Private Lives, Bolton Octagon, 26th March – 18th April Noel Coward’s 1930 comedy of manners opens with two honeymooning couples discovering their hotel terraces – and their exes. Cue the set-up for all kinds of hilarious consequences, plus a glimpse into the new hedonistic way of living – multiple partners, champagne-fuelled parties, staying up all […]
Anna Karenina, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Peter Wild
Anna Karenina, Royal Exchange, Manchester, 27th March 2015 Swssshshshshsshwishwishshshshshshshwish. People are whispering in the Royal Exchange. In front of us, in front of what has to be described as something of a stripped down stageset (a large white box on a metal floor), several people gather holding candles. Swssshshshshsshwishwishshshshshwsh. The people behind us – a […]
12 Angry Men, The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild
12 Angry Men, The Lowry, Manchester, 23rd March 2015 If you were to learn that I was a big fan of the 1957 Sidney Lumet movie 12 Angry Men starring Henry Fonda, Lee J Cobb, Martin Balsam and Jack Klugman, you’d probably expect me to like a theatrical iteration. But you should know I am somewhat […]
Peter Hainsworth and David Robey, Dante: A Very Short Introduction (Open UP) £7.99, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Hainsworth and Robey have to work within the limits of the Very Brief Introduction format. Their first pages rise brilliantly to the challenge. Swift-moving, decisive, sensitive and suggestive, plunging straight into a discussion of two famous encounters in the Inferno, and illustrating points with well-chosen references, this opening would have made me feel I knew why […]
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2015), dir. Isao Takahata, The Cornerhouse, reviewed by Peter Wild
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Manchester Cornerhouse, March 14 2015 Last year, with The Wind Rises, we saw the last film by Hayao Miyazaki, the man responsible (if we can say a single man is responsible) for making the name of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese Disney, a global brand. This year, we see The […]
Tomaž Šalamun, Soy Realidad (Dalkey Archive Press) €9.00, reviewed by Joey Frances
“La syntaxe est une faculté de l’ame.” So opens ‘The Bird Dove’, with a Paul Valéry quotation, in the French. One of my favourites of the contradictory things Walter Benjamin says about translation is: “all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of language.” This isn’t merely relevant […]
Prue Shaw, Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity (W. W. Norton) £20.00, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
If I could recommend only one book on Dante it would be this one by Prue Shaw. Her scholarship is profound and I think she must be a brilliant teacher: she shows an unusual ability to enter imaginatively into the minds of people who don’t have her knowledge. This book isn’t just “approachable”; it comes […]
Manchester Folio: Ali Smith, How to Be Both (Hamish Hamilton) £9.99, reviewed by Alicia J Rouverol
In her 2014 Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel How to be both, Ali Smith twists two narratives, that of a troubled teenager in contemporary Britain and that of a 1460s Renaissance fresco painter, into a single dazzling story. A triumph of doubling, deception and discovery, How to be both considers the twin concepts of art […]
Oklahoma!, The Lowry, reviewed by Emma Rhys
Oklahoma!, The Lowry, Salford Quays, Manchester, 17th-21st March 2015 ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning…’ So starts the original feel-good, frontier-conquering musical Oklahoma!, currently showing at the Lowry. Adapted from the play Green Grow the Lilacs by Lynn Riggs, Oklahoma! is considered a landmark musical, epitomizing the famous duo Rogers and Hammerstein’s innovation to the genre […]
Dylan Moran at The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
Dylan Moran, The Lowry, Manchester, March 15 2015 Observational comedy has taken a bit of a battering in recent years. Ever since Michael McIntyre appeared on the scene, like a Peter Kay tribute act with jokes that mostly revolve around how babies can’t yet speak, some of the big names in stand-up have been turning […]
Frank Ormsby, Goat’s Milk (Bloodaxe Books) £12.00, reviewed by David Cooke
Goat’s Milk, New and Selected Poems by Frank Ormsby, is a welcome opportunity to re-evaluate a significant Ulster poet. It brings together work from four previous collections and forty six new poems which have the thematic and stylistic coherence of a further individual collection. The volume also contains a substantial ‘Introduction’ by Michael Longley in […]
Me and My Friend, The King’s Arms, reviewed by Emma Rhys
Me and My Friend, The King’s Arms, Salford, 9th-13th March 2015 Me and My Friend is an award-winning black comedy by prolific playwright Gillian Plowman, about the lives of four ex-patients of a mental hospital, prematurely released due to ward closures. The comedy is a particularly dark shade of black, and at times the comedic […]
New Collections from Peter Robinson and John Dennison, reviewed by Ian Pople
Peter Robinson Buried Music (Shearsman) £8.95 John Dennison Otherwise (Carcanet Press) £9.99 Early in Peter Robinson’s Selected Poems are the lines, ‘A seamless landscape,/there’s nothing the tired eye/will not integrate’ and later in the same poem ‘What goes away/is only your attention’. There’s a double-take here as the writing suggests that only tiredness will blend […]
Hindle Wakes, Bolton Octagon, reviewed by Sarah-Clare Conlon
Hindle Wakes, Bolton Octagon, 19th February-21st March 2015 ‘Nowt so queer as folk’ might sum up Hindle Wakes; or, at least, ‘nowt so queer as womenfolk’. It’s 1912 and the disenfranchised fairer sex is becoming more demanding, much to the woe of their male counterparts, and to some of the older ladies in Northern England. […]
My Brother’s Country, The Lowry, reviewed by Emma Rhys
My Brother’s Country, The Lowry, Salford Quays, Manchester, 26th–27th February 2015 My Brother’s Country portrays the tumultuous life of Fereydoun Farrokhzad, an Iranian singer, TV presenter, poet and political activist who was forced into exile after the 1979 Revolution and ultimately, it is believed, murdered by the Iranian Islamic State in 1992. The play spans […]
Stewart Lee at The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild
Stewart Lee, The Lowry, February 13 2015 John Coltrane performing ‘My favourite things’ (his take on The Sound of Music classic), is not one of my favourite things. John Coltrane performing the full 13 minute and 47 second version of ‘My favourite things’ is very definitely not one of my favourite things. John Coltrane’s 13 […]
Susan Calman at The Lowry, reviewed by Sarah Jane Vespertine
Susan Calman, The Lowry, February 22 2015 In ‘Lady Like’, Susan Calman proves that she’s an old school stand up with a carefully honed performance, making much of frequently addressing the audience as ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ and working with no distractions on stage, simply herself and a microphone. It’s such an assured and professional set […]
Ross Noble at The Lowry, reviewed by Sarah Jane Vespertine
Ross Noble, The Lowry, February 21 2015 Ross Noble’s new tour is called ‘Tangentleman’, and there are few more appropriate titles for a performance that veers off in so many directions that neither Noble nor his audience are quite sure how they got to any given point. He summed up his own style beautifully when […]
Peter Sirr, The Rooms (The Gallery Press) €11.95, reviewed by David Cooke
The Rooms is Peter Sirr’s eighth collection. A beautifully orchestrated meditation upon the meaning of the word ‘home’, it weighs in at just over one hundred pages and is thus a substantial addition to his work. By profession, Sirr is a linguist, teacher and translator who, like Joyce, Mahon, Clifton, spent many years abroad. It […]
Togara Muzanenhamo, Gumiguru (Carcanet Press) £9.95, reviewed by James Horrocks
A long line runs through Togara Muzanenhamo’s Gumiguru. It is not just the “experiences of a decade” that makes the narratives of this book, it is the lines of the poems on the page, reaching across from margin to margin. The focus of this book is certainly the stories which are largely based in or […]
Owen Lowery, Rego Retold (Carcanet Press) £12.99, reviewed by Charlotte Rowland
If Paula Rego’s art is, first and foremost, about the body, Rego Retold, containing Owen Lowery’s poetic responses to this idea, are themselves separate nods to portraiture. Romance, though somewhat of a distilled notion for Rego, whose subjects are often portrayed as brawny, animalistic, or openly distressed, is utilised by Lowery to draw out the […]
Scuttlers, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Fran Slater
Scuttlers, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 5th Feb-7th March 2015 Inspired by the gangland style riots that disturbed the streets of Manchester back in 2011, Rona Munro decided to go further back in time to investigate some of their precursors. Focusing on the areas of Ancoats and the Northern Quarter that took the brunt of the […]
A-Bomb on Broadway, Nexus Art Cafe, reviewed by Emma Rhys
A-Bomb on Broadway, 1121 Collective, Nexus Art Cafe, Manchester, 2nd-7th February 2015 A-Bomb on Broadway is a performance-art piece carefully crafted and brought to life by the 1121 Collective – a new theatre company based in Manchester. With A-Bomb, this new amateur group have created a professionally staged and passionate piece of dynamic theatre and […]
Light, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
Light, Theatre Ad Infinitum, The Lowry, Manchester, 3-4th February 2015 A dance show without dancing, a play without words, or silent film brought to the stage? It’s difficult to define exactly what Theatre Ad Infinitum and George Mann’s Light exactly is, but that is not necessarily to its detriment. It is definitely something hugely original. Told […]
King Creosote, Manchester Academy 2
King Creosote, Manchester Academy 2, 27 January 2015 You remember the first time you hear King Creosote. ‘The internet sent me on a date and the guy gave me a lift home afterwards,’ the woman next to me says. Like everyone else in Academy 2, she is wearing her coat, both hands around her plastic cup of […]
Spur of the Moment, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater
Spur of the Moment, Deaf Dog Productions, HOME, Manchester, 15-17 January 2015 For the last few years the Re: play festival has sought to bring the best local fringe theatre of the previous 12 months back to the stage. Manchester’s thriving theatre scene features so many small venues and up and coming theatre companies that […]
New Collections from Arundhathi Subramaniam and Brian Bartlett, reviewed by Ian Pople
Arundhathi Subramaniam When God is a Traveller (Bloodaxe) £9.95 Brian Bartlett Ringing Here and There: A Nature Calendar (Fitzhenry & Whiteside) $19.00 Arundhathi Subramaniam’s When God is a Traveller is both a PBS Choice and, as a result, is on the T.S.Eliot award list. Brian Bartlett’s Ringing Here and There has received a slew of […]
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, National Theatre, The Lowry, Manchester, 18th December 2014 – 10th January 2015. It isn’t often that you can say that the stage itself stole the show during a theatre production, but in the case of The National Theatre’s adaptation of Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident you could […]
Two Collections from Roy Fisher, reviewed by Ian Pople
Roy Fisher Interviews through Time, ed. Tony Frazer, (Shearsman Books, £9.95) Roy Fisher, An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963-2013, (Shearsman Books, £12.95) It is often suggested that Roy Fisher the interviewee is a somewhat slippery customer. Kenneth Cox remarks in an essay on Roy Fisher’s poetry that reading an interview with Fisher is like […]
She Stoops To Conquer, The Lowry, reviewed by Sarah Jane Vespertine
She Stoops To Conquer, The Lowry, Manchester 9th-13th December 2014 The Northern Broadsides production of She Stoops To Conquer is, quite frankly, adorable. It’s a little bit Blackadder the Third crossed with Two Pints of Lager, largely camp and enormously entertaining. The ‘northernisation’ that Northern Broadsides do so well, moving the setting from the West […]
Slava’s Snow Show, The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild
Slava’s Snow Show, The Lowry, Manchester, 9th-13th December 2013 A shock haired man in a mustard coloured onesie stands gazing sadly out at the audience. The capaciousness of his outfit allows him to seemingly grow and shrink, albeit with possibly the saddest expression on his face ever worn by a man. Minutes pass. The man […]
New Collections from Louise Glück and Joshua Mehigan, reviewed by Ian Pople
Louise Glück Faithful and Virtuous Night (Carcanet Press) £9.95 Joshua Mehigan Accepting the Disaster (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) $23.00 Louise Glück has an astonishing record in the US having been awarded almost every poetry prize there is. Her last book, Poems 1962-2012, was garlanded with praise in every review it received. In the UK, this […]
People Zoo Pint-Sized, The Kings Arms, reviewed by Fran Slater
People Zoo Pint Sized, The Kings Arms, Salford, 4th-5th December, 2014 For their debut production, Manchester theatre company People Zoo chose to present three short plays from local writers. Each of Jumbo Shrimp, Let them Eat It, and Captain Awkward shared similar themes of awkward relationships, but other than that, the audience was treated to […]
Wuthering Heights, Contact, reviewed by Fran Slater
Wuthering Heights, Contact Theatre, Manchester, 26th-27th November 2014 I could start by saying that if you’ve ever wanted to see Wuthering Heights narrated by a horse, then this is the play for you. But I won’t. That would make very little sense to anyone. I could start by saying that fans of long, uncomfortable, and […]
The Bartered Bride, The Lowry, reviewed by Sarah Jane Vespertine
The Bartered Bride, Opera North, The Lowry, Manchester, 18th and 20th November 2014. The first and most striking thing about Opera North’s new production of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride is the stage setting. For a reasonably small space, the backdrop of gentle white clouds in a serene blue sky gives a feeling of space and […]