Critic Cal

The top three things I look for in a theatre trip: close harmonies, tight choreography, and smashed patriarchy. If I can have all that in an hour and a half or less, so much the better. So ' Two Man Show ' by RashDash Theatre Company – a fun and poignant 75 minutes'-worth of dance- and music-driven critique of androcentrism and the inadequacy of (androcentric) language to critique it – was my ideal evening out. It also sparked a number of bloggable trains of thought... The performance opened with a brief and rapid take on the history of patriarchy. In the paleolithic period (we were told) men and women were nomadic hunter-gatherers, equal in occupation and status . If anything, the female was revered (there is evidence of goddess worship) as the apparent source of life – the suggestion being that the link between sex and childbearing was not well understood. But this all started to change in the neolithic period, when human beings  discovered agriculture  and began sett...

When I finished primary school, my all-time favourite teacher gave me Cranford and Jane Eyre  as a leaving gift. It's taken me until now to realise that, as much as seeking to further my literary education, she was almost certainly trying to gently nudge me into feminist awakeness. Well, after a two-decade-long lie-in, I'm finally rubbing my eyes (sorry I'm late, Miss). I've not read either book for ages  – it's impossible enough keeping pace with the 'to-read' list without appending the many worthy 'to-revisit's. But I was recently delightfully surprised by the stage adaptation  of Jane Eyre in its second run at the Bristol Old Vic. I say 'surprised' ... it's a grumpy habit of mine to routinely and volubly disapprove of adaptations of anything , especially fiction to stage or screen. Too often (I maintain) it becomes an exercise in plot narration, neglecting all but the surface layer of the original material as well as the unique op...

I watched in spellbound horror as the fragile thread by which this turbulent, treacherous, tormented, temporal world precariously dangles ... -snapped- ... and the whole thing came crashing down in a pandemonium of light, glitter, smoke, leopard print, automatic gun-fire, luggage, canine skeletons, and virtuosic violining. And then we went to Wagamama's. Kneehigh  theatre company's  Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and Other Love Songs)  [1] is an immense tragicomic rollercoaster of satirical mayhem, beautifully crafted with a searing, seamlessly genre-fusing score (dubstep, ska, metal, classical, you name it), superb musical and theatrical performances, and all manner of impressive choreography, puppetry and set work. It charts the fate of a town embroiled in the self-serving schemes of wealthy pilchard magnate Peachum and his malevolent genius of a wife (an hilarious stage turn by scene-stealer Rina Fatania). Not that the inhabitants themselves are innocent victims --...

Nah then, Freddy: look wh' y' gowin, deah. […] Theres menners f' yer! Te-oo banches o voylets trod into the mad. […] Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y' de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel's flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f'them?  (Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion , Act I, George Bernard Shaw, 1912) Forget boxsets -- after-dinner read-throughs are the height of domestic entertainment. The latest production chez Whitnall was George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (named after the sculptor from Greek mythology whose most beautiful statue awakens to life).   In the play, a Professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, accepts a bet to inculcate 'common', comically Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle with such refined speech and deportment that she is able to pass for a duchess in upper-class society. [1] As forewarned by his mother and his housekeeper, the success of this undertaking lands Eliza in somethi...

August Bank Holiday weekend saw me, for once -- twice, even -- successfully coaxed substantial-ish distances away from home. In part this was due to some uncomfortable lunch-room conversations on the importance of disturbing one's routine in order to develop emotional intelligence. But the prospect of theatre helped; local summer offerings have lacked appeal (I am really, really glad that the ageing cast members of ' The Good Life ' are so comfortably provided for by the interminable stream of Alan Ayckbourn at the Bath Theatre Royal -- but I don't feel the need to witness it first-hand). So we were Saturday in Stratford-upon-Avon, for the current RSC production of ' King John ', and Monday in York, for the ' York Mystery Plays '. These two had in common a certain irreverence in their treatment of the original texts. In the case of the first this bothered me very little -- 'King John' is hardly beloved even amongst Shakespeare die-hards, and ...

The BBC recently televised the RSC's 2012 production of Julius Caesar . It was very good, apparently. So, having (typically) failed to catch it on iPlayer…we did one better, and made the trip to Stratford-upon-Avon, just in time for the second-to-last performance. Ha, I may yet meet my spontaneity quota for the year after all. It was stunning…the modern African setting (which did not feel forced or stretched at any point) was perfect excuse for some spectacularly vibrant music and dance. Indeed, this was how the play opened --the streets of 'Rome' streaming with a partying public fervently celebrating the forthcoming arrival of the beloved statesman. But the power and popularity Caesar has amassed threatens the constitution of the Republic, and there is an atmosphere of growing unease amongst the senators and even between his close friends: BRUTUS     What means this shouting? I do fear, the people     Choose Caesar for their king. CASSIUS  ...

Wimbledon is here. Wait, now... didn't Beckett's Lucky have something to say about tennis? Ordered to 'think', and supplied with his requisite hat, he spouts... “Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast heaven to hell so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labours left unfinished crowned by the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry […] waste and ...