The Imagined Village
The Imagined Village
at Theatre Royal, Norwich,as part of Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2012
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 25 May 2012.
Musical collaboration project Imagined Village brought some of the freshest, most innovative intercultural fusion and evolution of traditional folk into alt-rock and morris-bhangra around.
Folk legend Martin Carthy and his daughter Eliza led the 10-piece outfit who continuously push at the boundaries of folk. They work collectively, together tweaking and reinventing old songs and each others’ new material.
They updated My Son John, an old war song, making it a political statement about today’s conflicts. Word-of-mouth narratives like The Captain’s Apprentice rubbed shoulders with new edgy material about ‘culture in crisis’ such as The Guvnor, Fisherman and The Sick Old Man.
Their evolutionary technique was powerfully applied to Bjork’s Birthday, the ‘sinister lullaby’ Next, Billy Bragg’s Hard Times of Old England, a Cornish dance tune and their contribution to the Cultural Olympiad, Bending the Dark from their new album.
Dualling-complementary fiddles, drums and hand percussion, cello, double bass, keyboards and guitars played with ideas and painted moods, with clever use of sound effects and some earthy singing all made this a night to remember.
Filed under: Reviews
Duane Eddy
Duane Eddy
at the Hippodrome Circus, Great Yarmouth, part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2012.
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 21 May 2012.
Somebody in the crowd flocking to see Duane Eddy in concert expressed surprise that he is still alive! The late 50s/early 60s rock and roll legend, the man voted more popular in the UK in 1960 than Elvis Presley, is very much alive and rocking.
The rebel rouser who invented the ‘guitar twang’ and sold 100 million records gave a command performance of his classic hits, from the first Movin’ & Groovin’, which influenced the early surfing sound, to contemporary songs off his current album, Road Trip.
His influences from country music to rock were evident. He’s worked with and inspired musicians in many genres over the decades; it was easy to see why.
There were instrumental ballads, including First Love, First Tears. He rocked it up with Forty Miles of Bad Road, Ramrod and John Peel favourite, Peter Gunn. He lovingly played the blues backed by his versatile, talented British band.
He paid tribute to former pirate radio DJ Johnnie Walker who used Because They’re Young as his theme tune. This star and his influential music evoke a long gone era, yet can still teach today’s aspiring guitarists a thing or two.
Filed under: Reviews
Mirror
Schweigman & Mosk, at Open, Norwich, part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival 12.
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 19 May 21012.
This show asks two questions – ‘how strange can reality be?’ and ‘how real is reflected reality?’ The answers are extremely strange and not particularly real.
From the off, the audience of just 30 is divided into two, to sit on long benches gazing into a dark tank through a slit window along each side of a rectangle. Everyone close together in an intimacy, an exclusivity as if for comfort while sharing the weirdness.
Noises, glimmers of lights and a sense of movings, births and contortions come from within the structure. It’s not unlike waking from a nightmare about having a nightmare to discover it’s a nightmare.
It takes time before we realise that what we have been watching is not reality, but the mirror image. It’s unsettling, yet touching in the way it unsettles life’s certainties.
Ideally set in the cavernous old banking hall of Open, talented acrobats play games with reality, exploring spatial awareness.
What’s it about? It’s about foetuses in a womb, animals, people, love, death, puzzlement, manipulation of people as if puppets, gymnastics, deceptions of water, images of life and a total sensory experience all in one hour! Amazing.
Filed under: Reviews
The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart
National Theatre of Scotland’s Prudencia Hart
NUCA Bar, Norwich
Review published in Eastern Daily Press, 15 May 2012.
In Prudencia Hart, the Norfolk and Norwich Festival 12 fringe got off to a brilliantly surreal start.
The National Theatre of Scotland’s ambition is to transform the world in dreams and drama, ‘to make incredible things happen in unbelievable places’.
The Norwich University College of the Arts bar is a gem of theatrical possibilities, up dangerous stairs, ideal for a theatre of the imagination, theatre without walls.
And The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart was a piece of unspecific site performance, ideally suited to venue on and around the tables and audience.
Sponsored by Benromach whisky, there was a free dram for everyone. The play was about a girl who was a collector of traditional folk music, told in narrative folk ballad form of rhyming couplets and interspersed with live Gaelic music.
It was a fantasy tale of the Devil’s ceilidh, a snowy midwinter heaven and hell story where Old Nick, the collector of souls, fell in love with Prudencia. In escaping the topography of hell, it became anarchic theatre.
The intimacy and proximity of actors/musicians made it both moving and funny with comedy and satire along the way. It was a journey into the mind that was well worth taking.
Filed under: Reviews
Betrayal
Open Space Theatre Company, Seagull Theatre, Lowestoft
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 14 May 2012 and East Anglian Daily Times, 15 May 2012.
Open Space push at yet another boundary with Harold Pinter’s infrequently performed slow dance round the memories of shared guilt, secrets and lies.
Rich with the circular dialogue of life, the three-hander play exposes the deceits embedded in the relationships between a man, his wife and his best friend over years. Much of the narrative goes backwards in time as the pain and shallowness are unpacked.
Darren France is good as the friend/lover. Stephen Picton is excellent as the less than pure husband. Cathy Gill is just outstanding as the wife and mistress, juggling the men with her family but paying a high emotional price for her deceptions.
David Green directs. He has built a reputation for getting to the heart of a text through well-drawn characters, and in this, the self-absorption and self-deception provide a rich source of material which he exploits to perfection.
The scene changes with snippets of apt songs are handled smoothly as part of the performance and Alan Bolton as the mad Italian waiter is a mini delight.
Filed under: Reviews
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs
Mike Daisey at The Cut, Halesworth
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 8 May 2012.
The prestigious High Tide Festival attracted US performer Mike Daisey to Halesworth. It was a scoop. His one man, stand-up (sitting down) comedy monologue about Steve Jobs and Apple has been contentious everywhere.
The late Jobs was creator, inventor and cultural icon, genius behind Apple-Mac’s business and technology phenomenon. From garage inventions to mega-business power plays with anecdotes about the evolution of devices, this was a tale for our times.
A large desk-bound Daisey sat for two hours as he animated Jobs’ biography. Voices, faces and events flowed in this masterclass of agit-prop political humour appealing to Apple or Microsoft fans, technophobes or geeks. ‘Power-point presentations’ was side-splittingly funny.
The account of China’s Shenzhen Foxconn factory which makes Apples’ and others’ components where one exploited worker died after a 34-hour shift, was intensely moving.
Still fond of Apple gadgets, Daisey nonetheless paraphrased Steve Jobs as Big Brother – ‘if you control the metaphor through which people see their world, you control the world’.
He finished with a mind-virus image: ‘now you know how the laptops are made, you‘ll see blood welling between the keys’.
A theatrical tour de force!
Filed under: Reviews
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Norfolk Youth Music Theatre at Norwich Playhouse
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 13 April 2012.
Stephen Sondheim’s ground-breaking, musical revenge thriller is heavy with gore and bodies. This Norfolk Youth Music Theatre production puts some professionals to shame.
Adrian Connell directs a highly talented ensemble. Callum Bicknell plays the barber with an amazing voice, towering morosely over victims and innocents alike. Harriet Millsopp is just outstanding as the amoral Mrs Lovett, turning bodies into pies.
High soprano Emily Stangham, as Todd’s daughter, and Emma Hume as his tragic, lost wife, are superb. Fraser Davidson (the love-lorn Anthony), Daniel Herman (the depraved Judge Turpin), Jack Edwards (his accomplice), Alex Salzado (the rival barber) and Marland Barsby (the young, simple Tobias Ragg) are all exceptionally strong singers and actors.
This is extremely challenging musically. Mark Sharp’s necessarily hidden orchestra are consistently excellent and the on-stage chorus are spot on. The whole cast collectively and individually do full dramatic justice to the clever lyrical narratives and complex melodies.
Songs like The Worst Pies in London and My Friends (of his killer razors) have become classics. The ingenious chair served gruesomely well.
Recommended, and then some.
Filed under: Reviews
The Dubliners
The Dubliners in concert
at Norwich Theatre Royal
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 14 March 2012
The world of fifty years ago was a foreign country when Ireland’s Dubliners began performing. Their celebratory tour recalls many changes of the decades.
Original Barney McKenna is still playing, and while some have come and gone, all are long-serving. A certain magic binds them together, sharing their love of jigs and reels, instrumentals, ballads and folk songs, traditional and new.
A packed house, many the same age as the band, others younger, was spellbound by quality Celtic folk tradition, guitar, banjo, whistle, fiddle, tapping along approvingly.
1967’s chart-topper Seven Drunken Nights was followed by songs, some poignant, others funny, about Ireland, mountains, alcohol and jobs long gone, like the ferrymen.
Many lyrics were from the political-social commentary wing of folk, while the haunting I Wish I Had Someone to Love Me was moving indeed.
Band banter and anecdotes supplemented old videos and stills on the back screen, like a big scrap book and tribute to Dubliners who have passed away.
The concert was a nostalgic joy, encouraging and inspiring to share with men who have no intention of stopping. They promised to return to Norwich ‘to start our second fifty years’.
Filed under: Reviews
A Christmas Carol
Maddermarket Theatre, Norwich
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 19 December 2011
Charles Dickens’ iconic tale of redemption from darkness, A Christmas Carol, is a seasonal but timeless favourite, and The Maddermarket is true to the spirit of the original classic.
Besides the well-known ghosts, the Cratchitt family, the nephew and, of course, the great British curmudgeon Ebenezer Scrooge (Noel James), the play has many minor parts, some doubled up well by the large company.
The use of some of these characters as a Greek-style chorus to convey the narrative, comment and directly address the audience effectively sheds new light on the familiar.
Movement is restricted on the stage, but even so, the sombre, death-like atmosphere of those Victorian days was captured, including the chill grimness of the counting house.
The tragedy of the impoverished Cratchitts was mitigated by a sense of optimism and deep family love. Scrooge’s terror of the ghosts was mixed with comic touches.
The show will become a must-see this Christmas and New Year.
Filed under: Reviews
GCSE: The Musical
Mini Mouth Youth Theatre
at The Cut, Halesworth
Abridged review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 12 December 2011
Full review published in the East Anglian Daily Times, 13 December 2011.
After NHS The Musical, and musicals about Titanic, Thalidomide and Ofsted, the time has surely come for one about the General Certificate of Secondary Education.
It comes in the form of an original piece written and directed by James Holloway, leader of the Mini Mouth Youth group at The Cut. The large open stage was a perfect setting for an energetic ensemble of thirty young to older teenagers.
This group are being trained in theatre techniques and performing arts in their own time, and it is a joy to see some success stories of tomorrow learning their craft today, and mastering the discipline needed to sing, dance and act.
Good choreography from Caroline Mummery and musical direction of a small but well formed band stage-side from Edith Peck added zest to a tale of rival pop bands forbidden from performing and competing till their GCSEs are over, wrapped up in lashings of teenage love, frustration and angst.
With some funny one-liners, mainly at the expense of teachers and youth, it happily mixed elements of Glee, Grease and High School Musical to create a piece of entertainment that was pure fun, both for themselves and the audience.
Filed under: Reviews