Bristol
Mark Kidel
Tricky navigates a kind of penumbra, a fertile and ever-renewing source of inspiration in which his mixed-race, gender-fluid self can re-invent itself periodically, while staying true to his roots and his unique self-taught take on the world of electronics and beats.His latest album maintains the high standards he has established over the last few years. The restlessness that’s taken him to New York to Paris, back to London and now to Berlin, is reflected in the sombre edginess of the music, and in his willingness to experiment with collaborations, inspired by the creative presence of others Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Christmas pantomime is all about letting go, and being carried away on a wave of communal jollity. The genre also delights in carnivalesque gender-bending, the anarchic undermining of authority and the playful representation of evil. There is always a danger when a tradition that thrives on predictable tropes is re-invented, but Sally Cookson, after her very successful productions of Peter Pan and Treasure Island, has once again made something immensely original and new, while paying homage to this particularly British seasonal entertainment.In post-feminist times, it makes a lot of sense to Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Tom Morris has a strong feel for drama that explores the personal implications of fanaticism: his production of John Adams’s powerful opera The Death of Klinghoffer for New York's Met and the ENO, used a language of great simplicity that allowed the work’s most disturbing complexities to come through with formidable power. Once again with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, an equally rich text, there is a stripped-down quality to his overall vision, supported by a generally superlative cast and finely tuned pacing. This works wonders with a play that explores the dark ways in which human frailties Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Brian Friel’s Living Quarters ranks with his best plays but isn’t well known. This powerful story of family dysfunction was first performed in the UK in 1991, directed by Andrew Hilton for Bristol’s legendary pub theatre company Show of Strength and was then not seen on the English stage until now – once again with the Bristol director at the helm.Hilton’s conviction in the text’s undoubted quality has paid off: this is theatre in which Ireland’s greatest living playwright brilliantly plays with narrative form in a way that blends the experimentation of Pirandello and the hot-house family Read more ...
Helen K Parker
An air of busy calm greets me as I walk onto the top floor of Bristol’s Cameron Balloon factory. Considering this company is the largest manufacturer of hot air balloons in the world, my novice expectations of behemoth machinery raging back and forth in huge production lines are somewhat undone by the sight of six women sitting at industrial sewing machines, dotted around the farthest edges of the vast room, quietly stitching. No cacophony of machinery, just the steady thrumming of needle through fabric, bobbins spinning, the occasional tut as unwieldy material is hefted further in from the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Julio Bashmore” is actually the nom-de-dancefloor of Bristolian DJ-producer Matt Walker who’s been slowly building a rep over the last five years. Outside clubland, music-lovers may have heard of him via his production on Jessie Ware’s early singles. In the nightworld, he’s better known as the purveyor of classy, propulsive house sprinkled with a smidgeon of grit. His debut album combines both these aptitudes to increasingly enjoyable effect as it progresses.It opens with the title track, which samples early Eighties easy listening R&B-disco queens The Jones Girls and, for a few songs, Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Andrew Hilton’s immensely enjoyable Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory production of the Sheridan classic opens with a display of hilarious brio from Byron Mondahl, who steps into the intimate arena of this South Bristol venue, only half in character as he has yet to don his powdered wig, to deliver a quick fire introduction on the joys of gossip. He is wearing salmon pink brocade and breeches and suddenly whips out a red mobile to catch up with the latest tweets, shooting a selfie of himself in front of the audience. This stunning and energising piece of anachronistic warm-up sets the Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Teen spirit explodes time and time again in the intimate space of Bristol’s Tobacco Factory, with piercing electronic sounds, fierce lighting and a torrent of high-energy movement. The frenetic pace of Baz Luhrman’s film has left its mark on intepretations of Shakespeare's classic love story, and this isn't necessarily a good thing. There is more than enough youthful energy in Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory's production of Romeo and Juliet, and the decision to place the action in the rebellion-torn 1960s feels misguided and undermines a show that nevertheless features some very good Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bristolian Roni Size was a leading light among Nineties drum & bass originals. By 1997, like many of his contemporaries, he was feted by the media as an artist about to supernova, to lead pop in wild new directions. It was all very exciting and when New Forms, the debut album by his band Reprazent, won the Mercury Music Prize, it marked a moment when drum & bass seemed about to take over. It never did. That was it. The breakthrough that dubstep eventually made the following decade was not to be. Outside his scene, then, Size has been relatively quiet for nigh on fifteen years. He Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The popularity of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia owes a great deal to the play’s brilliant weave of themes and ideas, outlined by characters from two different historical periods – Romantic and modern. There is breathtaking brio in the way the writer’s skill combines so many strands, with both humour and irony: from the mathematics of Fermat’s theorem to the exploration of fractals, and from the limits of rationalism to the flights of fancy that inhabit science just as much as poetry.This is director Andrew Hilton’s first venture into contemporary theatre – he has mostly tackled Shakespeare, but also Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Andrew Hilton, the creative force that drives the consistently excellent Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, might be playing safe by returning to a play he put originally put on in 2003. But “As You Like It”, for all its light touches, is a challenging proposition: both in terms of the way the author treats complex relationships between play-acting and authenticity, true and projected love, goodness and evil, but also because the many-threaded story doesn’t unfold with quite the same elegance as in some of the other comedies.This is a play in which structure is a little too apparent Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The makers of 8 Minutes Idle have a kickstarter campaign to thank for the cinema release of their offbeat comedy, which was made in 2012 but has sat on the shelf since. It's a charming (perhaps knowingly so) low-budget romcom, adapted from his novel of the same title by Matt Thorne with Nicholas Blincoe, and directed with a light touch by Mark Simon Hewis.It covers an awful but life-changing week in the life of Dan (the ever wonderful Tom Hughes, a huge star in the making), a young call-centre worker in Bristol who's drifting through life by way of emotional inertia. On Monday morning his mum Read more ...