Wired Aerial Theatre’s As the World Tipped confronts climate change at the Brighton Festival
FESTIVAL
Brighton Festival7th-29th May, Tel: 01273 700 747
Brighton celebrates freedom and democracy in May with a festival co-ordinated by guest director Aung San Suu Kyi. In email contact from Burma since her release in November, Aung San Suu Kyi has worked with the directors to produce an invigorating programme of cultural events.
Asian Dub Foundation will open the festival in the concert hall on Saturday 7th, to be followed by the likes of John Cale of the Velvet Underground and American singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens. Classical riches include Elgar’s There Was a Child on Sunday 22nd, while a reading of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets has been paired with Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor for a candelit evening in St Nicholas Church on Saturday 14th.
English PEN talk “Writing Freedom” is at the Corn Exchange on Sunday 22nd, and Julian Assange discusses freedom of information on Saturday 21st. Other writers appearing include PD James, Sadie Jones, Philip Hensher, Jackie Kay, Helen Oyeyemi, AL Kennedy, Colin Thubron, Mark Ravenhill and newcomer Luke Williams.
Bring a picnic for As You Like It in the St Nicholas Rest Garden, and see Compagnie Carabosse’s transformation of St Ann’s Well Gardens after dark on the weekend of 7th-8th. In Wild Park Moulsecoomb, Wired Aerial Theatre’s As The World Tipped (above) confronts climate change in an outdoor performance, while this year’s site-specific commission is The New World Order, a collection of Harold Pinter’s political miniatures woven together by theatre company Hydrocracker in Brighton’s Town Hall. At the Theatre Royal, Butley by the late great Simon Gray runs from Wednesday 25th to Saturday 28th, and The Lady of Burma by Richard Shannon (19th-20th), based on Aung San Suu Kyi’s life, has been updated to reflect last year’s events.
Natalie Young
THEATRE One Man, Two GuvnorsDir Nicholas Hytner, National Theatre, from 17th May, Tel: 020 7452 3000
At his annual press conference at the start of this year, NT director Nicholas Hytner revealed he was getting in touch with his radical side: “I love the shows that subvert the concrete elegance of this building… I love the theatre when it’s not well behaved.”
Subverting the National, it turns out, involves bringing in playwright Richard Bean—on a roll with recent work for Out of Joint (on Irish terrorism) and the Royal Court (a satire on climate change). Bean has taken A Servant of Two Masters, the most famous masterpiece by 18th-century Italian legend Carlo Goldoni, and recreated it as a black farce in Brighton.
Comedy favourite James Corden—who first registered in Hytner’s NT production of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys—plays the split personality of a small-time East End hood chasing down a debt from his fiancée’s father. But Dad is really his own sister posing as her dead brother who’s been killed by her boyfriend… wake up at the back, there.
Goldoni and his commedia dell’arte has always been a problem in British theatre. The NT opened with a disastrous production of his play Il Campiello back in 1976. His Venetian carnival spirit and beautiful, transparent writing are usually beyond us; we like to think too much. But Hytner, Bean and Corden may well have perpetrated a creative, cultural hijack: Ray Cooney meets Brighton Rock.
Michael Coveney
POP MUSIC
Rome (Parlophone)Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi, 16th May
Part of the joy of the spaghetti western is its quirky music. Composers like Piero Umiliani, Piero Piccioni and Ennio Morricone blended orchestral, Latin and psychedelic themes into a cocktail of easy listening, poisoned by rattling snares, lone whistlers and proud mariachi trumpets, depending on who or what was being shot.
As a genre, Italian film music has always had its enthusiasts, including the French group Air, who assimilated its circumspect progressions into their futuristic lounge music. In creating Rome, however, Italian composer Daniele Luppi and producer-creator Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton) have gone further and sought out an authentic sound. Not only did they hire Forum studios in Rome, where many of the old soundtracks were recorded, but they filled it with musicians from Ennio Morricone’s original orchestra, including members of the celebrated vocal group I Cantori Moderni, which provided the whimsical melodies on classics like A Fistful of Dollars.
Rome, however, is not a film soundtrack but an original album. Five years in production, what makes it an exciting prospect are not only the new compositions we are promised, nor that Jack White and Norah Jones sing guest vocals, but Burton’s exceptional talent in the studio. With three Grammy awards and production credits with Gorillaz, Beck, The Black Keys and U2, 33-year-old Burton is a man in his musical prime.
Nick Crowe
ART
Kerry Tribe: Dead Star LightCamden Arts Centre, 13th May-10th July, Tel: 020 7472 5500
Kerry Tribe is an American artist preoccupied with memory, time and the moving image. Through her large-scale video and film installations she immerses her audience in her struggle to recall the past.
Although well-known in the US, this is her first show in Britain. Camden Arts Centre has earned a reputation for talent-spotting and identifying international artists we ought to have heard of, as well as homegrown artists we have ignored. Dead Star Light has been jointly commissioned by the Camden Arts Centre, Modern Art Oxford and the Arnolfini, in Bristol.
In the new pieces, Tribe explores the different potentials of 16mm film (in a work called Parnassius Mnemosyne), reel-to-reel audio (Milton Torres Sees a Ghost) and video (The Last Soviet). These are shown alongside the older work H.M., which is Tribe’s best-known piece. A highlight of the 2010 Whitney Biennial, this experimental documentary features the patient H.M., whose capacity to form new memories was destroyed by surgery in 1953, condemning him to a perpetual present. The film runs simultaneously through two projectors, programmed 20 seconds apart—the length of H.M.’s memory—so we too experience a disorienting disruption of our powers of perception and recall.
Emma Crichton-Miller
OPERA From the House of the Dead; FidelioOpera North, in rep from 5th May; Leeds Grand Theatre; The Lowry, Salford; Theatre Royal, Nottingham; Tel: 0113 243 9999
The unique appeal of Siberia was captured in song by Cole Porter in the 1955 musical Silk Stockings: “Where the fresh salt air makes us feel so fine/ It is fresh salt air from our own salt mine.” But Janacek got there first in his final, Siberian-set opera, From the House of the Dead, adapted from a Dostoevsky novel and first performed in 1930. The setting of a labour camp might not suggest a rich tonal palette but Janacek uses a range of unexpected colours, with orchestrations calling for everything from high woodwind to the use of chains as a percussion instrument.
The dramatisation of imprisonment, the joy of release and the importance of freedom also inspired Fidelio. Beethoven’s only opera isn’t slow to deliver its pleasures. Barely 15 minutes into the first act comes the meltingly beautiful quartet Mir ist so wunderbar, in which four principal characters follow each other singing the same material, their calmly stated feelings shimmering.
Tim Albery’s superbly claustrophobic production of Fidelio, first seen at Scottish Opera, boasts soprano Emma Bell as Leonore, who fights for the life of her husband Florestan (Steven Harrison). In John Fulljames’s new production of From the House of the Dead, the cast is to be led by Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts and Alan Oke, who both starred in Phyllida Lloyd’s thrillingly intense Opera North production of Peter Grimes. If they’re anywhere near that form, it should be unmissable.
David Benedict
FILM
Viva Riva!On release from 27th May
The Democratic Republic of Congo has vast mineral wealth, and some of the poorest people on earth. But the first feature film to emerge from the country for years proves there are natural resources of which its people cannot be robbed.
Djo Munga’s rumbustious gangster picture is set among the brothels and barracks of Kinshasa, where the cheerfully amoral Riva (Patsha Bay) is plotting to swindle a local crime boss. There’s an authentic feel to its portrait of Congo’s mean, breezeblock-built streets, but this is also a demonstration of the tenacity of genre. Munga’s protagonists are the sub-Saharan equivalents of figures from 1970s blaxploitation movies: the dancehall moll, the flamboyant killer in disco whites, the mountainously large nightclub owner. Only Marlene Longage’s casually corrupt lesbian military commander seems wholly indigenous.
For a western audience, the film’s power derives from the contrast between the intensity of the violence and the modesty of the stakes: the loot here is not some great stash of cash or cocaine, but a vanload of plastic petrol barrels. Munga is already working on a follow-up. Now that Nollywood—Nigeria’s film business—seems to be declining, it would be exciting to think that a rival movie culture might blossom in the DRC. Not that the characters of Viva Riva! could summon up such optimism. “Your country,” says its principal villain, an Angolan mobster on a Congolese tour, “is the worst cow pie I’ve ever seen.” Matthew Sweet
FESTIVAL
Brighton Festival7th-29th May, Tel: 01273 700 747
Brighton celebrates freedom and democracy in May with a festival co-ordinated by guest director Aung San Suu Kyi. In email contact from Burma since her release in November, Aung San Suu Kyi has worked with the directors to produce an invigorating programme of cultural events.
Asian Dub Foundation will open the festival in the concert hall on Saturday 7th, to be followed by the likes of John Cale of the Velvet Underground and American singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens. Classical riches include Elgar’s There Was a Child on Sunday 22nd, while a reading of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets has been paired with Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor for a candelit evening in St Nicholas Church on Saturday 14th.
English PEN talk “Writing Freedom” is at the Corn Exchange on Sunday 22nd, and Julian Assange discusses freedom of information on Saturday 21st. Other writers appearing include PD James, Sadie Jones, Philip Hensher, Jackie Kay, Helen Oyeyemi, AL Kennedy, Colin Thubron, Mark Ravenhill and newcomer Luke Williams.
Bring a picnic for As You Like It in the St Nicholas Rest Garden, and see Compagnie Carabosse’s transformation of St Ann’s Well Gardens after dark on the weekend of 7th-8th. In Wild Park Moulsecoomb, Wired Aerial Theatre’s As The World Tipped (above) confronts climate change in an outdoor performance, while this year’s site-specific commission is The New World Order, a collection of Harold Pinter’s political miniatures woven together by theatre company Hydrocracker in Brighton’s Town Hall. At the Theatre Royal, Butley by the late great Simon Gray runs from Wednesday 25th to Saturday 28th, and The Lady of Burma by Richard Shannon (19th-20th), based on Aung San Suu Kyi’s life, has been updated to reflect last year’s events.
Natalie Young
THEATRE One Man, Two GuvnorsDir Nicholas Hytner, National Theatre, from 17th May, Tel: 020 7452 3000
At his annual press conference at the start of this year, NT director Nicholas Hytner revealed he was getting in touch with his radical side: “I love the shows that subvert the concrete elegance of this building… I love the theatre when it’s not well behaved.”
Subverting the National, it turns out, involves bringing in playwright Richard Bean—on a roll with recent work for Out of Joint (on Irish terrorism) and the Royal Court (a satire on climate change). Bean has taken A Servant of Two Masters, the most famous masterpiece by 18th-century Italian legend Carlo Goldoni, and recreated it as a black farce in Brighton.
Comedy favourite James Corden—who first registered in Hytner’s NT production of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys—plays the split personality of a small-time East End hood chasing down a debt from his fiancée’s father. But Dad is really his own sister posing as her dead brother who’s been killed by her boyfriend… wake up at the back, there.
Goldoni and his commedia dell’arte has always been a problem in British theatre. The NT opened with a disastrous production of his play Il Campiello back in 1976. His Venetian carnival spirit and beautiful, transparent writing are usually beyond us; we like to think too much. But Hytner, Bean and Corden may well have perpetrated a creative, cultural hijack: Ray Cooney meets Brighton Rock.
Michael Coveney
POP MUSIC
Rome (Parlophone)Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi, 16th May
Part of the joy of the spaghetti western is its quirky music. Composers like Piero Umiliani, Piero Piccioni and Ennio Morricone blended orchestral, Latin and psychedelic themes into a cocktail of easy listening, poisoned by rattling snares, lone whistlers and proud mariachi trumpets, depending on who or what was being shot.
As a genre, Italian film music has always had its enthusiasts, including the French group Air, who assimilated its circumspect progressions into their futuristic lounge music. In creating Rome, however, Italian composer Daniele Luppi and producer-creator Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton) have gone further and sought out an authentic sound. Not only did they hire Forum studios in Rome, where many of the old soundtracks were recorded, but they filled it with musicians from Ennio Morricone’s original orchestra, including members of the celebrated vocal group I Cantori Moderni, which provided the whimsical melodies on classics like A Fistful of Dollars.
Rome, however, is not a film soundtrack but an original album. Five years in production, what makes it an exciting prospect are not only the new compositions we are promised, nor that Jack White and Norah Jones sing guest vocals, but Burton’s exceptional talent in the studio. With three Grammy awards and production credits with Gorillaz, Beck, The Black Keys and U2, 33-year-old Burton is a man in his musical prime.
Nick Crowe
ART
Kerry Tribe: Dead Star LightCamden Arts Centre, 13th May-10th July, Tel: 020 7472 5500
Kerry Tribe is an American artist preoccupied with memory, time and the moving image. Through her large-scale video and film installations she immerses her audience in her struggle to recall the past.
Although well-known in the US, this is her first show in Britain. Camden Arts Centre has earned a reputation for talent-spotting and identifying international artists we ought to have heard of, as well as homegrown artists we have ignored. Dead Star Light has been jointly commissioned by the Camden Arts Centre, Modern Art Oxford and the Arnolfini, in Bristol.
In the new pieces, Tribe explores the different potentials of 16mm film (in a work called Parnassius Mnemosyne), reel-to-reel audio (Milton Torres Sees a Ghost) and video (The Last Soviet). These are shown alongside the older work H.M., which is Tribe’s best-known piece. A highlight of the 2010 Whitney Biennial, this experimental documentary features the patient H.M., whose capacity to form new memories was destroyed by surgery in 1953, condemning him to a perpetual present. The film runs simultaneously through two projectors, programmed 20 seconds apart—the length of H.M.’s memory—so we too experience a disorienting disruption of our powers of perception and recall.
Emma Crichton-Miller
OPERA From the House of the Dead; FidelioOpera North, in rep from 5th May; Leeds Grand Theatre; The Lowry, Salford; Theatre Royal, Nottingham; Tel: 0113 243 9999
The unique appeal of Siberia was captured in song by Cole Porter in the 1955 musical Silk Stockings: “Where the fresh salt air makes us feel so fine/ It is fresh salt air from our own salt mine.” But Janacek got there first in his final, Siberian-set opera, From the House of the Dead, adapted from a Dostoevsky novel and first performed in 1930. The setting of a labour camp might not suggest a rich tonal palette but Janacek uses a range of unexpected colours, with orchestrations calling for everything from high woodwind to the use of chains as a percussion instrument.
The dramatisation of imprisonment, the joy of release and the importance of freedom also inspired Fidelio. Beethoven’s only opera isn’t slow to deliver its pleasures. Barely 15 minutes into the first act comes the meltingly beautiful quartet Mir ist so wunderbar, in which four principal characters follow each other singing the same material, their calmly stated feelings shimmering.
Tim Albery’s superbly claustrophobic production of Fidelio, first seen at Scottish Opera, boasts soprano Emma Bell as Leonore, who fights for the life of her husband Florestan (Steven Harrison). In John Fulljames’s new production of From the House of the Dead, the cast is to be led by Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts and Alan Oke, who both starred in Phyllida Lloyd’s thrillingly intense Opera North production of Peter Grimes. If they’re anywhere near that form, it should be unmissable.
David Benedict
FILM
Viva Riva!On release from 27th May
The Democratic Republic of Congo has vast mineral wealth, and some of the poorest people on earth. But the first feature film to emerge from the country for years proves there are natural resources of which its people cannot be robbed.
Djo Munga’s rumbustious gangster picture is set among the brothels and barracks of Kinshasa, where the cheerfully amoral Riva (Patsha Bay) is plotting to swindle a local crime boss. There’s an authentic feel to its portrait of Congo’s mean, breezeblock-built streets, but this is also a demonstration of the tenacity of genre. Munga’s protagonists are the sub-Saharan equivalents of figures from 1970s blaxploitation movies: the dancehall moll, the flamboyant killer in disco whites, the mountainously large nightclub owner. Only Marlene Longage’s casually corrupt lesbian military commander seems wholly indigenous.
For a western audience, the film’s power derives from the contrast between the intensity of the violence and the modesty of the stakes: the loot here is not some great stash of cash or cocaine, but a vanload of plastic petrol barrels. Munga is already working on a follow-up. Now that Nollywood—Nigeria’s film business—seems to be declining, it would be exciting to think that a rival movie culture might blossom in the DRC. Not that the characters of Viva Riva! could summon up such optimism. “Your country,” says its principal villain, an Angolan mobster on a Congolese tour, “is the worst cow pie I’ve ever seen.” Matthew Sweet
