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Death becomes her: A Brief List Of Everyone Who Died @finborough

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For a natural process, death is not a topic that comes up naturally for people. We ask how people are doing but expect the response to be “I’m great”, not “I’m not dead yet”. And so for the main character in A Brief List of Everyone Who Died, Graciela has a death issue. Starting with when she was five and found out only after the matter that her parents had her beloved dog euthanised. So Graciela decides that nobody she loves will die from then on. And so this piece becomes a fruitless attempt at how she spends her life trying to avoid death while it is all around her. It’s currently having its world premiere  at the Finborough Theatre . As the play title suggests, it is a brief list of life moments where death and life intervene for the main character, from the passing of relatives, cancer, suicides, accidents and the loss of parents. Playwright Jacob Marx Rice plots the critical moments of the lives of these characters through their passing or the passing of those around them. Howeve

Opera: La Sonnambula


 Opening night of La Sonnambula at the Royal Opera was an opportunity for Eglise Gutiérrez to show off some incredibly light yet lingering high notes in this piece about jealousy, mistaken identity... And sleepwalking. It is a mildly silly opera but the piece by Bellini with its music and creative forces at work make you overlook these things and the let the action unfold in what looks like a large railway station foyer.

The cast are great and rising star tenor Celso Albelo makes his Royal Opera debut as the jealous composer Elvino. But the real passion and drama was perhaps watching Gutiérrez and conductor Daniel Oren create music together. It was exhausting yet exhilarating and what any good night at the opera surely is about. Nothing too serious but lovely music set to a mildly amusing farce, complete with a domineering mother. It runs through to November 18.

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