Manchester
Veronica Lee
One of the oddities about theatre is that there can be a gripping performance at the heart of an underwhelming production – and so is the case with Maxine Peake’s Hamlet, directed by Sarah Frankcom. This was a much anticipated production – Peake going home, as it were. She started acting at the Royal Exchange Youth Group and is now an associate artist at the theatre, and has recently been seen giving a towering performance in The Village on BBC One. Frankcom’s production, meanwhile, is described in the press release as a “radical reimagining” of the play.Peake’s interpretation has much to Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
When Ryan Gander’s wife wanted a designer lamp, the versatile artist knocked one up from junk. She was so impressed he sold it as an artwork and by now has made 55 in his garden shed. Three are here in Manchester, made from foil food trays, a guitar stand and concrete. These pieces are quite unrepresentative of the rest of this highly conceptual show, but in a diverse, major survey there appears to be no truly representative way in.What most visitors first come across, in the 19th-century foyer of Manchester Art Gallery, is a short bronze ballerina. Degas, you might think, rather than Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Oasis: Definitely Maybe“His onstage presence is supernatural, a good looking boy exuding primal sexual allure while standing stock still, hands behind his back, all effort going into his big chested, raw throated pure and essential singing.” The beyond-hyperbolic liner notes to Deluxe Box Set edition of the 20th-anniversy reissue of Definitely Maybe, the first Oasis album, read like a parody. Liam Gallagher may be many things. But supernatural?Elsewhere, they gush that “the holy grail of British pop music is surely a bunch of longhaired boys with guitars playing swaggering, melodic rock Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There's a bit of Gene Hunt revisited in Peter Bowker's new three-part drama. Philip Glenister returns to the Manchester stomping grounds he patrolled in Life on Mars, and he even drives an Audi (though it isn't Hunt's celebrated Quattro). But this time he's not a cop.It's 15 June 1996, the Euro 96 football championships are just swinging into action, and the Stone Roses and New Order are on the soundtrack. Glenister plays successful businessman Daniel Cotton, doing his best to patch up a poisonous family rift between his father Samuel (Bernard Hill, pictured below) and wayward, wastrel Read more ...
philip radcliffe
By picking his way through Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid - written 600 years later - Simon Armitage has it all, including the horse and Helen, each of whom in their way enable the hordes to breach Troy’s gates. What with that and the mingling of mortals and gods, not to mention the 100,000 troops that Agamemnon leads across the Aegean to rescue Helen, there’s a lot to attempt to pack into this theatre’s intimate space in three hours. Rather too much as it turns out.In order to accommodate the action, director Nick Bagnall has moved slightly away from the usual in-the-round Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Policeman wrongly accused of murder" is possibly not history's most original story idea, but in Prey, writer (and TV debutant) Chris Lunt has turned it into a platform for a skilfully-controlled thriller that keeps your brow sweaty and your breath coming in short panicky gasps. It's greatly assisted by having John Simm playing the lead role of Manchester-based DS Marcus Farrow, since there's nobody better when you want a bit of earthy-but-sincere, with added soulfulness.Though we first met Farrow in the aftermath of a road accident, when he was trapped in the back of an upside-down police Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Soccer-mad Shostakovich’s score for a ballet about a Soviet football team visiting Western Europe, the world premiere of an oboe concerto by John Casken marking the 1914 centenary, and a rare semi-staged performance of Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins made up this remarkable programme. Even Sir Mark Elder pronounced it “eccentric”.The centrepiece and a musical milestone was Casken’s specially commissioned work, Apollinaire’s Bird, inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem, “A Bird Sings”, written while fighting in the trenches. In that poem, he captured the isolation of a bird singing amid Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Swedish director Maria Aberg, making her Royal Exchange debut, sets Shakespeare's comedy in 1945 post-war Britain and strives to play in the effects of war on the home front, where women are in charge and have taken on men’s roles. The same goes for some of the casting here. Gender-blind casting is apparently a mission of Aberg's, to redress a male bias. So Leonato, still listed as the Governor of Messina, becomes Leonata, while Constable Dogberry and his sidekick Verges are played by women.Aberg has previously concerned herself with Iraqi war veterans. War, military and civilian, being a Read more ...
philip radcliffe
No one could accuse Manchester’s musical forces of short-changing Richard Strauss on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth. Under the title Strauss’s Voice, over two months three orchestras, eight conductors and a dozen soloists have delivered eleven concerts and several open rehearsals and talks. The enterprise has been led as a labour of love by 88-year-old Strauss authority Michael Kennedy, who started the series by enthusing about the composer’s ability “to exploit the radiance, eroticism, drama and tenderness of a voice”, especially the soprano voice.It fell to principal Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It’s the thought that counts. That’s what we say about presents. But when the gift is a song by Richard Strauss it is that and more. He made a habit of gifting songs, particularly to his wife Pauline. Several of the Six Orchestral Songs on offer here, as the two-month Strauss’s Voice series marking the 150th anniversary of his birth nears its end, are taken from groups originally celebrating occasions such as their wedding day (10 September 1896).It was Sir Mark Elder’s turn to step up for his first appearance in the series, and he drew some glorious sound from the Hallé, while being Read more ...
philip radcliffe
“It’s all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind,” advised Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West when writing the spoof biography Orlando as a “love letter” to her. When she had finished the novel, depicting Vita as an androgynous time-traveller, she wrote defensively: “It is all over the place, incoherent, intolerable, impossible.”Molly Gromadzki as the alluring Sasha performs demanding aerobaticsWelcome to her world of topsy-turvydom, in which the eponymous hero changes sex, cross-dresses, transgresses barriers of gender, place and time. Along the way he/she derides Read more ...
philip radcliffe
We are witnessing the end of an era in the long history of Manchester’s theatreland: the disappearance, after more than 60 years, of the treasured Library Theatre. Coming full circle, it is ending as it began, with a production of The Seagull.Modestly located in the basement of the city’s grand Central Reference Library (pictured below), where it was opened by King George V in 1934, the theatre has a distinguished history, boasting European premieres of Sondheim musicals and quality productions, especially of plays by Neil Simon and Bertolt Brecht. Some successfully transferred to the West Read more ...