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Review: Matthew Bourne’s Cinderella – Illuminations DVD

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Original Review for Culturefly

CINDERELLA

A transformative fairytale: the charm of this Cinderella is in the transformation

Cinderella is a fairy tale about transformations: across the ages, the archetypal rags-to-riches tale has enchanted all cultures, imaginations, and artistic forms with its transformative magic. From glass slippers, balls, and a prince to gas masks, bombings, and a traumatised pilot, Matthew Bourne reimagines the classic and richly and wittily transforms it into a wartime romance. With Prokofiev’s euphonious score, Lez Brotherston’s glamorous forties costumes and cinematic sets, and Bourne’s charming choreography, this is a fairy tale that glitters in the gloom of the Blitz.

The charm of this Cinderella is in the transformation: an unloved Cinders is whisked away to a ball, but it’s in a rocking café, not a royal castle, underneath the war-torn streets of a bombed-out London, and it’s a pilot, not a prince, she falls in love with. At the ball they dance jazz and jitterbugs as well as waltz, and it’s a fairy godfather in a white silk suit that whisks Cinderella away in a sidecar. As the determined dreamer Cinders, Ashley Shaw’s playful pas de deux with a dummy – in place of dancing with her broom in the ballet – is delightful, and her dream blossoms into life as Andrew Monaghan’s dashing pilot in an inspired act to introduce the prince before the ball.

The setting for the ball is based on a real-life cabaret bombing during the Blitz, each act prefaced by Pathé projections with real images of air raids, and the drama of Bourne’s Cinderella makes the stakes much higher than being home before the clock strikes twelve: Continue reading “Review: Matthew Bourne’s Cinderella – Illuminations DVD” →

Review: Kit Monkman’s Macbeth

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Original review: Culturefly

Kit Monkman's Macbeth

Ambitious, bloody drama danced on a singularly psychological stage

Along with elegant poetry, gripping prose, and the grounds on which to found great performances, the freedom of adaptation is one of the greatest gifts in Shakespeare’s plays. An adept adaptor, the Bard worked historical chronicles and the King’s writings on Daemonologie into one of his bloodiest and bleakest works, but Macbeth is rich in dramatic ambition. With witches, wars, and natural order overturned, it invites new interpretation of what drives a worthy thane to kill a king – witches, his wife, free will? – and director Kit Monkman’s production is an experiment not only in motive, but filmic form.

‘Nothing is but what is not’ notes the newly crowned Thane of Cawdor as the prophecy that has also promised him kinghood takes hold, and Monkman has taken this as his muse. For Macbeth, the unbelievable is to be believed, and for Monkman, the unimaginable is to be imagined. Continue reading “Review: Kit Monkman’s Macbeth” →

Review: Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man – Illuminations DVD

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Original review: Culturefly

the-car-man.jpg

Passionate and powerful: every bit as searing and sexy as the opera

Carmen is one of most passionate and powerful pieces in the operatic canon, set under a sizzling Spanish sun and ablaze with seduction, sensuality, and Bizet’s striking score. The Car Man, Matthew Bourne’s reimagining, may do away with the nineteenth-century Spanish cigarette factory and matadors in favour of stifling small-town 1960s America and mechanics, but it is every bit as searing and violent and sexy.

Set to a stripped-back reworking of Bizet’s score by Rodion Shchedrin and originally restyled for Bourne in 2000 by Terry Davies, The Car Man is a reimagining stripped back to its gritty, aggressive, grounded origins – there are no Swans or Cinderellas here. The protagonists have no express parallel: Luca, the Car Man, is the seducing stranger, as is Carmen, but, like Carmen, it is one of his lovers, Lana, that’s the beauty who betrays one lover for another. And, as Bourne explains in the informative, informal, interview-focused ‘Making Of’ featurette, much of the influence is owed to film noir thrillers, with the central betrayal and retribution less Car-Man and more The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Thrilling from the off, there’s blood, sweat, and sex aplenty as the languor of a long summer yields to lust: Continue reading “Review: Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man – Illuminations DVD” →

Essay: Kenneth MacMillan – Master Choreographer

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Original article: Culturefly.co.uk 

Kenneth MacMillan by Donald Southern:ROH 1989

Ballet is no Sleeping Beauty. It’s no art installation, no history in hallowed halls, no artefact kept under lock and key. Steps and concepts can be penned, but can’t be captured in a still frame like film, composed on staves like music or printed on paper like poetry. It’s ephemeral, like theatre, existing only for a moment, but, unlike theatre, that moment – or movement – exists only on the body that embodies it. Ballet lives and breathes.

No one understood this more instinctively, or intensely, than Kenneth MacMillan; a master choreographer of the Royal Ballet and beyond whose life and work is being celebrated by the best of British companies, as well as around the world, to commemorate 25 years since his death. MacMillan had a heart attack backstage at the Royal Opera House in 1992 during a revival of the emotionally arresting Mayerling, but while the creator’s heart may have stopped, the heart of his creations go on beating and breaking on ballet stages around the world as wards of his widow, Lady MacMillan.

Most of the works in the celebration, performed by a mix of dancers from six world-class companies from around the UK, are composed of three short, one-act works to showcase the diversity and depth of his choreographic style. Continue reading “Essay: Kenneth MacMillan – Master Choreographer” →