Latest news with #BerwickuponTweed
The Guardian
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry review – life-affirming musical reckons with death
There is nothing like impending death to concentrate the mind on life. Certainly not for Harold Fry, the Bunyanesque modern-day everyman who goes out to post a letter to his terminally ill, long-lost friend and ends up hiking 500 miles to say goodbye to her in person. Harold (Mark Addy), middle-aged and mournful, leaves his Devon home and his distant, disenchanted wife, Maureen (Jenna Russell), to go to the post office. But he is inspired by a petrol station attendant (Sharon Rose, twinkling as Garage Girl) to begin his secular pilgrimage to the Berwick-upon-Tweed hospice where Queenie (Amy Booth-Steel) lies dying. The development of this musical follows a familiar trajectory: it is an adaptation of a best-selling novel (by Rachel Joyce), which has already been turned into a film starring national treasures (Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton). If sentiment laced the story in its original form, then schmaltz led the latter incarnation. The same syrupy, unabashed sentimentality roves through this show, adapted by Joyce herself. But its winning twist lies in the music, composed by singer-songwriter Michael Rosenberg, otherwise known as Passenger, which blasts the story through with folksy heart and foot-stomping soul. One belter follows another from the first song, Rise Up, to the last, Here's One for the Road. The tunes are twinned with vibrant choreography by Tom Jackson Greaves and director Katy Rudd's imaginative staging fuels the show's idiosyncratic spirit. It is performed within a luminous circle on Samuel Wyer's playfully lo-fi set, an abstract back-screen reflecting the changing landscape, with actors standing in for trees, sheep and washing lines. Some scenes break out into fantasy, garish and whirling at times, witty at others. Together, it has the makings of a quirky West End transfer, in the mould of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Jack Wolfe is compelling, first as the Balladeer and then as Harold and Maureen's dead son. He has an uncanny resemblance to Earl Cave (his counterpart in the film) and is an almost ubiquitous presence, first benign, then agitating and angry. Russell is slowly, icily magnificent as a woman estranged from herself, while Addy's Harold, stolid and unremarkable, comes alive slowly, as if thawing back into feeling all of life's pain and joy that he has thus far held at bay. Harold's unlikely Instagram stardom attracts a band of pilgrims/outcasts and they bring broadness and warmth albeit earnestness too. In fact, the stray dog – an exquisite puppet – outshines them all. The book's discussions around faith are muted and emotions come in primary colours, while the script abounds with wholesome mottoes for life. Yet still it does not pull its punches around the messiness of grief and the anger around loss. It pulls you irrepressibly in with its rousing message that life is not for regret but for kindness, gratitude – and most of all for living. At Minerva theatre, Chichester, until 14 June
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
New historical mystery-thriller series to be launched at literary festival
A new historical mystery-thriller series by an Oxfordshire author will be launched at a Headington literary festival this weekend. Amanda Roberts, who lives in Islip, will unveil her third novel, Lady of the Quay, at HeadLitFest on Saturday, May 10. The one-day festival will be held at Headington Quarry Village Hall. Headington Quarry Village Hall (Image: Greg Blatchford) Set in 16th-century Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, the book begins the Isabella Gillhespy series, which follows the only daughter of a wealthy merchant who finds her inheritance is not what she expected after the unexpected death of her father. Ms Roberts, a member of the Royal Society of Authors and the Historical Novel Society, was inspired to set her new series in Berwick-upon-Tweed after a family holiday in the town in 2021. The Elizabethan ramparts and the town's unique past, marked by its strategic importance and frequent changes in ownership between the English and the Scottish from the 11th century to 1482, sparked her imagination. Ms Roberts' first novel, The Roots of the Tree, is a true family story that follows her mother's struggle with the discovery that her biological father was not the man she had known all her life. Her second novel, The Woman in the Painting, is a dual-timeline historical novel set in 2019 and 1645, in her home village of Islip - the site of a little-known battle between Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army and three of the King's regiments. The book was awarded the silver medal in the Coffee Pot Book Club Historical Fiction Book of the Year Awards in the time slip/time travel/dual timeline category. The narrative of Lady of the Quay, as summarised on the book jacket, reads: "1560, Berwick-upon-Tweed, northern England. "Following the unexpected death of her father, a series of startling discoveries about the business she inherits forces Isabella Gillhespy to re-evaluate everything she understands about her past and expects from her future. "Facing financial ruin, let down by people on whom she thought she could rely, and suspected of crimes that threaten her freedom, Isabella struggles to prove her innocence. "But the stakes are even higher than she realises. "In a town where tension between England and her Scottish neighbours is never far from the surface, it isn't long before developments attract the interest of the highest authority in the land, Sir William Cecil, and soon Isabella is fighting, not just for her freedom, but her life. "She must use her wits and trust her own instincts to survive." Ms Roberts is also a member of West Oxfordshire Writers and Oxford Independent Authors.
