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Online voting opens in Golden Handbag Awards 2016

Voting in the 2016 Golden Handbag Awards opens at midnight tonight, (April 26), giving readers of Gscene Magazine the opportunity to recognise and reward those in the community who have worked selflessly in the last 12 months to make Brighton and Hove a better place for LGBT people to live.

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This year a couple of minor changes have been made to the voting categories.

For your vote to count and be verified you have to register a vote in five different categories.

The award for Favourite Door hostess which has been won every year bar one in the last 10 years by the fabulous Joan Bond is being expanded to embrace Scene personalities, creating a new award which will be called the Favourite Hostess and Scene Personality Award.

A scene personality is someone you see out on the scene week in, week out throughout the year, bringing life and colour to the commercial gay scene. The scene would not be the same without them so think carefully when casting your vote.

This year we have also created a new award for Favourite Musical Performance from a choir, performer or instrumentalist. You can still vote for your favourite choir in the Favourite LGBT Organisations category but the quality of many of the musical concerts in 2016 staged by LGBT music groups is now of such a high standard that those performances deserve special recognition.

Finally for the first time there will be a Volunteer of the Year Award given by Gscene Magazine after private consultation with all voluntary sector LGBT/HIV groups and organisations.

When it comes to running your campaigns please remember why we do the Golden Handbags. It is not about being seen as the best, it is about recognising the wide variety of work that goes on behind the scenes to make Brighton and Hove such a special place for LGBT people to work, live and play.

James Ledward
James Ledward

James Ledward, creator of the Golden Handbag Awards in 1995, said: “Run your campaigns on Facebook, on Twitter and to your memberships directly. Remember there is nothing wrong with asking people to vote for you and this year think extra hard before you vote in categories such as Favourite Bar Boy and Girl as these are the people who are the gatekeepers to our community and the roles they play are very important especially to new people arriving in Brighton and Hove who access the commercial gay scene for the first time.

“Think carefully about groups that provide services to all different sections of the community and make sure that you remember and vote for the smaller groups who provide essential front line services to young people, to older people, to people with HIV and to the victims of Hate Crime.

“An organisation can be your favourite because in your view it deserves recognition for the work it does, no matter how small the organisation is.

“Last year 4,600 people voted in the Golden Handbag Awards. Lets make 2016 a record voting year in the history of the awards and make sure they reflect the reason why they were originally created –  to give us all the opportunity once a year to pat ourselves on the backs and say job well done!”

Enter into the spirit of the awards and remember that you receive a Golden Handbag because you deserve one not because you want one.

To vote in the Golden handbags, click here: 

REVIEW: The Father: Theatre Royal

gscenefatherThe Father

Florian Zeller

Theatre Royal, Brighton.

Now eighty years old, Andre was once a tap dancer. He lives with his daughter Anne and her husband Antoine. Or was he an engineer whose daughter Anne lives in London with her new lover, Pierre? The thing is, he is still wearing his pajamas and he can’t find his watch. He is starting to wonder if he’s losing control…

The Father is the winner of France’s highest theatrical honour, the 2014 Moliere Award for Best Play, and Christopher Hampton’s crisp translation, has dazzled audiences and critics alike.

Kenneth_CranhamThe play is a disoriented, staccato, repetitive, revisionist, confusing  and deliberately undermining exercise in the struggle to maintain dignity.  This serves to shift the understanding of the audience that the narrative will make some kind of sense, here- as in the illness- it shifts and turns, doors open, people change faces, roles, identities, suspicion and confusion rule, and reality itself seems to meld and fold until every time you open your eyes it’s something new, confusing and ultimately distressing.

gscene father 2This is strong theatre, Kenneth Cranham shows why he wins such awards and his is a bountiful, rich, noble and ultimately tender portrait of Andre’s end of life.  It’s acted with panache and careful casting has given the actors chemistry, and a play about the intimacies of memories and family and the intersection of identity, place and being is always going to hinge on how the actors work together. There are harsh moments, the ever increasing paranoia when the confusion jars and slowly it dawns on the audience that there is no happy ending here, just a slow fading out of everything.  It’s peppered with laughter, both hard and silly and that keeps the narrative tension bobbing along even when the facts are in freefall.

gscene1The full house loved it, and for good reason, the acting is superb. My companion and I, discussing it quietly as we left with the contemplative theater crowds felt it was missing some essential heart, a certain softness at its core where the care, love and compassion should have been, but perhaps with the focus of the play on the fathers decent into his dislocation and confusion this seeming lack of compassion was by design. This is the only translation of Florian Zeller’s work, which is an odd comment on the Anglo-centric British theatre commissioners and it would be good to see more of his work explored with such creative and innovative style.

Gscene credit Simon AnnandThere’s no interval; it’s ninety five minutes long. The staging and soundscape add to the relentless erosion of the person, with both becoming mere echoes of what we remember, broken snatched Bach partitas crumble into notes which nag the memory to be left in peace. The effective motive of slowly removing things from the stage, until all that was left was the bed in a huge white bare room was ruthless. Then the panic rises and consumed all even the grasped at clarity of what is and was lost.  Recommend for those who like their theatre with some substance and enjoy a tour de force of acting.

Until 30th of April

Theatre Royal

New Road

Brighton

For more info or to book tickets see the Theatre Royal Website here

 

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