Lytham Festival night cancelled due to 'adverse weather'
A festival organiser said: "Due to adverse weather conditions we unfortunately have had to make the decision to cancel this evening.
"The safety of our customers, staff and artists is our priority and increasing high winds mean it would not be safe to go ahead.
"All customers will receive a full refund for tonight's show. Please wait to hear from your ticket agent for further information."The evening's line-up, as well as Canadian star act Morissette, was to feature Leigh band Lottery Winners and US acts Liz Phair and Train.This year's festival has been dogged by bad luck. The planned first night on Wednesday 2 July was cancelled when the frontman of headline act Kings of Leon, Caleb Followill, suffered a broken foot. The festival was reduced to four days as a result.
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Scotsman
14 hours ago
- Scotsman
Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Tom at the Farm
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... THEATRE Tom at the Farm ★★★★☆ Pleasance at EICC (Venue 150b) until 24 August It's unusual to see theatre on the Fringe at the scale of Tom at the Farm, the 2011 play by Canadian writer Michel Marc Bouchard, now in this multi-award-winning Brazilian production. At EICC, on a stage bigger than several Fringe theatres put together, this epic story of brutality and homophobia in the countryside is charged with fierce energy. Leading Brazilian actor Armando Babaioff translated the play into Portuguese (it is performed here with English sur-titles) in light of the fact that Brazil has the highest number of LGBTQ+ murders in the world. He plays Tom, an urbane advertising executive, who travels into the remote hinterland for his lover Paul's funeral. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Armando Babaioff and Iano Salomão in Tom at the Farm | Contributed However, when he arrives at the family farm, he discovers that Paul's mother Agatha (Denise Del Vecchio) had no idea he was gay. Paul had invented a girlfriend, Hellen, for her benefit. His older brother Francis, however (played with menace and barely suppressed rage by Iano Salomão) does know, and will do anything to protect his mother's ignorance. Instead of escaping back to the city, Tom stays on the farm, drawn into a twisted bond of danger, grief, repulsion and desire with Francis. It takes the arrival of a second visitor from the city (Camila Nhary) to push events toward their conclusion. In Rodrigo Portella's production, designed by Aurora dos Campos and beautifully lit by Tomás Ribas, the huge stage is smeared with mud and dotted with buckets of water, all of which are put to good use. Physicality is constantly foregrounded, from the birth of a calf to the ditch where dead animals are left to rot. Tom at the Farm is brutal, poetic and compelling. It is twice the length of most Fringe shows but the tension barely falters. You don't dare look away. SUSAN MANSFIELD THEATRE Lydia Bennet Works in Finance ★★★☆☆ Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 23 August Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Jane Austen meets Absolutely Fabulous in this Pride and Prejudice spin-off comedy written and performed by Trelawny Kean. Lydia Bennet, the youngest and perhaps most annoying of the five Bennet sisters has walked out on the philandering Wickham 'for good, this time'. She's on the street with her designer luggage and nothing approaching a plan. Her pouting falls on deaf ears with the rest of her family. Austen fans will enjoy the glimpses we get of them: Jane and Bingley have two kids called Balthazar and Bunny; Mary is a cross-fit instructor. Finally, Lizzie and Darcy agree to take her in, if she promises to get herself a job, hence her resolve to 'enter the workplace like Melanie Griffith'. Kean evokes Lydia with energy and panache, and the fact that the character is absolutely recognisable from the novel, albeit relocated to the 21st century and given a pair of Jimmy Choos, is an indication of the strength of the foundations. The big question is less whether Lydia will make it in the world or work, but whether she'll manage to grow up along the way. SUSAN MANSFIELD THEATRE Muller's Tales of Wonder ★★★☆☆ Assembly Rooms (Venue 20) until 23 August Dutch writer and performer Tim Honnef is a regular at the Fringe with his own Borgesian blend of storytelling theatre which plays with the notions of fiction and truth. This year he gets even more meta: he has made a series of shows which have been moderately successful at best, he wants to quit, but has not yet managed to make the play he really wants to make. This one. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Tim had a friend called Mia who wrote stories and entrusted a bunch of them to him, making him promise to make a show. So Mia's gently surreal stories (if she existed) are interwoven with the story of making the show and of Tim and Mia's friendship. Honnef's style is anti-theatrical – he sits at a desk and reads from a script because an illness (described in an earlier show) has affected his ability to learn lines – but his deadpan delivery and dry wit is part of the charm. How much of it is 'true' we'll never know, but there is a heartfelt subtext here about seizing the day, enjoying the journey and savouring the moment before a story begins. SUSAN MANSFIELD THEATRE Mr Creep ★★☆☆☆ PBH's Free Fringe @ Banshee Labyrinth (Venue 156) until 24 August It's hard to fault the ambition and weird aesthetic of Theodora van der Beek's intense 'office creep' character Martin, whom she invented for a pretend office party with her flatmates during lockdown. The execution, however, is variable, from the amusingly obscure (Martin eating a scotch egg with the same attempted weird allure as Faye Dunaway's 1979 Japanese advert where she eats a hard-boiled egg) to being desperate to shock (eating a jug of liquidised ham, leerily faking masturbation at the finale). Her intentions become clearer when she refers to this as a piece of 'cursed theatre', like the 'cursed' images which circulate on the internet, but it still feels like it's being workshopped before us. DAVID POLLOCK Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad To stay up to date, why not sign up to our weekly Arts and Culture newsletter? So you don't miss a thing, it will be sent sent daily during August. THEATRE The Domestiques ★★☆☆☆ C ARTS | C Venues | C Alto (Venue 40) until 24 August Misfit Toys Collective take a stab at Jean Genet's The Maids in The Domestiques, a choose-your-own adventure style performance that emphasises themes of political and social rebellion in the original. To begin, the audience chooses which of the two maids, Claire and Solange, will play the mistress, Madame, while the other plays her servant. The set (aka Madame's bedroom) is highly detailed, as is the script (the line 'Blue Lives Matter' is a particular highlight), but the audience are granted no further input in the actions of the characters, or the outcome of the plot, which proves a missed opportunity. JOSEPHINE BALFOUR-OATTS THEATRE Little Circus ★★☆☆☆ PBH's Free Fringe @ Greek Gyros Grill (Venue 605) until 24 August Elise Harris expresses regret at calling her one-woman storytelling and poetry piece Little Circus, leading audiences to believe it's a children's show, rather than tales of disappointment in a life of performing from a 'born show-off'. This includes the rude family who trudged in late with a noisy toddler, ate their picnic, checked their phones and walked out early when I was there. The venue, twice renamed since Harris's booking was made, is also a contender for the Fringe's worst, with no noise separation to the busy café upstairs and people trudging through to the store cupboard and toilets downstairs. Yet still her trust in the material appeared low, as she succumbed to the distractions and tried unsuccessfully to re-edit the performance as she went.
Spectator
17 hours ago
- Spectator
A sensory awakening: the adventures of a cheesemonger
Food memoirs, as distinct from cookery books, and from the relatively new genre of 'biographies' of ingredients, used to fall into three rough groups: foraging, hunting or gathering food; producing or cooking food; and eating. Like the restaurateur Keith McNally's recent I Regret Almost Everything, Michael Finnerty's The Cheese Cure adds a fourth category, memoirs of those who sell or serve food. These foodie books often blur at the margins and merge at the borders but usually share the characteristic of being narrated in the first person – and if recipes are given they are often incidental. (Of course, many of these authors also write cookery books.) There is a canon of such tomes by writers including Elizabeth David, M.F.K. Fisher, Jane Grigson, Wendell Berry, Julia Child, Patience Gray, A.J. Liebling and Joseph Wechsberg; and, more recently, Claudia Roden, Raymond Sokolov, Jeffrey Steingarten, Jonathan Meades, Bill Buford and Nigel Slater. Besides the quality of their writing, these memoirs have in common wit, grace, delicacy and introspection. Though it tells mostly of the pleasures of food, Fisher's work exemplifies these virtues. When she writes about youthful hunger, for example, she reminds us that it is a thing apart: It is very hard for people who have passed the age of, say, 50, to remember with any clarity the hunger of their own puberty and adolescence… But I can recall its intensity still; I am not too far from it to understand its ferocious demands when I see a 15-year-old boy wince and whiten at the prospect of waiting a few more hours for food. Fisher wrote this in 1946, when she was a sympathetic matron of 38. She remains one of the few food memoirists to take hunger and its feeling as a subject. Finnerty, now aged 54, works part-time at Mons Cheesemongers in London's Borough Market and part-time in Montreal, Canada, where he broadcasts a weekly live radio programme in French. His genre-defying book is an account of how he dealt with his mid-life predicament by taking leave from his job as a high-flying journalist to train as a cheesemonger. It's a remarkable tale, with only a tinge of bathos. Born in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, he spent 'the better part of a year' in secondary school as an exchange student with a French family in St-Étienne, where he had his first experience of non-supermarket cheese. There's a lacuna in the narrative and the reader never learns how or why he ended up in London, working as a researcher, then a reporter, then a producer for the BBC World Service and finally 'multimedia news editor' for the Guardian for '15 years on either side of the Millennium' . In 1999 he even bought an ex-council flat in Southwark, and in 2002 met his life partner, 'a beautiful, compassionate, eccentric and understanding Frenchman', about whose movements and whereabouts we somewhat annoyingly learn nothing more. Finnerty left his successful London life to return to Montreal, where for 13 years he presented Daybreak, the CBC early morning live radio show. He was well-paid, well-regarded and had fame of a sort: 'Hell, my face is on billboards and on the side of CBC trucks.' But, he writes, the job was 'robbing me of joy'. It seems obvious that the killer factor was the uncivilised hours – getting up at 3 a.m., having 'lunch' at 8 a.m. when the programme finished, needing sleep as well as food at anti-social times. So he negotiated a six-month sabbatical and went to live in his London flat. It soon occurs to him that both morale and his bank balance indicate that he should find a temporary job; and a meal in an Ottolenghi restaurant so tickles his foodie fancy that he applies to be a waiter there and works a trial shift, but fails. With lowered spirits, he sees an advert in Borough Market for a trainee cheesemonger, cheers up, applies, is taken on as an apprentice, passes his three-month probation and gets the job without ever mentioning his prior career. Finnerty is physically fit – which is just as well, since every day starts with sweeping, hauling out wheels of cheese, moving large tables, climbing ladders, moving boxes, wrapping with focus and precision, manipulating slates, cutting down through the thick pastes of Cheddars and Alpine cheeses with both hands on a knife, scrubbing surfaces to free them of cheese residue, bleaching and squeegeeing floors and rearranging the furniture. He is so tired that he longs only to be horizontal, not even experiencing the hunger or thirst Fisher details so eloquently. One attraction of his brave new career is the fraternity of fellow cheesemongers and market personnel – his descriptions and evaluations of them and his customers display the best writing in this book, and show that he is curious and cares about them as much as he does about the cheese he is handling and selling. There are a few outstanding set pieces, such as the account of the November 2019 knife attack at Fishmongers' Hall, at the north end of London Bridge, which spread into Borough Market and resulted in Finnerty and some of his colleagues and customers taking refuge in the cheese fridge. While much of this memoir is about Finnerty's state of mind and feelings, he does not neglect the subject of his subtitle. Every chapter ends with a page or two on a single cheese, always readable, sometimes funny, in the manner of his great predecessors Pierre Androuet and Patrick Rance. He's in love with cheese, passionately, and it shows. At the end of his sabbatical, as he prepares to return to Montreal and broadcasting, he worries about whether he's deceived his mates and his boss. In the end he finds a compromise. Next time you're shopping for cheese in Borough Market, ask if Michael is there to serve you.
The Herald Scotland
a day ago
- The Herald Scotland
Comedy awards boss warns industry is too 'tough' for women
The other contenders include Canadian double act Sam Kruger and SE Grummett, who perform under the name Creepy Boys, as well as English stand-ups Dan Tiernan, Ed Night, Ian Smith and John Tothill. Read more: Awards director Nica Burns has admitted it is still too 'tough' for women to pursue a career compared to male comics due to the need for emerging acts to be out on tour so much. She admitted the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, which have been running since 1981, 'could do better' with the gender balance of his final eight nominees. (Image: Supplied) However she pointed to the fact that a majority of the acts on the best newcomer shortlist are female as a clear sign of progress. The awards shortlists have been announced days after the Scottish comic Zara Gladman highlighted a lack of female stand-ups after attending a revival of the hit TV sketch show Smack The Pony at the Fringe. Sam Nicoresti is among the contenders for the Edinburgh Comedy Awards best show honour this year. (Image: Rebecca Need-Menear) She said: 'Seeing all these women on stage together shouldn't feel radical but it is. How many women aged over 40 have you seen at the Fringe this year? How many all-women sketch shows have been made since 1999?'. Ayoade Bamgboye, Elouise Eftos, Kate Owens and Molly McGuinness are all contention for the best newcomer award, along with Ada Player, one half of the double act Ada and Bron, which she formed with Bron Waugh. Ms Burns said: 'I think we are seeing progress in the young generations. "Having more women on our newcomers list makes other people feel that they can go into comedy. "But it can take more than a year to make the move from being a newcomer to get onto our main list, as you really have to write a whole new show, and do that as you are earning a living. "Things have been shifting well and through time I think it will become an equal game. "But we still have fewer women going into live comedy. It's tough for women to make a career out of it. 'If you are going to make a living doing comedy you are travelling all the time. You are moving around the country non-stop. It's what you have to do. 'It's very hard to get hard to get enough gigs to do them in order. There isn't a comedy circuit as such. There are just small independent clubs. "It is a much harder life for female comedians when they have a family. 'In her show, Katie Norris talks about the fact that she is 35 and doesn't have kids. She has freedom to do what she likes. She is a bloody good stand-up." Emma Thompson was part of the winning Cambridge Footlights show at the Fringe in 1981. However only two female comedians – Jenny Éclair and Laura Solon - won the main prize before Bridget Christie became the third in 2013. Since then Hannah Gadsby, Rose Matafeo and Amy Gledhill have all claimed the best show prize. Ms Burns added: "There has been huge progress this century. It's no longer a surprise to see a female comedian on stage. Women are on every single bill everywhere you go. All-male comedy nights went with the last century. 'More than 30 per cent of comedians performing at the Fringe have been women for a long time and it's much nearer to 40 per cent now. "The representation of women on our main list could be better, but I think it will take time for things to completely change. In the last century, we had no women on our main shortlist for years and years." More than 500 Fringe shows were eligible for this year's awards. Sam Bryant, chair of the judging panel, said: 'The landscape of comedy is expanding, with audio now playing a huge part in how comedians build their profiles and connect with audiences. "It's a thrilling moment where the live Fringe stage sits alongside podcasts and digital platforms as stepping stones in a comedian's career. 'The Edinburgh Comedy Awards have always been a launchpad for the next generation of talent, and that role feels more important than ever. 'Our panel and scouts dedicated themselves to the process, seeing more than 1,200 hours of comedy across the festival, to ensure that this year's shortlists reflect the breadth of voices, styles and opportunities shaping the future of the art form.' The Herald has teamed up with to make the purchase of tickets for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe so much easier. To buy tickets, please click here.
