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Showing posts with the label Rachel Lea-Gray

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A Man For All Seasons: Seagull True Story - Marylebone Theatre

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It's not often that you see a play that tells you not so much a story but gives you a sense of how it feels to be in a situation, how it feels to be silenced, how it feels to be marginalised, how the dead hand of consensus stifles your creativity. However, in Seagull True Story, created and directed by Alexander Molochnikov and based on his own experiences fleeing Russia and trying to establish himself in New York, we have a chance to look beyond the headlines and understand how the war in Ukraine impacted a a group of ordinary creatives in Russia. And how the gradual smothering of freedom and freedom of expression becomes impossible to resist, except for the brave or the suicidal. Against the backdrop of Chekhov's The Seagull, which explores love and other forms of disappointment, it presents a gripping and enthralling depiction of freedom of expression in the face of adversity. After playing earlier this year in New York, it plays a limited run at the Marylebone Theatre . Fro...

Carmen follies: Carmen 1808 @TheUnionTheatre

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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...