What’s the most haunting moment of Carmen? The rousing toreador’s song? One of the stompy dances? Carmen’s own teasingly lush habanera? Maybe. Or maybe it’s the wordless, taunting snatch of melody with which Carmen taunts Don José – the soldier already in thrall to her, dick and epaulettes caught in a hopeless struggle. ‘Tralalalala,’ she hums, as if to herself. ‘Tralalalala.’ It the perfect, … [Read more...]
Archives for April 2015
Almost invisible
It has taken me a while to work out why I often have a problem with immersive theatre. In theory, it’s marvellous – upending the staid conventions of bourgeois propriety, escaping the proscenium’s gilt and plush, the middle class’s guilt and hush. Opening the theatre to the world. Letting the world into the theatre. Yep to all that. That’s not my problem. The problem is that, once you let in … [Read more...]
Don’t mention the war
How much should we talk about history when we talk about Pina Bausch? Audiences respond to the late choreographer's elemental themes, but Bausch’s angst was not only existential, but also historic. Sexual politics were an abiding theme in her work, and the pummelling conflict between men and women is the livid matter of much of her dance. But it also figures much more than this – and the 1984 … [Read more...]
Suicide watch
Someone starves to death, another stage manages his own execution. A person falls victim to a booby-trapped chair. And someone dies, as it says on the playbill, of a broken heart. John Ford’s The Broken Heart (c1629-33), in a rare revival from Shakespeare’s Globe, sounds sensational. And of course it is. But it is also unlike more familiar Jacobean tragedies – it’s even quite distinct from … [Read more...]