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Walking With Ghosts - Gabriel Byrne Click here for tickets I’m a fan of the Irish actor Gabriel Byrne. I’ve never met him but he has always seemed to me one of the few actors I’d like to sit down and talk with. This was confirmed when I read his autobiography, Walking With Ghosts, in one sitting. Now he’s made a theatrical adaptation of his best-selling book which was recorded live at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, directed by Emmy award-winning director Lonny Price. He is, indeed, an unusually intelligent actor and more than that. He nearly became a priest but that didn’t work out and he turned to a variety of odd jobs, including plumbing, before finding, in drama, a place where this outsider could belong. Moving between sensual recollection of childhood in a now almost vanished Ireland and a commentary on stardom in Hollywood and on Broadway, Gabriel returns to Dublin, his home town, to reflect on a life’s journey. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Walking with Ghosts is a lyrical homage to the people and landscapes that ultimately shape our destinies. The Ireland he describes so beautifully no longer exists but I love his descriptions of it. On Demand 26 Feb - 4 Mar. 25 Euros World Book Day Live with Matilda and friends Click here to watch For more than 10 years, Olivier award-winning Matilda The Musical has celebrated the joy of reading through Roald Dahl’s book-loving heroine. A special performance from the RSC’s Matilda The Musical will kick off the World Book Day birthday celebrations. World Book Day Live with Matilda and friends will be hosted by rapper MC Grammar and showcase authors and illustrators supporting World Book Day including two Children’s Laureates, Cressida Cowell and Chris Riddell, Greg James, Chris Smith, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Humza Arshad, Allen Fatimaharan, Hannah Lee, and two new talents from World Book Day’s #PassThePen initiative with BookTrust Nizrana Farook and Maisie Chan. The event will also feature live drawing throughout by Chris Riddell. Please note that the timing of this event is a bit odd. It's livestreamed at 11am when, surely, all the children who are its target audience are at school but I'm told that the event will be recorded and available to watch subsequently On Demand on the World Book Day YouTube channel. (www.youtube.com/worldbookdayuk). 28 Feb at 11am The Red – Original Theatre Click here for tickets Benedict’s dad loved wine. He loved collecting it, drinking it and found sharing it with friends and family was an act of love. Benedict was a teenage alcoholic. He’s been sober now for 25 years. On the day of his father’s funeral, Benedict receives an unsettling final bequest: a bottle of exceptionally fine red wine. Will he drink one final toast to his father? Father and son actors Bruce Alexander and Sam Alexander star in Marcus Brigstocke’s bittersweet drama of family and addiction. Originally commissioned for BBC Radio 4 and winner of the BBC Audio Drama Award 2018 for Best Single Drama, Marcus Brigstocke’s compelling drama of family and addiction is based on his own recovery. Film Direction by Charlotte Peters. Feb 24-May 24 £15 The Family - Rijksmuseum Click here to watch During the lockdown, when the museums were closed, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam set its curators the task of picking a favourite painting and making a video about it which they called Rijksmuseum From Home. These are little gems, displaying not only the details about a painting you might not be familiar with, but also the depth and breadth of knowledge of the people who usually see them every day and were deprived, as we all were, of access to those artifacts that meant the most to them. Josephina de Fouw is a curator at the Rijksmuseum, and a mother. When she was working from home, those two separate worlds came together. In this informal portrait of Aernout van Beeftingh and his wife and kids, the same thing is happening. Grazing the Sky – circus performers documentary Click here for tickets An intimate look at the lives of modern circus performers in and out of Cirque du Soleil. The film follows the stories of several different performers and gives viewers an unprecedented look into their lives and art. A testament to the human spirit and the power of following your dreams, it is also an homage to the grace and power of artists who use their bodies as their instruments. Filmed on location in 11 countries and in three languages by a Cirque Du Soleil "insider" this film transcends a "behind the scenes" look and creates a powerful and moving work of art. Some of the interviews with the artists aren’t translated but are subtitled so don’t forget to turn on the subtitles icon on your computer. POCKET REVIEW The Forest – Hampstead Theatre A world premiere of a play by Florian Zeller, one of the world’s most popular living playwrights, is an event. The darling of international critics for his The Son, The Mother, the Oscar-winning The Father, and other hits, Zeller, it seems, has cornered the market in plays in which families reveal their faultlines. Guilt, lies, and the fear of being found out are what underlie the thoughts and actions of the apparently successful lives of Zeller’s characters. At least, his male characters. In The Forest the women – the wife and the mistress - are underutilised and underwritten, even though the flawless Gina McKee gives the wife every scrap of reality and empathy she can find in the script. At the centre of the play is a surgeon, played by both Toby Stephens and Paul McGann, who is having an affair with a woman who is attempting to persuade him to commit exclusively to her. So far, so prosaic. So far, so French. But for some reason, not clear to me, the man is unhinged by guilt and fear that his wife will find out. Not so French. The play asks the audience to sort out what is actually going on. Zeller fragments the action into repeated scenes in which something changes each time. There are symbols throughout for us to decode. Each time we return to the middle-class living room of the surgeon and his wife, the painting on the wall has changed, becoming a portrait of the mistress. Unexplained flower arrangements appear and finally fill the room. Mysterious anonymous phone calls. There is a murder and a Macbeth-like bloody apparition, an inquisitor-figure (creepily played by Finbar Lynch) with a white face and no apparent purpose, and a life-size dead stag. All of these, we understand, appear in the split, guilt-ridden mind of the split protagonist. Zeller’s language is straight-forward, educated but not obscure. What is odd is that, in the hands of his longtime translator, Christopher Hampton, The Forest sounds stilted, that is, it sounds like a translation. This can only be deliberate. Christopher Hampton, who has performed the same function for all Zeller’s plays, which are written in French, is too good a playwright himself, and too good a linguist, not to be able to turn Zeller's dialogue into normal, everyday English if he had wanted to do so. Clearly he and Zeller had a different aim in mind. Another mystery for the audience to solve.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
March 2024
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