News: Cricket and Warne

Shocking news on the front page of the Evening Standard that Shane Warne was suspected of shoplifting. Even more shocking was that he was shopping at Cecil Gee, which sells mostly rubbish at name label prices without the snob value of buying an actual label. Then again, it is probably a safer bet than talking dirty on a mobile phone...

The final ashes test has made anybody with the slightest ambivalence towards cricket a little more interested in the game now that it actually seems like England has a chance of winning. As much as people taunt me about this prospect I don't really care if Australia loses as they have held the bloody thing for 16 years. Ok I may be accused of being thoroughly un-Australian for saying it but surely nobody can deny that this Ashes has been more interesting than the last few?

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Opera and full frontal nudity: Rigoletto

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David McVicar's oddly modern production of Rigoletto is back at the Royal Opera House.

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Conductor John Eliot Gardiner keeps the music well paced. Dimitri Platanias in the title role sounded great and received a rapturous applause for his interpretation of the role. You get a sense more of the doting father rather than the court jester or cursed man here.

Vittorio Grigolo plays the Duke and sounds too lovely to be the cad the role calls for, but it is hard not to like when he is on stage anyway. And it is easier to understand the…
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Fluffing it: Rouge @Underbellyfest

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It's not enough for a circus act nowadays to offer a series of acrobatic feats. Nowadays, they are pushing all sorts of conventions. There's the all-male, the all-female, the all minimalist. Rouge is the all gender fluid pan-sexual circus for grown-ups who like a bit of everything. But only if that everything includes a little bit of nudity and a bit of mild titillation. 
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An inventive sequence happens where the performer is wearing a lampshade and combines hula hoops with a frantic strip dance …
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Swatting: The Flies @BunkerTheatreUK

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The Flies at The Bunker theatre is a chance for production company Exchange Theatre - which specialises in translating plays for English audiences - to return to the piece that put them on the map. With live music, video and eye-catching design, it’s an ambitious piece. But it seemed to miss any sense of drama. And it’s star actor Meena Rayann was off too.

Jean Paul Satre’s take on the Oresteia and the Electra myth, was written during the Nazi occupation of France. Fast forward seventy years, it's tempting to equate today’s new nationalists with yesterdays fascists. But it's a lazy comparison given the grand themes under exploration here. It feels more like an apparent dig at Nazi occupation, organised religion or group think over fake news, immigrant bashing and economic hardship.


It opens where two travellers approach Argos, a town where everyone is in mourning. One is Orestes in disguise. The city has become a dark place cursed with flies as punishment from the Gods since …
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