Latest news with #Desdemona
Glasgow Times
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Glasgow Times
Visit Arundel Castle a Disney like gem 2 hours from Watford
Just a two-hour drive from Watford, Arundel Castle is easy to reach but looks straight out of a Disney movie. You can also take the train from Watford Junction to Clapham Junction and then grab a second train to Arundel town, which is just a 20-minute walk from the castle. Perfect for children and adults, Arundel Castle has lots to explore and will keep everyone entertained. You can find out more about Arundel Castle via the website. Arundel Castle is a Disney-like gem just 2 hours from Watford The Arundel Castle website shares that the estate's story begins in 1067 with the grand building still retaining many of its original features, including the Norman Keep. During the late 1800s, the castle was nearly all rebuilt to transform it into a breathtaking Gothic style home, which is said to "be one of the great works of Victorian England". Along with the castle itself, the gardens are also not to be missed, with the English Rose Garden very popular among visitors. The garden is filled with an array of flowers, including Penelope Lively, Young Lycidas, Emily Bronte, Oliver Austin, Desdemona, Wild Edric and Shropshire Lad. The Arundel Castle shares that the gardens and landscapes are "beautiful", adding: "Over the last 20 years the gardens have been transformed, led by the Castle's renowned and highly respected Head Gardener Martin Duncan, whose personal achievement was recognised in 2018 with the award of the Kew Guild Medal." The castle also hosts a range of events throughout the year, including the Medieval Festival Weekend and Medieval Jousting Tournament. Arundel Castle is open from April 1 to November 2 in 2025, with the gardens and castle open daily except on Mondays. There is a range of tickets depending on what you want to see, ranging from £30 per adult to see everything, or £12.50 for a child. You can book tickets via the Arundel Castle website. On the online review site, Tripadvisor, Arundel Castle has a rating of 4.6/5 from more than 3,600 reviews. Recommended Reading One guest said: "An experience not to be missed. Stunning grounds and gardens, breathtaking. The history of the castle was amazing, and the rooms were fantastic. Well worth the money." Another guest said: "It was the second time I have visited the gardens at Arundel Castle and they were just as spectacularly beautiful." A third happy guest wrote: "The gardens are a true masterpiece. The colourful splendour of the flowers is just breathtaking. The interior of the castle is an example of classic English aristocratic elegance. A must-visit!"
Chicago Tribune
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘Othello' on Broadway stars a muted Denzel and a Gyllenhaal on fire
NEW YORK — 'Othello' is Shakespeare's most domestic tragedy, wrought from the marital bedroom, shot through with the corrosive power of sexual jealousy and suffused with betrayal of the most personal and effective kind. Othello and Desdemona, passionate lovers both, are slowly done in by, well, gossip. For all of the famous complexities of its central interracial marriage, the play is Shakespeare's cautionary tale for couples, a reminder to look to each other for answers, not trust noses with devious agendas pressed against the marital window. The casting of the 70-year-old Denzel Washington as Othello against the 27-year-old British actress Molly Osborne as Desdemona is a provocative choice and, of course, one that has caused a massive demand for costly tickets for this 15-week Broadway run at the Barrymore Theatre. Given the apparently well-heeled nature of the audience at the performance I attended and the slick, contemporary attire used in director Kenny Leon's production, as designed by Dede Ayite, I felt at times like I was watching an immersive, militarized version of 'Billions,' or 'Succession.' Actors can be effective at any age and the lean and charismatic Washington looks fit as a fiddle for love or war. But you don't feel much of a sexual connection between Othello and Desdemona; Washington goes for a more paternalistic approach which, to my mind, fights the play. We know Desdemona loves her guy, physically: 'I saw Othello's visage in his mind, and to his honor and his valiant parts did I my soul and fortunes consecrate,' she says, cheekily. Othello is a lot squishier, hacking on as he does about the curse of marriage and how he can't control his wife's sexual appetite. The problem is that doesn't make much sense unless he thought he was feeding it himself on a regular basis. Sexual insecurity is what makes this great military man so vulnerable to Iago's machinations. He can't come off as her weird dad. Perhaps in response to that difficulty, Washington seems to treat the character as removed from his own self, as if Washington is playing an Othello who is himself playing the character of Othello, disconnected from Othello himself. That's a legitimate way in; lots of Othellos of my experience have treated their guy as forced to play a part that does not come naturally, or to overachieve to fight off the racist snipers with him in their sights. But the danger is removing the urgency of the play. Tellingly, Washington seems never to look directly at the audience during the play's famous soliloquies, preferring to deliver them high into the air. I don't think Andrew Burnap's Cassio, notwithstanding that actor's charming eloquence, gives Washington enough competition. Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Iago, certainly gives the Moor of Venice plenty to fight against, if he chose to do so. Here is far and away the most dynamic performance of the night, a riveting, turbocharged interpretation that avoids any and all villainous cliches, or flowery self-doubts, and just presents a malevolent but highly effective military guy who sets out to do what he wants to straightforwardly do, a train hurtling down a track, gaining speed with every scene, determined to knock the Othello-and-Desdemona carriage into the ditch. What might surprise even this actor's fervent fans is the joy he takes in the lines: every word rings out clearly and colloquially, as if freshly minted and of this very moment. Rare is an Iago who has you wondering if he has a point to his villainy, and his deeply cynical wife, Emilia, as vividly played by Kimber Elayne Sprawl, is similarly fluid and fascinating; their relationship comes off as a more realistic and enjoyable counterpoint to that other, stranger one, wherein neither party dares to get too close for fear of invading comfort zones or upsetting the whole inter-generational shebang. It's interesting but it throws the play off. Othello is the name on the marquee. Leon makes much of the military context and Derek McLane's setting is elegantly minimalist, featuring Globe Theatre-like columns to hide behind, albeit lit by Natasha Katz with a triumphalist glaze. Eventually, of course, we end up in the bedroom and Desdemona in a nightgown as her Othello, seemingly off in a world of his own creation, takes her down even though it seems he knows not what he does, let alone why.
The Guardian
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The killers I met in jail didn't scare me': singer Rokia Traoré on why prison was ‘a privilege'
'It's been like a kind of military training,' says Rokia Traoré of the nine months she has just spent in European prisons. 'It was very hard. I was in a bad psychological state because I was separated from my children, but at the same time it was a kind of privilege because I was learning things it's not possible to learn without being in that situation. Everything is much more intense. Sharing a small space with someone – in a week you know more about them than their mother. You know everything: when she is happy, when she cries, when she goes to the toilet, when she has a shower. You see everything.' Born and based in Mali, she is one of the most inventive and adventurous female artists in Africa; a singer who can switch from delicate acoustic styles to rock, powered by her bluesy electric guitar work. As well as putting out six studio albums she has toured the UK with the Africa Express project, collaborating with Damon Albarn, Paul McCartney and John Paul Jones. She has been an actor, performing, singing and writing the songs for Desdemona, a 2011 Toni Morrison-penned stage project in which Shakespeare's tragic heroine was given an African perspective. She has won awards including the French equivalent of a Grammy, and in 2015 she was appointed a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. She seemed unstoppable, but she hasn't released an album since 2016's Né So. Her life was then transformed by a bitter custody battle with her former partner, the Belgian theatre director Jan Goossens, which led to her being jailed in France, Italy and Belgium. 'I was really sad,' she says of her time inside, speaking by phone from Paris, where she has been living since her release on 22 January. She sounds cheerful, and happy to talk at length, but is clearly angry about her experiences. 'It was difficult for me not knowing when it would all be over and I could be with my children again.' The dispute with Goossens was over their daughter, who was born in Belgium in 2015 but went to Mali to live with her mother when she was four months old. In 2019, after the relationship had ended, Goossens demanded custody through a family court in Brussels and was granted it – though a court in Mali had already granted sole custody to Traoré. After she failed to produce her daughter in the Belgian court, a European arrest warrant was issued, accusing her of 'kidnapping and hostage taking'. In March 2020, as she passed through Paris on her way to a concert at the Bolshoi theatre in Moscow, Traoré was arrested and jailed. She went on hunger strike in Fleury-Mérogis ( 'the worst prison in France', she says) but was released after six weeks because of the Covid pandemic. She was told to remain in France awaiting extradition to Belgium, but used her diplomatic passport (a common perk for African stars) to fly back to Mali on a private jet. Traoré said she was concerned about the welfare of her daughter, and her son from an earlier relationship, during the pandemic. Back in Mali, she couldn't find work. The security situation in the country had deteriorated, with attacks by armed Islamic groups seriously damaging tourism and the local music scene, and a military government taking over in August 2020. Because of the kidnapping charge against her, international funding for her Fondation Passerelle cultural centre had stopped. 'So I had to use my own resources to help the few artists we have,' she says. 'I'm not one that spends much money. The most expensive thing in my life is my children's education.' After four years in Africa she attempted to restart her career in Europe, although in October 2023 the Belgian court sentenced her to two years imprisonment in her absence. On 20 June last year she flew into Rome for a concert at the Colosseum, and was arrested, held in prison for eight months, then transferred to a jail in Brussels. Some of her fellow inmates there had been convicted of violent offences, but she says she 'wasn't fearful of someone who had killed someone. High-level criminals didn't scare me.' Her release in January came after she signed a confidential agreement with her daughter's father, validated by the court. Later in the year, the court will reconsider the case – this time with Traoré and her lawyers present. During Traoré's incarceration, her daughter was in Mali and had never been separated from her for so long. Her son was just starting university in Paris, but it was hard for Traoré to sort out payment for his accommodation. She survived, she said, by spending much of her time writing. Not songs, but a journal in which she chronicled the lives of the women who were locked up with her. Traoré says she heard 'stories that were much more troubling than my stories. Of course I was worried about what was going to happen to me, but my fears were nothing compared with theirs. It left me time to think about their cases and forget about myself. In a way it made it easier to pass the time, writing about the others. Being in jail destroys you, and you don't understand what's happening to you, but I made it a constructive experience.' She wrote about the way prison conditions varied across Europe. Italy was best, she says, not because of the state of the prisons but the attitude of the authorities. The guards were more respectful and lawyers talked openly about the large number of prison suicides, a subject discussed far less in France and Belgium. And in Italy, unlike Belgium, prisoners were allowed to draw up petitions over their grievances. She signed two, which were both successful: 'One of them was about missing medicines the prisoners needed, and the following week all the missing medicines were there.' In Belgium, the prison was new and prisoners were allowed TV and a phone, 'which was very good', but there were complaints of long waits to see a doctor and many prisoners couldn't understand how to use the computerised appointment system. 'I made two demands for my cellmates, and neither had been answered by the time I left.' All of which made her question what the prisons were hoping to achieve. 'There's no point in being in jail if it's not for the person to repair something inside, to understand that what they did was bad, and learn things that would be useful when they start a new life. But what happens in jails is not like that.' She says it seems as if 'people are there to be broken, to feel fear and pain and sadness. It's about so many things – except reconstruction'. In all three prisons, she says, 'some women got very close to me and supported me and talked to me as a friend. And the few times I was really sad they supported me, saying, 'Don't cry. You are going to be out, because you are different from us, you did nothing. But please, when you are out, talk about us – about our needs to see our children, to be treated as normal people when we are out.'' So she is doing just that, planning a book and a stage show based on her prison experiences. The live project will be 'a piece of musical theatre, as I used to do in the past', and will include monologues taken from the book, along with new music. She says the music will encompass both the classical Mandinka music of west Africa and 'probably something more modern showing the connection between Mandinka, blues and classical styles'. The approach sounds similar to that of Damou, her 2012 words-and-music project in which she demonstrated her compelling storytelling in a reworking of the Epic of Soundiata, a poem from Mali's ancient oral tradition. For the new project, she has yet to decide if she will perform all the spoken and musical passages herself or be joined by another musician. Titled À Huis Clos, the show will open in France, where Traoré has been discussing staging and choreography with Moïse Touré, director of the company Les Inachevés. An English version, titled In Camera, will follow. But for all that she is keeping busy, and remains a well-loved and successful artist, Traoré says that, like other former prisoners, she is still anxious about her return to the outside world. 'Because even for me, it's hard to restart life after prison. It can't be the same as it was before. The fact that you have been in prison impacts on all your life.' In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
