In every dream home there is heartache and a whole lot more in Philip Ridley’s 2015 play, which receives its Scottish premiere in Johnny McKnight’s dangerously madcap Tron company production.
The honeymoon is well and truly over by the time we meet the new Mrs Tesman in Kathy McKean’s fresh version of Henrik Ibsen’s seismic drama, which burst on stage in 1891 to mark the beginning of the end of the nineteenth century in explosive fashion.
Françoise Hardy, who has died aged 80, was a singer and songwriter who first came to prominence in the 1960s, when her downbeat compositions and exotic appearance subverted the British pop charts and made her an international star. Her appearances on Top of the Pops and Ready Steady Go made her an icon, even as she seemed to shy away from the fame that came with having hit singles such as All Over the World (1965), which spent 15 weeks in the UK charts.
Love and death are at the heart of Jane Austen’s 1811 coming of age novel, in which the very different Dashwood sisters embark on romances that are all but doomed before they even begin.
Jane Eyre, Botanic Garden, Glasgow, Four stars: A suitably dreich Botanic Gardens played host on Tuesday night to Jennifer Dick’s brand new adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 proto feminist classic, which opens this year’s largely non-Shakespearian Bard in the Botanics summer season. Judging by the line-up, the very current focus this year is on strong women making their way in the world in the face of overriding misogyny. With Dick resetting the action of Bronte’s taboo busting nineteenth century novel from the grim north of England to even bleaker Scottish soil, little orphan Jane is buffeted from pillar to post as she embarks on a gradual getting of wisdom. Until, that is, she meets Mr Rochester, a posh boy himbo with a secret in the attic that comes back to haunt him.
As brought to life here by Sally Reid, Russell’s creation remains a warm and powerful portrait of one woman’s wake up call, as a flight to Greece offers a last gasp chance at liberation from her own mid life crises that might just change everything.
When Carole King’s second album, Tapestry, was released in 1971, its appearance marked how bubblegum pop music had become a serious artform. King’s deeply personal set of songs also marked the epochal societal shifts that had liberated her and her peers enough to make a record to call her own. The late Douglas McGrath’s multi winning musical channels King’s life from her days in Brooklyn as a smart teenager with stars in her eyes, to the musical icon she became. Framing his book with King’s seminal post Tapestry concert at Carnegie Hall, McGrath has the singer going back to her precocious beginnings writing hit singles when she was sixteen, to her fertile professional partnership and tumultuous marriage with lyricist Gerry Goffin.
The world is drowning in this exquisite dive into troubled waters by Ireland’s Blue Raincoat Theatre Company, touring the fourth of a series of devised shows after premiering in Sligo in 2022.
'Echoes of rock follies past nevertheless rise up throughout the show’s appealingly scrappy and refreshingly spiky delivery'
The second half of Harris’ construction takes an audacious lurch into the meta, with Lady M taking charge after her husband falls apart, while scratches, scrapes and bumps in the night punctuate Pippa Murphy’s eerie sound design throughout.
