Tag: BroadwayWorldUK

Review: Birdsong UK Tour – Bristol Old Vic

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Original review: Broadway World UK

Birdsong UK Tour

Visually beautiful, evocative and affecting, and visceral in its brutality and effects

‘Some crime against nature is about to be committed’: true not only on the eve of the Somme in WWI, but of warfare now and forever. Birdsong, based on the book by Sebastian Faulks, is a brutal and beautiful observation of war and remembrance, with this new revival touring in time for the Armistice centenary this November.

Birdsong is at best a liberal abridgment of Sebastian Faulks’s book: in Rachel Wagstaff’s reworking, the novel’s naturalistic narrative style is lost to the non-chronological structuring, with the warfare acting as the frame for lieutenant Stephen Wraysford’s affair with the beautiful but unavailable Isabelle in France a few years earlier.

The effort to adapt an orderly if episodic plot into an analeptic play is fitting – memory and memorials are often a metaphor in the fictionalising of warfare – yet only fleetingly effective in practice. Continue reading “Review: Birdsong UK Tour – Bristol Old Vic” →

Review: Birmingham Royal Ballet’s La Fille mal gardée

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Original review: Broadway World UK

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Timeless escapist, enchanting, Ashton charm

La Fille mal gardée is classical choreographer Frederick Ashton at his most charming: comic, characterful, and with English classicism at its finest, it’s a playful romp through a pastoral picture of an unruly fille’s attempts to outfox her interfering mother to marry her charismatic but impoverished love. Balancing Ashton’s charming choreography with bright characterisation and breezy ballon, Birmingham Royal Ballet are absolutely beaming in this brightest of ballets. 

With maypole dancing, a pony, and a pantomime dame, it’s a deceptively simple premise, but La Fille demands the same meticulous footwork, expressive épaulement, and effortless performance as any Ashton classic. The choreography is characterful – with a clog dance for the dame, a coop of dancing chickens – accompanied by some percussive clucking from the orchestra pit – and a very English gallop around the maypole – as well as intricate and vigorous, full of grand allegro leaps, lifts, and gallant pas de deux.

The pas de deux for lively Lise and her country lover Colas are just as playful as the pair themselves. Continue reading “Review: Birmingham Royal Ballet’s La Fille mal gardée” →

Review: RashDash’s Three Sisters

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Original review: Broadway World UK

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Electrifying and confronting a classic with an unforgiving ‘fuck you’

RashDash’s Three Sisters, after Chekhov is thrillingly irreverent: to rules, to theatrical form, and even to reviews, but it’s their irreverence that’s so deserving of reverence. A rocking and rollicking retelling of a Russian classic with no time for men, marriages, or monologues, it tears up tradition and tramples all over it.

‘Rash as in reckless, Dash as in fast’, RashDash’s Three Sisters lives up to the trio’s self-titled expectations and destroys all others: dancing, dreaming, and cheerleading through the drawing rooms of Chekhov’s domestic drama, a chaise and a chandelier are the only evidence that these ladies were once in Chekhov’s Russia. The Russian Revolution that threatened and eventually overthrew the classist autocracy is reimagined as a revolution against the virility of the classical canon. Continue reading “Review: RashDash’s Three Sisters” →

Review: Agnes Colander at the Ustinov Studio

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Original review: BroadwayWorldUK

Agnes Colander at Ustinov

Engaging and enlightening

‘Only by forgetting all we’ve ever learned can we learn to live at all’: wise words from a work that was itself, forgotten. Lost to the British Library and brought to life over 100 years later, Harley Granville Barker’s Agnes Colander is an engaging and enlightening look at womanhood and liberation in early 1900s England from one of the Edwardian era’s greatest writers. 

Agnes is an artist living alone, a dangerous portrait of independence in a gallery of decorum. Directed for every detail by theatrical deity Trevor Nunn in the Ustinov Studio, the most intimate and diminutive of theatres, it feels more like sitting in on the seclusions of film set than seeing a play, so evocative are Rob Jones’s designs, Fergus O’Hare’s sound, and Paul Pyant’s ever-darkening lighting, and so privileged and privy is our view to the intimacies of one woman’s determinations and self-discovery. Sometimes, it feels like we’re seeing something before the final edit, and, fittingly, we are: Continue reading “Review: Agnes Colander at the Ustinov Studio” →