojan War, Homer’s epic is an unwieldy beast: it’s at times as if Bruce had himself succumbed to the avalanche of challenges the tired and traumatised warrior has to face on his way home.The magnificent Victorian Gothic church of St Paul's in Bristol, home to the contemporary circus school Read more ...