This book left me touched and aching to read its predecessor, it shows the development of love and understanding as life moves on and how women learn to accept, empower and inspire the people around them. Pure summer delight!
This book left me touched and aching to read its predecessor, it shows the development of love and understanding as life moves on and how women learn to accept, empower and inspire the people around them. Pure summer delight!
Kneehigh always get it just right, flavoursome reinvention of tradition and their blend of comedy, music, physical chorography, dance and top notch performers bring a superb energy to the theatre and their take on classic situations allow us an intimate depth of connection with the action sometimes missing from more contemporary theatre. Tristan & Yseult is almost a cult these days with a huge fan base of people who love it and it only seems to get better with each outing.
To say the dancers were superb is an understatement and some of due and trio dances were astonishing; virtuoso performances of agility, technique and pure scalding sensuality, all contained in a stylised and ruthlessly executed Tango. There were separate stylised dances each shone with a brilliance, a trio of male dancers whirled with a frenzy of erotic passion and interlocking geometrics’ of tango’s vocabulary but expressed in a way I’d not witnessed on a stage before, some of the male female pairings hardly stopped moving for more than a half second, the whole program gripped from the moment it started and didn’t stop until the last step has been taken.
This is a slightly soiled laid back bear pit of a show with a cuddly chubby grubby panda host Joe Foster, who did as little as he possibly could to keep the atmosphere up and running but then with ten acts on the bill there wasn’t much space for material even if he’d had any. It was refreshing to see so many women on the bill and the booker needs a pat on the back for ensuring such a decent balance, the line-up was different to advertised ( no Madame Senorita alas…) but after a few pints who cares, bring ’em on!
This is a curious hybrid of music and education lecture and semi biography of performer Hypnotique who regales us with her personal story about how she came to fall in love with and learn to play the world’s first electronic instrument the Theremin (from 1920s Russia).
Mimbre don’t challenge; they change and provide a healthy counter narrative to the usual edge-of-danger acrobatics and physical theatre and ‘If I could I would’ allows them to convince us that we’ve all got capacity to fly, have pools of resilience and sometimes you just need two cheeky old ladies at a bus stop to give you a push.
Saulwick come across like a retro-modern Madame Blavatsky using the vintage recording machinery and snatches of interviews to express her theosophical investigations, the temporary and temporal mashing up to form the present, the past and gone giving us creative material for the now, the reflection looking again at the lost and finding something new in the old, dead and departed. It’s a vivid and interesting concert.
Day is an energetic and engaging performer; he is charming and fun and clowns with a furious passion, helped along by an ability to contort his plastic features and sinuous lanky frame in many ways at once. His ability to perform to extreme is aided by the well thought out video mapping and under-stated sophistication of his technical support and the show as a concept worked well.
You hop on a bus, reminiscent of the mystery tours so favoured by aunts of mine in the 1970’s and are deposited in the dark, with some superb and wholly novel views of the city in the distance, it’s a long walk thought this night-time trail, like a crepuscular robotic nature watch we come across these aviaratic automata in this setting, suggesting behaviour and interactions where none can be. As you progress though different natural settings, each lit with style and humour
Tightly written, well-acted and delightfully compact production with a few well timed thrills, Gaslight is a lovely night out and worth trotting along to if you fancy some rather delightful quality writing performed with relish by this safe engaging team . It is 2 hours 25 minutes (including interval) but felt much shorter, testament to the gripping and absorbing production.
