England
aleks.sierz
N F Simpson is a legendary absurdist playwright of 1950s and 1960s vintage. But while his 1957 debut, A Resounding Tinkle, got a revival some three years ago at the Donmar, he was widely believed to have given up writing more than 30 years ago. After all, he has a back catalogue of comic classics, and he celebrated his 91st birthday in January this year! But, true to form, the veteran humorist has surprised us once more. Last night, the Jermyn Street Theatre, a fringe venue a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus, premiered his brand new play.If So, Then Yes is a surreal comedy about a day in Read more ...
theartsdesk
Next to choose some favourite books is conductor Peter Phillips, whose touring lifestyle can make "summer reading" something of a year-round phenomenon. When Phillips founded the vocal ensemble the Tallis Scholars in 1973 it was a hobby among university friends – a “haphazard” group, as the director himself describes it. Decades later, with more than 1,000 concerts and 50 disks to their credit, both the group and its members have grown up into professionals at the head of their field.Specialising in Renaissance polyphony at a time when such music was not only unfashionable but almost entirely Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
For hundreds of thousands of people watching Shane Meadows’s TV debut last night, an updating (by three years) of the director’s skinhead movie, This is England (2006), the opening episode may well have been their first experience of a "Shane Meadows film". What will they have made of it? Because I’m not sure whether it was exactly a Shane Meadows film, or whether it was a Shane Meadows pastiche or a Shane Meadows homage - "in the style of". For last night’s episode was co-written with Skins regular Jack Thorne and directed by someone else completely, Tom Harper (The Scouting Book for Boys). Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Meditative experiences are hard to come by in the Royal Albert Hall. The twitching, scratching, fidgeting ticks of over 5000 people conspire to break your focus, to draw attention from the musical middle-distance back to the here and now. Last night’s two Proms – whether through programming, performance or just a happy chance of circumstances – both glanced into this distant space, briefly achieving that sense of communion peculiar to Proms audiences. As a birthday tribute to composer-mystic Arvo Pärt, it was fitting indeed.As he has already proved at ENO, Ed Gardner is a master of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A good ghost story never ends. Its twirling impetus sets a narrative top in motion that continues to spin indefinitely in the mind, propelled by the force of a listener’s imagination. As good ghost stories go, The Woman in Black is among the most insidious, having reduced audiences of metropolitan adults to whimpering, night-light clutching infants since 1987. With a young pretender – Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories – now installed in the West End, it seems a good time to return to this dusty fixture of London theatre, and discover whether the sunken-eyed, white-faced woman in Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
My surname came to Britain with the Normans, and I must say that my forebears have had a bad press in their adopted homeland. From Hereward the Wake to Robin Hood, Anglo-Saxon legends have depicted us as despotic and cruel, whereas we were great builders of castles and cathedrals, brilliant horsemen and tip-top administrators, as well as being despotic and cruel. Anyway, it was good to have the refreshingly un-youthful and un-strident Professor Robert Bartlett (more Norman names) giving us his authoritative account of the antecedents and legacy of 1066 and all that. It’s about time we Viking- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
How do you construct a compelling play about the greatest of fictional detectives without either mystery or reveal? The cryptic answer, in the form of Jeremy Paul’s 1988 theatrical two-hander The Secret of Sherlock Holmes, is far from elementary.Arthur Conan Doyle’s Laudanum-quaffing, woman-hating logician Sherlock Holmes is surely the original for every heroic-cop-with-troubled-home-life that has since washed up in our fiction with whisky on his breath and murder on his mind. Clad in a paisley dressing gown, violin in hand, Holmes might colour proceedings with an inscrutable elegance, yet Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
"Oh! My Daddy, my Daddy!" It’s a cry that has echoed through the childhood of generations of English children, reducing all but the very staunchest to tears. Whether encountered through Edith Nesbit’s book or the classic 1970 film, The Railway Children is a national touchstone, sitting alongside Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland at the core of a proper English upbringing. With the film celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, what better time to don your knitted tam o’ shanter and climb aboard the latest theatrical adaptation, currently hissing and chugging its way into the disused Read more ...
graham.rickson
Yorkshire folkies The Demon Barbers have used English dance in their live shows for several years. Time Gentlemen Please takes the idea a step further, integrating contemporary dance stylings within a cast of more traditional types. Thus three hip-hop dancers barge into a musty pub and you’re immediately aware of their sense of displacement. Their moves are jerky and uncomfortable, their body language hinting at deep unease. Then on come the clog dancers.
Damien Barber, one of the Demons, writes in the programme that to try and reach a larger and younger audience it was necessary to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Anyone hoping to take refuge from last night’s football fever in the solemn halls of the Royal Opera House would have scored something of an own goal. Heading the bill for OperaShots – a trio of new operas staged in the intimate Linbury Theatre – was Jocelyn Pook’s Ingerland, an operatic meditation on the beautiful game. Framed by shorter works from Orlando Gough and Nitin Sawhney, the evening was a chance for three established composers to have a “shot” at opera for the first time. With Gough promising not so much an attempt as a “shot across the bow of opera”, we prepared ourselves for Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s an odd enough statistic that only four of Alan Ayckbourn’s plays have been made into films. Odder still that, of those, three are the work of Alain Resnais, the grand old man of the nouvelle vague. Yes, it was a curious moment when the director of Last Year in Marienbad got into bed with the author of Bedroom Farce. The last of those films, Coeurs, was no more than a mildly engaging romantic roundelay, but it was freighted with Anglo-Saxon certainties. Things like plot, meaning, a vague interest in the needs of the audience. Not far shy of 90, Resnais has for the first time adapted a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The late Simon Gray, who died in 2008, lived a ragged, bruised and battering life. I usually think of him as the John Prescott of playwrights, except that he was miles more articulate, and eventually rewarded by a CBE rather than a peerage. Anyway, he was pugnacious and out of step with playwriting trends. In an age of lefty state-of-the-nation dramas, Gray explored the emotions of upper-middle-class characters and their difficulties with communication. Although he could be irascible, and his published diaries are scorchingly rude, the default position of his plays is an ironic melancholy, as Read more ...