Catherine Bennett resumes the weekly look at the performing arts world, with the sad end of Jerusalem, the luck of a cabbie, and French revolt. Do you hear the people sing?
Adam Alcock reviews Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons and his own Four Elements at York Opera House.
Catherine Bennett highlights the trends in the performing arts world today.
Jonathan Cridford reviews 'Ghosts', one of the Freshers' plays for this year.
The Yorker will be at the opening night of each play, with a review appearing the same night, so if you aren't even convinced by the quality and scope of the drama on offer, don't forget to check back on Friday or Saturday mornings to see if there is a not-to-be-missed production on your doorstep.
Week 3
Travelling cloth salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find that he has morphed into a beetle. A weird start to Berkoff's adaptation of Kafka's short story, but what’s weirder is the reaction of his family. Instead of being a bit freaked out, they react with only mild indifference, and even some annoyance that the family’s sole bread winner is now incapacitated. The play has an extra political dimension, portraying Gregor as a victim of a money hungry, bourgeois society embodied by his father, a bitter failed businessman. The way that both the internal and external effects of Gregor’s metamorphosis are handled makes this a deeply effecting, thought provoking bit of drama. Fortunately there are still plenty of absurdly comic touches, and the return of most of the team from last term's incredible production of The Trial, another Berkoff work based on a Kafka story, with the visionary direction of Alex Wright, means that this is a cracking start to this term's proceedings.
Rod James
Week 4
Set amongst university students and made into a film in 2003 starring Paul Rudd and Rachel Weisz, it would be easy to dismiss The Shape of Things as a teen college movie that somehow started off as a piece of theatre. But don't forget - so did Cruel Intentions, and, like that classic, Labute's play has much more than meets the eye. Asking questions of the morality of art, relationships and the naivety of youth this looks to be one of the most immediately gripping of this term's program.
Ben Rackstraw
Week 5
Jean Genet famous absurd (in more ways than one) play, "The Maids" deals with some of the dramatist's key anxieties: power and relations. The somewhat deranged title characters, Claire and Solange, lend themselves to an elaborate role-play-within-the-play, with ambiguous results. The play, an unusual social critique of post-WWII France, exhibits at once "Vintage Genet" (obsessive concern/rejection of conventional authority and society) as well as elements of the Theatre of the Absurd in a disturbing but strangely captivating blend, as contemporary as ever.
Marie Thouaille
Week 6
Originally written for television in 1972, Brian Clark’s Whose Life Is It Anyway? focuses in on a hospital room where Claire, a sculptor by profession, has been paralysed from the neck down in a car accident and is determined to be given the rights to die. Directed by Carly Telford and Helen Fletcher and produced by Stephanie Hotchkiss, the Drama Barn will play host to a poignant version of Who’s Life Is it Anyway?, presenting us with serious concerns such as the relationship between responsibility and life itself, whilst enshrouding itself in wit, humour and light heartedness. Incorporating such thought-provoking lines as "If you saw a mutilated animal on the side of the road, you’d shoot it" beautifully contrasted with lines such as "Do you like my breasts?" Week 6 promises to be a great weekend for the Drama Barn. As one cast member said "Although the protagonist wants to die half-way through, we promise our play won’t make you want to do the same!"
Alicia Walters
Week 7
Crimp is one of Britain's most vital and important playwrights. With this work he took Sophocles fifth-century BC Greek tragedy, involving a wronged wife, a great hero and flesh consuming poison, and translated it to the modern day, addressing the Iraq war, the culture of spin and current atrocities as presented in the media. Cruel and Tender plays on the conventions of the tragedy, inverting and twisting them to explore his new subject matter.
Ben Rackstraw
Week 8
Fake boobs, debauchery and a sexual revolution are driving the population (sex) mad. This Alan Bennett play, set in the 60s, is set to have everything a drama-barn-going audience could ask for. Fast moving and farcical with a serious edge, the cast are set to perform for you the titillating delights of a horny middle class group unleashed from a society in which repression is the norm. Typical Alan Bennett; prepare to question the ethicality of the British class system as the working-class housekeeper, Mrs. Swabb, narrates the play. With characters called Canon Throbbing and Lady Rumpers, why wouldn’t you go to see this play?
Kirsty Denison
Week 9
"The Balcony," Genet's first commercial success, springs from his general contempt for the societal order. The brothel or "House of Illusions" in which the play is set, caters for men's fantasies of sex and power, each room a play within a play as the prostitutes and their clients take part in a wide variety of roleplay. However the bloody revolution that occurs in the city plunges the brothel in the midst of political proceedings, such that illusion and reality can no longer be distinguished. Subversive, provocative, shocking, erotic - an ideal drama.
Marie Thouaille
Performances usually run from Friday to Sunday, although occasionally a play will open on a Thursday. Tickets are available from Vanbrugh stalls in the week of the performance. Check Facebook groups and posters on campus for more information.
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