The triumphant final act was Rooster, a show for which Rambert has become renowned and received much praise. To laud it is an exercise in reiteration, but it is unavoidable when describing Christopher Bruce’s electric and charming dance. It is funny, but it also successfully displays the truth of young adulthood, where preening and posing mean that there are always those on the outside to the in-crowd. Vanessa Kang is particularly strong here.
Read MoreA man walks into a pub. So begins the first line of Barney Norris’s heart-wrenching new play, Eventide, and also its action. The opening line goes on to become a rather rude joke about a ferret, the details of which I will not go into here in case my mum is reading. The teller of this joke is the man that walks into a pub. Well, that walks into a pub garden, if we’re being picky . . . And of not quite knowing what to do when things end. A man walks into a pub. What happens when he walks out again we never find out.
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Shakespeare’s green-eyed monster, jealousy, raises its ugly head again in The Winter’s Tale. Its destructive power is a gift for an actor, enabling him to work through his whole repertoire of emotions and techniques, ranging from initial bonhomie to suspicion, to anger, to revenge and finally to regret. There is a lot of meat there into which the able thespian can sink his teeth . . . a satisfying and entertaining, if not exciting or original, production
Read MoreDirector Harry Fehr has painted Orlando as a senior officer in the RAF, given to outbreaks of sudden violent behaviour – a man seized and eventually overcome with hallucinatory dementia inflamed by the realisation that the woman he loves has left him for another man. That other man is the soldier Medoro, also in hospital to recover, but from physical wounds, not a mental condition . . . As can be expected of the WNO, this was another very high quality production showing bold interpretation and delivery.
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The story starts on the final day of the First World War and then, in leaps of approximately ten years, takes us into the late fifties. The tale encompasses all the trials and tribulations facing ex-soldiers in a land fit for heroes – the difficulty in finding gainful employment, adjusting to civilian life and so on, all issues we are familiar with today. But also the good, positive things like the creation of the Welfare State after WW2 .
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Brave New World, although dealing with similar themes to 1984, was sensible enough not to identify itself in a time period so specific as to make watching a play about what we all know didn’t happen thirty years ago a bit daft (à la 2001 – A Space Odyssey). The world depicted in the story is one where people are created in laboratories to fulfil certain tasks – top of the pile are the Alphas (no, not cars) and at the bottom are the Epsilons who are created without a sense of smell so they can work in the sewers.
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