The Peony Pavilion was originally a play written by Tang Xianzu and first performed in 1598. Most commonly and traditionally performed as an opera with a running time of over twenty hours, this retelling came about in 2008 when the then artistic director of the Chinese National Ballet, Zhao Ruheng, approached choreographer Fei Bo to […]
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Der Rosenkavalier, Opera North at The Lowry, reviewed by Ashley McGovern
Der Rosenkavalier, Opera North at The Lowry, directed by David McVicar; November 9 2016. In the Act III of Der Rosenkavalier, after he has been subject to the torments of a farcical trap to expose him as the grasping, bewigged horndog that he is, the bewildered Count Ochs says to his avengers ‘so this has […]
Ghosts, HOME, reviewed by Tristan Burke
Ghosts, directed by Polly Findlay, HOME; November 23 2016. Niamh Cusack is playing Helen Alving. She casually leans against a door frame, drinking milk from the carton that she’s taken from a fridge, as she watches the local priest, Pastor Manders (Jamie Ballard) simultaneously be conned into believing he is to blame for a fire […]
Tom French, The Way to Work (Gallery Press, €12.50), reviewed by Ken Evans
Patrick Kavanagh said that, ‘to know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience.’ In Tom French’s fourth collection from Ireland’s Gallery Press, The Way to Work, the poet homes in (I use the verb advisedly) on a way of life in rural Ireland, that seems almost familiar, to both poet and […]
Peter Sansom, Careful What You Wish For (Carcanet, £9.95), reviewed by Ken Evans
At first sight, the cover of Peter Sansom’s sixth collection, Be Careful What You Wish For, and the poem to which it refers, ‘Lava Lamp’ – a concrete poem simulating, as the poet puts it, the ‘soun dl ess gloo b le/ and gl oop’ of the lamps’ shape-shifting contents – are experimentally atypical of […]
Billy Bragg and Joe Henry, RNCM, reviewed by Peter Wild
Billy Bragg and Joe Henry, RNCM, 19 November 2016 I want you to think about Superman 2 a moment. Specifically the scene where, having fallen in love with Lois Lane, revealed his true identity and voluntarily stripped himself of his powers, Clark Kent finds himself in a diner on the receiving end of a whupping. […]
Billy Budd, Opera North at The Lowry, reviewed by Tristan Burke
Billy Budd, Opera North at The Lowry, directed by Orpha Phelan; November 10 2016. There is something similar about a late eighteenth-century warship and an opera company. Both are sophisticated technologies of production that rely on the hierarchical division of labour to produce spectacular effects. This similarity was stressed in Opera North’s recent production of […]
Kate Tempest, Let Them Eat Chaos (Picador, £7.99) reviewed by Chloé Vaughan
Kate Tempest’s newest collection of poetry demands to be felt. Let Them Eat Chaos is a book-length poem that begins with the admission, and gentle command, that ‘this poem was written to be read aloud’. Though Let Them Eat Chaos is meant to be read aloud, its performance on the page as a written poem […]
Ruby Robinson, Every Little Sound (Pavilion Poetry, £9.99), reviewed by Lucy Winrow
The title of Ruby Robinson’s poetry debut is derived from a line within its pages; the notion of paying close attention to “every little sound” appears in “Internal Gain,” a poem that traverses a gamut of sounds from “the conversation downstairs” to “echoes of planets slowly creaking.” The preface provides a definition of this central […]
BBC Philharmonic, The Bridgewater Hall, reviewed by Simon Haworth
BBC Philharmonic, The Bridgewater Hall; ‘Tragedy and Humour, Darkness and Light’: Sibelius, Tapiola / Kaija Saariaho, Notes on Light / Weill, Violin Concerto / Britten, Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes; November 5 2016. Tapiola, Sibelius’ last great orchestral work before he finally hit the mute button and succumbed to absolute silence at his […]
Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians (Faber & Faber, £13.99), reviewed by Maria Alejandra Barrios
This is the kind of love story that will make you fight for it, the kind that will break your heart and mend it all at once. At every step of the way, it will make you feel that you’re alongside the characters cheering for them or sharing the same doubts as their love progresses. […]
Parquet Courts, Manchester Academy 2, reviewed by Lydia Walker
Parquet Courts, Manchester Academy 2; October 10 2016. Debuting in 2011 with limited edition cassette EP release American Specialties, I’m not sure if Parquet Courts knew they would be storming festivals three years on, and releasing their fifth (ish) studio album two years later still. I say “ish” as their back-catalogue is eclectic: having already […]
The Emperor, HOME, reviewed by Peter Wild
The Emperor, by Ryszard Kapuściński, adapted by Colin Teevan and directed by Walter Meierjohann; September 29, 2016. You don’t need to know much about Haile Selassie to enjoy Kathryn Hunter’s performances in The Emperor, a one-hour, almost one-woman show in which she dons many hats (and shoulder stripes, and walking sticks, and epaulettes, and […]
Giselle, Palace theatre, reviewed by Zoe Gosling
Giselle, English National Ballet, directed and choreographed by Akram Kham, co-produced by Manchester International Festival and Sadler’s Wells; September 27 2016. The English National Ballet’s re-working of the 1841 ballet sees its landscape change from a peasant village to an industrial workhouse, where Giselle (Alina Cojocaru) and her community become the redundant migrant workers of […]
Rambert: A Linha Curva plus other works, The Lowry, reviewed by Elizabeth Mitchell
Rambert: A Linha Curva plus other works, by Itzik Galili; The Lowry, September 28 2016. The Rambert returns to Manchester with a winning combination: a triple bill, a premiere and a raucous audience. The evening opened with the premiere of Flight, choreographed by Malgorzata Dzierzon, herself a dancer with the Rambert between 2006 and […]
A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer, HOME, reviewed by Şima İmşir Parker
A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer, directed by Bryony Kimmings; HOME, September 23 2016. Emma is waiting at the reception of the oncology department. She is sure it is only a matter of time until she leaves. Doctors have spotted a tiny shadow on the lungs of Emma’s son, a little baby called […]
A Streetcar Named Desire, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Ruari Paton
A Streetcar Named Desire, The Royal Exchange, September 8 2016; directed by Sarah Frankcom. In Tennessee Williams’ 1947 play, a Southern belle, Blanche DuBois (Maxine Peake), is forced to move into the small and squalid New Orleans home of her sister, Stella Kowalski (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), and brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski (Ben Batt) after losing her […]
The Shawshank Redemption, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Shawshank Redemption, The Lowry, May 5 2016; adapted by Owen O’Neill and Dave Johns, directed by David Esbjornson. Hope springs eternal. Any of Stephen King’s constant readers (as the author himself likes to call them) will recognise that three-word phrase. It is the mantra by which Andy Dufresne, protagonist of King’s 1982 novella […]
#micropoem16 competition
For the fourth year running the Centre for New Writing and the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at The University of Manchester ran a #micropoem16 competition. The competition, which was themed around Science, took place between 17 June and 11 July 2016 and asked participants to tweet their micropoem with the hashtag #micropoem16. The […]
Now Listen To Me Very Carefully, HOME, reviewed by William Simms
Bootworks Theatre presents Now Listen To Me Very Carefully, HOME; June 7 2016. Now Listen To Me Very Carefully charts Bootworks Theatre Artistic Director Andy Robert’s self-diagnosed obsession with James Cameron’s 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgement Day. According to Robert’s stage persona, he has seen the film 238 times, and upon entering the theatre he […]
Adam Buxton at Manchester Opera House, reviewed by Ed Chapman
Live at the Opera House – with Adam Buxton, Manchester Opera House; May 25 2016. This event promised one of those hard-to-believe, all-star line-ups that only ever happen in London. And so it proved, with three-quarters of the bill changing. While the reconfigured line-up may not have had quite the star power originally offered, this […]
The Night Watch, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Night Watch, The Royal Exchange; May 19, 2016 (Photograph by Richard Davenport) The Night Watch, in Sarah Waters’ 2006 novel at least, investigates a range of important societal injustices that existed in England around the time of the Second World War. The novel does a thorough job of documenting the issues faced by conscientious […]
Carlos Acosta: A Classical Farewell, The Lowry, reviewed by Hazel Shaw
Carlos Acosta: A Classical Farewell, The Lowry; May 13, 2016 One of the most striking things about this performance on Carlos Acosta’s farewell tour is how little of it he spent on-stage. Not that I’m complaining, the evening was ably filled by the company of Cuban dancers touring with Acosta, and every one of the […]
Twelfth Night, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater
Twelfth Night, HOME; May 11 2016 There are a few ways to do Shakespeare. Fans of the bard will be familiar with a fair few of them. From the standard stick to the script and stick the actors in clothes that look a bit like those they wore in the 1500s, to the modernise the […]
An Evening with Chris Packham, The Lowry, reviewed by Emma Rhys
An Evening with Chris Packham: Growing Up Wild, The Lowry; May 9, 2016 I arrived at the Lowry early and was lucky enough to spot Chris Packham in his natural environment – or at least, natural to most of his species – eating lunch at the Tower Coffee Shop. He didn’t notice me. Perhaps if […]
Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century , HOME, reviewed by Şima İmşir Parker
Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century, Home, 30 April 2016 – 3 July 2016. “The melodramatic body is a body seized with meaning” writes Peter Brooks in “Melodrama, Body, Revolution.” Body is not only a sight branded with meanings and symbolism, but also a sight where resistance becomes possible through the […]
CRIME: Hong Kong Style season, HOME, reviewed by Laura Swift and Joel Swann
CRIME: Hong Kong Style season, HOME, February 4 – April 7, 2016 HOME’s ambitious season Crime: Hong Kong Style featured some twenty films over the course of two months, including films ranging from forgotten classics like The Swallow Thief, to international blockbusters such as Police Story, to several UK premieres. The season can be judged […]
Kate Tempest in conversation with Dave Haslam, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater
Kate Tempest in conversation with Dave Haslam, HOME, April 17 2016 Something feels a little bit special before the event even gets going. There’s a buzz in the room. You look around as Kate Tempest’s Everybody Down plays through the speakers and you see that the audience is made up of an interesting mixture of […]
Always (Crashing) season, HOME, reviewed by Tristan Burke
Always (Crashing) season, HOME, March 18-31, 2016 The gap in the literary landscape left by J.G. Ballard’s death in 2009 is still very much with us. He was probably the single most important post-war English novelist, and he opened up the scope and style of the English novel far beyond the sentimental, bourgeois realism that […]
King Lear, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Annie Dickinson
King Lear, The Royal Exchange, dir. Michael Buffong, April 1 – May 7, 2016 With a play like King Lear, William Shakespeare’s formidable tragedy of madness, a divided kingdom, and children turned against their parents, expectations are inevitably going to be high, and director Michael Buffong’s co-production with Talawa Theatre, the Royal Exchange, and Birmingham […]
Irvine Welsh, The Dancehouse, reviewed by Fran Slater
Irvine Welsh in conversation with Kevin Sampson, April 3 2016 (Photograph of Irvine Welsh & Kevin Sampson, copyright Manchester Literature Festival) Entering The Dancehouse on this wet Sunday evening was a strange experience. We were here for a reading from a new novel and an onstage interview with its author, but the size of the […]
L’elisir d’amore, Opera North at The Lowry, reviewed by Ashley McGovern
L’elisir d’amore, The Lowry, March 17 2016 The collaboration between harried librettist Felice Romani and the celebrated composer Gaetano Donizetti resulted in a trio of operas about three wildly different women. Overall, they seemed to favour melodrama, beginning with a tragic Tudor mistress in Anna Bolena (1830) and finishing on a lusty high with the […]
Alessia Cara, Sound Control, reviewed by Marli Roode
Alessia Cara at Sound Control, March 24 2016 After the gig, we went to a bar. I was worried about how I’d write about what’d just happened. My friend Zoe was worried about the state of the world, about the youth of today, about being out of touch and over the hill. She was worried […]
The Beanfield, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Beanfield, April 2 2016 Have you heard of the Battle of the Beanfield? I don’t mind admitting that, until last night, it wasn’t something that I was aware of. Some of you will be agreeing with me, I’m sure; while others, those who do know about the terrible events that unfolded in a field […]
The Herbal Bed, The Lowry, reviewed by Ruari Paton
The Herbal Bed, dir. James Dacre The Lowry, 30th March 2016 In the summer of 1613 Susanna Hall (Emma Lowndes), the daughter of William Shakespeare and wife of local doctor John Hall (Jonathan Guy Lewis), is publicly accused by her husband’s former student Jack Lane (Matt Whitchurch) of having an affair with close family friend […]