magic
mark.kidel
The Tempest, a rich and profound late work, is probably Shakespeare’s most complex and layered play: the combination of power politics, philosophy, magic and romance is dizzying and a challenge to any director who attempts to encompass the complexity of the work.The opening production from Theatre Royal, Bath’s Ustinov Studio’s new artistic director Deborah Warner offers dazzling theatre at times, and comparatively disappointing moments of flatness at others. Could the small space, providing intimacy one moment and a feeling of being cramped at others have something to do with it?The set by Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Reviewing the Grange Festival production of Tamerlano the other day, I noted the difficulty Handel poses the modern director with his byzantine plots and often ludicrous love tangles, expressed through music of surpassing brilliance but mostly stereotyped forms. But at least Tamerlano is a comprehensible story with its feet planted firmly in a sort of reality. In Alcina earthbound reality is hardly anywhere to be seen. We are on a magic island ruled by the enchantress of the title, who disposes of her many lovers by turning them into wild beasts or rocks, trees or rivers. Bradamante Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Last days of June 2022, I sit in my writing hut. My liver is radioactive jelly, my nose reinforced concrete, my leg muscles marathon-cramped, and poisoned perspiration rolls down my forehead, stinging my eyeballs.You’ll already have seen a trillion Twittering threepenny-bit reports on Glastonbury, but you haven’t taken this trip, I promise. So stroll in, fall over, pick yourself back up, take it all in, sniff it all up, drink it all down. Let’s do this.THURSDAY 23rd JUNEFinetime, my regular Glastonbury partner and photographer, is very proud of the tent he’s bought me from Lidl. My own tent Read more ...
Katie Colombus
This year marks 25 years since the release of Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill album. Not content with hitting the road for a celebratory world tour, the Canadian songstress is also releasing a new album – but it’s probably not what you might think.Morisette has been open about her musical journey of self-discovery and healing as far back as "Thank U", a song written for her 1998 album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, after taking some time out and visiting India. Her relationship with divinity, healing and personal growth continued in 2008 album Flavours of Entanglement, which saw Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It’s been seventeen years since Nicholas Hytner first directed Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials at the National Theatre, ambitiously whirling audiences into Pullman’s universe of daemons, damnable clerics and parallel worlds. Now he has collaborated with playwright Bryony Lavery to bring this fluent, fluid adaptation of the prequel to His Dark Materials – The Book of Dust – to the stage, delving into Pullman’s myth-infused landscape to create a compelling narrative for our times.Samuel Creasey plays Malcolm Polstead, the bookish wide-eyed 12-year-old who becomes embroiled in forces beyond Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
This show has been a long time coming. Neil Gaiman had the first inklings of The Ocean at the End of the Lane when he was seven years old and living near a farm recorded in the Domesday Book. Several decades later, he wrote a short story for his wife, Amanda Palmer, “to tell her where I lived and who I was as a boy”, as he puts it in his programme notes.That short story was developed into an award-winning novel; Joel Horwood’s adaptation opened at the Dorfman Theatre in late 2019, and was meant to transfer to the West End in early 2020. Now it’s back, and the spellbinding beauty of Katy Rudd’ Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Trigger warnings have become commonplace in theatres these days, but few chill the blood like the description "a new musical" on a playbill. There are so many things to go wrong, so few ways to get things right and, never far away, the dissenters who caught ten minutes of the Sound of Music during its annual Christmas TV airing and won’t stop telling you exactly how they feel about musicals.So, while the National Theatre gears up for its new musical, Hex, the RSC is commendably returning to its lockdown-postponed The Magician’s Elephant, both productions given the stages and Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Let it snow! The Broadway musical adaptation of the Disney film behemoth Frozen premiered back in 2018 and now, following Covid delays, a rejigged version finally makes its home in the West End – to the delight of the army of miniature Elsas in attendance. The good news is that there’s plenty here to keep grown-ups entertained as well.The show faithfully adheres to the film plot – as, indeed, it must to avoid a riot – but Jennifer Lee’s book adds more psychological depth to Elsa and Anna (Samantha Barks and Stephanie McKeon), and addresses, if doesn’t quite solve, the dramaturgical issue of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Bedknobs and Broomsticks has always suffered from not being Mary Poppins, the movie delayed in development and released in 1971 (it is a Sixties film in tone and technology) and always seeming to appear later on the BBC’s Christmas Disney Time programmes, after a bit of Baloo boogieing and a spoonful or two of sugar. It was probably more liked than loved. All of which may have played a part in its half-century long journey from screen to stage – but this new adaptation, on tour around the UK and Ireland through next spring, proves the wait was well worth it. The show's co- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Variety is a form of entertainment most usually seen on Saturday night television these days, but Wonderville is an attempt to bring it back into the West End. It's mostly a magic and illusion show, with a hefty slice of comedy, a bit of song and dance, and a speciality act thrown in for good measure.Much of it works, although there are some acts that it's best to gloss over (I was reminded, and not in a good way, of Britain's Got Talent a few times on the night I saw the show). But when it works, it's really good. And considering that many of magic and illusion's tricks go back centuries, it Read more ...
Tim Cumming
As this review goes live on the internet – an invisible medium even more pervasive than coronavirus – we’ve just enjoyed All Hallow’s Eve with not only a Blue Moon but October’s Hunter’s Moon, too, gazing down upon us from the constellation of Taurus, while today is All Souls’ Day, when the spirits of the dead are abroad and life is celebrated and decorated with skulls and skeletons. As winter approaches, this astro-cosmic emanation of the spirit world of magic and ritual – like the internet or Covid-19, another invisible medium – is celebrated and enacted in Cunning Folk’s arresting new Read more ...
India Lewis
Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God covers every angsty young woman’s favourite subjects. Witchcraft, heavy metal, viscera, and hatred. It’s a book in the grand tradition of Kathy Acker and women surrealists everywhere, dancing through space and time into different dimensions.Girls Against God isn’t particularly gripping, and it is confusing at times, but the sense of being unmoored feels very intentional. Its story appears to begin fairly normally, its narrator describing their life in small-town southern Norway in the 1990s, and their overwhelming feeling of hatred, directed towards their Read more ...