|
| | | Even Mice Belong in Heaven review – hand-crafted puppets bond in paradise | | by Simran Hans Oct 3, 2021 | | A mouse and fox forge an unlikely friendship in the afterlife in this beautiful-looking stop-motion fable In this surreal stop-motion animated fable, based on a children’s book by Czech writer Iva Procházková, Whizzy (Simona Berman), a mouse, roams the animal afterlife with Whitebelly (Graham Halstead), the fox who killed her. Their journey through the great beyond begins at a hot springs known as “the purification plant” and includes a pit stop at a rainbow-hued carnival. One trippy sequence sees Whizzy glimpsing the vastness of the universe in the bottom of a glittering well; a time-lapse of the changing seasons is like Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox meets Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Through Whizzy and Whitebelly’s unlikely friendship, the film gently suggests that it’s a choice to be brave or kind and to overcome our essential animal natures. The story is a little flat, but the gorgeous, hand-crafted puppets and sets give the film dimension. The anxious Whitebelly’s matted fur is rendered with exquisite detail and care, while a featherlight pink footbridge looks as though it’s been constructed from strawberry meringue. Continue reading... | | | | | Carmen review – Bizet's opera goes on a camp bunny-hop with serious ambitions | | by Erica Jeal Oct 3, 2021 | | Leeds Grand theatre
Opera North’s colourful production zeroes in on female agency with Chrystal E Williams as a magnetic Playboy-styled Carmen Opera North’s post-pandemic return to full-scale opera for a live audience is a Carmen that’s as camp and colourful as they come, but also has a serious ambition. The director is Edward Dick, who staged Tosca here in 2018. His aim is to make Carmen the active heroine of her own opera, which is harder than it sounds given the many male gazes – of novelist, librettists, composer – through which she’s imagined. We’re somewhere in the US, at a seedy club where the local garrison hang out, all bead curtains and glitterballs in Colin Richmond’s designs. It’s a long way from the cliched Spain of Bizet’s original, although Chrystal E Williams, who gives a magnetic and beautifully sung performance in the title role, still gets to show off her castanet skills. Carmen is at Leeds Grand theatre until 28 October, then touring until 2 April.
Continue reading... | | | | | Shutdown by Adam Tooze; After the Virus by Hilary Cooper and Simon Szreter – review | | by Will Hutton Oct 3, 2021 | | While Tooze brilliantly chronicles Covid-19’s impact on political thinking and our working lives, Cooper and Szreter identify the lessons we must learn from our forebears to rebuild The past 18 months have been the most extraordinary any of us have lived through outside wartime. Covid, which started in Wuhan to initial denial, became a pandemic, sparing no country from mass deaths, deep recession, unemployment and an epidemic of poor mental health and fearfulness. The world only found its way to relatively calmer waters – and then only temporary calm – because of extraordinary advances in vaccine development and manufacture along with agile management of the international financial system, allowing less creditworthy governments to borrow trillions with little sense of crisis. Even the derided (in Britain at least) EU managed to step up to the plate with increasingly effective collective action. What Covid has prompted, above all, as these two remarkable books agree, is root and branch reassessment of the way our societies must organise themselves. Yet for the moment, as Adam Tooze writes in his exhaustive and clear-eyed panorama of all that has happened, the forces propelling what he dubs the great acceleration of unmanaged globalisation remain intact. The world continues to handle crisis after crisis with institutions, geopolitical rivalries, absurd ideologies and vicious inequalities that will ultimately exhaust the reactive ad hoc approach that has worked so far. It is, as he calls his opening chapter, an age of organised irresponsibility. Continue reading... | | | | | |
| |
No comments:
Post a Comment