HOW many times have you commented that air travel is really no fun any more? Dutch choreographer Emma Evelein has captured the fear, tension, vulnerability and apprehension of travellers in her brilliant Gallery of Consequence, one of a double bill performed by Rambert dancers for the current tour, and on stage at Bath until Saturday…
ENGLISH Touring Opera’s visit to Bath went from the sublime, Benjamin Britten’s prickly high drama of Andre Obey’s play The Rape of Lucretia, to the “cor blimey”, with a Donald McGill seaside postcard production of Gaetano Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love. Both operas had modern settings. Lucretia drew parallels with the way in which women…
THERE is no question that Venice makes an indelible impression, and that mixture of enchantment, beauty and menace was never better captured than by Nic Roeg’s 1973 masterpiece Don’t Look Now, with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland at its heart. In 2007 playwright Nell Leyshon created a stage adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier short…
MATINEE audiences can be tricky – there are some wonderful stories about remarks made by elderly ladies at matinee performances of Waiting for Godot. The principally late-middle-aged audience that filled Bristol Old Vic to watch this beautifully staged 1930s-style production, were definitely not a great asset to the cast, with their muted and slow reactions…
A FAVOURITE saying of my father, when he had just driven a nice new, but underpowered car was “Lovely bodywork and interior, but couldn’t pull your cap off your head”. It is nowhere as drastic as that, but in many ways, under Loveday Ingram’s carefully structured direction, Ann-Marie Casey’s stage adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s…
PUCCINI’S Madama Butterfly, one of the great staples of romantic opera, is so well known for its earworm Humming Chorus and its aria Un bel di (One Fine Day is a highpoint in every soprano’s repertoire), that you sometimes don’t remember what the story really says about American imperialism and the very different religious and…
THERE is something new about the programme for Shaftesbury Arts Centre’s latest production. It is square and the cover names writer Charles Dickens, and, in type just a little bit smaller, adaptor Neil Bartlett and director Diana Banham. In recent years Dickens classics have been dissected and reconstructed by many theatre companies, turning their backs…
AS I entered and exited Bristol Hippodrome, there was an eerie feeling of the ghost of the clergyman who organised a protest when Gracie Fields, on a visit to Bristol, closed her show with a version of The Lords Prayer. What he would have made of Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone’s irreligious satire…
KEN Ludwig has a literary CV that most authors only dream about, and as he has already shown with his adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, he knows how to create those well- known and much-loved Agatha Christie characters on stage. In this touring production he is aided and abetted by his production team….
THE first version of Candide, with a book by Lillian Helman, met with little success on Broadway and in London’s West End, but, rather like Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the show refused to die. Gradually, with a reworked book and lyrics, it has developed into a classic opera. I doubt if any production since…