REVIEWS Archives - Page 197 of 548

Beckett: Unbound 2024 – The Tung Auditorium

3Jun

By Mark DavorenNo Comments

North West

Beckett: Unbound 2024 – The Tung Auditorium

The Beckett: Unbound 2024 Festival’s music curation responds to the theatre and dance programme via six contemporary works, featuring three world-première commissions and two UK / France premières. Composer Barry Guy’s Quindecim for baroque violin (Maya Homburger) and double bass (Guy) is a response to Swiss architect and artist Max Bill’s ‘Fifteen Variations on a Single Theme’ exploring the artist’s idea that ‘once the basic theme has been chosen - whether it be simple or complex - an infinite number of different developments can be evolved according to individual inclination and temperament’. The work incorporates four Beckett texts (Thither, 10 Mirlitonnades, The Downs, One Dead of Night) into its highly intricate ‘molten architecture’. Guy’s work for solo cello and electronics ‘S...

Rough for Radio II – The Tung Auditorium

3Jun

By Mark DavorenNo Comments

North West

Rough for Radio II – The Tung Auditorium

Rough for Radio II is a Beckett radio play written in French as Pochade radiophonique and first published in 1975. Beckett translated the work into English shortly before its BBC Radio 3 broadcast on his birthday (13th April 1976). Director Vincent Higgins, in collaboration with Simon Ruding (TIPP), recorded this version in-situ with inmates at HM Prison Liverpool. A man, Animator, makes small talk with his young female stenographer (Orla Charlton): is she ready to get to work, does she have the tools of her trade? The interchange is light and familiar. He then consults a character called Dick: is he on his toes? It is his job after all to ‘encourage’ the prisoner, Fox, to talk with the use of a bull’s pizzle. Beckett’s dialogue cleverly explores the idea that the prisoner is in fact...

They Don’t Really Care About Us – Hope Street Theatre

3Jun

By Gill LewisNo Comments

North West

They Don’t Really Care About Us – Hope Street Theatre

An intelligent and authentic production with fire in its belly, which does well to tackle complex themes with passionate conviction. Provides an important lesson in the ongoing injustices and experiences of racial and sexist discrimination, leaving room for further development and exploration. TDRCAU is set in the 90s during the immediate aftermath of the murder of Stephen Lawrence. A landmark case in which a public inquiry into the handling of his brutal racially motivated murder eventually exposed institutional racism within the UK police and justice systems. We follow the story of medical student Dinesh Sharma (portrayed by co-writer and co-director, Sab Muthusamy), a local lad of Indian descent who finds himself regularly subject to derogatory racial comments from th...

1Jun

By Caroline WorswickNo Comments

London

May 35th – Southwark Playhouse Elephant

4th June 1989 – This is the date to remember! But, if you live in China or Hong Kong, this date causes their government to have amnesia, and the Chinese government enforces countrywide amnesia on its people. There is no longer a 4th June 1989 in the Chinese calendar, not one that can be discussed anyway. To disguise discussion, this date is now May 35th, and both the date, and the lives of the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre have been erased from history. In a country where the government uses dehumanisation as a means of controlling its people, this play attempts to overturn this, by bringing together interviews from some of the victim’s families and allows them to speak in one voice. The play centres around a student, Ah Dai who was a hard-working b...

Iain Stirling: Relevant – Festival Theatre

1Jun

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Iain Stirling: Relevant – Festival Theatre

And, it turns out, good friend and co-writer Steve Bugeja, so more like a double-bill. The two were responsible for Buffering, a TV series that ran from 2021 to 2023, residing now, jokes Iain, amongst the ads on ITVX. It’s doubtful he’s lost much sleep over its demise, proud possessor of a 15-year career that started with CBBC in 2009, taking in presenting, stand-up, writing and acting. Not to mention the narrator’s role on ITV2’s cerebral masterpiece Love Island. Nor Taskmaster, Loose Women and Gogglebox… however, propelled atop a wave of youthful energy, at the age of 36 he’s beginning to wonder if he’s still ‘relevant’. Bounding on to the stage to warm up the audience, Iain announces Steve, who ponders, following a recent break-up, the topic of ‘the ick’, Dunfermline and an awkward e...

C’est Moi Dans la Poubelle – Victoria Gallery and Museum, University of Liverpool

1Jun

By Mark DavorenNo Comments

North West

C’est Moi Dans la Poubelle – Victoria Gallery and Museum, University of Liverpool

When Ezra Pound was released, after twelve years, from the mental hospital he'd been committed to, he returned to Italy and lapsed into a long silence of deep regret and shame. This was not a vow of silence, just a depressed wordlessness - he felt he'd ruined everything, not least his own Cantos ('a botch - stupidity and ignorance all through'). He went to see Beckett’s Fin de Partie (Endgame in Paris) in which two of the characters, Nagg and Nell, live in trash bins. Pound reportedly broke his by now habitual silence to say ‘C’est moi dans la poubelle’ (‘That’s me in the trash’.). Beckett subsequently went to visit him in Venice and this short film, written by James Lever and directed by Michael O’Neill (Armchair & Rocket), is their reimagining of that meeting based on Beckett’s ac...

1Jun

By Mark DavorenNo Comments

North West

Pas Moi / Not I – Toxteth Reservoir

Michael Cummins ensures Toxteth Reservoir is perfect as the pitch-black space illuminated only by a single beam of light which is focused on an actress’ (Clara Simpson) mouth with everything else blacked out around her in this production from Once Off Productions. The mouth utters jumbled up sentences at a ferocious pace and which obliquely tell the story of a woman of about seventy who was abandoned by her family after a premature birth and has lived a loveless, mechanical existence, and who appears to have suffered an unspecified traumatic experience. Virtually mute since childhood, this is one of her occasional outbursts in which she relates four incidents from her life: lying face down in the grass; standing in a supermarket; sitting on a mound in Croker’s Acre, and ‘that time at co...

31May

By H.S. BakerNo Comments

Scotland

The Merchant of Venice – Traquair House

Regardless of the weather, you know summer’s arrived when outdoor Shakespeare comes around. And of all the venues, Traquair House is surely the loveliest and most apposite in the Scottish borders. Shakespeare at Traquair is a promenade production, moving from one picturesque location to another, with the mewling peacocks providing an atmospheric soundscape. The night we were there, once the shower of rain had passed, we were relentlessly midged for the rest of the evening. But such are the joys of outdoor theatre in Scotland, and it’s a testament to the competence of the large cast that I only saw one young person reacting to the pesky wee blighters. In any case, they did little to detract from the enjoyment of this fine production of the Shakespea...

31May

By Mark DavorenNo Comments

North West

All That Fall – Toxteth Reservoir

Beckett described this radio play, first broadcast on the BBC in 1957, as ‘a text written to come out of the dark’, and director Adrian Dunbar has certainly achieved that with his choice of location and the use of Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 (D.810) to frame his re-imagining of a radio play whose dark-driven conclusion is hardly credible after the preceding slapstick and pantomime of the foley, with Michael Cummins’ technical direction in conjunction with Simon Roth’s sound design retaining Beckett’s orchestrated sound effects with cast (Orla Charlton, Anna Nygh, Vincent Higgins, Stanley Townsend, Frankie McCafferty) and musicians (Darragh Morgan (violin), Cora Venus Lunny (violin), Fiona Winning (viola), Tim Gill (cello)) positioned behind the audience. One of Beckett’s more acces...

Fun at the Beach Romp-Bomp-A-Lomp!! – Southwark Playhouse

31May

By Alan Stuart MalinNo Comments

London

Fun at the Beach Romp-Bomp-A-Lomp!! – Southwark Playhouse

If you're craving a delightfully exciting blend of retro charm and laugh-out-loud comedy, look no further than ‘Fun at the Beach Romp-Bomp-A-Lomp!!’ which is currently dazzling audiences at Southwark Playhouse (Borough). Directed by Mark Bell, the genius behind ‘The Play That Goes Wrong,’ this brand-new musical offers a riotous escape to a sun-soaked beach brimming with beach competitions, vibrant characters, and musical nostalgia. The story unfolds on a picturesque sunny, summers day during the famed ‘Beach Romp-Bomp-A-Lomp’ competition, where participants vie for the prestigious titles of King “or” Queen of the Beach. As expected, romance and rivalry intermingle amid a series of increasingly absurd and entertaining challenges. The show cleverly satirizes the conventional jukebox music...