Skip to main content

Susannah Clapp’s best theatre of 2021

Little Amal stirred hearts, Chaucer hit Willesden, Cush Jumbo was a perfect prince, and once again James Graham said it all

It was a year of promises and postponements, of dodgy mask-wearing in the stalls – and of sudden soarings. It was no surprise that Rebecca Frecknall’s spectacular production of Cabaret, with Jessie Buckley and Eddie Redmayne, should prove one of the big excitements of the year – and one of the most expensive. But who in the Pre-Puppet Era (before The Sultan’s Elephant and War Horse) would have thought that a three-and-a-half-metre-tall creature made of wicker and fabric would prove such a powerful reminder of how the theatre can stir hearts and stretch eyes?

Little Amal, the child-refugee puppet who walked from the Syrian-Turkish border to Manchester, was pelted with stones in Greece, danced in Trafalgar Square, became an ambassador for political change – and for the imagination. She was a reminder of how theatrical truth does not depend on naturalism: as were the small white daemon puppets that lit up the stage like Chinese lanterns in Bryony Lavery’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage, and the marvellous driftwood creations that scuttled and sashayed through Lolita Chakrabarti’s version of Life of Pi.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3yYKpqD
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...
Post a Comment
Read more