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- Salome
published on 2010-06-25 08:24:13
Hampstead Theatre, LondonMore symbolist poem than play, Oscar Wilde's once-banned Salome invites a strong directorial concept. But where Steven Berkoff memorably gave us a stylised, slow-motion dream, Jamie Lloyd's Headlong production transports the biblical fable to a world of grungy apocalyptic excess; while the result has an undeniable visceral power, it misses the curious moral force behind Wilde's lavish display of decadence.The milieu created by Lloyd and his designer, Soutra Gilmour, is a mix of mad militarism and rave-up. The guards attending the imprisoned Iokanaan sport combat gear and resort to gangsta rap. The tetrarch Herod is an uncontrolled sexual psychotic. And the supposedly virginal Salome taunts the prophet by pleasuring herself before him and inviting him to lick her finger.But Wilde's work hinges on Herod's horror when Salome demands Iokanaan's head. Since, however, Herod here inhabits a world of capricious violence, and since Iokanaan's warnings are largely inaudible, there seems no motive for revulsion. Wilde's poem depends on an instinctive stirring of conscience. But, if anything goes, why should Herod shrink from Salome's head-hunting? Even if logic is not the production's strong point, the execution is full-blooded. Con O'Neill as the roaring, bisexual tetrarch is not afraid to out-Herod Herod. Zawe Ashton as Salome, dancing to a ghetto blaster and voluptuously kissing the severed head, suggests an adolescent in the grip of fierce erotic imaginings. And, though often drowned out by the amplification, Seun Shote's Iokanaan has a glistening presence.But the best performances come from Jaye Griffiths as a troubled Herodias and from Richard Cant as her grieving page, with whom the tenderness of Wilde's language makes more impact than all the orgiastic frenzy. The key to Wilde, in the end, lies in the words.Until 17 July. Box office: 020-7722 9301. Then touring.Rating: 3/5TheatreOscar WildeMichael Billingtonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds - Film review: Good Hair
published on 2010-06-25 06:30:08
Clever and funny, Chris Rock's film about the hairstyles of African-American women makes the cutCan it be true that African-American men prefer to have sex with white women because they're allowed to touch their hair? This is one of the many questions asked by comic Chris Rock in this funny, incisive, eye-opener of a documentary about the complex and ideologically fraught state of black women's hair in today's US. He meets prominent black women and men – and their hairdressers – in an attempt to get past the cultural frizz of contemporary hair and reach the scalp of truth. Rock is a great interviewer: droll, probing, never condescending and, above all, funny. It is a film to be compared with the likable British movie on the same subject: Afro-Saxons, by Mark Currie and Rachel Wang.The starting point for Rock is what he sees as the extraordinary phenomenon of straightening or "relaxing" black women's hair, using a chemical treatment that can cause painful stinging and burning if not applied very carefully, and sometimes even when it is applied very carefully. Rock suggests that black women are in danger of becoming addicted to relaxing procedures. He speaks to little kids who had their first relaxing treatment when they were four or five. He also speaks to Maya Angelou and asks her when she first had her hair relaxed – she replies it was way back when she was 70 years old.The nature of "relaxing" is not very relaxing. It is a long, tricky and expensive business whose purpose is to get black women's hair to resemble European hair – the idea is to "relax" the white people who come into contact with black women. Furthermore, black hair products are largely controlled and manufactured by white people. And yet Rock shows that black women have made this style their own – it is no cultural cringe to white people.He goes on to discuss the concept of the "weave", and how it has replaced the quaint 1970s institution of the wig. Now other people's hair is invisibly woven into the women's hairdos, often very expensively and creatively. As actor Nia Long concedes, they are much less happy about their menfolk negligently running their fingers through it, which is the cue for Rock's mischievous riff about white girlfriends with lower hair-related standards. And where does this extraneous hair come from? It comes from India, where people routinely shave their heads for pious reasons, and there is a serious living to be made exporting the stuff to the US.Rock has come up with bold new insights into globalisation, race, sex and class. His film resembles, in many ways, the new wave of docu-polemics that sprang up in imitation of Michael Moore – and yet Rock is not angry, just amused, bemused and very entertaining. One small footnote: he talks a good deal about his two infant daughters, and how they will come to see their hair, and come to see themselves as women. Yet Rock does not interview his own formidable wife, Malaak Compton-Rock. Rock himself has implied, in his standup routine, that his marriage has not been plain sailing. Could it be that he has had differences of opinion with Mrs Rock on the subject of hair and other matters? Either way, this highly enjoyable film deserves a look.Rating: 4/5Chris RockDocumentaryComedyMaya AngelouPeter Bradshawguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds - The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists | Theatre review
published on 2010-06-25 05:30:06
Everyman, LiverpoolEmergency budget day, when ordinary British people paid for the failed speculations of bankers and capitalism, couldn't have been a better moment for the premiere of Howard Brenton's new adaptation of Robert Tressell's inspiring early-20th century novel about a group of painters and decorators. It's a novel that deftly suggests that the interests of the workers and their bosses are incompatible, and that workers collude in their own oppression.Tressell's novel – often called "the worker's bible" and published four years after his death and burial in a pauper's grave in Liverpool in 1911 – provided inspiration for the growing Labour movement and the establishment of the welfare state. It's good to be reminded of why it was so influential, not least because it offers one of the most effective and straightforward explanations of how capitalism works for the benefit of the bosses, in the famous "money trick", which translates beautifully to the stage.Given the timing, Brenton's clumsy framing device – which sees an upwardly mobile young couple seeking to buy the south of England house where, more than a century before, socialist painter and decorator Frank Owen and his fellow workers gave their blood, sweat and tears in return for little but the prospect of an early grave – is redundant. We can make the connections for ourselves. Saved from certain starvation by taking in a lodger for 12 shillings a week, Ruth and Easton's moving cry – "We can live!" – at the end of act one speaks with passion and eloquence of the eternal problem faced by working families of making ends meet when the ends keep moving.A little bit more passion elsewhere would help galvanise an evening that is always enjoyable, but lacks urgency. Sometimes there's a Dickensian cosiness to it all, as if all the suffering isn't quite real. Playing the bosses in masks is a neat idea, but the agitprop buffoonery and lack of characterisation doesn't help either the drama or the argument. While you get completely caught up in the men's daily working lives, as they work on the large house belonging to corrupt local businessman and town councillor Mr Sweater, the consequences of poverty are brushed over.There are some very good performances: Nicholas Tennant captures all the sweaty-palmed ambition of senior worker Bob Crass; Larry Dunn does fine work as the elderly Joe; and, as the watchful Frank Owen, Finbar Lynch suggests a man who has seen too much and knows that the workers do too little to help themselves.Until 10 July. Box office: 0151-709 4776. Then touring. Rating: 3/5TheatreLyn Gardnerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds - Joe Blackadder obituary
published on 2010-06-25 03:02:41
My father-in-law Joe Blackadder, who has died aged 78, was a popular figure in his local community of Whitehaven in west Cumbria. He was the deputy headteacher at Wyndham school in Egremont and was heavily involved in amateur dramatics as both an actor and director with the Whitehaven Theatre Group.In recent years, Joe had spent much of his time supporting the Rosehill theatre in Whitehaven. He was company secretary to the Rosehill Trust and chairman of the Friends of Rosehill. The theatre recently celebrated its 50th anniversary and Joe wrote and illustrated a book to mark the occasion, Rosehill: The Story of a Theatre.Joe was born and bred in Carlisle. He went from Carlisle grammar school to Manchester University, where he graduated with a degree in French and Russian in 1954. At university he met Sheila, whom he married in 1955. After his national service in the intelligence corps, and a brief career in industry, Joe became a languages teacher. He taught at Chorlton grammar school for boys in Manchester and then moved to Wyndham school in 1967 as head of languages. He later became deputy head and retired in 1989.Joe had a keen interest in music, and played the flute, trombone and guitar in folk and jazz bands, including the Music Masters Big Band. His great sporting loves were football and cricket. He was a season-ticket holder at Carlisle United and was among the fans that travelled to Wembley in March to see Carlisle play Southampton in the Johnstone's Paints Trophy final.After Cumbria, Joe's biggest love was France. He died suddenly near St Raphael, in the south of France, while on holiday with Sheila. She survives him, along with their sons, Kevan and Neil.Theatreguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds - Peter J Hall obituary
published on 2010-06-25 03:00:21
Costume designer who collaborated with everyone from Zeffirelli to BowieWhen Franco Zeffirelli produced an opera, he hoped audiences would "revisit a lost planet". The costume designer Peter J Hall, who has died aged 84, worked with Zeffirelli for more than three decades, and was a key collaborator on his style of sumptuous, painterly nostalgia. Many 19th-century operas are set in a wistfully imagined past, which Zeffirelli and Hall animated with loving detail. The theatre scholar Dennis Kennedy argued that Hall's work for Zeffirelli inscribed "sentimental romanticism into a sensory evocation of period".Fabric was Hall's lifelong passion. Making a toy theatre as a boy, he rummaged through his mother's wardrobe for scraps of material. "I remember those fabrics," he later recalled, "especially bits of an old evening dress – it was black net with tiny seed pearls over pale green silk. Lovely." Hall never lost this curiosity about the way material can move or gleam under stage lights.The second world war interrupted his training at the West of England College of Art in his native Bristol. In the army, he brought his interest in textiles to devising camouflage for the army. After the war, he moved to London and, on his first day of job-hunting, was appointed assistant stage manager on the musical Gay Rosalinda at the Palace theatre in 1945.He subsequently began designing, and from 1957 was chief milliner at the Covent Garden opera house, quickly learning how much singers hate wearing hats. A key production was Lucia di Lammermoor (1959), which not only showcased the young Joan Sutherland as "poor mad Lucy", losing her mind in breathtaking coloratura, but also introduced him to Zeffirelli's meticulous flair as both director and designer. Zeffirelli had begun his career as a stage designer, so he and Hall shared a sensibility and working language.Hall and Zeffirelli began to tour Italy with a range of operas, many with Sutherland. Having supervised revival costumes for Zeffirelli, Hall began to design his own outfits, beginning with a production of l'Isola dei Pazzi in Spoleto, Umbria.Back in Britain in 1960, Hall's vivid, Italianate Romeo and Juliet with Zeffirelli at the Old Vic was revelatory. Kenneth Tynan marvelled that the production, starring John Stride and Judi Dench, "evoked a whole town, a whole riotous manner of living". Hall's design for a later production of Romeo and Juliet, which played outdoors in Verona with an Italian cast, was backed by the city's peeling walls while church bells tolled.Hall and Zeffirelli's vivacious Much Ado About Nothing (1965) at the Old Vic was a Sicilian carnival, with characters iced as much as dressed. Maggie Smith's crimson-clad Beatrice sparred deliciously with Robert Stephens's Benedick, all pomade and shiny buttons. John Gielgud, playing Othello at Stratford in 1961, was less happy, complaining that Hall's costumes were "beautiful but cumbrous" and that the elaborate production stalled while Zeffirelli leafed through "his damned press cuttings".In opera, Hall maintained that "costumes illustrate the sound", but he always adapted to a director's vision. If elaboration was required, he delivered: frocks for Alcina (Venice, 1960) glittered amid what Hall calculated to be "25 tonnes of Murano crystal". Not everyone appreciated this opulent aesthetic: Peter Conrad dismissed Sutherland's Alcina as "a singing armchair" and Dale Harris suggested that Zeffirelli's audiences were "less dramatically involved than scenically awed".With the director Elijah Moshinsky, Hall revealed his sobriety. They staged a memorable Un Ballo in Maschera with Luciano Pavarotti for the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1980, and for Covent Garden produced a delicate Simon Boccanegra (1991) and a stark, Olivier award-winning Stiffelio (1993), which relocated Verdi's neglected drama of adultery and remorse to puritan America in the 19th century. The BBC2 controller Alan Yentob declared himself "bowled over" by Stiffelio and it was broadcast live on the channel.When John Dexter became director of production at the Metropolitan Opera, Hall helped him restore dramatic credibility to a stale repertory. In Hall's relatively austere Aida (1976), the black soprano Leontyne Price reflected that "the colour of my skin became my costume". The enslaved heroine moved with paradoxical freedom among the cast, dressed in stiff robes and elaborate headgear.The Met's house style was an extravagant pictorialism. However sumptuous the scale, Hall (who was appointed their resident costume designer in 1979) could humanise it. Character was key: "He wasn't just a dresser of divas," insists Moshinsky. "He told the story."Dressing a diva nonetheless demands flair and tact. Kiri Te Kanawa requested a frock from Hall for her farewell at the Met: "All I ask is that when I walk on stage, everyone says, 'Wow.' Now, what can you do for me?" Some singers, Hall observed, supplied skimpy measurements prompted by wishful thinking, while the Italians could be "very difficult at fittings, and some of them quite dotty". His humour remained intact, despite all caprices.Hall, who was witty, courtly and quietly malicious, made his home in Dallas, where he first worked with Zeffirelli in 1960. He quickly established himself as resident costume designer at Dallas Opera, where he designed more than 70 productions including, most recently, a modern-dress Ariadne auf Naxos (2006). He worked across America; in his striking Rigoletto for Houston Grand Opera (2001), the tormented hero was unhappily crammed into his jester's ruff. For Opera Australia, he and Moshinsky produced a handsome, Degas-inspired La Traviata (1994).The 19th-century bel canto repertory remained closest to his heart, with its romantic vision of lost time: Donizetti and Bellini playing with Tudors and Stuarts, Rossini and Verdi's torrid exoticism. He returned to these operas throughout his career: his first I Puritani with Sutherland (Palermo, 1960) shimmered in "black silk and velvet, and for the wedding scene, ruby red and sapphire blue", he recalled. An acclaimed production of I Puritani for the Met in 1976 brought a Van Dyck gallery to life – the heroine in chilly blue, the cavaliers in slashed sleeves and lace collars.Hall was a talented painter – his costume sketches are notably delicate, and Moshinsky recalls that his apartment in New York was covered with frescoes in the manner of Tiepolo. Beyond opera, he occasionally worked in ballet; on films including Doctor Faustus (1967), with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor; and with David Bowie ("serious, intellectual, wonderful to work with") and Mick Jagger ("exactly the opposite").Bowie, having admired Hall's work in New York, commissioned a colonial fantasia for his Let's Dance tour in 1983. The singer marvelled that Hall "chose all the materials and came to see how everything would look under our lighting". Whether rock or opera, Hall's eye for fabric, light and meticulous detail remained steady.• Peter John Hall, costume designer, born 22 January 1926; died 27 May 2010OperaTheatreDavid BowieDavid Jaysguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds