Brighton Festival
Thomas H. Green
At the Brighton Festival 2018 official launch this morning, the much-anticipated ritual of opening the brand new programme for the first time was taking place everywhere. It’s printed using a typeface based on visual artist and Guest Director David Shrigley’s handwriting and it’s clear from the tone that, alongside a plethora of rich artistic experience on offer, his unique sense of humour will be felt at the festival, which runs May 5-27.For instance, of a talk he’s giving he says, “David Shrigley will present an illustrated talk about his work. It will contain numerous rambling anecdotes Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Hanif Kureishi and his interviewer Mark Lawson are both wearing black Nike trainers, and long professional acquaintance makes them as comfortable with each other as an old, expensive pair of shoes. Kureishi’s promo tour for his latest novel, The Nothing – about a film director reduced by age to an impotent, misanthropic “penis in a wheelchair” – has brought him to Brighton and Hove High School’s Assembly Hall on the Brighton Festival’s closing night. The clock heard during exams ticks loudly, but it takes audience questions to throw him off his amiably provocative stride.Wearing an open- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tristan & Yseult has become something of a calling card for Kneehigh, which was founded in 1980 and is now the unofficial National Theatre of Cornwall. Emma Rice, currently artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe in London, created this production in 2003 with writers Anna Maria Murphy and Carl Grose, and it catapulted the company to national recognition. Here Rice directs a touring revival which is part of the Brighton Festival.The pre-Arthurian legend is a tale of forbidden desires and broken hearts. Tristan (Dominic Marsh) is sent by Cornish King Mark (Mike Shepherd) to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s a tricky business, approaching comedy on a day when a national tragedy has just occurred. Comedian and broadcaster Adam Buxton is aware of this. It was especially noticeable last night, with his show delayed as a direct result of the Brighton Dome’s extra door security, post-Manchester. As people slowly filed in to take their seats he patrolled the stage, acknowledging the events of the day before. His attempts to move into comedy were initially somewhat awkward, as if it wasn’t quite appropriate. It’s understandable. There’s a general sense of unsureness as to how to proceed. Are we Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Brighton is getting a bit above itself tonight. There’s a weird full moon atmosphere in the Theatre Royal, even though it’s not a full moon. At one point, Rich Hall makes a gag wherein he wishes the world were run by women, the brunt of which is that if war were imminent they’d get together, bond over swatches of desert khaki, have a Prosecco and there’d be no war. “You’re a dickhead,” shouts a woman’s voice, loudly, “Misogynist!” Hall makes a show of being astounded. Then another male voice pipes up from the circle, “We don’t like Theresa May!” (for she was included in Hall’s short list of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The subtitle of Richard Nelson’s new trilogy suggests an anti-Trump polemic. Instead, its miraculous, almost invisible craft fulfils the President’s most hollow promise. It restores full humanity to a family of lower-middle class Americans who often feel slighted and helpless. As they gather around their kitchen table, the Gabriels talk and live more fully than most media and politicians ever really believe of those they describe and rule. Nelson has said his aim is “verisimilitude”, a seemingly modest ambition which wonderfully succeeds.Like Nelson’s The Apple Family Plays, seen at the 2015 Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Old, young, or somewhere in the middle - people of all ages fill the seats around me and noisily wait for the evening to begin. The Picador Poetry List - home to literary giants like Carol Ann Duffy and Clive James - is celebrating its 20th birthday in the grandeur of Brighton’s Theatre Royal with performances from five of its most exciting contemporary poets: Hollie McNish, Glyn Maxwell, Lorraine Mariner, Richard Osmond, and Kate Tempest. After head of Picador Poetry, Don Paterson, warms up the crowd with an introduction that borders on stand-up comedy, the lights dim and Hollie McNish ( Read more ...
bella.todd
Dream palace, cesspit and church; celebrated, mopped (by Marlene Dietrich, no less) and fucked: Brighton’s Theatre Royal has seen a whole lot of history, of both the splendid and the seedy variety. Now it has found a magnificent if unlikely mouthpiece in the form of post-modern cabaret star Meow Meow. In the opening moments of her new song-cycle, inspired by the theatre’s half-remembered and misreported past, she clambers through the stalls trailing yards of historical costume, retrieves a page of script from her cleavage, and pinches an EXIT sign to use in the absence of stage lights.With “ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Watching tango dancers Gisela Galeassi and Nikito Cornejo own the apron of the stage during the second half of m¡longa, the brain finds it difficult to process what the eyes are seeing. The pair seem to be one writhing, dark-toned dervish of jutting, sensual, passionate movement. Back and forth they go, he spinning her round his body like a silk scarf, fluid as mercury; her feet attacking the stage, staccato, kicking out, kicking down, so fast it really is the proverbial blur. Nigh on two hours of tango with a 20-minute interval might sound like too much, but with only the smallest of lulls Read more ...
bella.todd
A whacking great story has gone largely untold in British theatre: the legacy of colonialism in India, including the cultural ghosts the British left behind. With the 70th anniversary of Indian independence just round the corner this summer, poet and playwright Siddhartha Bose has set out to address this "historical amnesia". Premiering at Brighton Festival ahead of a UK tour, No Dogs, No Indians shuffles three periods in Indian history and aims to deal big questions about the values of remembering and forgetting, resisting and assimilating, loving and leaving. Let’s just say we had the word Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jeremy Hardy is very happy to mock his audience and they love it. One of the biggest laughs of the night is when a punchline refers to us as a collection of “middle class white people”. Being Brighton, he goes further, explaining how tolerant the city is but that everyone’s frustrated as they have no-one to tolerate. Any immigrants, he explains, take one look and head down to Devon “where they have cream teas”. His “demographic”, as he refers to them, are certainly an older crowd, mostly retirement age, probably Radio 4 listeners who’ve heard him on endless quiz shows, but the comedian is Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
As befits a festival with a spoken word artist as its guest curator, storytelling is at the heart of the visual arts offer in the 2017 Brighton Festival. It is not known if performance poet Kate Tempest had a hand in commissioning these four shows, but she can probably relate to the four artists in town right now. Among their tales are stories from Turkey, the Australian Outback and, closer to home, the Sussex village of Ditchling.One soon realises that everyone has their own narrative. Turkish artist İpek Duben (pictured below) gives a voice to several compatriots, each of whom materialises Read more ...