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 […]
A Farewell to Arms, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
A Farewell to Arms, imitating the dog, The Lowry, Manchester, 13th-15th November 2014 Imitating the dog posit themselves as a theatre company that ‘tests theatrical conventions and brings high-end design and technical and thematic ambition to audiences at small and medium-scales.’ This was all on display during their adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel A […]
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Emma Rhys
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Royal Exchange, Manchester, 30th October – 29th November 2014 Taking our seats around the stage, our eyes immediately settled upon the awaiting scene of Maggie and Brick’s bedroom: the setting of the onstage action for the duration of the play. As I took in the beautifully lit and sumptuous white […]
Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense, The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild
Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense, The Lowry, November 4-8 2014 What-ho! Welcome to this review of Perfect Nonsense, a play(full!) adaptation of PG Wodehouse’s third Jeeves and Wooster novel, The Code of the Woosters, that draws attention to itself as a manufactured entertainment for a large audience as seriously as anything Bertolt Brecht ever […]
Austin Smith and Robin Robertson, reviewed by Lucy Burns
Austin Smith, Almanac (Princeton UP, $12.95) Robin Robertson, Hill of Doors (Picador, £14.99). Austin Smith’s debut collection with the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets is an impressive testament to rural life in north-western Illinois. Almanac is arranged concentrically around the family dairy farm and its surrounding landscape, reaching as far as Virginia, South Dakota and […]
The Dumb Waiter, The King’s Arms, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Dumb Waiter, Ransack Theatre, The King’s Arms, Salford, 6th-15th November 2014 As soon as the ticket collector led us down a narrow staircase and into a candlelit cellar, there was a sense that this adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter (1959) might just be a little bit special. Waiting for us in a […]
Colin Harper, Bathed in Lightning: John McLaughlin, the 60s and the Emerald Beyond (Jawbone Press) £14.95
John McLaughlin is a guitarist who for many, I would suggest, rose with little trace in the 1960s, until the complete revelation which was his debut album Extrapolation¸ in 1969. McLaughlin’s next move was to conquer America and dominate a particular style of jazz-rock guitar, in the seventies and beyond. In seventies, McLaughlin played with […]
Othello, The Lowry, a preview by Fran Slater
Everybody knows the story of Othello, right? ‘The green eyed monster’ and ‘the beast with two backs?’ Often seen as one of Shakespeare’s big four, this tale of jealousy, paranoia, and otherness features themes that have become no less relevant throughout the ages. In fact, almost exclusively among the Bard’s many plays, it could be […]
Secret Theatre: Show 6, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Fran Slater
Show 6, The Lyric Hammersmith Secret Theatre Company, Royal Exchange, Manchester, 30th October – 1st November 2014. It’s difficult to really provide a plot outline for The Secret Theatre Company’s Show 6. In many ways, it was difficult to fathom exactly what the plot was. But I’ll try. Two ‘users’ of an unmentioned drug have […]
Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2), The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild
Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2), Royal Shakespeare Company, The Lowry, Manchester, 21st-22nd October 2014 You find us in The Lowry on consecutive nights watching the RSC’s production of Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 (the RSC currently in the midst of a six year journey through all 36 of Shakespeare’s play, their latest outing […]
The Events, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Events, an ATC Production, dir. David Greig, HOME (Number 1 First Street), Manchester, 22nd-25th October, 2014 Following the massacre of her multicultural church choir, village priest Claire (Derbhle Crotty) is struggling to deal with a multitude of mixed feelings and unanswered questions. Having witnessed a particularly brutal killing in the church’s music room, survivor […]
Iris, Three Minute Theatre, reviewed by Fran Slater
Iris, Manana Productions Three Minute Theatre, Manchester, 9th-11th October, 2014 Iris is the first play from Manana Productions, a new theatre company founded by writer and actress Rebecca-Clare Evans and director Natalie Kennedy. Based on real events, it is a hard-hitting and unflinching consideration of the effects of domestic violence that is likely to leave […]
Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby, The Lowry, reviewed by Iain Bailey
Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby, a Royal Court Theatre and Lisa Dwan production in association with Cusack Projects Ltd, at The Lowry, Manchester, 23rd-27th September 2014 This trilogy of late plays by Beckett is organised around three striking images. Not I has its lips, teeth and tongue isolated by a narrow horizontal column of light. […]
James Acaster, Recognise The Lowry, reviewed by Jonny Rodgers
James Acaster, ‘Recognise’ (with support from Stuart Laws), The Lowry, September 21 2014 At first, the flyer for James Acaster’s new show ‘Recognise’ unnerved me. From his solemn look you could be forgiven for mistaking him for a brooding solo musician rather than a stand-up. Aren’t successful comics supposed to smile on their flyers or […]
Romeo & Juliet, HOME (Victoria Baths), reviewed by Fran Slater
Romeo & Juliet, a HOME production at Manchester’s Victoria Baths, 10th September-4th October 2014 From the very second the show began, it was clear that this would be no bog-standard Shakespeare adaptation. Taking place in the one-hundred-and-eleven year old setting of Victoria Baths, Walter Meierjohann’s take on Romeo and Juliet really did make the most […]
Hamlet, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Peter Wild
Hamlet, Royal Exchange, Manchester, 11th September-25th October, 2014 To begin with: an admission of my own ignorance. When, some months ago, I first espied the poster currently glorying the Royal Exchange, Maxine Peake, that brilliant, severe, intelligent actress last seen here by us as Strindberg’s Miss Julie, staring out from beneath a frowning forehead above the […]
The Best British Short Stories 2014, ed. by Nicholas Royle (Salt Publishing) £9.99, reviewed by Sarah-Clare Conlon
The fourth in this now popular annual anthology series, just out from 15-year-old independent publishing house Salt, rounds up 20 stories by different authors, offering an insight into how varied the short fiction landscape in Britain is right now. The task of editor Nicholas Royle (author of the critically acclaimed First Novel, about a lecturer […]
Rhys Darby at The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild
Rhys Darby, The Lowry, July 18 2014 Still best known as Murray from Flight of the Conchords, Rhys Darby has, in recent years, been making something of a name for himself outside of Australia as a stand-up – and his comedy is as affable, as gentle, as cosy and warm as you suspect Rhys himself […]
War Horse, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
War Horse, adapted by Nick Stafford, in association with the Handspring Puppet Company (The Lowry, 23 July – 20 September 2014) After a previous successful appearance at The Lowry, The National Theatre’s adaptation of War Horse began a nine week run at the venue on Wednesday July 23rd. Based on Michael Morpurgo’s 2007 novel of […]
New Collections from Gerður Kristnỳ and Sigurður Pálsson, reviewed by Ian Pople
Gerður Kristnỳ Bloodhoof, trans. Rory McTurk (Arc Publications) £9.99 Sigurður Pálsson Inside Voices, Outside Light trans. Martin S. Regal (Arc Publications) £10.99 If Icelandic literature means much to the sometimes translation resisting readership in the UK, it means the Sagas. More recently, however, Icelandic writers have contributed to the vogue of Scandi-Noir in the novels […]
Icarus, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
Icarus, produced by Square Peg Theatre and directed by Michael White (The Lowry, 3-4 July 214) Icarus is the second production from physical theatre company Square Peg. They have a close relationship with The Lowry following their entry for the Pitch Party competition at the 2013 re:play Festival. Although they didn’t win on that occasion, […]
David Gray: The Lowry, Manchester
Rewind fifteen years and you’d find David Gray enjoying something of a heyday. White Ladder was well into platinum sales and, after three previous albums that had performed disappointingly, this small singer from Sale was suddenly something of a superstar. He was at every festival. On every television show. The album was one of those […]
Love Supreme Jazz Festival, reviewed by Ian Pople
Love Supreme Jazz Festival: Glynde Place, 4 – 6 July Love Supreme, now in its second year, promised bigger and better and, in some ways, delivered. The weather forecast wasn’t promising, and the driving drizzle that swept over the campsite on Friday night/Saturday morning didn’t bode well. Fortunately, Saturday was comparatively clear and the sunshine […]
Billy Liar, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Peter Wild
Billy Liar, Royal Exchange, Manchester, directed by Sam Yates (13 June-12 July 2014). It’s probably fair to say that – if you think of anything when you think of Billy Liar – you think of the 1963 John Schlesinger film starring Tom Courtenay, Julie Christie and Wilfred Pickles. Keith Waterhouse’s original novel, and its sequel […]
Thomas A. Clark, Yellow & Blue (Carcanet Press) £9.95, reviewed by Charlotte Rowland
Thomas A. Clark’s Yellow & Blue, placing two distinct primary colours side by side, might, by its title, suggest the need to synthesise and equate is the most pronounced focus of his newest collection. The poems themselves are unpunctuated, and versed in lower-case small blocks, without titles, in order, it seems, to play with this […]
David Scott Beyond the Drift: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books £12), reviewed by Ian Pople
David Scott is an ex-Warden of the Winchester Diocese School of Spirituality, and a translator and editor of, amongst other things, Lancelot Andrewes. He’s also written on what he describes as a ‘family’ of spiritual writers, including Andrewes, Herbert, Donne, Vaughan and Traherne. In the volume under review, he also writes poems ‘On Not Knowing […]
Angel Meadow, performed by ANU Productions
Angel Meadow, performed by ANU Productions, and directed by Louise Lowe, presented by HOME Manchester (Cutting Room Square, Manchester, 10-29 June 2014). Arriving at Cutting Room Square, a steward from Home ticks off names and asks if anyone would like to leave bags or coats in a large red box for the duration of the […]
The Two Faces of January (2014), dir. Hossein Amini, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Two Faces of January is the latest feature film from director Hossein Amini, whose previous works include 2011 hit Drive and 2012 blockbuster Snow White and the Huntsman. The success of both these films has led to increased levels of interest in his latest work. Set in the early 1960s, the film gets off […]
EDA Collective, Why Are Animals Funny? (Zero Books) £9.99, reviewed by Allison Norris
I’ll be one of the first to admit, I love “Grumpy Cat” (fun aside though, the 2-year old American shorthair cat is actually named Tardar Sauce, and looks the way she does thanks to feline dwarfism and an under bite . . . and is apparently quite the loving little animal). I love pop-cultural tropes […]
Orlando, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Sarah-Clare Conlon
Orlando, Royal Exchange, reviewed by Sarah-Clare Conlon Subheaded “a magical comedy about love and time travel” and featuring former Coronation Street actress Suranne Jones (who trod the boards very persuasively for the first time here in 2009’s Blithe Spirit), Orlando is likely to get plenty of bums on seats whether this and other reviews […]
The Seagull, The Lowry, reviewed by Emma Rhys
The Seagull – a play for writers, actors and lovers; and the Manchester Library Theatre Company’s final production before becoming part of the exciting new arthouse venue HOME, opening in spring this year and located at First Street North. The purpose-built venue will include a 500-seat theatre and five cinema screens, and promises to continue […]
On the Thirteenth Stroke of Midnight: Surrealist Poetry in Britain, reviewed by Ian Pople
This is a very fine book with a whole range of surrealist documents including manifestos, commentaries and beautiful artwork. It is the first book of its kind since Germain’s Surrealist Poetry in English published by Penguin, in 1978. And whereas Germain’s book contained work from the US, Remy’s book concentrates solely on surrealist writing produced […]
Richard Burton, A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting (InfiniteIdeas) £30
In Under Briggflatts, Donald Davie declared that Thom Gunn has a public, whereas Basil Bunting has a following. That the former may no longer be guaranteed might have been confirmed with the recent news that August Kleinzahler has had to step in and buy the deceased Gunn’s library, because no-one else wanted to. But those […]
Anne Compton, Alongside (Fitzhenry and Whiteside) $14.95
When I first saw this book, with the ghost-like figures on its cover, and that slightly nervy title, I was inevitably reminded of Eliot’s lines from The Waste Land ‘Who is the third who walks always beside you?/ When I count, there are only you and I together./ But when I look ahead up the […]
1984, Liverpool Playhouse, reviewed by Simon Haworth
1984, Liverpool Playhouse (Headlong Theatre), tour continues Sherman Theatre, Cymru 5th – 9th November 2013, West Yorkshire Playhouse 12th – 16th November 2013 and Almeida Theatre, Islington 8th Feb – 29th Mar 2014 by Simon Haworth If rats in a trap ultimately await Winston Smith in the white walled, clinically lit personal hell […]