Brighton
Thomas H. Green
The humming is rising. Only three songs in and already a large section of the crowd is swaying, tranced out, from side to side, like southern Baptists, swept along by an extended version of “Meet Me There” from Nick Mulvey’s 2014 Mercury Music Prize-nominated debut album First Mind. The Komedia’s basement is an odd venue. It has a very low ceiling and takes exact ratios of performance energy, visual impact and audience goodwill to make it work. Whatever it takes, Nick Mulvey has it from the off. He doesn’t say much but captivates a cheerful, chatty and, admittedly, distinctly partisan crowd. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This excellent documentary considerably deepens the Nick Cave we know. If there is a Cave other than the spiritually and intellectually ravenous rock star with the raven hair, bone-dry wit and shamanic showman seen here, a bumbling secret identity behind the crafted persona, co-directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard don’t want to know. The junkie punk whose bands The Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds once thrived on confrontation and chaos only has a walk-on part in this portrait of the artist who survived those white-knuckle, white-powder days.Visual artists Forsyth and Pollard’s first Read more ...
Veronica Lee
She may have been performing for more than 30 years, but it takes some cojones to do your first solo show at the age of 56. Dawn French, with neither long-time partner Jennifer Saunders nor fellow cast members on stage, makes her debut with Thirty Million Minutes, an autobiographical show about the 30 million minutes (give or take) she has spent on this earth. She is doing it in the “sliver of time between the madness of my menopause and the impending madness of my dementia”.It's less a stand-up show, more a one-woman “how-to” life guide and, as directed by theatre and opera director Michael Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Espionage may have been the strict theme of the Brighton Festival’s Spies: Fact & Fiction (****), but the talk's perspective quickly widened towards broader aspects of statecraft, secrecy and surveillance. As might have been expected in a discussion chaired by the Guardian’s Luke Harding, which included ex-MI5 director general (long a novelist, too, with her alter-ego spook Liz Carlyle) Dame Stella Rimington, former defence minister Liam Fox (with his recent work of historical investigation Rising Tides: Facing the Challenges of a New Era – how does he find the time to write it?), and Read more ...
Katie Colombus
At first sight this children's theatre production could seem like a drab story circle for bored bairns. But despite a rocky start, I Believe In Unicorns develops into something rather magical.After finding her feet, solo performer and fabulist Danyah Miller whisks our attention away from the typical library setting and throws it headlong into an adventure of swimming through oceans, flying kites and climbing mountains.But most importantly, by opening the books stacked in piles upon the stage, she unearths precious gems - golden eggs, delicate houses with lights burning within, other, Read more ...
bella.todd
Getting pubes in your teeth during sex is one thing. Rabbit fur is something else. The moment when Ben Duke removes a wisp of partner Ino Riga’s costume from his mouth following a particularly lusty tussle may not be planned. But it’s in keeping with this witty dance-theatre duet created by Olivier-winning playwright Lucy Kirkwood and Lost Dog. Like Rabbits is all about the wild joy of a new relationship, the secret worlds we can access through sexual abandon, and the pressure that passion, and love, come under when reality intrudes.Their starting point is the Virginia Woolf short story Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of the mottos made famous by internationally renowned chocolatier Willy Wonka was: “A little madness now and then is relished by the wisest men”. Perhaps it’s a quotation that Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus, who put Talk to the Demon together, has framed on his wall. The piece is truly a trip, weaving down a barely trodden path between theatre, dance and art, ignoring narrative in favour of a free-flowing conceptual odyssey, rocketing the audience through exhilaration to tedium and back again. It doesn’t always work and it’s too long but I left the venue with my brain Read more ...
bella.todd
There are echoes of Lost in the crashed B-25 bomber that fills this often brilliant production with its rusting corpse. And they’re probably intended. Joseph Heller’s cult World War Two satire is, after all, about a kind of purgatory: US Army bombardier Captain John Yossarian is trapped by the absurdities of bureaucracy within a cynically perpetuated war where the ubiquitous Catch-22 states that anyone asking to be declared insane and discharged from duty must be well enough to continue to fly - fear of death being a rational human response.He is caught, too, by suppressed grief and guilt Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The question about Harrison Birtwistle’s Down by the Greenwood Side is: what is it? Designated by the composer as a “dramatic pastoral”, which is not very enlightening, it is not really an opera, nor a play with music, nor a piece of performance art, but somehow a winning combination of all three.Commissioned by the Brighton Festival in 1969, the revival of Down by the Greenwood Side is part of the celebrations for the composer’s 80th-birthday year, and Sir Harrison was in the sold-out audience at the Sunday performance. But it is hard to connect the present Birtwistle, elder statesman of the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When Kelis first walks onstage in a shimmering blue ball dress, a gigantic mane of black hair falling down her back, gay men all about me in the circle seats spring to life, some veering into “Go girl!” territory, others simply shrieking, and one in the row behind calmly saying to a neighbour, “She is just magnificent.” I'd not realised she was quite such a gay icon but this concert offered definitive proof. That said, gay and straight alike proved hugely vociferous throughout, hailing Kelis like a homecoming queen to a Brighton that was midway through the Great Escape music industry shindig. Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Zara McFarlane’s exquisite synthesis of jazz and nu-soul, an intoxicating proposition on CD, breathes more freely live, we discovered, in last night’s Brighton Festival performance. A recent appearance on Later... with Jools Holland was mentioned discreetly, and has clearly buoyed her confidence, as she gave an utterly engrossing demonstration of why Holland, and before him, Brownswood Recordings’ Gilles Peterson are supporting her.The Old Market, packed and ecstatic, was intimate without being cramped, and afterwards there were far more fans jostling to have a CD signed than queuing for beer Read more ...
Hofesh Shechter
On a lovely sunny Saturday morning the Children’s Parade was a really amazing start to things. The Brighton Festival team, the mayor and I started the parade, leading from the front for a few streets, then we went and watched from the side, wonderful, it made the hairs on my neck stand up. That evening was the first performance of my show Sun which opened the Festival and we had a big party afterwards. Not only that but it was my 39th birthday so it was a triple celebration. I didn’t feel rough on Sunday, though. I had a good amount of champagne but I’m still young - not 40 yet.On Sunday we Read more ...