David Jays on theatre and dance
At the Royal Opera House, ethnic diversity is usually more apparent among the ushers than the audience, but Ballet Black attracts a more varied crowd than the swanky home company can manage. This was evident in the ROH’s Linbury Theatre last night. And it was a rather good evening – two serious short pieces and, by Arthur Pita, the most deliriously enjoyable dance work of this short year. But … [Read more...]
To enjoy a classic novel, go to the theatre. That might be the lesson of two audacious recent British stagings. Headlong’s multimedia version of George Orwell’s 1984 has come to London’s Almeida Theatre, while a two-part adaptation of Jane Eyre in Bristol captures Charlotte Brontë’s tumultuous imaginative landscape. They and other adaptations (including long-running shows like War Horse, … [Read more...]
There’s nothing like holding a gun to a swan to ruffle a balletgoer’s feathers. It’s hardly on the scale of Black Swan, but at Dance Gazette, the Royal Academy of Dance magazine, we caused a kerfuffle with ‘Keep, Rescue, Retire’ – a feature that invited leading international artistic directors to consider the state of the ballet repertoire. They all agreed it was too narrow – the victim of patchy … [Read more...]
We all grow older. Since Performance Monkey last tottered towards the keyboard, his paws have grown sclerotic, his plush has rubbed off, he displays the rusty effect of winter and rough weather. He’s nearer death, as are we all. These merry reflections are inspired by Pina Bausch’s 1980, performed by the sublime Tanztheater Wuppertal. This was the work that turned a whole generation of British … [Read more...]
Can you stage the internet? I'm just back from the sweetest, saddest performance I've seen in ages - and also the first that, in barely more than an hour, tells the story of the web's utopia turning to dystopia. Chris Goode is an utterly beguiling theatre maker, and The Hippo World Guest Book opened Lean Upstream, a festival devoted to his boundary-blurring work. Goode's erudite, funny website … [Read more...]
It has been a while since the performance monkey put paw to keyboard, but he has still been, y'know, seeing stuff in theatres. Some of these things have been terribly cool, and have involved magical oracles, properly good nervous breakdowns and St Paul's Cathedral. And some of these things have been terribly lame (including a ballerina asking us to share her therapy, a playwright mawkishly … [Read more...]
There was no halfway house with Pina Bausch. As my editor remarked earlier today, you were either a devotee or sceptic, and if a devotee you were very devoted. There will be many tributes to Pina Bausch in the next few days - I'm writing one myself. So this is just a memory. Of the first time. For many years, Bausch's company (Tanztheater Wuppertal) didn't appear in London - there was no stage … [Read more...]
I was much tickled this afternoon to read the performance artist and lecturer Lois Weaver recalling a visit to David Hare's play The Secret Rapture. Her colleague Peggy Phelan, a reluctant co-attendee at the matinee performance ('this sea of the well-behaved'), became exercised during the scene in which the heroine's dangerously obsessive ex bursts in on her with a gun. The dynamic of the play was … [Read more...]
We critics - dressed in our usual dowdy - were discombobulated when we arrived at Sadler's Wells last week for English National Ballet's tribute to Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. There was a red (actually black) carpet, and a healthy jostle of paparazzi. Not, it turned out, for us (who knew?), but because there were British stars in attendance. Jeremy Irons, Stephen Fry, Matt Smith (who? The new Dr … [Read more...]
Helen Mirren sickens in the sunlight, bends double with torment, makes clammy advances to her stepson and scrabbles at herself in remorse. It's quite unlike the starchy home life of our own dear queen, as portrayed in Mirren's previous Oscar-winning performance. But this is a Racine queen - Phèdre, whose toxic desire blights her family in the 1677 French tragedy. Many have welcomed big-screen … [Read more...]