Reviews

As an introduction to my review of Inside the Bell Jar I would like to highlight the magical singing voice and piano playing of performer Kate Mulqueen.  Throughout the show songs and music play a part in setting a poetic and melancholy tone.

A graduate of the National Theatre Drama School and with experience in film, television and theatre Kate has gone out on a limb with Inside the Bell Jar, as she shares with her audience the most personal experience of the life, the suicide of her beloved sister Emily and all of the consequences surrounding it.

Lene Therese Teigen’s play, Falling Apples, comes from Norway.  A certain tinge or feel of Ibsen is present, but in purely formal terms, Ms Teigen is more expansive, more adventurous, more modern.  She presents a community – with some catalytic outsiders – in which her thirteen – yes, thirteen - characters are trapped in society’s structures and strictures, or disappointed or thwarted by false expectations, in interlocking, overlapping and parallel story strands and situations.  

Rib-achingly funny, heart-breakingly poignant, and dazzling in its energy and vitality, Our Ladies is the undeniable hit of this year’s Arts Festival. It isn’t necessary to know Alan Warner’s book (although I certainly want to read it now) to recognise the brilliance of Lee Hall’s adaptation and Vicky Featherstone’s direction. This is superb theatre; joyful, exhilarating, provocative and thought- provoking.

Sophocles and his fellow Athenians thought it mandatory for every citizen to join the debates of their new democracy – and that included going to the theatre.

It was surely the start of a good tradition.  So, we should all vote, and also go see Sport for Jove’s urgent new version of Sophocles’ Antigone.

Antigone and her siblings were born of her brother Oedipus bedding his mother.  Oedipus of course ended blind and wandering, and Thebes shattered by civil strife between Antigone’s two warring brothers.