Posts

Showing posts with the label Bizet

Featured Post

Love is love: An Instinct - at The Old Red Lion Theatre

Image
What do you do when a pandemic breaks out and people start dying? In An Instinct, the answer is to escape to a remote cabin in the woods with your ex-boyfriend, leaving your current boyfriend behind. This is the premise behind Hugo Timbrell’s An Instinct, billed as a queer thriller that delivers a few shocks along the way. Yet, the real tension lies in the disturbing dynamics between the three characters—the mind games, gaslighting, and unhealthy dependencies. While the play is cleverly constructed, its underlying themes of domestic violence may not be everyone’s cup of tea. It's currently running at the Old Red Lion Theatre .  The play opens with Max (Conor Dumbrell) and Tom (Joe Walsham) arriving at Tom’s parents’ cabin in a remote part of England. A pandemic broke out, but not the kind where you have to pretend to practice social distancing or hand out government contracts to your mates for dodgy hospital gowns and face masks. This one is highly contagious and very deadly. But s...

Carmen follies: Carmen 1808 @TheUnionTheatre

Image
Carmen died twice for me last week. The first time at the Royal Opera. Barrie Kosky’s black, minimalistic yet infuriating production of Carmen has large chunks of plot read to you in French. The effect stops the action dead and bores the audience to death.  Then there was this Union Theatre production. Here in Carmen 1808, Carmen’s working for the resistance and standing up to the French during the atrocities of the Peninsular War. But it’s a passionless 90 minutes of political posturing.  The inspiration has been taken from the Goya’s Los fusilamientos del tres de mayo. There’s probably a great story about Goya and his transition to his black period. But it would have been nice to leave Carmen out of all that.  Bizet’s Carmen is sensual and sexy. Sexual politics not hard politics is what’s at stake. Here it’s given a flat musical treatment that feels part Les Miserables and part Allo Allo. Gypsies join the partisans to support the king, the ladies work in a cigarette fa...